Politico

President Donald Trump’s post on Sen Al Franken (D-MN) allegations was the latest example of the president's habit of using his Twitter account to draw fire, rather than deflecting it. Controlling potentially damaging tweets was a job left mostly to the legal team in the early days of the administration. Marc Kasowitz, a former Trump attorney, and Jay Sekulow, a current member of the president's legal team, gave Trump one simple rule to guide his tweeting habit: Don’t comment online about the Russia investigation.

Apparently, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai will reveal plans to his fellow commissioners on Nov 21 to fully dismantle the agency's Obama-era network neutrality regulations in a major victory for the telecom industry in the long-running policy debate. The FCC will vote on the proposal in December, some seven months after it laid the groundwork for scuttling the rules that require internet service providers like Comcast or AT&T to treat web traffic equally. Pai’s plan would jettison rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or slowing web traffic or crea

The Federal Communications Commission told the DC Circuit Court of Appeals it was reasonable to reinstate the so-called UHF discount in April because it is “inextricably intertwined” with the 39 percent national audience reach limit imposed on broadcasters. Remember, the UHF discount allows broadcasters to count half the reach of UHF TV stations when calculating adherence to that 39 percent limit.

Federal Election Commission member Ellen Weintraub issued personal requests to Facebook, Google and Twitter to submit a comment aimed at helping inform a rulemaking the FEC is doing on internet ad disclosures. Commissioner Weintraub notes the urgency, since the comment deadline is Nov 9.

[Commentary] The latest news in the saga of Steve Bannon is that the former White House senior adviser has reportedly been pushing President Donald Trump to be more forceful against special counsel Robert Mueller. Bannon’s ideas allegedly include urging President Trump to cut funding for the probe, telling Trump to withhold documents and pressing Trump to bring in more aggressive lawyers. These latest alleged Bannon-Trump communications come on top of other reported contacts between the two since Bannon left the White House.

Apparently, President Donald Trump is considering scaling back White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s public role, as President Trump also weighs a broader shakeup of his communications shop in the wake of several scandals. The press secretary, who has turned into a household name over the past five months and garnered sky-high television ratings for his daily press briefings, has also drawn the ire of the president. He is no longer expected to do a daily, on-camera briefing after President Trump’s foreign trip, which begins May 19.

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Doanld Trump. Just days earlier, KT McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter. President Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

On the morning of May 10 as controversy swirled over the president abruptly firing his FBI chief amid an investigation of possible ties between Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and Russia, the president met in the Oval Office with none other than Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. But the meeting was closed press, meaning the rotating pool of photographers, reporters and camera operators who follow the president weren't allowed in. Yet photos of the three laughing and smiling were soon published by the Russian state news agency TASS. The Russian foreign ministry also tweeted photos of the meeting.

Asked by the print pooler why members of the Russian media were allowed into the meeting but no U.S. press was permitted, a White House official said, "Our official photographer and their official photographer were present, that's it," meaning TASS was considered the Russians' "official photographer."

The roughly 100-day frenzy of deregulation at the Federal Communications Commission marks a bright spot for the Trump Administration, which has been hampered in other areas like repealing Obamacare. And FCC Chairman Ajit Pai shows no signs of slowing down, teeing up a takedown of the signature FCC achievement of the Obama years: network neutrality rules designed to ensure internet service providers treat all web traffic equally.