The way this reporter intently drained a large coffee in the background of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman's testimony really resonated with viewers.

A picture from University of Washington's archives has people joking the teen climate activist is a time-traveler here to "save us."

Stephanie Grisham retracted claim she and her colleagues encountered notes after rejection from ex-Obama staffersStephanie Grisham at the White House in Washington DC, on 4 September. Photograph: REX/ShutterstockThe White House press secretary has backed down from her claim that Obama administration officials left behind notes for Trump staffers saying “You will fail” and “You aren’t going to make it”, after a number of aides denied the allegation.In a radio interview on Tuesday, Stephanie Grisham said she and her colleagues had encountered the notes upon entering White House offices.fundraiser“When we came into the White House, I’ll tell you something, every office was filled with Obama books, and we had notes left behind that said ‘You will fail’, ‘You aren’t going to make it’,” she said. “In the press office, there was a big note taped to a door that said that ‘You will fail’,” Grisham told the John Fredericks Show.Grisham retracted her claims, however, after a full-throated rejection from former Obama staffers.“This is absolutely not true,” Chris Lu, a White House cabinet secretary in the Obama administration, wrote on Twitter.“Obama repeatedly and publicly praised Bush cooperation during 2009 transition, and pledged we would provide same cooperation to whoever followed us. And that’s what we did. If Grisham is correct, why has it taken three years to come out?”Susan Rice, who served as Obama’s national security adviser, was similarly dismissive.“This is another bald-faced lie,” Rice wrote on Twitter.Other Obama officials, including Joanna Rosholm, the former press secretary to Michelle Obama, posted photos of the notes they had left behind. None of the notes said “You will fail”.Peter Velz, who worked as an assistant to the director of communications in the Obama administration, posted a photo of a note which said: “Best of luck to you and your team.” This is the note I left my successor. Really dispiriting to hear this from @PressSec, a person with whom I spent a couple amicable hours with during the the 2016 transition where I wished her nothing but institutional knowledge, good luck and all our support. https://t.co/kGb0pa59fp pic.twitter.com/Jtis9TEZK1 - Peter Velz (@petervelz) November 19, 2019After the backlash Grisham walked back from her initial remarks. She issued a statement saying the controversy was “silly” but did not expand on why she had made the claims.“[I] certainly wasn’t implying every office had that issue,” Grisham said.“I was talking specifically (and honestly) about our experience in the lower press office - nowhere else. I don’t know why everyone is so sensitive!”

A lawyer for Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman sent a letter to Fox News on Wednesday demanding the network either retract or issue a correction for a segment of the The Ingraham Angle, in which guest John Yoo, a former top lawyer in the Bush administration, seemed to suggest that Vindman might be guilty of espionage.Vindman, who listened to the July 25 phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky that forms part of the impeachment probe, testified in House hearings on Tuesday regarding the matter. Vindman is a long-serving military officer whose family fled Soviet Ukraine when he was three years old.During the October 28 airing of "The Ingraham Angle," host Laura Ingraham speculated on Vindman's motives for testifying."Here we have a U.S. national security official who is advising Ukraine, while working inside the White House, apparently against the president’s interest," Ingraham said. "Isn’t that kind of an interesting angle on this story?""I found that astounding,” Yoo responded. "Some people might call that espionage.""LTC Vindman and his family have been forced to examine options, including potentially moving onto a military base, in order to ensure their physical security in the face of threats rooted in the falsehood that Fox News originated," Vindman's lawyer David Pressman wrote.Pressman noted that espionage is a crime punishable by death, and that Vindman "had never in his decorated 20-year career of service to his country been accused of having dual loyalties or committing espionage."A spokeswoman for Fox News said she had no immediate comment when asked by the New York Times.Yoo wrote an op-ed in USA Today after the segment aired in which he clarified that he meant Ukraine may have committed an espionage operation, but that he didn't accuse Vindman specifically of espionage.Pressman wrote in his letter that "Mr. Yoo’s argument that he did not intend to accuse LTC of Vindman of ‘espionage’ - that he was accusing the nation of Ukraine instead - is as legally irrelevant as it is factually incredible."