Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s massive campaign apparatus and an army of some 500 staffers will march on through the general election in November even if he loses the Democratic nomination, campaign officials tell NBC News, shifting their efforts toward working to elect whoever the party selects to face President Donald Trump.

Bloomberg’s vast tech operation will also be redirected to help the eventual nominee, as Democrats struggle to compete with the vaunted digital operation built by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. Hawkfish, a digital company started by Bloomberg that’s carrying out his $100 million online ad campaign, will be retained through Election Day to help defeat President Donald Trump, the officials said.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti endorsed Joe Biden on Thursday, a boost for the former vice president in a critical Super Tuesday state.

The endorsement comes as Biden campaigns in California, a delegate-rich state where early voting will begin next month.

“Joe Biden is a close personal friend who has been an incredible partner in delivering progress for L.A.,” Garcetti said in a prepared statement, adding that the country needs “Joe Biden to bring our nation and world together during these most divided and dangerous times.”

Boeing employees mocked federal rules, talked about deceiving regulators and joked about potential flaws in the 737 Max as it was being developed, according to over a hundred pages of internal messages delivered Thursday to congressional investigators.

“I still haven’t been forgiven by God for the covering up I did last year,” one of the employees said in messages from 2018, apparently in reference to interactions with the Federal Aviation Administration.

The most damaging messages included conversations among Boeing pilots and other employees about software issues and other problems with flight simulators for the Max, a plane later involved in two accidents, in late 2018 and early 2019, that killed 346 people and threw the company into chaos.

The employees appear to discuss instances in which the company concealed such problems from the F.A.A. during the regulator’s certification of the simulators, which were used in the development of the Max, as well as in training for pilots who had not previously flown a 737.

“Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t,” one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. “No,” the colleague responded.

In another set of messages, employees questioned the design of the Max and even denigrated their own colleagues. “This airplane is designed by clowns, who are in turn supervised by monkeys,” an employee wrote in an exchange from 2017.

President Donald Trump has lost a bid to block an advice columnist’s lawsuit over his remarks that she lied in accusing him of rape.

In a decision this week, a Manhattan judge declined to order a hearing on Trump’s request to dismiss E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit and to put evidence-gathering on hold in the meantime.

A lawyer for Trump, Lawrence Rosen, had argued the New York court shouldn’t handle the case, saying that the president’s statements weren’t made in the state and that Trump currently lives in Washington, not New York, his longtime home.

Judge Doris Ling-Cohan said the argument wasn’t properly backed up.

“There is not even a tweet, much less an affadavit by defendant Trump in support,” Ling-Cohan wrote in a decision provided to lawyers in the case Thursday.

South Korea said Friday it conveyed a message by President Donald Trump to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wishing him a happy birthday, which is believed to be Jan. 8.

Returning from a visit to Washington on Friday, Chung Eui-yong, South Korea’s presidential national security director, told reporters that Trump requested Seoul to deliver the message to Kim during a meeting at the White House this week.

Chung didn’t disclose what the message specifically said, but said Seoul sent it to Pyongyang on Thursday through “proper means.”