Trump Administration

The right wing Washington Examiner reports: Top White House aide Kellyanne Conway, describing herself as “a powerful woman,” aggressively and disparagingly told a female reporter that it was improper to write about her husband and threatened to investigate the reporter’s personal life. This journalist, a breaking news reporter for the Washington Examiner, had written an article on Tuesday about President …

The Wichita Eagle reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo aggressively defended President Donald Trump on Thursday against criticism that his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northeastern Syria would inflict lasting damage on America’s credibility with its allies. In an interview with The Wichita Eagle and The Kansas City Star, Pompeo said that Trump is good for his word and …

Axios reports: The White House plans to order all federal agencies not to renew their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post, two papers that President Trump has repeatedly attacked for their critical coverage of his administration, the Wall Street Journal reports. The White House said on Tuesday that it would cancel its own subscriptions to the …

The Hill reports: White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Thursday that President Trump does not regret calling “Never Trump” Republicans “human scum” and said they “deserve strong language like that.” “The people who are against him, and who have been against him and working against him since the day they took office are just that,” Grisham said during an …

The National Law Journal reports: A federal judge on Wednesday said he wants the State Department to produce certain documents on Ukraine, including communications between President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and State Department officials, to a watchdog group within 30 days. American Oversight filed an open records request about five months ago for State Department communications with Giuliani, …

The New York Law Journal reports: The New York City Bar Association in a statement Wednesday called on U.S. Attorney General William Barr to stand aside in any ongoing or future review by the Department of Justice of issues stemming from the Trump administration’s dealings with Ukraine, in which Barr has allegedly involved. If Barr does not recuse himself, the …

The New York Times reports: Since becoming ambassador in June 2018, David Cornstein has assiduously courted Mr. Orban, giving the Hungarian leader unexpected influence in the Trump administration. Mr. Cornstein used his decades-long friendship with President Trump to help broker a coveted Oval Office meeting for Mr. Orban last May — a meeting now under scrutiny by impeachment investigators in …

The Washington Post reports: A trove of documents released Tuesday by the House Education and Labor Committee shows the Education Department provided $10.7 million in federal loans and grants to students at the Illinois Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Colorado even though officials knew the for-profit colleges were not accredited and ineligible to receive such aid. The …

NBC News reports: The White House is strongly considering Chad Wolf, the acting undersecretary for strategy at the Department of Homeland Security and former chief of staff to then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, to head DHS, according to four current and former department officials familiar with deliberations on the matter. Wolf is not considered as hard-line on immigration as two other names …

The New York Times reports: An anonymous Trump administration official who published a September 2018 essay in The New York Times, about the active resistance to the president’s agenda and behavior from within his own administration, will publish a book next month. The author, who has not been publicly identified, created an uproar when he or she wrote in an …

Bloomberg reports: Donald Trump has for weeks been privately testing the idea of replacing his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, who’s swiftly fallen out of favor with some of the president’s allies after high-profile stumbles handling the House impeachment inquiry. About a month ago, Trump said to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in front of a roomful of staff: “You have …

Politico reports: President Donald Trump has been notified by his staff that he can’t select two popular figures — Ken Cuccinelli and Mark Morgan — to serve as an acting secretary of homeland security because a federal law governing agency succession makes them ineligible. Instead, Sean Doocey, the White House director of presidential personnel, in recent days gave Trump a …

Quartz reports: US Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner plan to attend this year’s “Davos in the Desert,” a Saudi Arabian economic conference the US and many others skipped last year after Saudi security agents murdered Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. According to a federal procurement filing reviewed by Quartz, the State Department recently …

CNBC reports: President Donald Trump is prepared to use military force against Turkey over its actions in Syria in the event that such is “needed,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday as U.S. troops withdraw from the region. “We prefer peace to war,” Pompeo told CNBC’s Wilfred Frost in a taped interview that aired on “Closing Bell” on Monday. …

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department distanced itself on Sunday from Rudolph W. Giuliani, President Trump’s personal lawyer, declaring that department officials would not have met with Mr. Giuliani to discuss one of his clients had they known that federal prosecutors in New York were investigating two of his associates. Several weeks ago, Brian A. Benczkowski, the head …

The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration is planning to collect DNA samples from asylum-seekers and other migrants detained by immigration officials and will add the information to a massive FBI database used by law enforcement hunting for criminals, a Justice Department official said. The Justice Department will publish an amended regulation Monday that would mandate DNA collection for almost …

ABC News reports: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he never saw the kind of quid pro quo that acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney referred to on Thursday with regard to the decision-making process he was involved in. “The conversation was always around what were the strategic implications,” Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “Would …

The Hill reports: White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney insisted he never said the Trump administration expected a quid pro quo between U.S. aid to Ukraine and that Kiev launching investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden during a withering interview on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace. “You were asked specifically by Jonathan Karl was investigating Democrats …

The New York Times reports: A yearslong State Department investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server found that while the use of the system for official business increased the risk of compromising classified information, there was no systemic or deliberate mishandling of classified information. The inquiry, started more than three years ago, found that 38 current …

Via press release from the watchdog group CREW: In less than a year, Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway appears to have violated the Hatch Act on more than 50 occasions using her @KellyannePolls Twitter account which she uses for both personal and official government business. On June 13, 2019, Special Counsel Henry Kerner, a Trump appointee, took the unprecedented …