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[ad_1] White House officials and others familiar with the situation said the circumstances surrounding Dr. Jackson’s fall from grace and Dr. Pena’s departure dated back many years, to longstanding divisions in the medical unit — which is part of the military — where there are two factions that do not get along. Dr. Pena — known to patients simply as “Dr. Jen” — submitted her memos about Dr. Jackson last fall to Nick Ayers, Mr. Pence’s chief of staff, who shared them with John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Both Mr. Ayers and Mr. Kelly directed Dr. Pena to go through her military chain of command to address the issue, the person said. CNN, which obtained the memos, reported that Dr. Pena had accused Dr. Jackson of having intervened in a medical matter involving Karen Pence, Mr. Pence’s wife, and possibly violating her medical privacy rights. She also s...

[ad_1] UPDATE: 5:36 p.m. Eastern Time: NBC News issued a correction to  its original report on Thursday evening, specifying that authorities had not “wiretapped” Cohen’s phone but had used a “pen register,” a device which captures all outgoing calls  made from a specific phone, but does not record the content within those calls.  The original NBC report cited two sources with knowledge of the Cohen investigation. Those claims were later disputed in part by three senior U.S. officials. The original report has since been updated to reflect the correction. EARLIER: Federal investigators have been monitoring the phone lines of longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen and intercepted at least one phone call between a phone line belonging to Cohen and someone at the White House, NBC News reported on Thursday. Cohen is currently under federal investigation for a $130,000 payment he made on behalf of Trump to adult film actress Stormy Daniels , weeks ahead of the 2016 presidential electio...

[ad_1] During his train wreck of an interview on Hannity on Wednesday night , new Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani explained that the president fired then-FBI director James Comey because Comey refused to publicly announce that Trump “wasn’t a target” of the FBI’s investigation of his campaign. There’s just one problem. Giuliani’s explanation for Comey’s firing differs from two previous ones that have already been offered by the White House — the official line, which was that Comey mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation; and the one Trump offered NBC’s Lester Holt, which was that he fired Comey because he was frustrated with the Russia investigation . On Thursday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to reconcile team Trump’s shifting rationales for Comey’s firing. She responded with the verbal equivalent of the shrug emoji. “There were a number of reasons that James Comey was fired. The president has named several of them,” Sanders said. “But the bottom line ...

[ad_1] On April 5, President Trump specifically said he had no knowledge of the $130,000 payment Michael Cohen made to Stormy Daniels, and referred all questions back to Cohen. Last night, Rudy Giuliani admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen for the $130,000 in a series of payments that completed in 2017. During Thursday’s White House press briefing, Sarah Sanders was presented with a  very difficult task are explaining how these two things are consistent. She barely tried. Sanders initially said that “this was information the president didn’t know at the time but eventually learned.” But how could Trump not know about the $130,000 payment by Cohen if he had already reimbursed Cohen? That’s precisely what Sanders was asked next by ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “How could he not have known, he was paying him back?” “I’m not going to get into those details,” Sanders replied. This isn’t an answer but an acknowledgement that there is no answer. CNN’s Jim Acosta gave it another shot. “How can...

[ad_1] While several current and former officials said they had not heard the chief of staff call his boss “an idiot,” as NBC News reported on Monday, many said that Mr. Kelly had given the impression over many months that he did not hold the president in high regard. He speaks as if he sees himself as the lone bulwark against potentially dangerous decisions by the commander in chief, they say. And whether he used the word or not, they added, the story itself could serve to accelerate his departure. Yet Mr. Trump, always averse to confrontation, has continued to keep Mr. Kelly in his role, while increasingly steering around him on matters large and small. One person close to the White House said that it will be up to Mr. Kelly to end his tenure, since Mr. Trump knows how damaging it would be to dismiss a four-star Marine general. The result is that Mr. Kelly now finds himself in the position where several others who have worked for Mr. Trump have landed: aware that their jobs h...

[ad_1] WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering executive action to further restrict the sale of Chinese telecommunications equipment in the United States, people briefed on the discussions said, in a move that could ratchet up tensions between China and the United States as the countries vie for technological dominance. The executive order, which could be released within days, is expected to raise the barrier for government agencies to buy products from foreign telecom equipment providers like Huawei and ZTE, two of China’s most prominent technology firms. Private government contractors may also be restricted from buying foreign telecom products, which the United States believes may be vulnerable to Chinese espionage or disruption. The order would follow a series of intensifying actions by the Trump administration to block Chinese technology that is seen as a national security threat. In March, the Federal Communications Commission took action to block broadband companies ...

[ad_1] Nearly nine months after racist violence and domestic terror rocked Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the white supremacists involved in the bloodshed has finally received a verdict in his trial. On Tuesday evening, Jacob Scott Goodwin was found guilty  of malicious wounding, with a jury recommending ten years in prison for the 23-year-old. A judge will sentence Goodwin in late August, just over a year after one of Goodwin’s fellow white supremacists killed Heather Heyer and injured over a dozen more with his car after the white supremacist rally. Goodwin hasn’t gained as much notoriety as some of his fellow white supremacists, like Richard Spencer or Matthew Heimbach, but he shot to infamy after he was captured on tape battering a young black man in a Charlottesville parking garage. Goodwin’s victim, 20-year-old DeAndre Harris, was rounded up by a gang of white supremacists, who then broke Harris’s arm and left him with a spinal injury. Goodwin claimed the beating was in s...

[ad_1] During a news briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed that the White House was involved in retrieving President Trump’s medical records from his former doctor, Dr. Harold Bornstein, but disputed Bornstein’s claim that what a top White House aide and Trump Organization official did to his office in February 2017 was tantamount to a “raid.” “Why did Keith Schiller, who was a White House employee at the time, go and take medical records from the president’s personal doctor last year?” NBC’s Hallie Jackson asked. Schiller is Trump’s longtime bodyguard and served as director of Oval Office operations from Trump’s inauguration until September of last year. “Ah, as is standard operating procedure for a new president, the White House medical unit took possession of the president’s medical records,” Sanders replied. “It was characterized as a ‘raid’ — is that your understanding of what happened?” Jackson followed up. “The doctor seemed to be pretty upse...