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Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he hopes the intelligence community will “dumb down” former President Donald Trump’s briefings once he has the nomination. Anchor Kristen Welker said, “Let me ask you about this development. This weekend, U.S. intelligence officials are planning to provide briefings for Donald Trump. One will see if he officially secures the nomination despite the fact that he’s facing 40 felony charges for his handling of classified documents as the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Do you think it’s appropriate for him to receive intelligence briefings,

The White House on Friday struggled to explain to reporters why it suddenly stopped holding coronavirus briefings after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its latest masking guidance. “Why are the doctors not here in the briefing to take our questions?” asked NBC reporter Kelly O’Donnell during the White House press briefing on Friday. White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended not having a briefing with the federal health officials, noting President Joe Biden himself spoke to the American people about the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday. “He gave a more than 30-minute speech,” Jean-Pierre argued, adding...

Governors have become frustrated because President Joe Biden has not attended a single weekly COVID briefing. Vice President Kamala Harris has only attended one so far. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of all people, has taken charge of the briefings.....

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that there was “no circumstance” under which President Donald Trump should receive intelligence briefings once he leaves office. Schiff said, “There is no circumstance in which this president should get another intelligence briefing, not now, not in the future.” He added, “I don’t think he can be trusted with it now, and in the future, he certainly can’t be trusted. Indeed, there were any number of intelligence partners of ours around the world who probably started withholding information from us because they didn’t trust the president...

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller ordered a Pentagon-wide halt to cooperation with the transition of President-elect Biden, shocking officials across the Defense Department, senior administration officials tell Axios. Behind the scenes: A top Biden official was unaware of the directive. Administration officials left open the possibility cooperation would resume after a holiday pause. The officials were unsure what prompted Miller's action, or whether President Trump approved. Why it matters: Miller's move, which stunned officials throughout the Pentagon, was the biggest eruption yet of animus and mistrust toward the Biden team from the top level of the Trump administration. What happened:...

President Trump on Monday said he will resume giving regular coronavirus briefings this week, reviving a practice that is controversial among some aides as infections surge across the United States. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office he would deliver a briefing at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. It would mark his first time participating in a coronavirus briefing since late April.

Former National Security Adviser John Bolton criticized on Sunday President Trump’s response to reports that Russian military operatives offered bounties to Afghan militants to kill U.S. troops – saying Trump’s decision-making is “not connected to reality” and bashing the president for denying that he was aware of the bounties. The comments by Bolton, whose upcoming memoir about his time in the Trump White House has drawn the ire of the president, come as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calling on action to be taken against Moscow following reports in the New York Times that a Russian spy...

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that “everybody” enjoyed his White House coronavirus briefings — including himself — and vowed they will be back, just not daily. In an Oval Office interview with The Post during which he predicted a strong economic rebound from the coronavirus crisis by the end of the year, and offered his opinions on presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden’s best pick for a running mate and the sex-assault allegations facing the former vice president, Trump said the briefings were must-see TV. And he credited his frequent clashes with reporters for making engaging content.

President Trump plans to pare back his coronavirus press conferences, according to four sources familiar with the internal deliberations. He may stop appearing daily and make shorter appearances when he does, the sources said — a practice that may have started with Friday's unusually short briefing. Why this matters: Trump's daily press conferences — televised to a largely homebound population — have dominated the public discourse about the coronavirus.Behind the scenes: A number of Trump's most trusted advisers — both inside and outside the White House — have urged him to stop doing marathon televised briefings. They've told him he's overexposed and...

I have vociferously defended the news value of the White House Coronavirus Task Force daily press briefings, shoving back hard against the embarrassing, anti-journalism demands of anti-Trump media figures insisting that they be censored or boycotted. I will continue to do so. But that doesn't mean that I believe that the pressers are being wielded or executed properly or wisely by the president, or that their format shouldn't be revamped. In a Thursday house editorial entitled "Trump's Wasted Briefings," the Wall Street Journal's editors argue that Trump is too often squandering these news conferences by allowing them to descend into...

Has Trump manhandled the media in any way other than criticizing it for comical, biased overreach? Are reporters fearful of being arrested for their coverage? Has Trump put any unprecedented restrictions on the flow of information? No, no and no. Instead, he holds daily press conferences on the current pandemic, the most recent one lasting more than two hours. Meanwhile, media outlets are either ignoring these pressers or pretending they’re a substitute for the recent Trump rallies. Has he forced private businesses to do the government’s bidding? Mostly, no. He did tap the Defense Production Act to spur GM, already...

“The sessions have become a boring show of President vs. the press.“

Freedom of the press isn’t something we can take for granted and in the White House briefing room, it doesn’t even exist anymore. One America’s Pearson Sharp explains how the biased Press Corps is trying to shut down news organizations like OAN for not pushing their left-wing narrative.

Monday evening, Anderson Cooper greeted his ever-dwindling CNN audience with a stark and damning condemnation of the president of the United States and his daily Coronavirus Task Force briefings."What you mostly heard was the president. And what you saw was a hijacking. A hijacking of the task force press conference by a president determined to rewrite the history of his early and reprehensibly irresponsible response to this virus," said Cooper. "What the president showed us today is what the nation’s top scientists have to deal with every day- a president who now uses these briefings as a reelection platform, an...

The Democrats and liberal media insist that Russia wanted Trump to win over Crooked Hillary. The entire premise is ridiculous. The Russians had enough dirt on Hillary to fill the White House. The TRUTH is that the entire DC establishment including the Obama White House, the liberal media and the Obama Deep State wanted Hillary Clinton to win… and they worked tirelessly and illegitimately to make it happen. And still failed. On Sunday former prosecutory and Rep. Trey Gowdy joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. (video)

Personally, I enjoy watching Sean Spicer spar with the press. It’s good entertainment. But press briefings don’t make sense in 2017. And they certainly don’t make sense for a Trump presidency. I’ll tell you why. The role of press briefings is to create two complementary illusions. The first illusion is that the administration is providing new and useful information. That rarely happens. And when it does, it could have been done more easily in the form of a press release in response to a written inquiry. A written response can be faster than a press briefing because it doesn’t depend...

"""Trump threatens to cancel White House briefings because it is ‘not possible’ for his staff to speak with ‘perfect accuracy’""" President Trump threatened Friday morning to end White House press briefings, arguing that “it is not possible” for his staff to speak with “perfect accuracy” to the American public. Trump's comments come after his description of his decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey in an NBC News interview Thursday flatly contradicted the accounts provided earlier by White House officials, including Vice President Pence, exposing their explanations as misleading and in some cases false.

Sat down today to watch my first live briefing of Sean Spicer with media. Very surprised and pleased to see him take live questions via SKYPE with local reporters. One from Cincinnati, one from Texas, one from Virginia.... so far. Great idea. Goes beyond the sleazy Beltway fake news outlets.... and gives way for more specific questions about what "flyover" country cares about. Big Media losing again.

President-elect Donald Trump, after growing suspicious that intelligence officials were leaking news about their classified briefings with him, says he conducted a sting operation to try to prove top spies were behind the leaks. Trump revealed the extraordinary scheme to try to entrap the senior spies in a furious press conference where he suggested the intelligence community had been behind salacious and totally unproven allegations against him. ‘I think it’s pretty sad when intelligence reports get leaked out to the press. First of all, it’s illegal. These are classified and certified meetings and reports,’ Trump said during a press conference...

Former CIA director Leon Panetta said on Wednesday that President-elect Donald Trump risked being blamed after any potential attack on the United States if he refused to receive more regular intelligence briefings. U.S. officials told Reuters that Trump is receiving an average of one presidential intelligence briefing a week - far fewer than most of his recent predecessors - but that his deputy Mike Pence gets briefings around six days a week. Panetta, a former Democratic Congressman who served as CIA director and defense secretary in President Barack Obama's first term, told the Arab Strategy Forum, a conference sponsored by...