WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump issued a full pardon Wednesday to Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser, rewarding a loyalist who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation.

Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, was the only White House official charged by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Unions, anti-hunger groups and advocacy groups have launched a letter-writing campaign to support Rep. Marcia L. Fudge for the post of Agriculture secretary in the Biden administration.

Fudge, D-Ohio, was considered a likely contender for the top spot on the House Agriculture Committee after Chairman Collin C. Peterson, D-Minn., ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Joe Biden wasn't Hanieh Jodat Barnes' first choice.

An immigrant from Iran who served as a California delegate for Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this year, she threw her support behind Biden only once he was named the Democratic presidential nominee. She wanted to do whatever she could to ensure that President Donald Trump would ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Congress still has the potential to move forward in a bipartisan way on health care issues, including possible action to ban surprise medical bills, the top Republican on the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee told CQ Roll Call as he approaches retirement.

Greg Walden, R-Ore., who has served as both ranking member and ...Read more

Former President Obama doesn't mention President Trump in his new memoir, "A Promised Land," until page 672. That's out of 706 pages in the book, minus the footnotes.

But when he does talk Trump, it's memorable, revolving around the current president's "birther" rumblings back in 2011, when the real-estate developer questioned whether Obama had...Read more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump plans to travel to Pennsylvania on Wednesday for a meeting of state Republican lawmakers examining accusations of election impropriety, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Trump's visit to Gettysburg for a hearing by the Pennsylvania Senate Majority Policy Committee was not listed on the ...Read more

WASHINGTON — During the presidential campaign, Democrats expressed persistent anxiety that Joe Biden's coalition would collapse as soon as it ousted President Donald Trump from the White House — it felt too ideologically conflicted, too polarized, too tenuous to hold.

But Biden's initial Cabinet selections and other senior appointments have...Read more

WASHINGTON — Antony Blinken, tapped by President-elect Joe Biden to serve as America's 71st secretary of state, would carry the most valuable asset a diplomat can have when meeting other world leaders: the confidence of the U.S. president.

Biden and Blinken's history of working together since the early 2000s means America's allies and rivals ...Read more

Pardoning season is upon us.

President Donald Trump, who's rumored to be considering pardons for a handful of humans before he leaves office, extended the executive reprieve to a turkey at the White House on Tuesday and gushed about how "lucky" the Thanksgiving fowl was.

Playing along with the decades-old Thanksgiving tradition, Trump pardoned...Read more

When I ran for elected office my very first time, it was 1994, and it was a great year for Republicans: The Newt Gingrich revolution was occurring at the national level and conservative Delegate Ellen Sauerbrey had defeated moderate Rep. Helen Delich Bentley for the GOP gubernatorial nomination of Maryland.

Those were heady days for a 39-year ...Read more

President Donald Trump has largely been a corrosive force on health care issues, working to undermine the Affordable Care Act and advancing policies that favored younger, healthier people at the expense of Americans with preexisting conditions. But on prescription drugs — an area largely overlooked by the ACA — he's aligned himself with the ...Read more

President-elect Joe Biden is expected to restore protection to "Dreamers," provide a pathway to citizenship for other immigrants, rescind his predecessor's travel bans and allow in more refugees. It is a welcome break from the cruelty of his predecessor, who separated children from their parents and put them in cages.

Immigration is often ...Read more

WASHINGTON — President-elect Joe Biden will begin to get the nation's most classified intelligence after the White House signed off Tuesday on providing him the Presidential Daily Briefing as the transition moves forward.

The incoming president getting access to the top-secret briefing is the most high-profile part of the transition and seen ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Top appropriators reached bipartisan agreement Tuesday on a framework for an omnibus spending package that would avoid a partial government shutdown next month.

The compromise forged between the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees sets spending allocations for the dozen bills that fund federal agencies for ...Read more

The 2020 Democratic president ticket made history for several reasons and now can claim the most number of votes in a presidential election.

President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have 80,033,996 votes with as many as millions more still to tally, according to a running count by the nonpartisan Cook Report.

That's a ...Read more

Mary Nichols has led California's resistance to President Donald Trump's climate policies. Now she may wind up leading the federal government's fight on climate and other environmental issues.

The chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board is widely reported to be on President-elect Joe Biden's short list of candidates for Environmental ...Read more

Over the objections of Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Antony Blinken won the blessing of the Senate in 2014 as second-in-command at the Department of State under then-President Barack Obama.

Six years later, if Blinken is to become the top diplomat in the country under Democratic President-elect Joe Biden, it looks like he'll need to buck ...Read more

Global challenges won't wait for President Donald Trump to accept his clear defeat. So President-elect Joe Biden has been wise not to wait either, especially when it comes to forming his foreign policy team.

Biden's announcement of several key posts sends a signal to adversarial nations and transnational actors who would seek to seize advantage...Read more

President-elect Joe Biden has been clear about his agenda: control the pandemic, recover economic stability, advance racial equality and confront climate change. To accomplish any of these, however, another pressing issue will have to be tackled. The Biden administration must begin rebuilding Americans' trust in their government and public ...Read more

WASHINGTON — Avril Haines, chosen by President-elect Joe Biden to become the next director of national intelligence, will face the tough job of restoring Americans' trust in U.S. intelligence agencies, which in the past four years have faced a barrage of false accusations from illegal domestic spying to cooking up intelligence and have seen ...Read more