Republican legislator told multiple news outlets that he and other members of Congress will gather in a private room on Capitol Hill Thursday to review a secret draft of the party’s Obamacare replacement plan.

Via Bloomberg News:

The document is being treated a bit like a top-secret surveillance intercept. It is expected to be available to members and staffers on the House and Energy Commerce panel starting Thursday, but only in a dedicated reading room, one Republican lawmaker and a committee aide said. Nobody will be given copies to take with them.

“The draft of it is going to be available tomorrow for those of us on the health subcommittee to start pouring through,” said Representative Chris Collins of New York, a Trump ally and member of the health subcommittee of Energy and Commerce. “Unfortunately for you, we’re making sure it won’t be leaked.”

“We’re not having a hearing or anything,” added Gus Bilirakis of Florida, another panel member. “But there’ll be a place for us to view it, the draft.”

Collins also told Bloomberg that the committee may vote on the bill without receiving a score from the Congressional Budget Office. That is the budget agency tasked with estimating how many people the bill will cover and what it will cost.

“It looks like, unfortunately, based on the delays, we may be marking it up and voting on it before we have a score,” Collins said. The Washington Examiner reported a similar story, although one Politico reporter has also tweeted that the meeting is not happening.

It’s easy to see why secrecy is appealing to Republicans right now. One of their more recent proposals was leaked to Politico and quickly caused intraparty strife, as the Freedom Caucus began to protest tax credits in the individual market.
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Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”.

That night I did two things. First, I typed “Trump” in the search box of Twitter. My feed was reporting that he was crazy, a lunatic, a raving madman. But that wasn’t how it was playing out elsewhere. The results produced a stream of “Go Donald!!!!”, and “You show ’em!!!” There were star-spangled banner emojis and thumbs-up emojis and clips of Trump laying into the “FAKE news MSM liars!”

Trump had spoken, and his audience had heard him. Then I did what I’ve been doing for two and a half months now. I Googled “mainstream media is…” And there it was. Google’s autocomplete suggestions: “mainstream media is… dead, dying, fake news, fake, finished”. Is it dead, I wonder? Has FAKE news won? Are we now the FAKE news? Is the mainstream media – we, us, I – dying?

I click Google’s first suggested link. It leads to a website called CNSnews.com and an article: “The Mainstream media are dead.” They’re dead, I learn, because they – we, I – “cannot be trusted”. How had it, an obscure site I’d never heard of, dominated Google’s search algorithm on the topic? In the “About us” tab, I learn CNSnews is owned by the Media Research Center, which a click later I learn is “America’s media watchdog”, an organisation that claims an “unwavering commitment to neutralising leftwing bias in the news, media and popular culture”.

Another couple of clicks and I discover that it receives a large bulk of its funding – more than $10m in the past decade – from a single source, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. If you follow US politics you may recognise the name. Robert Mercer is the money behind Donald Trump. But then, I will come to learn, Robert Mercer is the money behind an awful lot of things. He was Trump’s single biggest donor. Mercer started backing Ted Cruz, but when he fell out of the presidential race he threw his money – $13.5m of it – behind the Trump campaign.
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To say that President Donald Trump has a casual relationship with the truth would be a gross understatement. He has repeatedly cited debunked conspiracy theories, pushed voter fraud myths, and embellished his record and accomplishments. The barrage of falsehoods has been so furious that journalists have taken to issuing instant fact-checks during press conferences and calling out false statements during cable news broadcasts.

All presidents lie, but lying so brazenly and so frequently about even silly factoids like his golf game has put Trump in his own category. His disregard for the truth is reflected in his top aides, who have inflated easily disproved figures like the attendance at his inauguration and even cited terror attacks that never happened.

The Huffington Post tracked the public remarks of Trump and his aides to compile a list of 100 incidents of egregious falsehoods. Still, it is likely the administration has made dozens of other misleading and exaggerated claims.

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96. Trump claimed that he negotiated $1 billion in savings to develop two new Boeing Co. jets to serve as the next Air Force One. The Air Force can’t account for that number. (Feb. 22)
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White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer took what several White House reporters who have covered both parties described as unprecedented action by banning several major outlets from a press briefing. The briefing was designed to push back on reporting indicating that the Trump administration has been colluding with the FBI to squash stories on contacts between Donald Trump’s team and Russia.

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While restricting the outlets that could participate, the move was described in an Orwellian White House release as an “expanded pool.”

Among those excluded were The New York Times, Buzzfeed, Politico, and CNN. All of those outlets have done significant reporting on the Trump-Russia connection. Additionally, the Guardian was banned, and they have pressed for investigating Trump’s Russian ties.

Here is a rundown of the stories that motivated this latest Trump attack on the free press:
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Throughout President Trump’s first 100 days, the Fact Checker team will be tracking false and misleading claims made by the president since Jan. 20.

In the 37 days Trump has been in office, we’ve counted 140 false or misleading claims.

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Donald Trump earned 59 Four-Pinocchio ratings as a presidential candidate. Now that he’s president, he has continued his proclivity for making dubious, misleading or false statements. He also often repeats the same debunked claims even though they have been fact-checked. It’s hard to keep up with all of Trump’s rhetoric, so the Fact Checker is assembling in one place all of his suspect statements from his first 100 days as president. You can sort them by various categories and see how many times he has repeated the same false statement.

The most frequent topic of these claims is immigration, which came up 25 times. Other frequent topics are jobs (20 claims) and biographical record (17 claims).

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The White House on Friday barred news outlets — including CNN, the New York Times, Politico and the Los Angeles Times — from attending an off-camera press briefing held by spokesman Sean Spicer, igniting another controversy concerning the relationship between the Trump administration and the media.

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The Wall Street Journal, which did participate in the briefing, said in a statement that it was unaware of the exclusions and "had we known at the time, we would not have participated, and we will not participate in such closed briefings in the future."

The Washington Post did not have a reporter present at the time of the gaggle.

CNN's Sara Murray went on air to describe what happened:

We lined up. We were told there was a list ahead of time, which is sort of abnormal, but we put our name on a list. And then when we went to enter, I was blocked by a White House staffer, who said we were not on the list for this gaggle today.

Now, normally, if you were going to do something like this — an extended gaggle, off camera — you would have one person from each news outlet. As you know, we have multiple people from CNN here every day. So, if you're going to do something beyond a pool, which is sort of the smallest group of reporters that then disseminates the information, you would have one person from every news outlet.

That is not what the White House was doing today. What the White House was doing was handpicking the outlets they wanted in for this briefing. So Breitbart, the Washington Times, the One America News Network — news outlets that maybe the White House feels are more favorable were all allowed in, whereas I was blocked from entering, Politico was blocked from entering, the New York Times, the L.A. Times. All of these news outlets were blocked from going to a gaggle.

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The Interior Department informed coal, oil and gas companies this week they do not need to comply with a new federal accounting system that would have compelled them to pay millions of dollars in additional royalties.

The Office of Natural Resources Revenue’s new method of calculating royalties for minerals extracted on federal land — which was finalized last July and took effect Jan. 1 — was aimed at preventing firms from underpaying what they owe by selling coal to subsidiaries at an artificially low price. But energy firms, some of whom challenged the new rule in court, called the requirements confusing, complicated and onerous and pressed for a delay.

“This rule would have had immediate detrimental effects to American energy producers and the hard-working Montanans and workers across the country they support,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who asked the administration last month to stay the rule.

Colin Marshal, president and chief executive of Cloud Peak Energy, called the change in accounting rules “among the most egregious” of the “punitive regulations” on coal the Obama administration had adopted, and welcomed its suspension.

Companies were set to file their first reports under the new rule Tuesday.
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On Thursday night, CNN reported that the FBI “rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

The report, which cites “multiple US officials briefed on the matter,” says White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus contacted top FBI officials and asked them “to at least talk to reporters on background to dispute the stories.” According to CNN, FBI Director James Comey denied Priebus’ request because “the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.”

The report is a bombshell. It suggests that the White House interfered with an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election. As Larry Tribe, a law professor at Harvard University, told ThinkProgress, “t could well be attempted obstruction of justice, and it’s certainly so unethical that it would be a firing offense for a chief of staff in any White House that respects the rule of law.”

Federal law prohibits any communication that “endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice.”
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A senior Republican lawmaker on Friday agreed that a special prosecutor should investigate Russia's alleged interference with the 2016 presidential election.



Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) became one of the few Republican representatives to state publicly the need for an independent investigation into Russia's reported election meddling. This comes as Democrats have increasingly pushed for an investigation into President Trump's associates' ties to Russia.

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On Friday, however, Issa seemed to agree with Maher that Sessions should not be involved in an investigation.

“You're right, you cannot have somebody, a friend of mine, Jeff Sessions, who was on the campaign and who was an appointee,” he said. “You're going to need to use the special prosecutor's statute and office.”


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As members of Congress take a break from the hard work of legislating to go home to their districts, many Republicans are facing a tough reception at town hall meetings. Liberals, echoing tactics used by Tea Party activists in the summer of 2009, are flooding these forums with unusually large and hostile crowds demanding answers about what the GOP plans to do for the millions of Americans who depend on the Affordable Care Act for health care.

Town hall mobilizations have been underway since Donald Trump’s inauguration, and they’ve already led many Republican members to decide they want to avoid holding any public events. President Trump, meanwhile, wants people to know that he finds the whole thing sad.

[blockquote style="border:1px solid #000000;padding:10px;"] The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 21, 2017

Trump is, fundamentally, correct that these crowds have been instigated and organized by liberal activists — just as the Tea Party crowds were organized by conservative ones.

But crying astroturf at the Tea Party didn’t stop the GOP from sweeping to a wave of victories in the 2010 midterms. And by the same token, the demonstrations against repealing the Affordable Care Act are clearly having an impact on Republicans’ thinking — slowing down the process and raising real doubts about whether repeal will happen.
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