Jordan Fabian

President Donald Trump attacked The New York Times, days after he called one of the paper’s reporters to give an exclusive interview on the decision to pull his healthcare plan from the House floor. “The failing @NYTimes would do much better if they were honest!” President Trump tweeted on both his personal and official White House accounts.

The tweet linked to a piece by New York Post columnist John Crudele, in which he said he canceled his Times subscription “because I felt the paper had become ethically challenged in its coverage of the presidential election.” Crudele ripped the paper’s coverage of the federal investigation into whether Trump associates helped Russia meddle in the 2016 election and Trump’s wiretapping claims.

The White House said it’s unfair to compare Vice President Pence’s use of a private e-mail address to conduct state business as Indiana governor to Hillary Clinton’s home e-mail server setup. “It was an apples to oranges comparison,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. "He was a governor, not a federal employee, which means the laws are different,” she continued. “He did everything to the letter of the law in Indiana, turned all his emails over unlike Hillary Clinton, at least 30,000 on her private server and classified information was found.”

There are numerous differences between the two situations. Indiana law does not bar public officials from using private email accounts, but they are expected to retain those communications for public records requests. Federal employees, on the other hand, are strongly discouraged from using personal accounts for work purposes. Pence spokesman Marc Lotter said he directed his lawyers “to review all of his communications to ensure that state-related emails are being transferred and properly archived by the state, in accordance with the law.” Clinton deleted almost half of her private email archive, claiming they were personal in nature. But an FBI investigation later turned up thousands of work-related emails that were not turned over to the State Department.

President Donald Trump’s top spokesman dismissed a news report alleging the FBI rejected a request by the White House to publicly knock down reports about communications between Trump associates and the Russians. “What you guys have done is indefensible and inaccurate,” he told reporters.

Senior administration officials accused CNN, which broke the story, of mischaracterizing the White House’s request to the FBI — though they did not dispute that a communication took place between the FBI and White House officials. CNN reported that White House chief of staff Reince Priebus reached out to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe asking them to talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories about communications between Trump associates and Russia, which ran in The New York Times and CNN. Comey reportedly rejected the request because the alleged communications are the subject of an investigation. The discussions between the FBI and the White House could run aground of longstanding rules restrictions of contact regarding pending investigations.

President Trump said his ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn was treated "unfairly" by the "fake media." At a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump blamed Democrats and leaks by the intelligence community for Flynn's resignation over his conversations with Russia. Nov 15’s comments are Trump's first in-person reaction to Flynn's resignation. “I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media — as I call it, the fake media, in many cases,” President Trump said. “I think it’s really a sad thing he was treated so badly.”

President Donald Trump scrapped plans to sign an executive action launching a government-wide cybersecurity overhaul. The White House did not immediately provide an explanation for the cancellation. It was an abrupt about face after the White House spent all day Jan 31 plugging its plans to boost the nation's offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.

Officials told reporters earlier in the day that Trump planned to order Cabinet officials to enhance their agencies’ cyber defenses and commission an administration-wide review to assess hacking risks. Hours later, Trump convened a “listening session” with top White House, Cabinet and cybersecurity experts in the Roosevelt Room. “I will hold my Cabinet secretaries and agency heads accountable, totally accountable for the cybersecurity of their organizations which we probably don’t have as much, certainly not as much as we need,” he said. “We must protect federal networks and data.”

President-elect Donald Trump has asked roughly 50 senior Obama Administration officials to remain in their roles in order to "ensure the continuity of government," spokesman Sean Spicer said. The decision comes as Trump is reportedly struggling to fill important posts in his new administration. Among the President Obama holdovers are key national security officials, including Brett McGurk, special envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The move is somewhat surprising, given President-elect Trump’s repeated criticism of President Obama’s effort to combat the terrorist group. He called the president "the founder of ISIS" during a campaign event last April.

President-elect Donald Trump is set to meet with two top executives from Univision after repeatedly clashing with the Spanish-language broadcaster during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is set to meet at Trump Tower with network CEO Randy Falco and head of news Isaac Lee, according to transition spokesman Sean Spicer. The meeting is a chance for the two sides to mend fences after an acrimonious campaign season. The feud dates back to when Trump announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, when he made disparaging remarks about Mexican immigrants. When Univision anchor Jorge Ramos attempted to question Trump about his comments at an August 2015 news conference, the candidate ejected him, telling him to “go back to Univision.”

President Barack Obama denounced the the spread of fake news online, suggesting it’s helped undermine the US political process. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not ... if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems," President Obama said during a news conference in Germany.

The president’s comments amplify reports that viral fake news influenced the 2016 presidential election, adding to pressure on social media sites like Facebook to address the criticism that they didn’t do enough to address the issue. President Obama argued that phenomenon can have an affect on voter attitudes toward candidates, particularly “in an age where there is so much active misinformation, and it’s packaged very well, and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or turn on your television.” “If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect,” President Obama said. “We won’t know what to fight for."

President Barack Obama gave an “entirely factual” response when asked in 2015 about how he discovered Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail server as Secretary of State, his top spokesman said. President Obama’s claim that he first learned about Clinton’s server “through news reports” was called into question again after an e-mail chain released Oct 25 by WikiLeaks showed a top Clinton aide expressing concern in March 2015 that the president might be accused of lying. "What the president said was an entirely factual response,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. "I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state,” Earnest continued. “But they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny, so I guess they are back to recycling thoroughly debunked conspiracies."

The White House has repeatedly insisted that President Obama did not have knowledge of Clinton’s unusual e-mail server, even though the two did communicate by e-mail during her time at the State Department. But Clinton’s allies privately expressed concern about President Obama’s claim during a March 2015 CBS News interview that he first learned through media reports that the secretary of State used an e-mail system “outside the U.S. government for official business,” as reporter Bill Plante described it while questioning the President. “[L]ooks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news,” Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin told other allies in a March 7, 2015, email published by WikiLeaks. “[W]e need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov,” responded former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills. At a White House press briefing two days after the email exchange, Earnest said that Obama knew about Clinton’s email address because he sent messages to it. But he said the president was unaware of the exact nature of the server or the extent to which she used it.