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White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has reportedly resigned, per the NYT's Glenn Thrush. Spicer was opposed to the appointment of Anthon Scaramucci as the White House Communications director.

U.S. Sen. John McCain revealed Wednesday evening that he has a brain tumor. The announcement follows a procedure to remove a blood clot from above his left eye at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix last Friday, where a pathology report revealed the glioblastoma, a malignant brain tumor. Treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.

President Trump said Tuesday he's prepared “let ObamaCare fail” after the collapse of Senate Republicans' latest health care bill, indicating he's willing to move on to tax reform and other issues – and deal with an Affordable Care Act fix down the road. “I think we're probably in that position where we'll just let ObamaCare fail,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We're not going to own it. I'm not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We'll let ObamaCare fail, and then the Democrats are going to come to...

This is breaking on McConnel's twitter feed. Statement to abandon repeal/replace for a straight repeal with a 2 year delay to replace.

Today, Fusion GPS employee Rinat Akhmetshin today confirmed his attendance at a meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner along with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.Accusations have arisen that the meeting was part of a wider setup to achieve a FISA warrant to wiretap phones of the Trump campaign during 2016. President Trump himself has accused the FBI under Loretta Lynch of wiretapping his campaign. Now, a former Trump campaign official reports that Paul Manafort’s phone was subject to FISA wiretap during the infamous meeting. Follow James B @jbro_1776 Scoop: Manaforts phone was illegally bugged during meeting with...

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,The mainstream media’s silence over Klaus Eberwein’s death is deafening.Eberwein was a former Haitian government official who was expected to expose the extent of Clinton Foundation corruption and malpractice next week.He has been found dead in Miami at the age of 50.The circumstances surrounding Eberwein’s death are also nothing less than unpalatable. According to Miami-Dade’s medical examiner records supervisor, the official cause of death is “gunshot to the head.“ Eberwein’s death has been registered as “suicide” by the government. But not long before his death, he acknowledged that his life was in danger because he was outspoken...

The Senate will defer consideration of the GOP healthcare plan that would partially repeal and replace Obamacare until Sen. John McCain returns to work following a procedure to remove a blood clot from above his left eye, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement late Saturday. After wishing him a "speedy recovery," McConnell, R-Ky., added: "While John is recovering, the Senate will continue our work on legislative items and nominations, and will defer consideration of the Better Care Act." About two hours earlier McCain's office revealed that he would be spending a week in his home state of...

The Latest on a judge’s decision on President Donald Trump’s travel ban (all times local): 3:50 p.m. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court for greater freedom in limiting visitors to the United States from six mostly Muslim countries and refugees from around the world. The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal with the high court late Friday that seeks to undo a Hawaii judge’s ruling from a day earlier. That ruling diluted President Donald Trump’s restrictions on refugees and visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

A Republican donor and operative from Chicago's North Shore who said he had tried to obtain Hillary Clinton's missing emails from Russian hackers killed himself in a Minnesota hotel room days after talking to The Wall Street Journal about his efforts, public records show. In a room at a Rochester hotel used almost exclusively by Mayo Clinic patients and relatives, Peter W. Smith, 81, left a carefully prepared file of documents, which includes a statement police called a suicide note in which he said he was in ill health and a life insurance policy was expiring. Days earlier, the financier...

Ex-president Jimmy Carter was rushed to a Canadian hospital Thursday for dehydration as he was building a new Habitat for Humanity house in Winnipeg, according to a Canadian news network. Carter, 92, was working on the home when he “collapsed,” a volunteer told CBC News. Paramedics and firefighters rushed to help him and an ambulance took him to a hospital. “President Carter has been working hard all week. He was dehydrated working in the hot sun and has been taken offsite for observation. He encourages everyone to stay hydrated and keep building,” a statement from the Carter Center said.

The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews. This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.

The state appeals court on Thursday overturned the Sheldon Silver's 2015 corruption conviction for pocketing $4 million in kickbacks from a cancer researcher and real estate developers. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison in May 2016. But he appealed earlier this year after the Supreme Court narrowed the definition of "official act" for the purposes of proving corruption cases. That Supreme Court case centered on alleged criminal conduct by former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. In Silver's case, the court ruled his jury was given a too-broad definition of what constitutes an "official act" in light of the Supreme...

The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.

With the jury selection process underway this week for the second Bunkerville Standoff trial in Las Vegas, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was at the federal courthouse today in Las Vegas. Courtroom observer and wife of one of the defendants on trial for the second time in the case, Andrea Parker, heard Sessions praise the way the prosecution is leading the case and then say he was not taking sides in the case. Parker said Sessions comments spoke for themselves and to her were an endorsement of the "atrocity" of the prosecution of those accused in the standoff near Bundy Ranch...

2.8K Donald Trump Jr. on Tuesday released a stunning chain of emails detailing his conversations about setting up a campaign meeting with a Russian lawyer who had offered compromising information on Hillary Clinton. The information “would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” reads one of the emails from Rob Goldstone, who acted as an intermediary to set up the meeting. “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump,” wrote Goldstone. In one of the emails released on Twitter,...

The White House said Monday that the real collusion with a foreign power during the campaign was between the Democratic National Committee and Ukraine.“If you are looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the DNC which actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian embassy,” said White House principal deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders.Fending off questions about Donald Trump Jr. meeting with a Russian lawyer during the presidential race, Mrs. Sanders noted at the daily White House press briefing that the DNC’s work with Ukraine was well documented.DNC operatives...

House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows says the next government spending bill, which needs to be passed at the end of September, must fund the construction of President Trump's border wall, or else there'll be a government shutdown.

[snip]Brazen story... ordinarily trigger a front-page news story or an outraged editorial — a bunch of rich individuals asking Congress to write them a law that would give them better negotiating power against other rich individuals. [snip]Bezos, Slim, and Buffett need Congress to help them negotiate with Google.

More than half of the memos former FBI chief James Comey wrote as personal recollections of his conversations with President Trump about the Russia investigation have been determined to contain classified information, according to interviews with officials familiar with the documents. This revelation raises the possibility that Comey broke his own agency’s rules and ignored the same security protocol that he publicly criticized Hillary Clinton for in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election. Comey testified last month he considered the memos to be personal documents and that he shared at least one of them with a Columbia University...

The Illinois House voted to override Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto of the income tax hike and budget bill. This is the first budget Illinois has passed in two years. The House voted 71-42, which is the bare minimum House Speaker Mike Madigan needed, after a security incident delayed the vote for two hours. The House passed the tax hike and budget bill on Sunday with 72 votes, including 15 Republicans. A few flip flopped, according to The Chicago Tribune: On Thursday, there were some slight changes. One lawmaker who previously voted for the income tax hike on Sunday, Republican...