Former FBI Director James Comey will tell the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday that President Donald Trump asked him for his loyalty during a dinner in January and requested in an Oval Office meeting in February that he drop the FBI's investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

"The president began by asking me whether I wanted to stay on as FBI director, which I found strange because he had already told me twice in earlier conversations that he hoped I would stay, and I had assured him that I intended to," Comey said in his prepared remarks, which the committee published Wednesday.

"My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship," the remarks say. "That concerned me greatly, given the FBI's traditionally independent status in the executive branch."

Comey, whom Trump fired on May 9, wrote in the remarks that he told Trump he loved his work and "intended to stay and serve out my 10-year term as director. ... I added that I was not on anybody's side politically and could not be counted on in the traditional political sense, a stance I said was in his best interest as the president.

"A few moments later, the president said, 'I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,'" Comey continued. "I didn't move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence. The conversation then moved on, but he returned to the subject near the end of our dinner."

Comey will also tell Congress about his conversation with Trump during an Oval Office meeting on February 14 in which Trump told him he wanted to talk about Flynn.

"Flynn had resigned the previous day," Comey's remarks say. "The president began by saying Flynn hadn't done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the vice president. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify."

"'[Flynn] is a good guy and has been through a lot,'" Comey recalls Trump as saying. "He repeated that Flynn hadn't done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the vice president. He then said, 'I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.'"

Comey's prepared remarks say he told Trump that he agreed Flynn was "a good guy," but that he did not tell the president that he would drop the investigation. He did, however, reassure Trump that he was not the direct subject of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation.

Still, according to Comey's prepared testimony, Trump called him at least twice more, on March 30 and April 11, to discuss the Russia investigation.

"On the morning of March 30, the president called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as 'a cloud' that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country," Comey's remarks say. "He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia."

Comey, along with the director of the National Security Agency, Mike Rogers, had testified the week before that the FBI was investigating whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the election.

"I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn't find anything, to our having done the work well," Comey's remarks say. "He agreed, but then re-emphasized the problems this was causing him."

On April 11, Trump called Comey again, according to the prepared testimony, to ask what the FBI director had done to tell the public that Trump himself was not under investigation.

"I replied that I had passed his request to the acting deputy attorney general, but I had not heard back," Comey's remarks say. "He replied that 'the cloud' was getting in the way of his ability to do his job. He said that perhaps he would have his people reach out to the acting deputy attorney general. I said that was the way his request should be handled. I said the White House counsel should contact the leadership of DOJ to make the request, which was the traditional channel."

The final straw leading Trump to fire Comey appears to have been the president's  "white hot" anger  after Comey confirmed in an open — and televised — hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI was still investigating whether the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.

Comey had not allowed the White House to preview that testimony, which Trump and his aides considered "an act of insubordination," according to Reuters. The New York Times echoed that report, saying Trump was broadly irked by his inability to gain assurances of loyalty from Comey.

Comey will testify one day after the Senate Intelligence Committee grilled top intelligence officials about the circumstances surrounding his firing.

Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told the officials — National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats — that it was "jarring" to hear "recent reports of White House officials, perhaps even the president himself, attempting to influence and enlist our intelligence-community leaders in attempting to undermine an ongoing FBI investigation."

WASHINGTON — President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo that Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

The existence of Mr. Trump’s request is the clearest evidence that the president has tried to directly influence the Justice Department and F.B.I. investigation into links between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia.

Mr. Comey wrote the memo detailing his conversation with the president immediately after the meeting, which took place the day after Mr. Flynn resigned, according to two people who read the memo. The memo was part of a paper trail Mr. Comey created documenting what he perceived as the president’s improper efforts to influence an ongoing investigation. An F.B.I. agent’s contemporaneous notes are widely held up in court as credible evidence of conversations.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of the memo to a Times reporter.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey that Mr. Flynn had done nothing wrong, according to the memo.

Mr. Comey did not say anything to Mr. Trump about curtailing the investigation, only replying: “I agree he is a good guy.”

In a statement, the White House denied the version of events in the memo.

“While the president has repeatedly expressed his view that General Flynn is a decent man who served and protected our country, the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn,” the statement said. “The president has the utmost respect for our law enforcement agencies, and all investigations. This is not a truthful or accurate portrayal of the conversation between the president and Mr. Comey.”

In testimony to the Senate last week, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, said, “There has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.”

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.

Mr. Comey created similar memos — including some that are classified — about every phone call and meeting he had with the president, the two people said. It is unclear whether Mr. Comey told the Justice Department about the conversation or his memos.

Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey last week. Trump administration officials have provided multiple, conflicting accounts of the reasoning behind Mr. Comey’s dismissal. Mr. Trump said in a television interview that one of the reasons was because he believed “this Russia thing” was a “made-up story.”

The Feb. 14 meeting took place just a day after Mr. Flynn was forced out of his job after it was revealed he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of phone conversations he had had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Despite the conversation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Comey, the investigation of Mr. Flynn has proceeded. In Virginia, a federal grand jury has issued subpoenas in recent weeks for records related to Mr. Flynn. Part of the Flynn investigation is centered on his financial ties to Russia and Turkey.

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

Mr. Trump then turned the discussion to Mr. Flynn.

After writing up a memo that outlined the meeting, Mr. Comey shared it with senior F.B.I. officials. Mr. Comey and his aides perceived Mr. Trump’s comments as an effort to influence the investigation, but they decided that they would try to keep the conversation secret — even from the F.B.I. agents working on the Russia investigation — so the details of the conversation would not affect the investigation.

Mr. Comey was known among his closest advisers to document conversations that he believed would later be called into question, according to two former confidants, who said Mr. Comey was uncomfortable at times with his relationship with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Comey’s recollection has been bolstered in the past by F.B.I. notes. In 2007, he told Congress about a now-famous showdown with senior White House officials over the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. The White House disputed Mr. Comey’s account, but the F.B.I. director at the time, Robert S. Mueller III, kept notes that backed up Mr. Comey’s story.

The White House has repeatedly crossed lines that other administrations have been reluctant to cross when discussing politically charged criminal investigations. Mr. Trump has disparaged the ongoing F.B.I. investigation as a hoax and called for an investigation into his political rivals. His representatives have taken the unusual step of declaring no need for a special prosecutor to investigate the president’s associates.

The Oval Office meeting occurred a little more than two weeks after Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Comey to the White House for a lengthy, one-on-one dinner in the residence. At that dinner, on Jan. 27, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Comey at least two times for a pledge of loyalty — which Mr. Comey declined, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

In a Twitter posting on Friday, Mr. Trump said that “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

After the meeting, Mr. Comey’s associates did not believe there was any way to corroborate Mr. Trump’s statements. But Mr. Trump’s suggestion last week that he was keeping tapes has made them wonder whether there are tapes that back up Mr. Comey’s account.

The Jan. 27 dinner came a day after White House officials learned that Mr. Flynn had been interviewed by F.B.I. agents about his phone calls with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. On Jan. 26, Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates told the White House counsel about the interview, and said Mr. Flynn could be subject to blackmail by the Russians because they knew he had lied about the content of the calls.

FBI Director James B. Comey has been dismissed by the president, according to White House spokesman Sean Spicer.

“The president has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney General and the deputy Attorney General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Spicer told reporters in the briefing room, according to a pool report.

Earlier in the day, the FBI notified Congress that Comey misstated key findings involving the Hillary Clinton email investigation during testimony last week, saying that only a “small number’’ of emails had been forwarded to disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, not the “hundreds and thousands’’ he’d claimed in his testimony.

The letter was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, more than a week after Comey testified for hours in defense of his handling of the Clinton probe.

“This letter is intended to supplement that testimony to ensure that the committee has the full context of what was reviewed and found on the laptop,’’ wrote FBI Assistant Director Gregory A. Brower.

In defending the probe at last week’s hearing, Comey offered seemingly new details to underscore the seriousness of the situation FBI agents faced last fall when they discovered thousands of Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s emails on the computer of her husband, Anthony Weiner.

“Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information,” Comey said, adding later, “His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him I think to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state.”

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

One of the meetings was a private conversation between Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place in September in the senator’s office, at the height of what U.S. intelligence officials say was a Russian cyber campaign to upend the U.S. presidential race.

The previously undisclosed discussions could fuel new congressional calls for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russia’s alleged role in the 2016 presidential election. As attorney general, Sessions oversees the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been leading investigations into Russian meddling and any links to Trump’s associates. He has so far resisted calls to recuse himself.

When Sessions spoke with Kislyak in July and September, the senator was a senior member of the influential Armed Services Committee as well as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers. Sessions played a prominent role supporting Trump on the stump after formally joining the campaign in February 2016.

At his Jan. 10 Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, Sessions was asked by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) what he would do if he learned of any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of the 2016 campaign.

“I’m not aware of any of those activities,” he responded. He added: “I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians.”

Over 100,000 visas have been revoked as a result of President Trump’s ban on travel from seven predominantly Muslim countries, an attorney for the government revealed in Alexandria federal court Friday.

The number came out during a hearing in a lawsuit filed by attorneys for two Yemeni brothers who arrived at Dulles International Airport last Saturday. They were coerced into giving up their legal resident visas, they argue, and quickly put on a return flight to Ethiopia.

“The number 100,000 sucked the air out of my lungs,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg of the Legal Aid Justice Center, who represents the brothers.

The government attorney, Erez Reuveni from the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, could not say how many people with visas were sent back to their home countries from Dulles in response to the travel ban. However, he did say that all people with green cards who came through the airport have been let into the United States.

For people like the brothers, Tareq and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz, who tried to enter the country over the weekend with valid visas and were sent back, the government appears to be attempting a case-by-case reprieve. They and other plaintiffs in lawsuits around the country are being offered new visas and the opportunity to come to the U.S. in exchange for dropping their suits.

Virginia Solicitor General Stuart Raphael said such a piecemeal approach was not sufficient, since it is not clear how many people were turned away at Dulles or other airports. The state had sought to join the suit, saying it impacted many state residents.

“There’s something very troubling about the way this is playing out,” Raphael said. “While I am pleased that they are willing to whisk people back if they come to our attention, they won’t come to our attention if we don’t know who they are.”

He said, for instance, that Virginia officials have learned that a George Mason University student from Libya is stuck in Turkey due to the ban.

Judge Leonie M. Brinkema allowed Virginia to join the Aziz brothers’ suit.

Noting that she presided over the case of 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, Brinkema said she had never before faced such interest in a legal dispute. Other judges dealing with lawsuits against the order around the country, she said, have told her of similar experiences.

“I have never had so much public outpouring as I’ve seen in this case,” she said. “This order touched something in the United States that I’ve never seen before. It’s amazing.”

For the order itself, she had some harsh words, though she said the president has “almost unfettered” power in the realm of borders and national security.

“It’s quite clear that not all the thought went into it that should have gone into it,” Brinkema said. “There has been chaos. . .without any kind of actual hard evidence that there is a need” to revoke visas already granted. People had relied on their visas as valid, she said; families had expected to be reunited with loved ones.

Bringing back individuals who have sued after failing to get into the country is a good step, she said, but “I don’t think it’s far enough.”

Outside the courthouse, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said he was “really pleased the judge recognized real harm is happening in Virginia.”

Brinkema declined to hold government officials in contempt for the way they handled travelers from the seven banned countries over the weekend, saying she did not know enough Friday to make that determination. Virginia had cited news reports and affidavits from lawmakers that, contrary to an order Brinkema issued last weekend, Customs and Border Patrol officers denied immigrants access to lawyers.

“There were so many lawyers there willing to help, and not a single one got access,” Raphael said.

Reuveni said that security at Dulles bars lawyers from anything but telephone access to people in screening.

Brinkema said she would expand the order and extend it another week but has not yet released the details.

Judge Neil Gorsuch, 49, is on President Donald Trump's short list for appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated a year ago by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

Gorsuch has the typical pedigree of a high court justice. He graduated from Columbia, Harvard and Oxford, clerked for two Supreme Court justices and did a stint at the Department of Justice.

“The real appeal of Gorsuch nomination is he’s likely to be the most effective conservative nominee in terms of winning over Anthony Kennedy and forging conservative decisions on the court,” said Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center. “He’s unusual for his memorable writing style, the depth of his reading and his willingness to rethink constitutional principles from the ground up. Like Justice Scalia, he sometimes reaches results that favor liberals when he thinks the history or text of the Constitution or the law require it, especially in areas like criminal law or the rights of religious minorities, but unlike Scalia he’s less willing to defer to regulations and might be more willing to second-guess Trump’s regulatory decision.”

Judge Thomas Hardiman, 51, is on President Donald Trump's short list for appointment to the Supreme Court to fill the seat vacated a year ago by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

If chosen, Hardiman would be the only Supreme Court justice not to have attended either Harvard or Yale — a selling point that his boosters have used to push his candidacy to Trump, who has railed against the political elites ever since the launch of his presidential campaign.

As a justice, Hardiman would be unlikely to swing the ideological balance on the court. Legal experts see him as largely falling in line with the conservative bloc, as Scalia did.

A 2007 ruling Hardiman wrote upheld the constitutionality strip searches of jail prisoners regardless of how minor an offense they were accused of. The Supreme Court later endorsed his decision, 5-4.

While Hardiman has backed First Amendment rights in the context of political donations, he took a narrower view in a 2010 suit over an arrest for videotaping a police officer during a traffic stop, holding that there was no clearly established First Amendment right to record such an event.

Hardiman won favor with gun rights advocates for a 2013 dissent that said New Jersey was violating the Second Amendment to the Constitution by requiring those seeking to carry a handgun to demonstrate a “justifiable need” for such a permit.

Pryor is a standout favorite among many constitutional conservatives for his uncompromising, often caustic criticism of the leading liberal Supreme Court decisions. He has called Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion rights ruling, “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.” As an outspoken elected attorney general of Alabama, he often blasted federal judges.

“The courts have imposed results on a wide range of issues, including racial quotas, school prayer, abortion and homosexual rights. Those issues belong in Congress and the state legislature,” he wrote in a 1997 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Pryor made it onto the 11th Circuit in 2004 via a rare recess appointment from President George W. Bush after Senate Democrats blocked a vote on Pryor’s nomination for nearly a year. He was confirmed on a 53-45 vote in 2005 as part of the so-called “Gang of 13” deal that allowed approval of several stalled Bush judicial nominees but preserved the right to filibuster.

While Pryor’s record as an appeals court judge has been staunchly conservative, he surprised many legal observers in 2011 by joining a decision holding that some discrimination against transgender individuals is prohibited by constitutional doctrine forbidding sex discrimination.

Republicans moved one step closer to repealing Obamacare when the House passed a measure this afternoon directing committees to begin working on legislation to repeal major pieces of the law.

The resolution cleared the House 227-198. Ten members didn't vote. Similar legislation passed in the Senate Thursday morning largely along party lines.

Republican leaders expect to enact a repeal as early as next month; House Speaker Paul Ryan said it would "definitely" come in the first 100 days.

They also say they will advance a replacement at a similar pace, though it could take years to go into effect.

The passage of the budget measure allows Republicans to dismantle large pieces of the Affordable Care Act quickly and efficiently.

A group of nine moderate and conservative House Republicans voted against the bill with concerns that Republicans would end up repealing the law without clearly laying out and presenting their replacement.

"The only thing I've ever asked for is that the replacement plan be fully developed before we take on the repeal issue," Rep. Charlie Dent, R-PA, a leading moderate who voted against the measure, said in an interview.

Hardliners want more details and are concerned about adding to the deficit.

Democrats criticized the vote and accused the GOP of playing politics.

"It's being done for political reasons," said Rep. John Delaney, D-Maryland, on the House floor.

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington, where Republicans control both houses of Congress and where a wealthy businessman with myriad potential conflicts of interest is preparing to move into the White House.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, spoke out during the meeting to oppose the measure, aides said on Monday night. The full House is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the rules, which would last for two years, until the next congressional elections.

In place of the office, Republicans would create a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review that would report to the House Ethics Committee, which has been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

“Poor way to begin draining the swamp,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, said on Twitter. He added, “Swamp wins with help of @SpeakerRyan, @RepGoodlatte.”

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement on Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some of them have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“The O.C.E. has a serious and important role in the House, and this amendment does nothing to impede their work,” the statement said in part.

But Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, joined others who had worked to create the office in expressing outrage at the move and the secretive way it was orchestrated.

“Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House G.O.P. has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement on Monday night. “Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

The Office of Congressional Ethics has been controversial since its creation and has faced intense criticism from many of its lawmaker targets — both Democrats and Republicans — as its investigations have consistently been more aggressive than those conducted by the House Ethics Committee.

The body was created after a string of serious ethical issues starting a decade ago, including bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All three were ultimately convicted and served time in jail.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, which is overseen by a six-member outside board, does not have subpoena power. But it has its own staff of investigators who spend weeks conducting confidential interviews and collecting documents based on complaints they receive from the public, or news media reports, before issuing findings that detail any possible violation of federal rules or laws. The board then votes on whether to refer the matter to the full House Ethics Committee, which conducts its own review.

But the House Ethics Committee, even if it dismisses the potential ethics violation as unfounded, is required to release the Office of Congressional Ethics report detailing the alleged wrongdoing, creating a deterrent to such questionable behavior by lawmakers.

Under the new arrangement, the Office of Congressional Complaint Review could not take anonymous complaints, and all of its investigations would be overseen by the House Ethics Committee itself, which is made up of lawmakers who answer to their own party.

The Office of Congressional Complaint Review would also have special rules to “better safeguard the exercise of due process rights of both subject and witness,” Mr. Goodlatte said. The provision most likely reflects complaints by certain lawmakers that the ethics office’s staff investigations were at times too aggressive, an allegation that watchdog groups dismissed as evidence that lawmakers were just trying to protect themselves.

“O.C.E. is one of the outstanding ethics accomplishments of the House of Representatives, and it has played a critical role in seeing that the congressional ethics process is no longer viewed as merely a means to sweep problems under the rug,” said a statement from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog group that has filed many complaints with the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“If the 115th Congress begins with rules amendments undermining O.C.E., it is setting itself up to be dogged by scandals and ethics issues for years and is returning the House to dark days when ethics violations were rampant and far too often tolerated,” the statement continued.

One Republican House aide on Monday disputed the suggestion that the Office of Congressional Complaint Review was a new entity, arguing that the current staff would largely remain and that the outside board overseeing it would also continue to exist.

“It’s the same office, same people, most of the same rules,” said the House aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Among the most prominent cases brought by the Office of Congressional Ethics since it was created was an investigation into Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, who was accused of intervening with the Treasury Department to try to assist a struggling bank in which her husband owned stock.

Ms. Waters was ultimately cleared by the House Ethics Committee, but the committee criticized the actions of her grandson, who was then her chief of staff, and urged the House to consider broadening a ban on lawmakers’ hiring their relatives to include grandchildren.

By moving all of the authority to the House Ethics Committee, several ethics lawyers said, the House risks becoming far too protective of members accused of wrongdoing.

Bryson Morgan, who worked as an investigative lawyer at the Office of Congressional Ethics from 2013 until 2015, said that under his interpretation of the new rules, members of the House committee could move to stop an inquiry even before it was completed.

“This is huge,” said Mr. Morgan, who now defends lawmakers targeted in ethics investigations. “It effectively allows the committee to shut down any independent investigation into member misconduct. Historically, the ethics committee has failed to investigate member misconduct.”

The U.S. agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards was itself penetrated by a hacker after the November elections, according to a security firm working with law enforcement on the matter.

The security firm, Recorded Future, was monitoring underground electronic markets where hackers buy and sell wares and discovered someone offering log-on credentials for access to computers at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, company executives said.

Posing as a potential buyer, the researchers engaged in a conversation with the hacker, said Levi Gundert, vice president of intelligence at the company, and Andrei Barysevich, director of advanced collection.

Eventually they discovered that the Russian-speaking hacker had obtained the credentials of more than 100 people at the election commission after exploiting a common database vulnerability, the researchers said.

The hacker was trying to sell information about the vulnerability to a Middle Eastern government for several thousand dollars, but the researchers alerted law enforcement and said Thursday that the hole had been patched.

The Election Assistance Commission said in a statement late Thursday that it had become aware of a "potential intrusion" and was "working with federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the potential breach and its effects."

"The FBI is currently conducting an ongoing criminal investigation," the statement added.

The election commission certifies voting systems and develops standards for technical guidelines and best practices for election officials across the country.

The researchers said the hacker had an unusual business model, scanning for ways to break into all manner of businesses and other entities and then moving rapidly to sell that access, rather than stealing the data himself.

“We don’t think he actually works for any government or is super sophisticated,” Barysevich said.

In the case of the election commission, the hacker used methods including an SQL injection, a well known and preventable flaw, obtaining a list of user names and obfuscated passwords, which he was then able to crack.

Though much of the commission’s work is public, the hacker gained access to non-public reports on flaws in voting machines.

In theory, someone could have used knowledge of such flaws to attack specific machines, said Matt Blaze, an electronic voting expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The researchers were confident that the hacker moved to sell his access soon after getting it, meaning that he was not inside the system before election day.

The U.S. voting process is decentralized and there were no reports of widespread fraud in November.

The Election Assistance Commission was created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 and is led by presidential appointees.

(CNN)At least eight people were taken to hospitals after an active shooter was reported on the Ohio State University campus Monday, authorities said.

One of those eight patients is in critical condition, Columbus Fire spokeswoman Rebecca Diehm said.

Campus officials urged people to shelter in place and avoid the Watts Hall area.

"Buckeye Alert: Active Shooter on campus. Run Hide Fight. Watts Hall. 19th and College," OSU Emergency Management tweeted Monday morning.

Watts Hall is the university's materials science and engineering building.

OSU senior Anthony Falzarano, 22, said he was in class at the time of the shooting.

"We heard a lot of sirens. I was in class and everyone got a text message at the same time for the emergency alert," he told CNN. "Someone said they heard popping right before we got the alert, but I didn't hear it. We are in a shelter-in-place right now in the building next door. "