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When I worked in the White House, I was viewed as strange by many of my colleagues on Sean Spicer’s press team. Although, as a deputy assistant to President Trump, I could regularly be seen on the major news networks, standing on the North Lawn of the White House and discussing some aspect of the administration’s latest policy, I maintained a rather different relationship with the press than all of my other politically-appointed colleagues. Unless we had a preexisting relationship, I didn’t trust any journalist. And if you came from an outlet that belonged to what President Trump calls #FakeNews,...

Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” when asked about Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said it was a “gossipy book” that should not be treated seriously. Paul said, “I guess my first response this was sort of gossipy book, like Kitty Kelly book back when I was in high school, nobody really believed them. They were treated as sort of like a sitcom or treated as a television show. They weren’t treated seriously by the media.”

Battered by the backlash from Michael Wolff's book, Steve Bannon is trying to make amends with the Trump family, providing a statement to Axios that expresses "regret" to President Trump and praises his son, Donald Trump Jr. "Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around." "My support is also unwavering for the president and his agenda — as I have shown daily in my national radio broadcasts, on the pages of Breitbart News and in speeches and...

In spite of growing evidence that Michael Wolff’s explosive new book Fire and Fury should not be treated as the epitome of truthful and accurate reporting, Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough and Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson are still keeping the faith and treating it as the Holy Grail of recording the true story behind the internal workings of the Trump administration. At one point early in the second hour of Friday’s Morning Joe, Robinson professed his conviction that “every page [of Wolff’s book] really rings true, doesn’t it Joe,” to which Scarborough replied: “It does. It really does.” Joe...

A just published tell-all book from a former Secret Service officer details how former President Bill Clinton’s allegedly obsessive out-of-marriage relationships endangered the lives of Secret Service officers. Gary J. Byrne, who was assigned to protect Clinton during his White House years, wonders whether “Clinton’s sordid personal affairs worth and officer’s life” as the president often tried to visit his “well-known and lesser-known mistresses.” During one of Clinton’s trysts, another Secret Service agent almost lost his life in a motorcade crash, the Washington Examiner notes. Byrne writes in “Secrets of the Secret Service: The History and Uncertain Future of the...

"Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House" has set the political world ablaze. It contains vivid, detailed, and embarrassing accounts of President Donald Trump and those around him. But the book's author, Michael Wolff, says he can't be sure that all of it is true. The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump's presidency acknowledged in an author's note that he wasn't certain all of its content was true. Michael Wolff, the author of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the...

President Donald Trump distanced himself from his former chief strategist Steve Bannon on Wednesday, contending that "he not only lost his job" but also "lost his mind" when he left the White House. On Wednesday, excerpts from an upcoming Michael Wolff book showed that Bannon called a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.

A mile-high skyscraper, a dome covering most of downtown Manhattan, a triumphal arch in the form of an elephant - some of the most exciting buildings in the history of architecture are the ones that were never built. A new book, Phantom Architecture, reveals the stories behind more than 50 unbuilt structures, describing how they were conceived, exploring their incredible variety and showing how they went on to inspire other architects who created some of Britain's best known landmarks. Phantom Architecture also shows how London could have looked should some architects have had their way - including a pyramid cemetery...

Some of us LOVE getting books, especially for Christmas. There's something special about unwrapping a book on Christmas morning - and enjoy sharing with others. I rarely post anything, (maybe ten articles in 16 years on Free Republic), but thought this would be a good time for book-lovers to share what we received this morning. Merry Christmas!

Last week during an address at the White House, President Donald Trump likened his tax plan to the tax cut that John F. Kennedy proposed 55 years ago. This elicited some howls of protest from Trump's liberal critics, who say it's historically inaccurate to compare the Trump plan to JFK's. Is it? In 1963 Kennedy proposed a tax cut that slashed business and individual tax rates by about 30 percent. It's true that tax rates were a lot higher then (90 percent in some cases) than now. But the philosophy was the same: Lower taxes will get businesses, investors and...

**SNIP** The Oscar buzz comes despite pushback from skeptics, led by University of Alabama in Huntsville climatologist Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist who accused Mr. Gore of attributing natural phenomena to human-caused climate change. In September, Mr. Spencer published an 84-page e-book, “An Inconvenient Deception,” which blasted the film as “bursting with bad science, bad policy, and some outright falsehoods.” “An Inconvenient Truth” was similarly rebuked by skeptics — Danish academic Bjorn Lomborg challenged it in a book and film called “Cool It”—but the movie earned $24 million at the box office, making it the 11th-highest grossing documentary of...

I was on the John Batchelor Show last Thursday talking about Project Vanguard, GPS and my book GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones. www.gpsdeclassified.com

Steve Bannon may be the most wildly caricatured, criticized, and, in some quarters, reviled figure in American politics. He crisscrosses the country with badass bodyguards in tow because, one assumes, he needs them. But in researching for my new book “Bannon: Always the Rebel,” which included ten hours of one-on-one talks with the man, I discovered and wrote about someone quite different than the popular image of a goose-stepping neo-fascist who wants to withdraw the United States from the world and make Donald Trump dictator for life.Here are just a few of the popular misconceptions about Bannon that normally can’t...

If you spent Election Night last November in utter disbelief and concluded that Donald Trump was a clown who stumbled into a lucky win, you missed “one of the most important perceptual shifts” in human history.

Time magazine is already celebrating their Best of 2017, and their favorite "Non-Fiction" book of the year is....Hillary Clinton's campaign memoir What Happened. Time assistant managing editor Claire Howorth gushed, "Clinton offers one answer to the question that rang collectively from more than half the country on Nov. 9, 2016. The writing is frank, reflective and a piece of modern history." It came complete with buying instructions from Amazon, and Hillary Clinton quickly tweeted out how "honored" she was:

Time magazine is already celebrating their Best of 2017, and their favorite "Non-Fiction" book of the year is....Hillary Clinton's campaign memoir What Happened. Time assistant managing editor Claire Howorth gushed, "Clinton offers one answer to the question that rang collectively from more than half the country on Nov. 9, 2016. The writing is frank, reflective and a piece of modern history." It came complete with buying instructions from Amazon, and Hillary Clinton quickly tweeted out how "honored" she was: "I loved writing this book, & I’m honored to be in such great company on this list!" Number two on the...

Matt Bracken continues to please. I have read all of Matt's books, and consider him a friend, even though we have never met in person.The Red Cliffs of Zerhoun is a distopic novel of the near future. There have been no significant technological advances. The world's economy has crashed, with large parts of the world torn by local wars. Electricity in most areas is either missing, or highly localized.The action takes place near the coasts of Ireland, mainland Europe, and Africa, if we consider “near” to be within a couple of hundred miles.Matt knows his weapons, and how they...

The Washington Post reported new details from Donna Brazile’s forthcoming book, Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, that include the fact that the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee considered replacing Hillary Clinton as the Democratic party’s 2016 presidential candidate.Following Clinton’s bizarre collapse during the 2016 9/11 memorial ceremony, Brazile seriously considered choosing either Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Cory Booker from New Jersey as the party’s presidential nominee. Brazile does not hold back her criticism of the campaign, palpably describing it as having “an odor of failure.”...

There was a behind-the-scene report where Hillary Clinton angrily lashed out at DNC chairwomen Donna Brazile after a presidential forum on NBC. She knew the questions in advance but Matt Lauer decided to go off-script and ask her about her email server instead. This enraged Hillary and after the interview she walked off stage and confronted her staff particularly Brazile: I’m so sick of your face. You stare at the wall like a brain dead buffalo, while letting that f – – – ing Lauer get away with this. What are you good for, really? Get the f – –...

In yet another bombshell from Donna Brazile's upcoming book, the former interim head of the Democratic National Committee describes the paranoia she went through surrounding the Russia-linked hacks of Democrats' emails during the 2016 campaign. In the memoir, which will have the title, "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House," Brazile talks about the mysterious murder of DNC data staffer Seth Rich, which some conspiracy theorists say is because he leaked internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks, and wrote about how she felt her own life was in danger. Brazile says...