When Gordon Sondland arrived at the Capitol last month to provide what would be pivotal testimony in the Trump impeachment inquiry, a reporter asked the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, “Are you here to salvage your reputation?”

“I don’t have a reputation to salvage,” Sondland shot back.

Until recently, Sondland, 62, had a pretty low profile outside his hometown of Portland, Ore., where he and his wife, Katy Durant, are big Republican donors and contributors to numerous arts and civic organizations.

Now, as Sondland prepares to testify publicly before congressional investigators Wednesday, he finds himself in the middle of a Category 5 political storm.

Congressional investigators are looking into whether President Trump withheld security assistance from Ukraine to pressure the government to say it was investigating former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Sondland, who helped reach out to the Ukrainian government on Trump’s behalf, first told Congress that the president was simply interested in battling corruption. He had demanded no favors in exchange for security assistance, he claimed.

But Sondland later amended his testimony, saying the aid package was in fact contingent on an investigation into the Bidens.

A strive for prominence

The impeachment inquiry has given Sondland a notoriety he never bargained for when he became EU ambassador.

The son of Holocaust survivors, Sondland dropped out of college early and got into commercial real estate. At just 28, he bought and renovated the bankrupt Roosevelt Hotel in Seattle, where he was born.

Today, his company, Provenance Hotels, owns 14 hotels, including six in Portland.

“He sees a good property that’s kind of in the right location and makes enough of an investment in it to make it a highly desirable place to stay,” says Len Bergstein, a public affairs consultant who has worked with Sondland.

Sondland has worked hard to be seen as a civic leader and cares a lot about how he is seen, Bergstein says. When Sondland worked out a deal with local government to acquire some land for a hotel, he insisted that he be referred to as a “pillar of the community” in the press release the city put out, Bergstein says.

“He was in many ways exercising his political muscles to try and up his profile, to take him from a kind of a noted and successful businessperson in a relatively narrow sense to much larger circles of prominence in the community,” Bergstein says.

According to Oregon Business, Sondland is a big fan of Ayn Rand, whose books promoting free market capitalism are popular with many libertarian conservatives.

But he has mainly donated to moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush and even a few Democrats, according to Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics.

A complicated relationship with Trump

His relationship with Trump is complicated. Sondland publicly broke with him following the then-presidential candidate’s attack on a Gold Star Muslim family. Yet Sondland also became a “bundler” for Trump, using his network of Portland political donors to help Trump get elected.

“In that election he gave nothing to Trump but he was listed as one of Trump’s bundlers in 2016, and of course being a bundler gives you more clout than just giving a single donation,” Krumholz says.

Sondland also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration through four companies Sondland controls.

A lot of people in liberal Portland have been taken aback by Sondland’s willingness to work in the Trump administration, Bergstein says.

“It was a surprise when Gordon found Donald Trump as an acceptable candidate. That wasn’t his type of Republican that he supported,” he says.

And Sondland has already paid a price for that support.

He is sometimes confronted by demonstrators when he goes out in public. And Democratic Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who represents the Portland area, has called for a boycott of his hotels.

Record-shattering cold, heavy snow and howling winds are descending on a broad swath of the U.S., the National Weather Service says. It’s the result of one of the coldest arctic air masses to hit the country in recent memory, the agency says, forecasting bitter conditions in areas from the Upper Midwest to many Eastern states.

Warning of a “very dangerous and life-threatening arctic blast,” the weather service predicts that the next several days could see “widespread record lows and low maximum temperatures from the Upper Midwest to the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley.”

Officials also are warning of horrible travel and road conditions, high temperatures that stay in the single digits and wind chills that dip far below zero.

In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has declared a state of emergency, urging people to limit the time they spend exposed to the elements and to check on the well-being of children, older neighbors and pets. Her office advised people to keep water dripping through vulnerable pipes to prevent them from freezing — and to set the thermostat to the same temperature for night and day.

“Keeping Michiganders safe during this stretch of dangerously cold temperatures is our priority,” Whitmer said.

Frigid weather has already started to hit the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. It is expected to sweep into the Eastern U.S. in coming days, forcing residents and businesses, governments and schools to adapt to intensely low temperatures.

Wisconsin could see wind chill values from minus 30 to minus 50 degrees, Gov. Tony Evers said as he declared a state of emergency in his state Monday afternoon.

“When it gets this cold, nobody should be outside unless it is absolutely imperative for them to be outside,” Douglas Brunette, an emergency room doctor at Hennepin Healthcare, told Minnesota Public Radio.

“Stay inside,” Brunette said, warning of the heightened risks of frostbite and hypothermia. “Don’t challenge nature.”

Farther east, in Buffalo, N.Y., the city’s public school district canceled classes for Wednesday and Thursday and told school staff to stay home, citing the forecast of “heavy lake effect snow, winds, and extreme cold.” Other nearby districts were making similar plans, as member station WBFO reports.

A winter weather advisory went into effect at 4 a.m. Tuesday in Baltimore, where health officials declared a “Code Blue” emergency through Friday morning. “The designation prompts agencies to offer free meals for senior citizens, encourage homeless people to seek shelter and help residents apply for utility bill assistance,” The Baltimore Sun reports.

As of Tuesday, more than 1,800 flights had been canceled and more than 8,000 had been delayed.

Federal government workers in the Washington, D.C., area were allowed to leave two hours early, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

In the Southeast, predictions of perilous weather prompted Delta Air Lines to cancel 170 flights out of Atlanta on Tuesday. Member station WABE’s Susanna Capelouto says it was a pre-emptive move and that travelers will be allowed to change their flights without a penalty.

“It’s Super Bowl week in Atlanta, so a forecast of possible snow late this morning caused schools and governments to close for the day,” Capelouto reports for NPR. “Icy weather is taken seriously here, as just five years ago, thousands of motorist were stranded on highways after a midday snowfall.”

Around 1 p.m. ET, the National Weather Service office in Atlanta canceled its winter weather advisory for counties in northern Georgia but warned that patches of black ice could still pose a threat.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey declared a state of emergency for all of her state’s counties Monday, well in advance of the brunt of the storm. As member station WBHM reports, many school systems and city and county offices have since been closed because of expected snow.

“Due to the extreme cold and heavy snow predictions, all crime and doing really dumb things has been cancelled until further notice,” the Priceville Police Department in Alabama joked in a post on Facebook.

After years of incendiary comments on race and other issues that lost him the support of many Republican Party leaders, conservative Iowa Rep. Steve King has lost his bid for reelection to a primary challenge by GOP state Sen. Randy Feenstra, The Associated Press projects.

“I am truly humbled by the outpouring of support over the past 17 months that made tonight possible and I thank Congressman King for his decades of public service,” Feenstra said in a statement. “As we turn to the general election, I will remain focused on my plans to deliver results for the families, farmers and communities of Iowa. But first, we must make sure this seat doesn’t land in the hands of Nancy Pelosi and her liberal allies in Congress. Tomorrow, we get back to work.”

First elected in 2002, King faced the toughest primary campaign of his career in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, trailing in the polls with a limited cash supply and minimal advertising. He faced an onslaught of challengers feeding off of his vulnerability due to inflammatory rhetoric.

His primary opponents focused on an argument that King is unable to effectively represent the interests of his constituents since being stripped of House committee assignments last year, rather than focusing on his history of controversial statements.

“The 4th District needs a seat at the table, an effective conservative voice,” stressed Feenstra in a May debate hosted by WHO-TV.

Feenstra represented the most likely threat to King’s reelection, raising $925,849 this cycle, compared to King’s $330,000, according to the Center For Responsive Politics.

Also challenging King were former Irwin Mayor Bret Richards, former state representative and Woodbury County supervisor Jeremy Taylor and real estate developer Steve Reeder. All had similar platforms: opposing abortion rights, securing the southern U.S. border and supporting gun owners’ views of the Second Amendment.

The writing may have been on the wall for King, who President Trump once dubbed “the world’s most conservative human being.” In his last general election, he scraped by with a margin of just 3% of the vote in his bright red district against Democrat J.D. Scholten, a paralegal and former minor league baseball pitcher.

Scholten’s progress at nearly flipping the northwest district, which is home to Sioux City and Ames, prompted this crowded Republican primary with challengers painting King, 71, as ineffective and offering themselves up as a viable conservative alternative without the reputation of being a toxic thorn in the GOP’s side.

Scholten is returning for a second swing at the seat this year and ended up without any competition in the Democratic primary.

Not only did Feenstra raise more than King in the first quarter, he also garnered the high-profile endorsements of former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, the National Right to Life Committee and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The latter released an ad criticizing King for inaction.

“When we’ve needed him most, Steve King has let us down. He got kicked off the agriculture committee, hurting our farmers, and hasn’t written a single farming bill that passed Congress,” the ad proclaimed.

Many top Iowa Republicans have abandoned King this cycle, seeing it as an unnecessary risk to maintaining control of the district, with King’s controversial record considered a distraction to the conservative cause and a possible threat to the reelection Sen. Joni Ernst.

Last year, King wondered out loud to The New York Times why “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are considered offensive terms. King was widely rebuked by party leadership and stripped from key committee assignments, including his place on the House Agriculture Committee, a panel of particular importance to his home state. King did support a House resolution condemning his comments that was passed nearly unanimously in 2019.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who rarely wades into actions by House Republicans, released a statement at the time calling King’s statements “unworthy of his elected position.”

“If he doesn’t understand why ‘white supremacy’ is offensive, he should find another line of work,” McConnell wrote.

King issued a public statement shortly after the interview was published, defending himself by saying he wasn’t an advocate for white nationalism but rather supports “western civilization’s values.”

It hardly marked the first time his explosive comments made the news.

In 2008, he said terrorists would “be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11” if Barack Obama were elected president.

He’s also made incendiary comments on multiculturalism, immigration and abortion, falsely expressing skepticism that a woman could get pregnant as a result of rape or incest.

One day after the House advanced President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package, Vice President Kamala Harris championed the proposed round of aid as much needed help for Black Americans, calling the pandemic an “accelerator” for “the fissures and the failures, the defects, the flaws in our system.”

Harris delivered her remarks at a Black History Month Virtual Celebration, hosted by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md. In her keynote address, the vice president cited the ways the pandemic has made things worse for “those for whom things were bad before,” particularly Black Americans, who Harris noted, have been shown to be disproportionately affected by the hardships of the pandemic — from health and deaths to economic struggles.

“We are looking at a country in a situation where more than two in three Black Americans personally know someone who has been hospitalized or who has died from COVID-19. Black women workers are being forced out of the workforce in record numbers, and so many Black small businesses are being forced to close their doors,” Harris said.

Harris drew a throughline from those she called “innovators” in the civil rights struggle “who were clear-eyed about the moment in which they lived” to taking action on the pandemic.

“I do believe we can meet this moment and I do believe that this Black History Month, this year, and at this moment, we must be clear-eyed about the challenges in front of us,” Harris said.

The remarks at the 40^th annual iteration of the event came less than 24 hours after the House passed its version of the relief package with provisions aimed at bolstering the nation’s vaccination campaign, stimulating the economy and providing aid from checks to rental assistance to individual Americans. The bill, which now heads to the Senate, also includes provisions for those living in poverty and assistance for families with children.

Harris championed the legislation and its provisions for small businesses and money for vaccination efforts as well as a $3,000 per child tax credit – with $3,600 for children under the age of 6 — that was included in the House bill.

“By doing that, we will lift half of those children living in poverty, out of poverty. And a disproportionate number of children in America who are living in poverty are Black children,” Harris said.

The vice president also highlighted how Black Americans had contributed to battling the public health crisis. She mentioned the health care and essential workers who have been on the front lines during the pandemic — such as Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett who contributed to the development the Moderna vaccine, and Sandra Lindsay, the first nurse to receive the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in the U.S..

Harris also brought up her Thursday visit with Washington, D.C. health director Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt to a pharmacy in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the nation’s capital. In her Saturday remarks, Harris noted that access to COVID-19 vaccines is often a concern among Black and brown Americans.

“We know how folks were treated, historically, in terms of medical science and research. So we know it is an issue that we must acknowledge” Harris said. “We must continue to also educate folks about what is happening now that is different.”