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Brian Hook, a noted Trump critic during the presidential election, is a key figure in a State Department containing many unfilled positions. Hook is the State Department’s director of policy planning, and a Politico report Sunday citing several officials said that Hook has an inordinate amount of power in shaping American foreign policy. A State Department official confirmed this description of Hook to The Daily Caller. The position of director of policy planning is usually an important one and serves as a think tank of sorts for the department. However, with many unfilled roles at the State Department, Hook has...

The US ambassador to Britain, Lewis Lukens, directly contradicted President Trump and threw his support behind London Mayor Sadiq Khan in a series of tweets on Sunday. The top diplomat in London praised Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, after criticism from his boss, President Donald Trump, over the deadly attacks from the night before. 'I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack,' Lukens said in a post, quoted on the US embassy's Twitter account. Lukens, 53, also praised the 'extraordinary' response from Londoners and emergency services.

Lew Lukens, the highest-ranking U.S. official in London, is a piece of work.  The Chargé d'Affaires, or acting U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, undercut President Trump's criticism of London's Mayor Sadiq Khan in the wake of the recent terror attack by brazenly tweeting high praise to the leftist leader, whose hostility to Trump is well known. Lukens's tweet, spotted as a retweet on former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes's Twitter feed, reads: I commend the strong leadership of the @MayorofLondon as he leads the city forward after this heinous attack. – LLukens 3/3 https://t.co/p4dDZuCpyO — U.S. Embassy London (@USAinUK) June 4,...

'We should ... set up a stand-alone PC in the Secretary's office, connected to the internet (but not through our system) to enable her to check her emails from her desk' (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch announced today that it recently received records from the Department of State disclosing plans by senior State Department officials to set up a "stand-alone PC" so that Clinton could check her emails in an office "across the hall" through a separate, non-State Department computer network system. Referencing the special Clinton computer system, Under Secretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, writes Clinton Chief of...

A federal judge on Thursday ordered that the videotape of Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff giving a deposition later this week be sealed so it can’t be used in political attacks against the former secretary of state and likely Democratic presidential nominee. Judge Emmett G. Sullivan said the transcript will be made public, so the public will know what Cheryl Mills says. He said it was “unnecessary” to have the video released. He extended that order to all of the depositions being taken in the open-records case, which also applies to Mrs. Clinton’s closest personal aide, Huma Abedin. Neither...