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Domestic Spying: Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, says that the Obama administration surveilled Donald Trump's transition aides and possibly Trump himself following November's election. If true, it warrants a major investigation. "I recently confirmed that on numerous occasions the intelligence community ... collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition," Nunes told reporters. Nunes immediately came under intense criticism from congressional Democrats for his revelations. What's both hilarious and sad is that these are the very same Democrats who have been nearly silent as a series of illegal leaks from the intelligence bureaucracy have...

Wednesday, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), held a press conference where he claimed he possessed proof that “U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition” were “incidentally” surveilled by the Obama administration. Nunes clarified that the evidence he’d reviewed was not related to, “Russia, the investigation of Russian activities, or the Trump team.” Rep. Nunes’ announcement came as a shock to ranking committee Democrats, who learned the news via the press conference. The White House was also unaware of Nunes’ findings until the press conference. An Intelligence Community (IC) insider approached Rep. Nunes with the bombshell...

I just heard with my own ears from the former head of the House Intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, on the Rush Limbaugh show guest hosted by Mark Steyn, that the illegal raw wiretap transcripts on the Trump Transition were sent by the intelligence community directly to the OBAMA WHITE HOUSE!! This is far bigger than Watergate.

On January 20, the New York Times published a story on wiretapping of Trump insiders. In the print version, the headline was "Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides," although you're going to have to squint to read the acknowledgment of the print headline at the bottom of the page.Still, if you look through the actual article, you'll find this paragraph: The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of...

The House Intel Chief confirms now that data was collected on the Trump Transition Team while Obama was in office. Further that data was leaked and widely disseminated throughout the Intelligence Community. And even further, some US citizens were “unmasked” and exposed throughout the network. The talk is that the Trump family was being discussed, President-elect Trump’s new agenda was being discussed, and the selection of his Cabinet members was also discussed. This is beyond the pale, and we knew something was amiss; but we had no idea that FBI Director Comey would blatantly lie to Congress. He said, “there...

Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward said that allegations from a report that say President Trump's transition team was named in surveillance reports of foreign individuals would be "gross violations." A couple of diplomats who were legitimately wiretapped were talking about meeting Trump or his team, Woodward said on "The O'Reilly Factor." However, U.S. intelligence agencies are supposed to comply with "minimization" rules, which protect Americans' names from being published in reports or leaked in any way, he added. "The idea that there was intelligence value was really thin," Woodward said. "You've got this really serious problem potentially of people...

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned on Wednesday that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said earlier that he had briefed Trump on new information, unrelated to an investigation into Russian activities, that suggested that several members of Trump's transition team and perhaps Trump himself had their identities "unmasked" after their communications were intercepted by U.S. intelligence officials. The revelation is notable because identities of Americans are generally supposed to remain...

Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, admitted after his committee’s review of President Donald Trump’s claim the Obama administration had wiretapped his transition team, he had a “legitimate case to make,” but said he may have overstepped with his Twitter claim. “[T]he president had a very legitimate case to make,” King said. “He overstepped it by saying President Obama ordered wiretapping. That we don’t know, but what we do know is to me this is shameful.” Host Bill O’Reilly pressed King on the seriousness of Trump being...

On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized new rules that allow the National Security Agency to share information it gleans from its vast international surveillance apparatus with the 16 other agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. With the new changes, which were long in the works, those agencies can apply for access to various feeds of raw, undoctored NSA intelligence. Analysts will then be able to sift through the contents of those feeds as they see fit, before implementing required privacy protections. Previously, the NSA applied those privacy protections itself, before forwarding select pieces of information to agencies that...

Legacy: Barack Obama came into the White House in 2009 promising a "new era of responsibility." What he's left President Trump is a government careening toward fiscal ruin.That's what the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office shows. The CBO report looks at what federal spending and revenues will look like over the next decade if the government is left on autopilot. The picture is grim. Deficits this year are expected to be $559 billion. By 2023, the government will once again be running trillion-dollar annual deficits that will quickly climb in the following years. Left unchanged, the national debt...

With its dying breath, the Obama administration delivered a parting shot to Donald Trump and decided to provisionally lift economic sanctions against Sudan after almost 20 years, citing “progress” in areas of human rights, ceasing hostile activities against the population, and counterterrorism. Besides having zero correlation with events on the ground in Sudan, this outlook belies a troubling reality: by normalizing bilateral relations, Obama is threatening national security by giving free rein to terrorist groups. The government of Sudan has a long history of supporting terrorists. Sanctions were first imposed by President Bill Clinton in 1997 on suspicions that Sudan...

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 56% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President-elect Trump’s job performance. Forty-four percent (44%) disapprove. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republicans and 55% of unaffiliated voters approve of the job Trump is doing. Seventy percent (70%) of Democrats disapprove. The latest figures include 38% of all likely voters who Strongly Approve of the way Trump is performing and 36% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of +2 (see trends).

...... This morning, they sank to another low by blocking uniformed Air Force members from entering the Inauguration ceremony. ..... [VIDEO - 31 seconds]

Republican and Democratic presidents have long nodded to the importance of diversity as they select their Cabinets. Since 1989, every president’s first Cabinet has included at least one Latino. Not Donald Trump’s. After a campaign in which relations with Latinos grew painfully raw, the sort of tension that typically would make reaching out imperative, Trump selected a Cabinet that is predominantly white and male. The only members who break from that description, out of 15 positions, are an African American man, one Asian American woman and a white woman. The absence struck many Latinos as a fresh slap after a...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump enters the White House on Friday just as he entered the race for president: defiant, unfiltered, unbound by tradition and utterly confident in his chosen course.

Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis was approved on Wednesday by the Senate Committee on Armed Services to serve as secretary of defense in Donald Trump’s administration. Mattis sailed through the committee, which voted 26-1 for him to lead the Pentagon. Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) was the only member of the Senate panel to vote against the retired four-star general, who enjoys bipartisan support to head the Defense Department under President-elect Trump. Gillibrand has previously said she would oppose confirming Mattis because he only retired from the Marine Corps in 2013, while federal law requires a seven-year break between military...

Voter attitudes about President-elect Donald Trump have changed little since Thanksgiving, with just over half of voters continuing to give him favorable marks. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 52% of Likely U.S. Voters share a favorable opinion of Trump, with 30% who have a Very Favorable one. The president-elect is viewed unfavorably by 48%, including 37% with a Very Unfavorable view.

A pair of B-2 "stealth" bombers blasted two ISIS training camps in Libya on Wednesday evening, dropping 108 precision-guided bombs and sending jihadists scattering -- many of whom were then "cleaned up" by drone-launched hellfire missiles, U.S. defense officials told Fox News. The assault killed an estimated 85 terrorists at the camps, which were about 30 miles southwest of the Libyan coastal city of Sirte. President Obama authorized the action. Most of the terrorists targeted had escaped Sirte after extensive military actions there. U.S. drones "cleaned up" the operation by launching hellfire missiles that killed a several of ISIS fighters...

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has written 275 briefing papers for the incoming Trump administration: nearly 1,000 pages of classified material on North Korea’s nuclear program, the military campaign against the Islamic State, tensions in the South China Sea, and every other kind of threat the new team could face in its first weeks in office. Nobody in the current administration knows whether anyone in the next has read any of it. Less than three days before President Obama turns the keys to the White House, and the nuclear codes, over to President-elect Donald J. Trump, Mr. Trump’s transition staff...

As this administration draws to a close, Audrey Edwards is packing as fast as the Obamas. By January 20, Inauguration Day, she'll be nearly 6,000 miles away from Brooklyn not watching the festivities in Paris. A journalist and real estate agent, she first got the idea to leave the US when former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ran for president in 2008. But when Trump rode down that gilded escalator, called Mexicans rapists, and announced his candidacy for Commander-in-Chief, Edwards put friends on notice: "If somebody as crazy as this guy gets in, I'm out of here." She plans to...