Author: Philip Rucker
-
Shutdown standoff to stretch past Christmas
Parts of the federal government are set to remain closed through much of next week as Congress shuttered Saturday for Christmas amid a stalemate with President Trump over border wall funding. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that his chamber would not return to legislative business until Thursday, which means many federal agencies will…
-
Trump vows ‘severe punishment’ if U.S. determines Saudi agents killed Khashoggi
—
by
WASHINGTON • President Donald Trump vowed “severe punishment” for Saudi Arabia if the United States determines that Saudi agents killed Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, calling the journalist’s suspected murder “really terrible and disgusting.” In excerpts of a new interview released Saturday morning, Trump said that the incident is being investigated and that the Saudis…
-
McCain’s funeral was a melancholy last hurrah for what’s been lost in Trump era
—
by
WASHINGTON • Official Washington gathered on Saturday for a funeral to honor one of its favorite sons, John Sidney McCain III. It delivered for the country and the world an extraordinary, and in moments disquieting, repudiation of Donald Trump’s presidency and today’s politics. Ringing through Washington National Cathedral on a dreary morning were paeans to…
-
Trump’s Putin fallout: Inside the White House’s tumultuous stretch of walk backs
Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save WASHINGTON – Executive time began early on Thursday, just after sunrise. Feeling exasperated and feisty as he awoke in the White House residence, President Donald Trump firedoff his grievances on Twitter about how the media had been covering his Helsinki summit. And, refusing to be…
-
Praise for Kim Jong Un reflects Trump’s growing regard for totalitarian leaders
Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save President Trump’s praise Friday for Kim Jong Un’s authoritarian rule in North Korea — and his apparent envy that people there “sit up at attention” when the 35-year-old dictator speaks — marked an escalation of the American president’s open embrace of totalitarian leaders around the…
-
Trump issues pardon to Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney
President Trump on Friday issued a pardon to Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former chief of staff to Vice President Richard B. Cheney who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with the leak of a CIA officer’s identity. “I don’t know Mr. Libby,” Trump said in a statement, “but for years I…
-
After testy call with Trump over border wall, Mexican president shelves plan to visit White House
Tentative plans for Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to make his first visit to the White House to meet with President Trump were scuttled last week after a testy call between the two leaders ended in an impasse over Trump’s promised border wall, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. Peña Nieto was eyeing an official…
-
Trump’s Russia ‘hoax’ turns out to be real
The hackers, he suggested, may have been Chinese. Or some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed. Again and again, he insisted, Russian interference was a hoax — a fiction created by Democrats as an excuse for losing an election they should have won. When Donald Trump finally acknowledged publicly that Russians had hacked Democratic emails…
-
Mueller unlawfully obtained emails, Trump transition team claims
—
by
An organization that was part of President Trump’s transition team claimed Saturday that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III improperly obtained a trove of transition emails as part of the inquiry into Russian influence in the 2016 election and other matters. The batch of emails totaling thousands of pages of communications was improperly provided to…
-
Former DNC head Donna Brazile says she considered replacing Clinton with Biden as nominee
—
by
Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated replacing Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.” In an explosive…