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White House Tag

After a mere ten days, Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House Communications Director. From The New York Times:
Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.

President Donald Trump will host the entire U.S. Senate on Wednesday for a briefing on the situation with North Korea. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will join the senators along with Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. It will take place at 3PM ET. Press Secretary Sean Spicer told the media that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for the meeting. The Senate usually holds these meetings at a secure location on Capitol Hill, but Trump offered to host the meeting at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

The House Intelligence Committee has invited some former President Barack Obama's administration officials to testify in a closed hearing over the panel's investigation into possible Russian interference in our presidential election. The committee included former acting Attorney General Sally Yates who President Donald Trump fired when she instructed Department of Justice "lawyers not to make legal arguments defending" Trump's executive order on immigration back in January.

What allegedly happened at a routine White House briefing yesterday may be the latest skirmish in the larger conflict between the D.C. insider class and outsider challengers. Tensions between legacy Washington, D.C., media and new-entrant reporters who have been granted access under the Trump Administration came to a head Friday in an alleged attack leveled at Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich by Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker. As reporters entered Friday's White House press briefing, witnesses reported that Decker loudly, and allegedly physically, accosted Wintrich personally, calling him a "Nazi," and saying of the site, "they hate blacks, Jews, and Hispanics."

New England Patriots tight end Martellus Bennett has announced he will skip the team's trip to the White House when President Donald Trump honors them. The Patriots defeated the Atlanta Falcons in a thrilling Super Bowl on Sunday night:
"I haven't thought about it. I am not going to go," the New England Patriots tight end said. "I can elaborate later on in life; right now I am just trying to enjoy this ... People know how I feel about it, just follow me on Twitter."

No president in recent memory has been more embraced by America's celebrity class than Obama. Liberal Hollywood has celebrated with Obama at the White House countless times but this weekend they had one last hurrah. The Daily Mail reports:
Inside the Obamas' final star-studded party: White House bash goes on until 4am with Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks and SJP on the dance floor and chicken and waffles for breakfast Dozens of celebrities turned out to party until 4am at the White House in a farewell bash that saw the likes of Paul McCartney, Meryl Streep and SJP tear up the dancefloor.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama invoked a provision of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands act, a law from 1953, that allowed him to place "a permanent drilling ban on portions of the ocean floor from Virginia to Maine and along much of Alaska's coast." Overall, it adds up to almost 120 million acres! No other president has used this provision to protect such a large part of federal waters before and he promised not even President-elect Donald Trump could undo this declaration. But Alaska lawmakers Sen. Dan Sullivan, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and Rep. Dan Young said they want to find a way to draft legislation to overturn Obama's actions:
"The sweeping withdrawal disrespects the Alaskan people, is not based on sound science, and contradicts the administration's own conclusions about Arctic development," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Dan Sullivan and Rep. Don Young said late Tuesday. "It will have lasting consequences for Alaska's economy, state finances, and the security and competitiveness of the nation. In making the decision, President Obama yet again sided with extreme environmentalists, while betraying his utter lack of commitment to improving the lives of the people who actually live in the Arctic."

The U.S. Treasury Department released more sanctions against Russians and Russian companies for Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in March 2014. The Kremlin has lashed out against these new sanctions, saying the government may respond:
"We regret that Washington is continuing on this destructive path," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. "We believe this damages bilateral relations ... Russia will take commensurate measures."

PRECIOUS! During an interview with NPR, President Barack Obama advised president-elect Donald Trump not to abuse the executive orders privilege:
Should President-elect Trump, once he's inaugurated, use his executive powers in the same way that you have? I think that he is entirely within his lawful power to do so. Keep in mind though that my strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done. In my first two years, I wasn't relying on executive powers, because I had big majorities in the Congress and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed. And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent over backwards consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative solution to some of the big problems that we've got — a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution — one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help.

White House staffers placed four snowmen in the Rose Garden for Christmas decorations, but a few decided to use them as pranks on President Barack Obama after he called them creepy:
In an Instagram post this weekend, Souza showed a snowman decoration looking in on Obama through a window in the Oval office. Many online saw the photo and commented the snowman looked as if it were stalking the president. In the post, Souza explained it was part of a prank.

With President-elect Donald Trump a month away from taking the White House, President Barack Obama's administration has put pressure on Cuba's regime to make deals with GE and Google for the companies to operate on the island:
White House officials are unsure how Mr. Trump, the president-elect, will approach Mr. Obama’s Cuba policy. He has said he would reverse the effort to build relations, and this week wrote on Twitter that “if Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate the deal.”

President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama met at the White House for around 90 minutes to discuss transition of power. Trump called Obama a very good man and hopes to work with him in the future, while Obama called the meeting excellent:
Obama said the two men talked about foreign policy and domestic policy and said he was encouraged by Trump's interest in working together during the transition. "As I said last night, my No. 1 priority in the next two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our President-elect is successful," Obama said.