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Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.

HOUSTON -- A Texas oilman who's accused of defrauding the Nigerian government by illegally pumping and exporting 10 million barrels of oil is a major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. Kase Lawal of Houston is at least the fourth person accused or convicted of criminal wrongdoing to help finance Clinton's political ambitions since 2000 and the second in her quest for the White House. The list also includes Chinese and Pakistani fugitives and a former Miami lawyer, Peter Paul, who was convicted of defrauding Cuba. There's no indication that Clinton's campaign was aware of Lawal's legal problems when it...

Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday the Confederate battle flag should not be displayed “anywhere,” weighing in as South Carolina lawmakers seek to remove it from the grounds of their statehouse. The Democratic presidential candidate called the deadly shootings of nine black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, “an act of racist terrorism perpetrated in a house of God.” Clinton called the Confederate flag a “symbol of our nation’s racist past that has no place in our present or our future. It shouldn’t fly there. It shouldn’t fly anywhere.” …

The woman who ran the Internal Revenue Service's tax-exempt organizations division has been promoted, and now heads the agency's health-care office, ABC News reported. Sarah Hall Ingram was commissioner of the embattled IRS office from 2009 to 2012, roughly the period that the agency is accused of singling out Tea Party and conservative groups for extra scrutiny, based on nothing but their political bent. As a firestorm grows around the IRS, Ms. Ingram quietly left the tax-exempt office and was made director of IRS Affordable Care Act Division...

In 2008, John McCain's campaign team discussed whether they should let Sarah Palin be sworn in as vice-president if they were to win the election, according to campaign staffer Nicolle Wallace. "There certainly were discussions -- not for long because of the arc the campaign took -- but certainly there were discussions about whether, if they were to win, it would be appropriate for her to be sworn in," Wallace tells Time's Claire Suddath. In her new novel, It's Classified, Wallace has a character -- a mentally ill female vice-president -- which she says is based on her experience working...

Similarly, had John McCain lost with Tim Pawlenty as his running mate in 2008 (and he would have), Pawlenty would have had at least as good a shot as Mitt Romney of taking the nomination this time around, his uninspiring persona notwithstanding. (Noah Millman) It’s an intriguing suggestion, but I doubt it. Losing VP nominees rarely return later to become their party’s nominee, and when it has happened it has sometimes been many elections after the VP nomination. Yes, it happened in 1984 and 1996, but Mondale had been the Vice President when the Democrats lost in 1980, and Dole...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--Two Senate Republicans joined an effort to rapidly wind down government controlled mortgage titans Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FMCC), hoping to put pressure on Democrats to take action soon. Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) introduced a bill Thursday to wind down or privatize Fannie and Freddie over the next five years. Their bill mirrors one introduced earlier this month by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas). "The events of the past three years have made it clear that never again can we allow the taxpayer to be responsible for poorly managed financial...

John McCain is in more hot water after appearing to concede he could lose the US presidential election by telling voters they have nothing to fear with Barack Obama in the White House. The extraordinary gaffe comes just three weeks before Election Day with the Republican candidate trailing badly in the polls. Now Republican aides fear he may have further damaged his chances by accepting the possibility that he could be defeated. (snip) Mr. McCain made his remark while appealing for calm on the campaign trail amid fears that angry outbursts from supporters were raging out of control. After a...

(snip) It was at the height of the 2008 presidential election campaign, not long after Bush publicly endorsed John McCain as his successor. Naturally the election came up in conversation. Trying to be even-handed and polite, the Brits said something diplomatic about McCain’s campaign, expecting Bush to express some warm words of support for the Republican candidate. Not a chance. “I probably won’t even vote for the guy,” Bush told the group, according to two people present.“I had to endorse him. But I’d have endorsed Obama if they’d asked me.”Endorse Obama? Cue dumbfounded look from British officials, followed by some...

A Colorado man faces charges that he helped a wealthy Democratic fundraiser cheat banks out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Federal prosecutors said Friday that Shahin Kashanchi, of Telluride, provided fake documents that let his brother-in-law Hassan Nemazee defraud three banks of more than $290 million. Nemazee was the national finance chairman for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. He later raised money for Barack Obama.

The shady Iranian fundraiser who for years donated lucrative sums to top Democrats—including the president, vice president and secretary of state—has pleaded guilty to a major bank-fraud scheme that could land him in jail for nearly two decades.Disgraced Democratic money man Hassan Nemazee admitted this week that he defrauded three financial institutions out of nearly $300 million in loan proceeds by falsifying documents and signatures to show he had hundreds of millions of dollars worth of collateral. The Ivy League-educated crook then used the proceeds to donate big bucks to the campaigns of federal, state and local candidates. Among them...

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<p>Sen. Charles Schumer "betrayed" Hillary Rodham Clinton by working with other senators to make sure a Democrat would win the White House in 2008 -- actively recruiting Barack Obama to run as an alternative to his New York colleague, an explosive new book claims.</p>

Sen. Charles Schumer played both sides of the fence in the lead up to the 2008 presidential primaries -- actively recruiting Barack Obama to run as an alternative to Hillary Clinton even as he signaled that "home-state decorum" would prohibit him from publicly opposing his fellow senator if she decided to run, an explosive new book claims. And Clinton had no idea that Schumer and her other Senate colleagues were actively plotting her downfall -- learning months later, when it hit her like a ton of bricks, according to Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the...

Depictions ‘took place entirely in her imagination,’ says Wallace. NBC NEWS and NEWS SERVICES NEW YORK - Former McCain campaign senior adviser Nicolle Wallace says Sarah Palin's book "Going Rogue" is "based on fabrications," and that the basis for Palin’s depictions of her and former McCain campaign director Steve Schmidt as villains "took place entirely in her imagination." In a statement to The Rachel Maddow Show, the former McCain spokesperson repeatedly used the word "fiction" to describe Palin's narrative and echoed criticisms by other former McCain staffers. "She [Palin] probably has a legitimate complaint that things could have been better...

<p>In her new book, according to the Associated Press, Sarah Palin alleges that the McCain campaign gave her a $500,000 bill to pay for the campaign vetting her for the VP nod. She also makes the charge that the McCain camp said they would have paid all the bills had they won, but since they lost, the bills were her responsibility.</p>

To listen to some pundits, Barack Obama's public image began taking a serious beating when the off-year election returns came in a week ago. Or maybe it was the undeserved Nobel Prize, his approach to the war in Afghanistan, or when he revved up his pursuit of national health-care reform.

Eighteen months later, Nevada Republicans have completed a count of all delegate ballots from last year's state convention. A group of disaffected Republicans says it feels vindicated after a Friday night count of missing ballots from the April 2008 gathering showed three delegates for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul should have been sent to the national convention. Paul supporters said they felt party leaders cheated them out of a place at the national convention when they abruptly recessed the convention before delegate ballots from the state's 2nd Congressional District could be counted. The district was allowed to choose three of the...

Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and Secretary of State Ross Miller announced Monday that voter registration fraud charges have been filed against an organization that works with low-income people and two of its employees in its Las Vegas office. The complaint includes 26 counts of voter fraud and 13 counts for compensating those registering voters, both felonies. The Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, Inc., also known as ACORN, operated a Las Vegas office that helped register low-income voters last year. Throughout 2008, ACORN employed canvassers to register people to vote in Nevada, the complaint said. ACORN paid the...

On Wednesday, September 24, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., phoned Reid and told him, “Harry, I am suspending my campaign to come back and help negotiate a deal.” McCain explained that he was also calling upon Obama to suspend his campaign, and together they could convene a meeting at the Bush White House to help come to a deal on a bailout for Wall Street. Reid didn't think it was such a great idea... "They were on the verge of an agreement, and any such McCain stunt would cost us valuable time," writes Reid, also noting that McCain "had no standing...