Top News From WTOP - 6PM Update - August 6, 2026
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43 segmentsFrom ABC News. I'm Brian Clark. A federal judge dismissed the indictment of the former Olympian who was charged with vandalizing the reflecting pooled at the Lincoln Memorial. U.S. Attorney for Washington, Janine Piero, requested the charges be dropped that angered President Trump. Today in the Oval Office, the president was asked about another of his hand-picked legal choices. He wants Todd Blanche to be confirmed as Attorney General, but Todd Blanche faces uncertain Senate support. Let's see if we need anybody. I'll reach out to whoever I have to. Anybody voting against them would be doing a great disservice to the country. The president also said the U.S. has more than enough missiles for its needs, refuting reports that stockpiles have dwindled amid the war in Iran. Retired Lieutenant General and ABC News contributor Dan Carbler says, It's always, always been a challenge for us. The math never works out well on our side in terms of the number of interceptors we have versus, again, just the plethora of missiles that... our adversaries and in this case, I ran can shoot at us. Air traffic over a large swath of the Midwest was shut down. It's now reopened, but it was because of a problem in a major air traffic control center in the Midwest. ABC Transportation reporter Sam Sweeney explains. Well, this was a radar and a frequency outage at one of the largest air traffic control centers. This is called Minneapolis Center, but it handles the air traffic over several nearby states. We're talking more than 330,000 square miles. The cause is under investigation. The Justice Department... says it received a referral from a Senate committee that voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for his refusal to answer questions last week. Anthony Fauci's attorney called it a political stunt. Investigators in Washington State say the man accused of starting last week's devastating fires in Spokane admitted to starting at least 25 fires between July 4th and August 11th. You're listening to ABC News. 602 on Thursday, August 6th, 2026. We have 79 after those storms rolled through.
And there could be more on the way. Good evening. I'm Brendan Hazleton. And I'm Ann Kramer. Top story we're following for you is the breaking weather news. And that is us watching closely. But Mother Nature is going to be bringing our way for the next couple of hours once again. We made it through the first batch of some of the severe weather. Let's bring in WTOP meteorologist Mike Sineford. And Mike, it looks like radar is showing something around Culpeper and Front Royals. Is that headed our way then? Yes. It's coming right down the I-66 corridor. In fact, the leading edge. As far east now is... Haymarket and Gainesville. So as you head west this evening on I-66, once you get past the centerville area, you're into some very heavy rain very quickly. And as you mentioned, this goes down through Warrington and Coal Pepper. Just saw a wind gust of 32 miles an hour at Coalpeper with these storms coming through. Risk for severe weather for a couple of hours. Everything should die down around sunset. But watch out for another round of severe storms again tomorrow afternoon and again on Saturday afternoon. And I'll be back in just a couple of minutes with your complete forecast. All right. Thank you, Mike. 603, an update for you now. On the case of the alleged vandalism at the reflecting pool, an attorney for the former Olympian and Bethesda resident, David Hearn, says the vandalism case has been formally dismissed this nearly a week since the government dropped the felony charge against him. Attorney Norm Eisen posting that official order on social media. The Justice Department admitted last week it was shoddy construction work on the pool, not vandalism, that caused the peeling of the paint on the bottom of it. Hearn's legal team has also requested the charges be dismissed with prejudice, which would mean the government couldn't refile the case later. Justice Department lawyers have until August 18th to respond to that motion. 604 to Montgomery County now where there is another lawsuit. There are three of them now being filed against the county over a new gun bill that was signed into law. It does put restrictions on where people can lawfully carry a gun when they are in public. WTOP's Kate Ryan has some new information about one of the lawsuits filed by a local synagogue. Montgomery County Executive Mark Elrich says the county will not surrender in the fight. over restrictions of firearms in public places. Our job is to try to protect people, and gun legislation is important in accomplishing that. But Rabbi Manasha Josh Shapiro is suing along with the Silver Spring Jewish Center. Josh Shapiro says the new law is not only a violation of the Second Amendment to keep and bear arms, but... We allege that this is a violation of the free exercise clause, the ability to exercise our religion, which we assert that we have a sincerely held religious belief. to defend our community when necessary. Josh Shapiro says the spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the county underscores that need. Two other lawsuits have been filed, including one by the U.S. Department of Justice. Kate Ryan, WTOP News. 605, Virginia's governor is intervening in the case of Nextera's proposed merger with Dominion Energy. Abigail Spanberger says she's the first governor to ever take a step, take the step in... case like this. Here's WTOP Scott Gelman. The other significance of this, not just talking about the impact that could have on customers bills, she says she wants to make sure that bill credits are not just one and done for a short period of time, that they don't go up and sort of counteract, that a bill credit would be counteracting, possibly a bill increase in some way. What's really interesting about all of this, too, is...
The SEC still has the final decision here. This is still the regulatory body that can approve, deny, or make changes to this. But by intervening, there is one other luxury that Governor Abigail Spanberger is afforded. As a party to the case, as I will be, because I'm in the case, I do have the ability to take legal action once there's a decision. Perhaps the most significant comment that she made during this about half hour news conference. And again, that's WTOP Scott Gelman, the State Corporation Commission, usually gets about six months to act on a merger proposal, but there have been calls to get state leaders to extend that timeline. Well, are you ready to tailgate again? The NFL's preseason kicks off tonight in Ohio, and the next time you head to an NFL game, artificial intelligence may be watching you. WTOP's John Doeman has our story. Every stadium you go through already has metal detectors looking for weapons as soon as you reach the entrance. So no weapons are making it inside the stadium. But Bernard Wright, the CEO of Pervista AI and Prince George's County, says it's a different story if you're walking or tailgating outside the stadium. So there you... using AI to look for weapons at Northwest Stadium in Landover as well as the Falcon Stadium in Atlanta. If someone pulls out a gun, we do have a data set of firearms and we're making a match frame by frame against that data set. But we don't rely on artificial intelligence alone. We have a 24 by 7 operation center. A human being is in that operation center to verify it's a weapon and not, say, like an umbrella. For those worried about privacy, the only time images are recorded and retained are if it's believed that a crime's being... committed. John Dome and WTOP News. Money News on WTOP, here is Tom Busby. This is a Bloomberg Money Minute. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is gearing up to release its first ever consumer device, a $300 portable donut-shaped smart speaker so you can converse with its chatbot anywhere. Meantime, Etsy CEO says that AI is, quote, changing how all of us work. So the online crafts retailer is cutting 220 corporate staffers. Oil prices, they rose today to near $78 a barrel after Iran's deal with Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would include a ban on all U.S. and Israeli ships from that waterway. That rattled U.S. negotiators and sent Wall Street lower. At the close, the Dow down 464 points, almost 1% lower. While the NASDAQ lost just 15, the S&P lower by 14. And SpaceX today says it's going to build its own natural gas-fired power plant for its computer chip-making facility. It's developing right now with Tesla outside Houston hopes to create 3,000 new jobs. From the Bloomberg Newsroom, I'm Tom Busby on WTOP. Coming up on WTOP, we will check in with CBS News, White House correspondent, Chief Washington correspondent, excuse me, Major Garrett. We're going to talk live to him about a number of things, including the decision by a Senate committee to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. That's coming up next.
The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted today to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions during a hearing before the committee last week. Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Former Senator Rand Paul, the committee's chair, says... After this vote today, he's now going to refer to the case directly to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution. Well, joining us live is CBS News Chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett. Major is also the host of the takeout. It's on the CBS 24-7 streaming network. Major, always good to have you on with us this evening. Let's talk about Dr. Anthony Fauci here first. This decision today by the committee, likely not a surprise, but were there a lot of Democrats here pushing back or at least supporting? Dr. Anthony Fauci and what he decided not to testify here last week? Yes, definitely supporting Dr. Anthony Fauci and questioning the very process by which this decision was reached. It was a party-line vote in committee. And Rand Paul, the chairman, said he's not sure he's going to take it to the full Senate, which historically, when Congress wants to hold someone in any administration in contempt, they have the full body register that opinion. You're speaking on behalf of the entire body, House or Senate. as you indicated in the lead-in, Senator Paul is going to walk this over to the Justice Department. Those are his words, not mine, and the U.S. Attorney's Office of the District of Columbia, Gene Piro, to try to expedite this, saying he doesn't want to wait a month for the Senate to decide whether there can be 60 votes to approve this. He has doubts whether or not that would happen, and probably justifiably so. So there's a process issue here, one that Anthony Fauci, Dr. Anthony Fauci's lawyers, will likely challenge. Like, this is illegitimate because it hasn't gone through the... historical precedent of having the full Congress at least take a vote on it. So that's one aspect. The other aspect of it is this is the constant relitigation. of what happened in COVID and what Republicans, particularly those conservative MAGA Republicans, believe went wrong, even though most of the decisions they're most upset about were carried out by governors, not by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Yes, he offered advice. Yes, he advised counsel. Yes, he talked about the science, but as President Trump often likes to remind people, he took a federalist approach to this, letting governors decide what to do when it came to closures, reopenings, and the like. Nevertheless, Republicans want to relitigate COVID and they want to make Dr. Anthony Fauci the representative in Washington of what they believe went fundamentally wrong. Dr. Anthony Fauci has testified many, many times before Congress on this topic, but he didn't want to testify this time because he was afraid, as he said in his opening statement, anything that he said the committee might use or misuse to charge him with lying before Congress, and he didn't want to take that risk. Now he'll take the risk of a contempt charge. If Senator Paul does indeed walk this over to the Justice Department,
U.S. attorney for D.C. Janine Piro be the one making the decision? Or would that be one of the ones that would be part of that decision for sure. And as everyone in D.C. knows, she's under a lot of pressure right now because the president has given a couple of interviews, one to NBC today, saying he believes she made a huge mistake in the reflecting pool decision to withdraw the indictment against David Hearn. And subsequently, all the other. misdemeanor and other charges brought against others in the reflecting pool basically saying there was no evidence of vandalism that could be successfully prosecuted President Trump has rhetorically said over and over and over again that there's witnesses and videos and all sorts of things. Well, his own appointed U.S. attorney, very close to him, a longtime ally, looked at the evidence, brought it over to the White House to show him in boxes and said, no, Mr. President, it's not there. It's not a prosecutable case. That's the legal truth from her perspective. It's not the rhetorical truth for the president. And as we've all come to learn, Rhetorical truths for this president, and I put that word truths in quotation marks, sometimes they're more durable than evidentiary ones. Piero's been very loyal to Trump, and we know that's what he loves. So what do you think the likelihood is that he would let her go? He told NBC News, her job is not in jeopardy. So that's... to be taken at face value for the moment. Lots of people have been given that reassurance by Donald Trump long before he was in politics and gotten fired, and when he was in politics as president and gotten fired. That doesn't guarantee anything for the U.S. Attorney Janine Piro, but for the moment, it sounds like a bit of a reprieve. Major, thanks as always for your time. Thank you. CBS News, Chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett, who also hosts the takeout on the CBS 24-7 streaming network.
Breaking news on WTOP. Comes out of Prince George's County. A man is dead. There was a shooting in Landover. The man was killed during the shooting. Happened around 4.30 on Stoddart Lane near Pimebrook Road. The Police Department of Prince George's County says when officers got there, man had been shot and he died. Police do not believe the shooting was random. They're now working to find the suspect and the motive. Sports on WTOP brought you by Amentum, delivering advanced solutions for space and defense. We say good evening to Rob Woodfork. And we say good evening to Philadelphia. That's where the nationals and Phillies are finishing out their series. And after a one, two, three, top of the first inning. So we have a line drive hook to right. This is going to be down. It's going to be a base hit. It'll be cut off by Cruz. Shy of the warning track. Turner will score. Harper to third. Arise in at second. And it's immediately one-nothing Phillies. Arise delivers an Arbor. again. He has had four RBI hits in his first series as a Philly. An infield hit a walk in a double and the Phillies strike first. Yeah, they do. Dave Jagler on 1,500 a.m. and the Phillies would tack on another to make it a two-nothing advantage against Miles Michaelis, who had an RBI sacrifice button last night. He's on the mound and off to a rough start here, bottom of the first inning of what is the 10th anniversary of his major league debut. Andrew Pinckney is actually making his first big league start for the Nats to Nights, the Alabama products, batting sixth in the order. He's playing in left field to join forces with Dylan Cruz out of LSU and Jacob Young out of Florida. I mentioned their schools because they have formed the MLB's first all SEC outfield in seven years. for those who are into that sort of thing. The Orioles fell short of a series sweep of the Angels for one losers to finish a three and three homestand before embarking on a 10-game road trip. The Wizards and Anthony Davis mutually deciding to table talks on a contract extension until the season starts, reportedly giving the two sides the first 20 games or so to see how the marriage, you know, goes, goes, and... As of today, the oft-injured AD eligible to sign a max extension of four years, $275 million. If you're going to spend that kind of money, I guess you ought to know the guy. Rob Woodfork, WTOP Sports.