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The White House confirmed that Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping discussed Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou with President Joe Biden days before she was released on Friday.“It should not come at no surprise that President Xi raised the Huawei official,” Psaki said. “But again there was no negation on this call.”The call between Biden and Xi took place September 9 and lasted an hour and a half, according to Biden.The Biden Justice Department dropped charges against Wanzhou, setting her free from house arrest in Vancouver. Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in 2018 during the Trump administration on charges she violated...

U.S. Vice President JD Vance put down President Volodymyr Zelensky after he dismissed the effectiveness of American diplomacy, forcefully telling the Ukrainian he was acting without respect. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the White House on Friday for talks with President Donald Trump and, it is thought, to sign the much-discussed minerals deal. As is customary, Trump and his senior colleagues sat down with Zelensky in the oval office with press cameras present for a brief discussion before the real talks would begin in private, but a beligerent attitude from Zelensky derailed proceedings before they even began. Responding to...

this is the best thing you’ll watch today. this is white house deputy chief of staff stephen miller speaking in the white house press briefing room. pop some corn. just sit back and enjoy the next 1 minute and 46 seconds. (link) if he had ended with “thank you for coming to my TED talk” i would have died laughing. i cannot tell you the untrammeled and unalloyed joy i’m experiencing just watching competent, confident people step up and take clear, sane, reasonable, principled stances. the time of having to walk on eggshells and pretend that DEI and performatively contrived...

Legal services groups that offer representation and guidance to thousands of migrant children facing deportation said on Tuesday that they were abruptly directed by the Trump administration to halt their government-funded work. Affected organizations across the U.S. said the move would prevent them from offering critical legal services, including "know your rights" sessions, to migrant children who crossed the U.S. southern border without their parents or legal guardians. Under U.S. law, the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for housing unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S. without legal authorization, until they turn 18 or can be placed...

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, challenging its decision to suspend federal funding for refugee resettlement. The move comes as part of President Donald Trump’s broader effort to realign American priorities—protecting the homeland first, rather than funding programs that facilitate unchecked migration. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names the State Department, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as defendants. USCCB is incorporated as a non-profit and headquartered in the District of...

Thank you for the kind introduction. I want to start by thanking President Macron for hosting the event and of course, for the lovely dinner last night. During the dinner, President Macron looked at me and asked if I would like to speak, and I said, "Mr. President, I'm here for the good company and free wine, but I have to earn my keep today." I, of course, want to thank Prime Minister Modi for being here and for co-hosting the summit, and all of you for participating. I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was...

The Trump administration has moved to push out a swathe of federal workers previously involved in combating election-related disinformation, according to three people familiar with the matter, amid allegations from congressional Republicans that their work unfairly targeted conservative speech online. Roughly half a dozen employees from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency who once worked in its Election Security and Resilience division were notified Thursday night they were being put on administrative leave, said the three people, who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

The largest U.S. government workers' union and an association of foreign service workers sued the Trump administration on Thursday in an effort to reverse its aggressive dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The lawsuit, filed in Washington, D.C. federal court by the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association, seeks an order blocking what it says are "unconstitutional and illegal actions" that have created a "global humanitarian crisis." Those actions include President Donald Trump's order on January 20, the day he was inaugurated, pausing all U.S. foreign aid. That was followed by orders from...

Political commentator Tucker Carlson might not have taken a role in President Donald Trump’s second administration, but his son, Buckley Carlson, did. Buckley Carlson, 28, is set to serve as Vice President JD Vance’s deputy press secretary, ABC News reported Monday. The former Fox News host’s son previously served as an aide on Capitol Hill since 2019. He most recently took on the role of deputy chief of staff to Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., according to the outlet. He first joined Banks’s office in 2019, and he became the GOP congressman’s communications director in 2021. Tucker Carlson previously revealed in...

The warning came one day after the administration ordered that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the government be shut down by 5 p.m. Wednesday.The Trump administration on Wednesday threatened federal employees with “adverse consequences” if they fail to report on colleagues who defy orders to purge diversity, equity and inclusion efforts from their agencies.Tens of thousands of workers were put on notice that officials would not tolerate any efforts to “disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language.” Emails sent out, which were based on a template from the Office of Personnel Management, gave employees 10 days to...

President-elect Donald Trump announced in a public social media post Saturday that he will not be inviting two members of his former administration back to the White House. Nikki Haley, who served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were both mentioned in the post. The Republicans had been considered two strong candidates for Trump's new Cabinet. "I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation," the president-elect posted on Truth Social early Saturday evening. Despite...

Newly obtained documents indicate that then-outgoing President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and their administration sought to hamper the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump in significant ways. According to The Daily Signal, which obtained the documents via a Freedom of Information Act request made to the National Security Agency (NSA) two years ago, “show how much the D.C. elites feared” Trump, the Western Journal reported. “In the 217 redacted pages, we see the coalescing of the effort to smear the incoming president as a Russian agent,” the outlet noted further. According to The Daily Signal: “The documents reveal...

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio told a Washington jury on Monday (Apr 3) that Malaysian financier Jho Low revealed his plans to donate up to US$30 million to help US President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign in what prosecutors allege was part of an illegal foreign influence operation. "It was a casual conversation about what party he was in support of," DiCaprio said, telling jurors that Low said he planned on giving "a significant donation" to the Democratic Party that was "somewhere to the tune of US$20-30 million." SNIP The Titanic star took the witness stand in the trial of Prakazrel "Pras"...

Let's begin with the obvious: Ukraine is toast. There is little or no chance that the country will be able to endure, given Russian military superiority. Thus, the Western “strategy,” such as it was, to tempt Ukraine progressively closer to NATO and the EU, all while shielding Ukraine against potential Russian aggression with (mostly idle) threats of “severe economic sanctions,” has failed, and spectacularly so! The key question now is: what penalty will Russia pay for its impertinence, as the West sees it? And how long will it pay? Will sanctions be mild or severe? Will they last weeks, months,...

One week ago today, Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the government’s criminal case against former Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann. That motion, in requesting the court obtain Sussmann’s waiver of any conflicts of interest held by his lawyers on the record, provided in excruciating detail the factual basis for the purported conflicts. In doing so, it revealed that “enemies of Donald Trump surveilled the internet traffic at Trump Tower, at his New York City apartment building, and later at the executive office of the president of the United States, then fed disinformation about that traffic to...

When President Donald Trump, in October 2019, ordered a successful takedown of top Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Democrats and even the anti-Trump media celebrated the death of the terror leader. But top leaders of the Democratic party still chastised Trump for failing to notify top congressional Democrats of the impending strike. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi issued the following statement: "The House must be briefed on this raid, which the Russians but not top congressional leadership were notified of in advance, and on the administration's overall strategy in the region. Our military and allies deserve strong,...

At a critical point in the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan had enough and cleaned house of his senior political advisors including campaign manager John Sears. One staffer would later recall, “Ronald Reagan would not have come so close in 1976 had he not hired John Sears; and Ronald Reagan would not have won the GOP nomination had he not fired John Sears in 1980.” As it does on so many occasions, history repeats itself. Like Reagan before him, Donald Trump now must clean house if he hopes to make a serious political comeback. Trump’s 2016 win was mostly of his...

There are two gargantuan foreign policy misconceptions in the mainstream media today. The first is that former President Donald Trump was an isolationist, a throw-back to the pre-President Dwight Eisenhower days of Sen. Robert Taft when Republicans believed they could establish a fortress America and blithely let the world go to hell. The second is that President Joe Biden represents a return to the status quo of American foreign policy, with the commander-in-chief making responsible decisions about global matters that reassure our allies and resonate with our adversaries. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump was not an isolationist....

The Republican Party is on the cusp of a historic victory in November, provided they don’t give into what is far too often their instinct: self-destruction. No political party ever has been so adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Still, Republicans have all the advantages anyone could imagine – a wildly unpopular president of the other party serving as an anchor on every Democrat up for reelection, an agenda disconnected from the needs, wants, or desires of the general public, and an economy to make Jimmy Carter’s record look desirable. All they have to do is avoid...

Once, during a meeting with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York, we discussed energy policy. I told Trump that if we went all out to produce America's abundant supply of oil, gas and coal, the United States could be energy independent in four years. Trump looked at me from behind his desk and shook his head. "I don't want America to be energy independent. I want America to be energy dominant." There are few issues where Trump and resident Joe Biden have differed more broadly on policy than on energy production. Trump went...