John Wagner

President Donald Trump used his Twitter account to make false and misleading attacks against The Washington Post and Amazon, the behemoth online retailer whose founder owns The Post. In the first of his tweets, President Trump said the “Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court two months ago.”  The president was apparently referring to a Supreme Court case decided in June  that will allow state governments to compel online retailers beyond their borders to collect sales tax revenue from consumers.

President Donald Trump lashed out anew at the news media, suggesting that reporters are slanting their coverage of his relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin with the aim of provoking a possible war. “The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war,” the president wrote amid a series of morning tweets.

President Donald Trump said that he had been “totally exonerated” by a new Justice Department report that is highly critical of several key FBI figures in the Hillary Clinton email probe, including former FBI Director James Comey. The report by the department’s inspector general offered no findings regarding the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller III into possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign in the 2016 election.

President Donald Trump boasted that the viewership of his State of the Union speech was “the highest number in history” — a claim at odds with ratings figures released the day before. In a Feb 1 tweet, President Trump said, "Thank you for all of the nice compliments and reviews on the State of the Union speech. 45.6 million people watched, the highest number in history. @FoxNews beat every other Network, for the first time ever, with 11.7 million people tuning in. Delivered from the heart!

President Donald Trump shared three inflammatory anti-Muslim videos on Twitter posted by a far-right British activist.  The videos — whose authenticity could not be independently verified — were first shared by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, which bills itself as a political party but has been widely condemned as an extremist group that targets mosques and Muslims.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order that sets up a commission to review his controversial allegations of widespread voter fraud, along with reports of voter suppression. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity will be led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), who has aggressively pursued allegations of voter fraud in his state.

About a dozen other election officials representing both parties will fill out the commission, which will deliver a report to the president in 2018, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. Sanders said that the commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine confidence in the integrity of federal elections, including improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting and voting suppression. The commission will not just focus on the 2016 general election but also systemic issues over the years.

Nearly a month into a presidency full of missteps, Donald Trump returned Feb 18 to firmer ground outside of Washington, staging a raucous campaign-style rally here with a throng of adoring supporters who helped sweep him into the White House. For 45 minutes, there was no talk of the president’s falling approval ratings or turmoil in his administration. Instead, Trump rattled off familiar campaign promises, scolded the media, mocked protesters gathered outside, declared that it is “a new day in America” and basked in applause from a crowd of 9,000 that waited hours in the sun to see him.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence pledged that the incoming administration would work with Republican and Democratic mayors alike on priorities facing America’s cities, including passage of a “big” infrastructure bill.

Appearing before a gathering of the US Conference of Mayors in Washington, Pence relayed that he had told President-elect Donald Trump that he would be dropping by and that Trump offered this instruction: “Tell 'em we’re going to do an infrastructure bill, and it’s going to be big.” Trump has pledged to mobilize anywhere from half a trillion to a trillion dollars to upgrading the nation’s aging roads, bridges and transportation hubs. But rather than relying entirely on direct federal spending, the Trump plan could utilize an investment tax credit to spur private spending.

Hillary Clinton’s increasingly confident campaign has begun crafting a detailed agenda for her possible presidency, with plans to focus on measures aimed at creating jobs, boosting infrastructure spending and enacting immigration reform if current polling holds and she is easily elected to the White House in November.

Clinton has started ramping up for a presidency defined by marquee legislation she has promised to seek immediately. The pace and scale of the planning reflect growing expectations among Democrats that she will win and take office in January alongside a new Democratic majority in the Senate. While careful not to sound as if she is measuring the draperies quite yet, Clinton now describes what she calls improved odds for passage of an overhaul of immigration laws — the first legislative priority she outlined in detail last year — and what could be a bipartisan effort to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, rail system and ports. She also could be immediately confronted with a choice about a Supreme Court vacancy that could set the tone for her relationship with Congress, and she plans to immediately champion new measures on campaign-finance reform and ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers. Her campaign’s to-do list includes assembling a Cabinet that has women in roughly equal numbers to men and that otherwise reflects American diversity, and lobbying has intensified for those and scores of other jobs that Clinton would fill in her administration.

With an eye toward what happens after November, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, announced new members of a leadership team to start preparing for a potential administration. The move comes two weeks after paperwork was filed to formally establish the Clinton-Kaine Transition Project, a nonprofit group that will oversee the effort to create a Democratic administration headed by Clinton and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA).

Podesta, who is also serving as president of the transition project, said that Ken Salazar, the former Secretary of the Interior and former senator from Colorado, will serve as chairman of the new entity. He will be joined by four co-chairs: Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser under President Obama; Jennifer Granholm, a former governor of Michigan; Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank; and Maggie Williams, director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Williams also served as chief of staff to Clinton when she was first lady. Podesta said that Ed Meier and Ann O'Leary, two top Clinton campaign policy advisers, will shift full-time to the transition project to manage its day-to-day operations. In the previously filed paperwork, Minyon Moore, a senior adviser to Clinton, was named as the project’s secretary.