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The Washington Post has built a sizable army of reporters to dig into every facet of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's life under orders of new owner Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and Democratic Party donor. Post Associate Editor Bob Woodward revealed Wednesday that the Post has assigned 20 staffers to Trump. In addition the paper plans a book. "There's a lot we don't know," he told the National Association of Realtors convention in Washington. "We have 20 people working on Trump, we're going to do a book, we're doing articles about every phase of his life," he added.

Americans, collectively, are not as angry as watching cable TV would lead you to believe. But many poorer, less-educated folks who have been left behind in the 21st century—the ones who have seen their wages stagnate, their opportunities for upward mobility disappear and their life expectancies shorten—are looking to disrupt a status quo that has not worked for them. That’s what Sanders and Trump are both promising to do. And that’s the main reason why Bernie beat Hillary Clinton in yesterday’s West Virginia Democratic primary by 15.4 points. He carried every single county in the Mountaineer State, which by every...

Donald Trump will come to Washington on Thursday for a series of meetings with Republican congressional leaders. The goal, all involved say, is to hasten the process of unifying a fractured party. The reality is that, nice words to the contrary, Trump and those party leaders are likely never to fully achieve that result.

the public pension debt for the 50 states and the District of Columbia jumped 84 percent in recent years, from $2.625 trillion in 2008 to $4.833 trillion in 2014. ... The highest pension debt/household is in Alaska, with an estimated $113,137 figure; Illinois and California are in the second and third highest rankings at more than $77,000 per household.” The lowest state pension debt per household is in Tennessee at $17,761. Illinois has the lowest “market funded ratio” (value of pension assets divided by market liability), at 23.3 percent. The other 49 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. have a market...

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has signed up to serve as a delegate for presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump at this summer’s national convention in Cleveland. McCarthy’s move is notable in part because House Speaker Paul Ryan has said he is “not ready” to endorse Trump, even though he is the lone Republican remaining in the contest.

Washington (CNN)The Supreme Court is in the home stretch of an unexpected term, racing to issue opinions in more than 30 cases, many that were impacted by the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia. At the center of it all is Chief Justice John Roberts, facing perhaps one of the the greatest challenges of his 10-plus year tenure -- navigating a series of issues such as abortion access, health care, affirmative action and immigration with a court comprised of four liberal and four conservative justices. Early in his tenure, Roberts said that promoting unanimity and collegiality were a priority. He's...

From The Hill: President Obama can’t wait to take on Donald Trump. Obama has been largely sidelined in the presidential contest, a last-year officeholder with high approval ratings who has repeatedly shown he likes to spar with political foes.

Once again Donald Trump is frazzling the custodians of civil discourse....... But dismissing JFK’s assassination as a trivial subject is one mistake that Donald Trump does not make. His gambit is an old story in American culture. With his intuitive media personality, Trump is drawn, moth-like, to an eternal flame of American culture: the JFK story......... The issue facing the next president–and those who will vote for him or her– is not “Who killed JFK?” The issue in 2016 is “Who will kill JFK secrecy?” The Law::::::Within a year of taking the oath of office President Trump (or President Clinton)...

GREENSBORO — North Carolina’s two U.S. senators on Saturday called on Republicans to unite behind Donald Trump – but they had little to say about the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. Richard Burr spoke to the state Republican convention Saturday morning, offering pep talks for the coming campaigns. Tillis’ speech didn’t mention Trump by name, but he made his views clear on the Republican leaders who say they won’t support the nominee’s campaign. “Anybody who doesn’t support the Republican nominee ... is a RINO,” Tillis said, referring to the acronym “Republican In Name Only.”

The first gun range and gun store within the city limits of Washington, D.C. is scheduled to open within the next year. DC Gun Range and DC Guns and Ammo will be located under the same roof at a site on Queens Chapel Road in the city’s northeast quadrant. They will be a short distance from the National Arboretum in a neighborhood that features a number of restaurants and nightclubs. Currently, the city of more than 600,000, which has enacted some of the strictest gun control measures in the country, does not have a single gun store or public shooting...

Jodie Foster is on point. Mere minutes into conversation and she’s talking politics, specifically as they pertain to “Money Monster,” a timely thriller she’s directed. It’s impossible to watch “Money Monster,” which stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts and opens May 13, and not be reminded of the indeterminate rage of the Trump phenomenon. She’s eager to talk about “Money Monster,” in which Clooney plays Lee Gates, the swaggering, superficial star of a cable financial show who’s taken hostage by a young man, played by Jack O’Connell, whose savings have been wiped out by one of Gates’s stock tips. Foster...

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, doesn’t talk all that much about education issues, but when he does, it is usually about the Common Core, rankings and spending. And usually he is wrong, wrong and wrong. In one Trump ad this year, he hit all three in just a few sentences: “I’m a tremendous believer in education. But education has to be at a local level. We cannot have the bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to manage your child’s education. So Common Core is a total disaster. We can’t let it continue. We are rated 28th in the...

America’s uranium industry has been absolutely devastated by Department of Energy decisions and political maneuvering by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and individuals closely tied to her. ... in 1976, the uranium extraction industry employed 35,000 people. Today .. fewer than 500 people in this country are involved in it .. 20 percent of our electrical power is dependent on those 500 people, that’s every fifth light-bulb. We’re now producing enough uranium to power 4 or 5 of our nuclear reactors, that’s 94 dependent on foreign uranium. ... Since 2011, DOE has sold off roughly $1 billion of publicly-owned uranium...

It looks as though California will be considering a measure this November to legalize the recreational use of marijuana by adults over the age of 21. If the ballot measure actually makes the ballot, both California and Maine may soon be joining Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Alaska, and the District of Columbia as states where it's completely legal to toke up. To make the ballot, organizers had to garner more than 365,880 signatures. According to the coalition behind the ballot initiative, over 600,000 people have signed in support. Supporters of the measure include Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsome (D) and Facebook president...

Walter E. Fauntroy was worried about spies. The renowned civil rights figure, who had left the District in 2012 amid mounting financial and legal troubles, was living in the United Arab Emirates and believed his emails were being “wiped out” by American intelligence officers assigned to block his outgoing messages, according to dozens of emails obtained by The Washington Post and acknowledged as authentic by his lawyer. So he began using an alias email address, while still signing his messages with his real name or “The Congressman” — a reference to his nearly two decades as D.C.’s delegate to the...

We hope Sens. Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are giving that devastating new profile of resident Obama’s foreign-policy guru a careful read. Because they’ll learn how they were all played for fools on the Iran nuclear deal by that aide, Ben Rhodes — and the resident. That applies especially to Schumer, who will be the Senate Democratic leader come January. Booker and Gillibrand hewed to the party line in backing the deal. Schumer gave it a thumb’s-down — but then refused to lobby his colleagues to take his side. Sen. Bob Menendez, on the other hand, is looking...

I had the pleasure of attending an informal discussion held by writer/political pundit Fred Barnes recently, where the topics ranged from his biography of Jack Kemp-co-written with McLaughlin Group colleague Morton Kondracke-to his thoughts on the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Taking place prior to the New York primary, and subsequent devastating losses by Ted Cruz to the now presumptive Republican nominee, it served as a fascinating overview of the internal divisions within the conservative establishment, which are even more pronounced now that the worst nightmare of many has come to fruition. Even as Fred Barnes-like a handful of other...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is likely to interview Hillary Clinton in the next few weeks about her use of a private email server while she was U.S. secretary of state and have already interviewed some of her aides, CNN reported on Thursday. The nine-month investigation into whether laws were broken as a result of the server kept in her New York home has overshadowed Clinton's campaign to become the Democratic Party's candidate in November's presidential election. With only a few states left to vote in primary elections, she retains a commanding lead over her rival, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders...

Mary Matalin, a high-profile political pundit and veteran strategist for the Republican Party, changed her party registration to Libertarian from Republican, she said on Thursday. But in an interview with Bloomberg, which reported on the switch, she emphasized that her decision was not connected to Donald J. Trump’s being the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. She described herself as a voter as a “provisional Trump” and a “never Hillary,” referring to the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Pressed on Thursday about why she switched political parties, Ms. Matalin told Bloomberg Politics that she was a Republican in the “Jeffersonian, Madisonian sense.”...

The FBI is reportedly coordinating with Hillary Clinton’s campaign schedule in order to find a time to interview the presidential candidate about her private email server, CNN reports. Investigators have already interviewed several of Clinton’s top State Department aides, including Huma Abedin, the network reported on Thursday. Some of those aides have been interviewed several times. The next step in the investigation — which is looking into whether any classified information was mishandled on Clinton’s server — will be to interview Clinton herself. But that poses a problem because she is in the heat of a presidential campaign. And with...