Free Republic

The thrill among White House aides for special presidential candy would shame any Oompa Loompa at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. With apparently “so much time and so little to do,” many White House aides spend working hours every Thursday competing for special presidential candy, a phenomenon known inside the administration as “candy pickup day,” Politico reported Tuesday. Fueling the phenomenon is the “rationed” supply of chocolate candy. Each office inside the White House receives a designated delivery amount, which is quickly gobbled by aides. The excitement in some offices reached such heights that office managers reportedly implemented strict rules to...

White House aides fear giving President Joe Biden news he does not want to hear on various topics “because those who do can get their heads bitten off,” Axios reported Monday. Biden struggles with anger outbursts when peppered with unwanted questions — especially questions about the Biden family corruption, Breitbart News previously reported. All throughout Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and into his presidency, the president consistently used anger in an attempt to dispel questions he did not want to answer. Biden leveraged his defensive anger at least five times when questioned about his family’s business dealings, the Republican National Committee...

President Joe Biden reportedly ignores most White House aides when they try to share “contributions” or “ideas” about how to handle Hunter Biden’s legal position, according to a report. Although a Delaware court dismissed the tax and gun plea deal Thursday against the president’s son, it was only a formality. Special Counsel David Weiss, appointed last week, intends to take his case to trial. “Inside the White House, most aides strenuously avoid discussing Hunter’s troubles with the president, believing their contributions and ideas would not be welcome,” the Washington Post reported Thursday based on comments from half a dozen current...

Hillary Clinton's former aides say they can't enjoy watching her 2016 presidential campaign rival Donald Trump face legal problems, even after he threatened to jail Clinton if he won that election. Trump could be charged soon for his alleged role in a hush-money payment to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels about their alleged affair ahead of his winning presidential bid against Clinton, and could potentially be charged in multiple other ongoing investigations. Daniels said she will "dance down the street" if the former president goes to jail. But Clinton's allies aren't in a dancing mood. One former Clinton staffer...

Claims by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) that he had no contact with the intelligence community whistleblower at the center of the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump are disputed in a new book. In Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump, authors Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian reveal a meeting between the whistleblower’s attorney, Andrew Bakaj, and lawyers working for the House Select Committee on Intelligence. This occurred in the run-up to the fall 2019 launch of an impeachment inquiry into Trump over allegations he demanded Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to initiate corruption investigations into now-President...

The staff shake-ups continue in the vice president's office. Rohini Kosoglu, domestic policy adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, has announced she'll be leaving the position in August, continuing a high rate of turnover in Harris's staff. It was also reported that Meghan Groob, Harris's director of speechwriting, is leaving after working in the office for less than four months. Kosoglu is one of the longest-serving aides working under Harris, beginning with her time in the Senate and continuing through her brief presidential campaign and her time serving as a second-in-command to President Joe Biden. Harris released a statement calling...

White House aides are leaving the administration before the fall midterms as one top official said that many staffers are simply 'tapped out.' The Hill Newspaper reported Thursday on the burnout being felt inside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., as President Joe Biden has had to deal with a pandemic, a war, rising inflation, a baby formula shortage, among other things, after 17 months in office, and for some staff, a year or more on the campaign trail. 'It's been a long few years,' the official told the Hill. 'The burnout is real. It might not be the ideal time to leave...

President Joe Biden's pattern of delivering speeches and hosting events from the so-called 'set of Jeopardy' - the White House's South Court Auditorium - has left White House aides asking, 'why are we doing this?' as he fails to break through. CNN interviewed 14 White House aides and other Democrats close to the president for a story out Thursday, which charted the struggles they've faced trying to get Biden to create the right kind of headlines. 'He has to speak about very serious things,' explained one White House aide to the network, 'and you can't do that getting ice cream.'

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol sent a number of subpoenas Monday, including to top 2020 Trump campaign aides and the lawyer responsible for crafting the strategy of how the former president could seek to overturn the election results in Congress. Among the six subpoenas released is one for John Eastman, who drafted a memo advising the Trump campaign both to use supposed vice presidential authority to push back on election results and to get state legislatures to reject electors from certain states in order to deny President Biden a majority of the Electoral College...

President Biden and a third of his Cabinet will be at the United Nations Climate Change conference in Scotland that starts Sunday, a high-profile show of force amid pressing domestic issues. Attendees at the conference include Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, National Economic Council Director Brian Deese, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Eric Lander, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan. Biden climate advisers John Kerry and Gina McCarthy will...

At least 34,000 home health workers in New York appear to have missed a deadline to get vaccinated under a new state mandate, according to preliminary state data, rendering them unable to work and deepening a shortage of home health aides. At the same time, the vaccination rate among home health workers as the deadline arrived on Thursday - 86 percent - exceeded the expectations of some union and industry leaders, and suggested that thousands of workers decided to get their first shot at the last minute to stay employed. Some industry leaders had predicted that as few as 70...

The sexual harassment scandal engulfing Gov. Andrew Cuomo escalated Wednesday with the emergence of allegations that he reached under a female aide’s blouse and groped her while they were alone in a room inside the Executive Mansion in Albany. The incident allegedly unfolded after the much younger woman was summoned to help the 63-year-old governor fix a problem with his cellphone, the Albany Times Union reported.

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to unveil a major Covid-19 relief package on Thursday and his advisers have recently told allies in Congress to expect a price tag in the ballpark of $2 trillion, according to two people briefed on the deliberations. The Biden team is taking a "shoot for the moon" approach with the package, one lawmaker in close contact with them told CNN, though they added that the price tag could still change. The proposal will include sizable direct payments to American families, significant state and local funding -- including for coronavirus vaccine distribution and other emergency spending...

WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence plans to maintain an aggressive campaign schedule this week despite an apparent outbreak of the coronavirus among his senior aides, the White House says. Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, and “a couple of key staff surrounding the vice president” have tested positive for the virus, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday. The vice president, who along with his wife, Karen, tested negative on Sunday, according to his office, is considered a “close contact” of the aides under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria but will not quarantine, his spokesman...

Multiple former aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have cashed in on their connections by lobbying on coronavirus-related spending bills. According to a report Wednesday in the Washington Free Beacon, at least seven Pelosi aides are now on the other side of the revolving door of influence for such clients as Delta Airlines and Uber that have sought to cash in on the trillions of dollars of recovery spending sloshing around Washington this spring. “The former aides lobbied on policies related to the coronavirus pandemic for over 50 clients in the first quarter of 2020. Their firms received over $2...

In “Donald Trump Is a Hostage to 1979” (Sunday Review, Jan. 12), Stephen Metcalf argues that President Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani stems from his obsession with being the anti-Jimmy Carter. But the image of Jimmy Carter as a weak president defies reality. As a former submarine officer, Mr. Carter considered a naval blockade of Iran’s ports, but his national security and military advisers were concerned that it would enhance the influence of the Soviet Union and lead to the hostages being returned in coffins. As president he reversed the decline in post-Vietnam War defense spending. All the weapons...

A number of longtime aides to failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton are still being paid from her campaign committee nearly one year after her defeat, Federal Election Commission filings show. The aides—who have remained close to Clinton, some working with her as a private citizen—have through the end of the third quarter collected thousands of dollars in payments from Hillary for America, Clinton's presidential campaign committee, the most recent filings show. Huma Abedin, Clinton's longtime friend and aide who acted as vice chair of the campaign, has been paid nearly $65,000 between mid-November to the end of June. From...

Hillary Clinton and seven of her top aides have retained their State Department security clearances a year after the FBI concluded they were "extremely careless" handling sensitive information. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed Clinton's current security clearance status on Friday. Grassley released the information to express concern about the State Department's slow bureaucratic process, Circa reported. "The State Department confirmed that it is continuing to review the mishandling of classified information that passed through Secretary Hillary Clinton's unauthorized email server as she and seven former aides retain access to sensitive information," Grassley's office...

Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” network correspondent Ed Henry reported Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had revealed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 presidential nominee for the Democratic Party, and six of her aides retained their access to top secret and classified information after leaving the State Department in 2013. “We’re learning from Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley that she and six staffers in 2013 retained clearances where they still had access to top secret and classified information,” Henry said. “Why? They were titled ‘research assistants.’ So the assumption on Capitol Hill is it was because she...

WASHINGTON — With his first two key personnel appointments, President-elect Donald Trump made an overture to Republican circles by naming GOP chief Reince Priebus as his White House chief of staff and fired a shot across the Washington establishment's bow by tapping Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon as chief strategist and senior counselor. The two men had made up the president-elect's chief of staff shortlist, and while Priebus received that job, Bannon's post also is expected to wield significant clout. The media executive with ties to the alt-right and white nationalist movement was given top billing in the press release...