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House Speaker Paul Ryan is not seeking re-election and will retire from Congress after this year, the Wisconsin Republican announced Wednesday. "You realize something when you take this job," Ryan told reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday morning. "It's a big job with a lot riding on you ... but you also know this is not a job that does not last forever. ... You realize you hold the office for just a small part of our history. So you better make the most of it." He reminded reporters that he took the job "reluctantly" in 2015, when he took...

Speaker Paul D. Ryan announced Wednesday that he will not seek re-election in November, ending a brief stint atop the House and signaling the peril that the Republican majority faces in the midterm elections.

Wow. Just wow.

Zuckerberg’s testimony does not address fully that Obama’s reelection campaign scraped data from users who downloaded the Obama 2012 app, and from those users’ friends.  The users’ friends did not give consent - these people were simply unaware their data was being used by the Obama campaign analytics. The former director of Obama for America’s Integration and Media Analytics shop, explained that the political bias within Facebook allowed her to continue the use of Facebook user’s data without their consent.  Facebook had to realize they were violating the rights of their users but failed to care. Here is Zuckerberg’s testimony...

Mark Zuckerberg swears he found out just two weeks ago that bad actors were harvesting users’ private info by the millions. But the company was alerted long, long before that. Facebook was warned five years ago that the “reverse-lookup” feature in its search engine could be used to harvest names, profiles, and phone numbers for virtually all its users. But the company ignored the red flags until last week, after it happened. In prepared testimony to Congress released Monday, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that malefactors had used the reverse-lookup “to link people’s public Facebook information to a phone number,” he wrote...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will apologize for his company’s role in a data privacy scandal and foreign interference in the 2016 elections when he appears before Congress this week, saying the social network “didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility,” according to prepared remarks released Monday. Zuckerberg will appear before lawmakers on Tuesday and Wednesday to try to restore public trust in his company and stave off federal regulation that some lawmakers have floated. His company is under fire in the worst privacy crisis in its history after it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm affiliated...

Ahead of Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released the Facebook CEO’s prepared statement.~You can read the full statement ~ below.~

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a prepared statement Monday ahead of his scheduled testimony before Congress, and it wasn't long before people began to notice what wasn't included in an otherwise thorough assessment of the situation: everything that happened between 2008 and 2012.

Rumors have been swirling for months on Capitol Hill that Speaker Paul Ryan will either resign his seat or not serve as speaker if he returns to Congress next year. This has set off something of a scramble among top Republicans to position themselves to replace him if the speaker exits the stage. Two top members of Paul Ryan's leadership team, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Steve Scalise, have begun angling for his job in the event the speaker calls it quits after the election. They're closely monitoring the moves of the other and quietly courting Republicans who...

Tomorrow Attorney General Jeff Sessions will announce the assignment of U.S. Attorney John Lausch to facilitate the production of documents from the DOJ (Horowitz/Huber) to the House Judiciary Committee, and Chairman Bob Goodlatte. Mr. Lausch is a Trump appointed U.S. Attorney from outside Washington DC. John Lausch currently heads the Northern District of Illinois which includes Chicago, and this specific U.S. Attorney has extensive experience in complex cases of conspiracy and political corruption; a key skill-set given the issues within the Horowitz/Huber investigation of potential politicization of the FBI and DOJ offices. Accepting the OIG report is almost certainly the...

I just turned the radio on to Hugh Hewitt this morning and he was interviewing the wonderful Lindsey Graham. Hugh Hewitt was filled with excitement and saying Will trump absolutely must attack Syria now! Of course Lindsay was saying the Trump must attack Assad. What do you think about how much these guys have such a predictable knee-jerk reaction to I guess at act like this

The speech was written. A cast of relatable Americans with emotional stories was standing by to reinforce the message. But President Donald Trump was in no mood to play along. “The hell with it,” Trump said, recounting the scene with his aides to a West Virginia crowd last week, Trump tossed the staff-prepared remarks on tax cuts in the air and ducked as the paper fluttered to the floor. “I said, ‘This is boring, come on.’ Tell it like it is.” This president has never been one to stick to a script, but that abandoned speech illustrates a new phase...

Few Republicans in Washington are willing to go head-to-head with President Trump, but there is one band of GOP members willing to stand up to the leader of their own party: lawmakers who have announced their retirements. While it’s not uncommon for members to feel far more liberated on their way out the door, it has taken on a whole new meaning in the Trump era, where lawmakers are confronted daily by a never-ending stream of White House controversies.

It might be uncomfortable to talk about, but Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been fighting brain cancer since July. The 81-year-old has not returned to the US Capitol since December. So the speculation is already underway about what would happen if McCain stepped down — or, worse, could no longer serve. The Washington Post reported Tuesday that a list of possible successors is circulating in the whispering Republican class, headlined by McCain’s wife, Cindy McCain, and former US Sen. Jon Kyl. If McCain leaves office before May 30, the Post indicated, his Senate seat will be on the ballot in...

Saturday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said that if Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein does not turn over the unredacted documents requested by Congress related to FISA, FBI and more then impeachment could be in order. “Rod Rosenstein can call Michael Horowitz, who has the documents, and say just give them to Congress. If he doesn’t do that … there is a growing consensus of holding them in contempt of Congress, but it’s not enough to stop there. We have to have someone willing to do the job. If the deputy attorney general is not willing to do it and not...

Saturday, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said that if Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein does not turn over the unredacted documents requested by Congress related to FISA, FBI and more then impeachment could be in order. “Rod Rosenstein can call Michael Horowitz, who has the documents, and say just give them to Congress. If he doesn’t do that … there is a growing consensus of holding them in contempt of Congress, but it’s not enough to stop there. We have to have someone willing to do the job. If the deputy attorney general is not willing to do it and not...

With all the talk about Twitter shadow banning conservative commentators, National Review's Jim Geraghty wondered whether the social network also had the gall to go after conservative politicians. So he looked at the number of retweets and likes Senator Ted Cruz's tweets receive on average and compared them to California Democratic Senator Kamala Harris. Harris has only half of Cruz's followers: 1.5 million versus 3.2 million. As such, you'd expect Cruz to be retweeted more often by his followers. Surprisingly, that's not the case. But that's not even the most shocking part. Look at the difference; it's gigantic. Texas Republican...

New reports have emerged that dozens of House Democrats waived the background checks on the Awan Brothers — the House I.T. aides handling their cybersecurity and with access to their email systems. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton went to Capitol Hill last year to help shine a spotlight on the ongoing Awan Brothers I.T. scandal in the House of Representatives that the mainstream media — and, sadly, even our Justice Department and much of Congress — are all ignoring. This is a story that involves political corruption, alleged cybersecurity breaches, the potential sharing of private constituent info, possible large-scale fraud,...

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is threatening another legal fight, this time over the Rosetta Stone of the Russia collusion investigation: The FBI document, (or EC, for Electronic Communication) showing exactly what triggered it. On Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray that instructed them to produce unredacted copies of the documents that the FBI used as the basis to officially open up its Russia investigation.

Congresswoman, Rep. Elizabeth Esty will not run for re-election after facing intense criticism for mishandling domestic violence allegations against her since-fired chief of staff. Here is the full statement from her office: From being a room parent in a first grade classroom to serving on the library board, town council, state house and U.S. Congress, I went into public service to fight for equality, justice, and fairness. It is one of the greatest honors of my life that the people of Connecticut’s Fifth District elected me to represent them in Congress. However, I have determined that it is in the...