Deutsche Bank tells court that it does not have Trump's tax returns

• "Republicans are looking for any silver lining they can get," the source said. "Sondland could be a silver lining ... He donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural. He's a Trump guy. Whereas [former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie] Yovanovitch is a career person."

The backdrop: Text messages turned over by former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker revealed that Sondland, who was named in the whistleblower complaint that set off the impeachment inquiry, was an intermediary in Trump and Rudy Giuliani's alleged efforts to push Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

One particularly explosive exchange that Democrats have keyed in on was a text sent to Sondland by the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, Bill Taylor.

• "I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign," Taylor texted.
• Sondland texted back: "Bill, I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's intentions. The President has been crystal clear no quid pro quo's of any kind." The New York Times reported that Sondland's response came after he spoke to the president.

After the State Department blocked Sondland's testimony, Trump tweeted that he didn't want the ambassador "testifying before a totally compromised kangaroo court, where Republican’s [sic] rights have been taken away, and true facts are not allowed out for the public."

• Sondland was subpoenaed hours later by the committees.
• Later that day, the White House sent a letter informing House Democratic leaders that the Trump administration will not participate in their impeachment inquiry, condemning it as "constitutionally illegitimate."

The big picture: On Thursday, the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees sent out the following schedule, obtained first by Axios, to committee members and staffers outlining the officials who are expected to testify over the next week, per the congressional sources.

• Friday: Former U.S. Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
• Monday: Trump's former Russia adviser Fiona Hill.
• Tuesday: Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent.
• Wednesday: U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
• Thursday: Counselor of the State Department Ulrich Brechbuhl.

Yes, but: These sources acknowledge that they can't say with 100% certainty that the Trump administration will allow these officials to testify.

• "We're never sure until the morning of," one of the sources said.
• But they all said that as of now, the committees are preparing as if each of these individuals are appearing.

Go deeper ... Trump-Ukraine scandal: The key players, dates and documents

"I don't know those gentlemen. Now it's possible I have a picture with them because I have a picture with everybody. ... Somebody said there may be a picture or something at a fundraiser or somewhere. But I have pictures with everybody. ... I don't know, maybe they were clients of Rudy. You'd have to ask Rudy."

Why it matters: Parnas and Fruman helped introduce Giuliani to Ukrainian officials as part of an effort to push Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden over unsubstantiated corruption allegations — a campaign that is now at the center of an impeachment inquiry.

• Parnas' and Fruman's lawyer John Dowd — who separately represented Trump during the Mueller investigation — wrote in a letter to House committees investigating Ukraine last week that the two men "assisted Mr. Giuliani in connection with his representation of President Trump."

Go deeper: Foreign-born Giuliani associates arrested on campaign finance charges

What he's saying: Powell was upbeat about his interest rate cuts, which he said were designed to give the economy room to "gather steam again." He was also optimistic on inflation, and said he was trying very hard to persuade the markets that he wants to see it higher.

• Powell barely needed to mention unemployment, which is at a 50-year low. There are now just 1.04 Americans looking for work for every job vacancy in America, according to new data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That's an all-time low and bespeaks a very healthy labor market.

Yes, but: Next week is the official start of earnings season. Major banks will report their 3rd quarter results, including JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. Look out for United Airlines and J&J too.

Why it matters: Expectations are low. Analysts expect S&P companies' third-quarter earnings to come in 4% lower than the same period last year. That would mark the biggest year-over-year drop since 2016, according to FactSet.

• Companies have been guiding investors' expectations downward in the wake of uncertainty about the trade war, higher tariff-related costs and concerns about the global economy. What's certain is that earnings won't come close to the expectations that the market priced in last year.

Go deeper: The world according to Jerome Powell

Why it matters: The same companies that extol high-minded principles on U.S. soil are perfectly content to abide by every censorship rule set by the Chinese Communist Party — and are even happy to travel to Riyadh to butter up the murderous Saudi royal family.

• Apple has been a leader on immigration in the U.S., going to bat for Dreamers. But it also removed the HKmap.live app from its app store after complaints from China, citing danger to Hong Kong’s police. Its latest iOS update caused the Taiwanese flag to disappear for users in the Chinese territories of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as anybody on the mainland.
• Google has taken the same stance on Dreamers and on its app store. It was also caught building a censored search engine for China.

"China’s economic miracle hasn’t just failed to liberate Chinese people. It is also now routinely corrupting the rest of us outside of China."

The list is almost endless. All three big U.S. airlines — American, United and Delta — bent to the party’s will last summer and scrubbed references to Taiwan; Marriott did likewise. Gap apologized for selling T-shirts with a map of China that didn't include Taiwan, saying its map was "incorrect." Even news organizations are treading carefully, if they're owned by Disney. Hollywood has long accepted China's censorship rules to rake in its profits.

Driving the news: American firms’ instinctive deference to Chinese autocrats was thrust into the national spotlight this week.

• Basketball fans watched the NBA chide the Houston Rockets’ GM for tweeting — then deleting — a single image supporting Hong Kong protestors.
• Sneakerheads watched Vans pull shoe designs that alluded to the Hong Kong movement from a global sneaker design contest.
• Gamers watched Activision Blizzard — an American company in which Chinese tech giant Tencent has a 4.9% stake — suspend and take prize money from a Hong Kong-based player who publicly supported the protests.

One level deeper: Thermo Fisher Scientific, which is based in Massachusetts, boasts of its "strong global citizenship practices." But, it has also supplied the Chinese government with DNA sequencers that are being used to collect the DNA of Uighur ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

The bottom line: For all that CEOs increasingly talk of their "moral duty to speak up," those moral duties seem to be left on the tarmac whenever they hop on their corporate jet.

Go deeper: China's vise grip on corporate America

The big picture: As Axios first reported, Trump told House Republicans that he made his now infamous phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the urging of Perry. In May, Perry led a U.S. delegation to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration in place of Vice President Mike Pence, leading Democrats to ramp up their scrutiny of the trip and Perry's conversations with Ukrainian leaders.

• The AP also reported last week that at the same time Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani was pushing Ukrainian officials to investigate Biden, Perry was engaged in an effort to replace board members at Ukraine's state-run gas company with new management — including one of his Texas donors.
• The AP notes that it's not clear if the two pressure campaigns were related, but argues that it "shows how those with ties to Trump and his administration were pursuing business deals in Ukraine that went far beyond advancing the president’s personal political interests."

Read the letter to Perry

Go deeper ... Trump-Ukraine scandal: The key players, dates and documents

REPORTER: "Is it appropriate for the president of the United States to solicit foreign interference in our political process?"

MCMASTER: "Of course no. No, it's absolutely not. And of course, what has to happen here is seeing our democracy play out, our separation of powers play out. And for the American people, through their representatives in Congress, to make a judgment of whether that happened."

Why it matters: Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry over allegations that he pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden. McMaster, a 3-star general who served as the 2nd of Trump's 4 national security advisers, was widely considered one of the more responsible high-ranking officials to serve in the president's inner circle — part of a loose alliance in the early days of the Trump presidency that saw it as their duty to protect the nation from disaster.

Go deeper: Trump's trifecta of calling on foreign powers to interfere in elections

Between the lines: The retirement will have political implications for the New York Democratic Party, which is experiencing a widening divide between establishment figures and left-wing insurgents — exemplified by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's primary victory in 2018 over 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley. Lowey was facing a primary challenge from 32-year-old progressive attorney Mondaire Jones.

Go deeper: More Republicans than Democrats leaving Congress before 2020 election

The backdrop: Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman introduced Giuliani to former Ukrainian prosecutors Viktor Shokin and Yuri Lutsenko, who promoted allegations that Biden forced Ukraine to fire Shokin in 2016 because Shokin was investigating a gas company that employed Biden's son, per the Washington Post. President Trump's and Giuliani's efforts to get Ukraine to investigate Biden for this alleged corruption are now at the center of an impeachment inquiry.

• Earlier this week, Parnas and Fruman told the House committees investigating Trump and Ukraine that they will not comply with document or deposition requests.
• Their attorney John Dowd, who represented Trump during the Mueller investigation, accused Democrats of attempting "to harass, intimidate and embarrass" his clients.

The latest: On Thursday, the House Oversight, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees subpoenaed Parnas and Fruman to turn over key documents about Ukraine by Oct. 16. The chairmen said the two men will be asked to testify as well at a later date.

• U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman said at a press conference that Parnas and Fruman were "about to board an international flight with one-way tickets" when they were arrested. He also added that the investigation is "ongoing."

Read the indictment:

Background: For years, the DOJ has argued that the key reason for tech companies to implement weaker encryption algorithms was that strong encryption helps hide evidence critical to fighting terrorists. The metric the DOJ used to make this point was how many cellphones it was unable to break into to obtain this and other evidence.

• That changed last week when Attorney General William Barr and his counterparts in Australia and the U.K. started emphasizing a different metric and a different topic. In a letter to Facebook and a subsequent conference, Barr emphasized that the key reason for tech firms to weaken encryption was to stymie child exploitation operations run through messaging apps.

The main encryption controversy — whether tech firms should design encryption to let users control who can see their data, or allow law enforcement to access data without user permission — hasn't changed.

• Cryptographers and security experts still believe that weakening security to give authorities access to data will make it easier for everyone else, including bad actors, to access that data, too.

But, but, but: The focus on messaging apps and child exploitation adds a new wrinkle.

• Johns Hopkins associate professor Matthew Green notes that it's harder to safely weaken encryption on chat apps than on physical phones.
• "If China wants to decrypt everyone in the Senate’s phones," he told Codebook, "they need to physically obtain all the phones." But chat messages can be obtained remotely — they pass through the internet to reach their target.

A recent report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace noted a variety of other reasons that the debate should focus on phones rather than messaging apps, including chat apps that continuously change encryption keys, a valuable tool that is tough to maintain while extending access to law enforcement.

• "[I[f good-faith debate on all sides can’t lead to more constructive discussions in this area, then there are likely none elsewhere," the report concluded.

And child exploitation is a more sprawling problem to address, in technical terms.

• The DOJ touted Facebook as a company that was able to provide investigators with massive amounts of tips regarding illegal images being shared on the platform.
• But there's a big difference between assisting terrorism investigations with occasional access to specific phones and assisting child exploitation investigations by building massive image analysis networks.
• That would require platforms to invest in costly bulk surveillance systems that will inevitably rely on advanced artificial intelligence to analyze every image — and will also need humans to double-check the work.
• Some, like Facebook, already have a version of that in place to flag illegal content on their unencrypted platforms. But messaging apps that haven't had to screen content in the past would be starting from scratch.