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Rex Tillerson is out as secretary of State, ending a tumultuous tenure as America's top diplomat that was marked by a series of public disagreements with his boss — President Donald Trump. Trump plans to appoint CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace the former Exxon Mobil chief executive. The president picked deputy CIA Director Gina Haspel to run the spy agency.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday named Gina Haspel as the first woman head of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Trump also replaced US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo.

President Trump has ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replaced him with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, orchestrating a major change to his national security team amid delicate negotiations with North Korea, White House officials said Tuesday. Trump last Friday asked Tillerson to step aside, and the embattled top diplomat cut short his trip to Africa on Monday to return to Washington.

Something that now seems ordinary, until you think about it historically – and realize it is actually, stunningly, extraordinary, is the level of transparency President Trump has delivered to his administration. Citizen government by a person who understands the value of the camera and the opportunities of the microphone. Here President Trump frames a cabinet meeting with the media for over 20 minutes while outlining initiatives and objectives. No prior president has ever allowed even a small percentage of the deliberative access delivered by President Trump. POTUS keenly dominates the narrative; outlines the milestones; establishes the expectations and summarizes the...

WASHINGTON -- An impasse remains over a nettlesome aspect of the nation's biofuels standards even after the White House on Tuesday hosted Sen. Ted Cruz and some corn state senators for a meeting at the Texan's request. Despite the lack of a breakthrough to deal with Cruz's concern that the setup is harming refineries in Texas and beyond, he lifted a months-long blockade on an Iowa official nominated to a top USDA post. The Senate then quickly confirmed Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey. Senator Ted Cruz ✔ @SenTedCruz This morning, we had a very positive & productive meeting on fixing...

A chorus of Democratic lawmakers have joined the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, in calling for Congress to act after a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Fla. In a letter on Friday, all 17 Democrats on the House Education Committee urged Representative Virginia Foxx, the committee’s chairwoman, to convene hearings on school shootings, describing them as a “public health epidemic.” “Wednesday’s preventable tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, resulted in the deaths of at least 17 students and faculty,” the letter said. “Sadly, since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Thursday that the Department of Justice was ending the “executive branch legal activism” of the previous administration, while also fighting the judicial activism of liberal judges. “I think the department did become too political” under President Barack Obama, Sessions said. “Essentially, it was executive branch legal activism. They would take cases or regulations or statutes and expand or redefine the meaning of words in them to advance the agenda that they thought ought to be advanced — an agenda that often had zero chance of passing Congress, where...

The Rob Porter domestic abuse scandal is more than just another bout of bad publicity for the White House. It's an actual dilemma that leaves President Donald Trump with no great options, only differing levels of bad choices. But every sensible choice includes chief of staff John Kelly leaving the White House. The key is what Kelly knew about the evidence of Porter's domestic abuse record, when he knew it, and what he did about it when he did know it. That leaves Kelly stepping down quietly and the president not commenting about it as the least bad scenario. It's...

The Treasury Department and IRS will seek to prevent hedge funds from exploiting the new tax law to cut their taxes through carried interest, Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday in congressional testimony. Mnuchin was responding to the news reported earlier in the morning by Bloomberg that hedge funds are setting up Delaware LLCs in large numbers to try to avoid the law's limitation on carried interest.

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney responded Sunday to reports that he’s being considered to replace White House Chief of Staff John Kelly after the retired general faced backlash over the way he handled Staff Secretary Rob Porter’s departure over domestic abuse allegations. “Absolutely not,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “I think all of these stories about replacing General Kelly are mostly being fed by people who are unhappy that they’ve lost access to the president under General Kelly’s leadership,” he added. “I'm extraordinarily pleased with the job the chief has been doing. … I think the president is...

Carson is an acclaimed neurosurgeon who oversees a large government agency for which he has no particular qualifications and in this way represents the grand theme of the Trump administration. He, like the president, came to power by promising that an outsider would have the "common sense" it takes to cure what ails us. And so, while conservative gadfly Armstrong Williams played host to this party at the Monocle restaurant, it was Carson everyone came to see. "There's never been a time in the history of the world where a society became divided like this and did well," Carson said...

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke joined Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM where he downplayed a report that President Donald Trump has turned on him after his controversial decision to remove Florida from consideration for his agency’s offshore oil and gas leasing program. That report, from Axios, claimed Trump is “angry” about the move and described it as a “mistake.” A former Interior Department official is quoted calling Zinke’s decision “clumsy” and an “unforced error.” Zinke countered the unnamed source’s characterization of the incident, describing his relationship with President Trump as “great,” telling Breitbart News Deputy Political Editor Amanda House,...

For years after Michelle Obama’s ironically named Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, students at Penn-Trafford High School in Harrison City, Pennsylvania staged an accidental trash can rebellion. As in many districts, waste management companies were the only winners as students dumped lunch into the garbage. For this school year, Penn-Trafford High School instead tossed Mrs. Obama’s school lunch plan and now President Trump is doing the same on a national scale. As with any policy created by coercive utopians to control personal choices, nothing about the Obama plan made sense. Kids, parents and school districts hated it, and its...

The Washington Post reports that “nearly a year into President Trump’s administration, the Justice Department lacks Senate-confirmed appointees in leadership posts running the national security, criminal, civil rights and other key divisions.” “The problem shows no sign of abating anytime soon,” the Post adds. The Post is correct. Not only are key leadership posts vacant, but it now appears they will remain vacant until at least the Spring. Moreover, this creates a serious problem. William Barr, a former Attorney General told the Post that “anyone who has worked in an administration knows how damaging it is” not to have key...

B‏ @B75434425 #qanon Camp David attendee list for this weekend. Participants: President Donald J. Trump Vice President Mike Pence Senators/Members: Senate Majority Leader McConnell Senate Majority Whip Cornyn Speaker Paul Ryan House Majority Leader McCarthy House Majority Whip Steve Scalise Cabinet Arriving Saturday Morning: Secretary Rex Tillerson, Department of State Secretary Jim Mattis, Department of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Department of Homeland Secutiry Secretary Betsy Devos, Department of Education Director Mike Pompeo, Central Intelligence Agency Director Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget Administrator Scott Pruitt, Environmental Protection Agency Dep Sec Jeffrey Rosen,...

President Donald J. Trump today announced his intent to nominate the following individuals to key positions in his Administration: Holly W. Greaves of the District of Columbia, to be the Chief Financial Officer of the Environmental Protection Agency. Ms. Greaves is a former senior manager at the public accounting firm KPMG LLP, where she provided auditing and advisory services to cabinet-level Federal agencies. She has extensive knowledge of Federal financial and IT environments, Federal accounting standards, and the laws and regulations applicable to financial management and operations. Ms. Greaves was a lead developer for industry-specific training content for KPMG’s Federal...

President Trump's pick to run Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday called for a crackdown on so-called sanctuary cities, saying politicians who help run them should be charged with crimes. In an interview with Fox News' Neil Cavuto, ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan said the Department of Justice needs "to file charges against the sanctuary cities" and "hold back their funding." Homan, who was announced in December as President Trump's pick to permanently run the agency, went on to say that politicians enforcing sanctuary city policies need to be held "personally accountable." "We gotta take [sanctuary cities] to court,...

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Multiple agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have reportedly been told by the Trump administration that they cannot use certain phrases in official documents. Officials from two HHS agencies, who asked that their names and agencies remain anonymous, told The Washington Post that they had been given a list of "forbidden" words similar to the one given to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). A second HHS agency was told not to use the phrases “entitlement,” “diversity” and “vulnerable," in documents. It was also told to use "ObamaCare" as opposed to the "Affordable Care Act" and...

In his first 11 months in office, President Donald Trump is keeping another of his campaign promises: reducing regulations so that the economy can breathe again. Speaking in the Roosevelt Room — an irony that may have been intended — Trump summarized brilliantly exactly how the greatest economic miracle in history got bogged down: Congress has abandoned much of its responsibility to legislate [see Article I, Section I of the U.S. Constitution: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States”], and has instead given unelected regulators ... extraordinary power to control the lives...