Live updates: Van Hollen to challenge Schumer; Outlook starts bouncing back

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) announced on Thursday night that he will be challenging Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to become the majority leader of the upper chamber next Congress, as Schumer faces dissent from new senators in particular.

“I think that we heard loud and clear from the American people that they want to end the war in Iran and bring down prices,” Van Hollen told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki. “We should do it now. We shouldn’t say we’re going to wait ’til January.”

Microsoft’s catastrophic Outlook outage started easing on Friday morning, over 18 hours after it turned off email for millions of people.

The Federalist Society on Thursday night heard from Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito at its annual convention. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will address the group on Friday night. Alito implored Congress to fund the high court and chastised lower judges for sometimes issuing “unjustified” orders blocking presidents’ policies.

The East Potomac Park lawsuit returns to a D.C. courtroom on Friday, two weeks after a federal judge opened an investigation into concerns that the Trump administration lied to her in the ongoing legal battle over President Trump’s desire to redevelop the golf course there. A hearing starts at 10 a.m. EST.

Trump has a series of policy meetings at the White House on Friday.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) criticized Vice President Vance’s claim that Republicans lost the midterms because of the war in Iran, saying the reason behind the party’s sweeping midterm losses is “a lot deeper than that.”

“This loss was not because of Iran. That might have played a part, but I don’t think every statewide Republican in Texas lost their election, every single one, because they think American foreign policy is too interventionist,” Kennedy told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Thursday. “I mean, put down the crack pipe.”

Vance shared his thoughts on GOP midterm losses in a lengthy post to the social platform X after the election, writing, “the reason we lost is the war.”

Microsoft is still working to restore access to its services after a massive global outage impacted dozens of its services on Thursday.

The company said early Friday that it is “seeing encouraging recovery progress” according to a statement shared on social media.

“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue,” it reads. “We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”

Microsoft reported that the outage started at 11:17 a.m. EST on Thursday, impacting services like Outlook and Teams. Users began reporting problems accessing their email services at around 12:21 p.m., according to Downdetector.

The company has not shared a cause for this outage, but it stated that the disruption was not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

President Trump claimed in a new interview that he could “easily” beat former President Obama in a political match-up, days after Republicans experienced sweeping losses in the midterm elections.

“I got many more votes than he got, and I got many more votes in the states,” Trump told “Straight Shooter” host Stephen A. Smith in a sit-down interview at the White House.

“And I have the most of the state records of the big states,” he continued. “If you take a look at Texas, I have the all-time record. Florida, I have the all-time record.”

When pressed by Smith about whether he thought he could “beat Obama,” the president replied, “I think I could beat him easily.”

“I think he’s highly overrated, yeah,” he added.

Trump has repeatedly teased the idea of running for a third term, despite term limits enshrined in the Constitution.

Justice Samuel Alito, speaking to the Federalist Society on Thursday, warned against any potential congressional action to defund the Supreme Court as he defended the importance of an independent judiciary.

“Congress can turn off the lights at the Supreme Court and stop everything from happening if they want to defund their activities. And there are many, many, many other things that they can do, or at least try to do,” Alito said. Read more here.