FBI chief confirms probe of possible coordination between Kremlin and Trump campaign.

Extraordinary disclosure comes as Comey rejects Trump wiretapping claims

James B. Comey acknowledged his agency’s wide-ranging investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election during a hearing before lawmakers. But he refused to answer whether specific individuals close to the president had fallen under suspicion of criminal wrongdoing. The FBI does not typically disclose the existence of probes, but Comey said he was authorized by the Justice Department to do so in this case.

• By Ellen Nakashima, Karoun Demirjian and Devlin Barrett
• 
  

Six big takeaways from the hearing on Russia, Trump and wiretapping.

There was no smoking gun from either side's perspective, but we did learn more about what the FBI is investigating and what Republicans and Democrats in Congress want to investigate.

• By Amber Phillips
• 
  

1. There's no evidence of Trump's accusation that Obama tapped his phones.

2. The FBI is investigating connections between President Trump's campaign associates and the Russian government.

3. But the FBI is going to be VERY tight-lipped about the investigation.

4. Democrats seem pretty sure associates with Trump's campaign colluded with Russia.

Here's what we know about Trump's campaign and Russia:

1. The intelligence community has concluded that Russia meddled in the U.S. election to undermine faith in the democratic process and harm Hillary Clinton's candidacy, in part because Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed then-Secretary of State Clinton for domestic protests against his authority in 2011-2012.
2. Two members of Trump's inner circle — former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — have publicly acknowledged that they failed to disclose private conversations with the Russian ambassador to the United States. Flynn lost his job; Sessions agreed to recuse himself from the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election as a result.
3. Democrats are suggesting that Russia's involvement in the election and Trump officials' lack of disclosure about their ties to Russia point to something more. In a 15-minute opening statement, Schiff laid out a series of ties between Trump's campaign and Russia, citing former British spy Christopher Steele, who compiled an unverified dossier on Trump and Russia. They included accusations that:
   • One of Trump's national security advisers during the campaign, Carter Page, has ties to Russia and has praised its president, Vladimir Putin.
   • Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been on the payroll for pro-Russian interests in Ukraine.
   • Trump officials met with the Russian ambassador to Washington during the Republican National Convention. At that convention, Republicans changed their platform to remove a section that supported giving weapons to Ukraine as it battles Russia for territory.
   • Former Trump adviser Roger Stone boasted in a speech that he knew of impending WikiLeaks documents related to Hillary Clinton's campaign before they were published.
   • And Flynn and Sessions would go on to avoid disclosing their conversations with the Russian ambassador during or shortly after the campaign.
   • 
     
   • 
   • After spelling all that out,  ranking member Adam Schiff (D-CA) (rhetorically) asked this:

     “Is it possible that all of these events and reports are completely unrelated and nothing more than an entirely unhappy coincidence? Yes, it is possible. But it is also possible, maybe more than possible, that they are not coincidental, not disconnected and not unrelated, and that the Russians use the same techniques to corrupt U.S. persons that they employed in Europe and elsewhere. We simply don't know. Not yet. And we owe it to the country to find out.”

     
     

     5. Republicans, meanwhile, want to focus on intelligence leaks to the press.

   • 
     

   • 6. Intelligence officials still don't think there's any evidence Russia's meddling directly influenced votes.

   • 
     
   • 

Trump is dealt his hardest truth: He was wrong

The FBI director’s testimony on wiretapping and the Russia probe put the White House on the defensive, and threatens to damage the president’s credibility not only with voters, but also with lawmakers of his own party.

• By Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker
• 
  
• 
  
• Trump’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Twitter day
  The president’s Twitter accounts were active during testimony on Trump-Russia ties. But the posts were misleading, inaccurate or simply false.
  • By Glenn Kessler

Chuck Berry

1926–2017

Wild man behind rock-and-roll’s rebellious spirit dies at 90.

Chuck Berry, a charismatic singer, songwriter and one of the greatest guitarists of all time, was an unlikely idol who set the gold standard for the rock extroverts who followed. His songs and the boisterous performance standards he set directly influenced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and later Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger.

• By Terence McArdle Washington Post
• 
  
• 
  
• Mr. Berry was rock’s master theorist and conceptual genius, a songwriter who understood what the kids wanted before they did themselves.
  By JON PARELES NY TIMES

With his indelible guitar licks, brash self-confidence and memorable songs about cars, girls and wild dance parties, he did as much as anyone to define rock ’n’ roll’s potential and attitude in its early years.

With songs like “Johnny B. Goode” and “Roll Over Beethoven,” he gave his listeners more than they knew they were getting from jukebox entertainment.

His guitar lines wired the lean twang of country and the bite of the blues into phrases with both a streamlined trajectory and a long memory. And tucked into the lighthearted, telegraphic narratives that he sang with such clear enunciation was a sly defiance, upending convention to claim the pleasures of the moment.

Continue reading the main story

In “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “You Can’t Catch Me” and other songs, Mr. Berry invented rock as a music of teenage wishes fulfilled and good times (even with cops in pursuit). In “Promised Land,” “Too Much Monkey Business” and “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” he celebrated and satirized America’s opportunities and class tensions. His rock ’n’ roll was a music of joyful lusts, laughed-off tensions and gleefully shattered icons.

Mr. Berry was already well past his teens when he wrote mid-1950s manifestoes like “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music” and “School Day.” Born Charles Edward Anderson Berry on Oct. 18, 1926, in St. Louis, he grew up in a segregated, middle-class neighborhood there, soaking up gospel, blues, and rhythm and blues, along with some country music.

He spent three years in reform school after a spree of car thefts and armed robbery. He received a degree in hairdressing and cosmetology and worked for a time as a beautician; he married Themetta Suggs in 1948 and started a family.

By the early 1950s, he was playing guitar and singing blues, pop standards and an occasional country tune with local combos.

From the Texas guitarist T-Bone Walker, Mr. Berry picked up a technique of bending two strings at once that he would rough up and turn into a rock ’n’ roll talisman, the Chuck Berry lick, which would in turn be emulated by the Rolling Stones and countless others. He also recognized the popularity of country music and added some hillbilly twang to his guitar lines. Mr. Berry’s hybrid music, along with his charisma and showmanship, drew white as well as black listeners.

 In 1955, Mr. Berry ventured to Chicago and asked one of his idols, the bluesman Muddy Waters, about making records. Waters directed him to the label he recorded for, Chess Records, where one of the owners, Leonard Chess, heard potential in Mr. Berry’s song “Ida Red.”

A variant of an old country song by the same name, “Ida Red” had a 2/4 backbeat with a hillbilly oompah, while Mr. Berry’s lyrics sketched a car chase, the narrator “motorvatin’” after an elusive girl. Mr. Chess renamed the song “Maybellene,” and in a long session on May 21, 1955, Mr. Chess and the bassist Willie Dixon got the band to punch up the rhythm.

The music was bright and clear, a hard-swinging amalgam of country and blues. More than 60 years later, it still sounds reckless and audacious.

Mr. Berry articulated every word, with precise diction and no noticeable accent, leading some listeners and concert promoters, used to a different kind of rhythm-and-blues singer, to initially think that he was white. Teenagers didn’t care; they heard a rocker who was ready to take on the world.

The song was sent to the disc jockey Alan Freed. Mr. Freed and another man, Russ Fratto, were added to the credits as songwriters and got a share of the publishing royalties. Played regularly on Mr. Freed’s show and others, “Maybellene” reached No. 5 on the Billboard pop chart and was a No. 1 R&B hit.

In Mr. Berry’s groundbreaking early songs, his guitar twangs his famous two-stringed lick. It also punches like a horn section and sasses back at his own voice. The drummer eagerly socks the backbeat, and the pianist — usually either Mr. Johnson or Lafayette Leake — hurls fistfuls of tinkling anarchy all around him.

Slide Show

Jean-Marie Perier

From 1955 to 1958, Mr. Berry knocked out classic after classic. 

No matter how calculated songs like “School Day” or “Rock and Roll Music” may have been, they reached the Top 10, caught the early rock ’n’ roll spirit and detailed its mythology. “Johnny B. Goode,” a Top 10 hit in 1958, told the archetypal story of a rocker who could “play the guitar just like ringin’ a bell.”

 On film and in concert, he dazzled audiences with his duck walk, a guitar-thrusting strut that involved kicking one leg forward and hopping on the other.

 He spun surreal tall tales that Bob Dylan and John Lennon would learn from, like “Thirty Days” and “Jo Jo Gunne.” In “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” from 1956, he offered a barely veiled racial pride. His pithiness and humor rarely failed him.

In the early 1960s, Mr. Berry’s songs inspired both California rock and the British Invasion. The Beach Boys reworked his “Sweet Little Sixteen” into “Surfin’ U.S.A.” (Mr. Berry sued them and won a songwriting credit.) The Rolling Stones released a string of Berry songs, including their first single, “Come On,” and the Beatles remade “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Rock and Roll Music.”

But by the time his music started reaching a new audience, Mr. Berry was in jail.

He had been arrested in 1959 and charged with transporting a teenage girl — who briefly worked as a hatcheck girl at Club Bandstand — across state lines for immoral purposes. He was tried twice and found guilty both times; the first verdict was overturned because of racist remarks by the judge. When he emerged from 20 months in prison in 1964, his wife had left him (they later reconciled) and his songwriting spark had diminished.

He had not totally lost his touch, though, as demonstrated by the handful of hits he had in 1964 and 1965, notably “Nadine,” “No Particular Place to Go,” “You Never Can Tell” and “Promised Land.” He appeared in the celebrated all-star 1964 concert film “The TAMI Show,” along with James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye, the Beach Boys and the Supremes.

Jean-Marie Perier

While he toured steadily through the 1960s, headlining or sharing bills with bands that grew up on his songs, his recording career stalled after he moved from Chess to Mercury Records in 1966....When he returned to Chess in 1970, he recorded new songs, like “Tulane” and “Have Mercy Judge,” that flashed his old wit but failed to reach the Top 40.

In 1972, Mr. Berry had the biggest hit of his career with “My Ding-a-Ling,” a double-entendre novelty song that was included on the album “The London Chuck Berry Sessions” (even though he recorded the song not in London but at a concert in Coventry, England). The New Orleans songwriter Dave Bartholomew wrote and recorded it in 1952; Mr. Berry recorded a similar song, “My Tambourine,” in 1968, and is credited on recordings as the sole songwriter of the 1972 “My Ding-a-Ling.”

It was a million-seller and Mr. Berry’s first and only No. 1 pop single. It was also his last hit. His 1973 follow-up album, “Bio,” was poorly received; “Rockit,” released by Atlantic in 1979, did not sell. But he stayed active: He appeared as himself in a 1979 movie about 1950s rock, “American Hot Wax,” and he continued to tour constantly.

Jean-Marie Perier

In July 1979, he performed for President Jimmy Carter at the White House. Three days later, he was sentenced to 120 days in federal prison and four years’ probation for income tax evasion.

He had further legal troubles in 1990 when the police raided his home and found 62 grams of marijuana and videotapes from a camera in the women’s room of his restaurant. In a plea bargain, he agreed to a misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, with a suspended jail sentence and two years’ probation.

By the 1980s, Mr. Berry was recognized as a rock pioneer. He never won a Grammy Award in his prime, but the Recording Academy gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1984. He was in the first group of musicians inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.

Around his 60th birthday that year, he allowed the director Taylor Hackford to film him at his home in Wentzville for the documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” which also included performances by Mr. Berry with a band led by Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and special guests. “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography” was published in 1988.

Mr. Berry continued performing well into his 80s. He usually played with local pickup bands, as he had done for most of his career, but sometimes he played with fellow rock stars. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cleveland in 1995, Mr. Berry performed at an inaugural concert, backed by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Christopher Mele contributed reporting.

Continue reading the main story

This is how to get rid of gerrymandered districts
By Ryan D. Williamson, Michael Crespin, Maxwell Palmer and Barry C. Edwards


WASHINGTON POST

President Donald Trump’s budget proposal got a rough reception Thursday on Capitol Hill.

“Not our starting point.” “Not something that will fly around here politically.” “Congress will do its own budget.”

And that’s just the Republicans.

Key GOP lawmakers in the House and Senate already are signaling they won’t move forward with Trump’s proposal.

WASHINGTON POST

Congressional Republicans sharply criticize Trump budget

Defense hawks, rural conservatives and even some of Donald Trump’s most vocal supporters in Congress pushed back on the huge potential hike in defense spending as insufficient and decrying some other cuts to federal agencies and programs. Several of his closest allies have said the plan has virtually no chance in Congress.

White House targets programs designed to help working poor
The proposed cuts will fall hardest on rural and small town communities that Trump won, where one in three people are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.
• By Steven Mufson and Tracy Jan

No Charges, but Harsh Criticism for de Blasio’s Fund-Raising

By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUMMARCH 16, 2017

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

• Share
• Tweet
• Email
• More
• Save

After yearlong fund-raising investigations, federal and state prosecutors said that Mayor Bill de Blasio and his aides had failed to abide by the “intent and spirit” of the law.

Michael Flynn Was Paid by Russian-Linked Firms, Letter Shows.

 ADAM GOLDMAN and MICHAEL SCHWIRTZMARCH 16, 2017

Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

• Share
• Tweet
• Email
• More

The fees were apparently for speaking engagements by Mr. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general and former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The engagements occurred before he became an official adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

The letter and supporting documents provide new details about a trip Mr. Flynn took to Moscow in December 2015 on behalf of RT. As part of that trip, RT paid him more than $45,000 to deliver a speech at an opulent gala hosted by the network, where he sat next to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

In October 2015, Mr. Flynn was paid another $11,250 by the firm, Kaspersky Government Security Solutions, which was founded by Eugene Kaspersky. Mr. Kaspersky’s Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab has long been suspected of having ties to Russian intelligence services. 

Mr. Kaspersky founded the lab with his wife in their Moscow apartment in 1997, and since then, it has grown into one of the most well-known and respected cybersecurity firms in the world. That prominence would make interactions with Russian intelligence unavoidable, although no concrete evidence has yet to surface showing any formal cooperation, experts and current and former American officials said.

Trump's budget delivers red meat to GOP base

Defense and Homeland Security are big winners, while whole swaths of EPA, Commerce, State and Energy take cuts.

By NANCY COOK

 POLITICO

Trump’s base, who elected him based on his promise to upend Washington and dismantle the federal government. Voters rarely want to sweat all of the details; they want action. And Trump’s budget will offer that reward by pinpointing the winners and losers within the federal bureaucracy in broad strokes, according to transition sources.

Most agency cuts are expected to lack specificity, transition sources said; they will require each Cabinet secretary to find savings by eliminating programs, cutting the workforce or both.

Trump’s budget seeks deep cuts.

Plan calls for reductions in spending for science, diplomacy and the poor.

President Trump’s first budget proposes a $54 billion increase in military spending while seeking significant cuts across much of the rest of the federal government, including reductions of more than 20 percent at the departments of Agriculture, Labor and State, and more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.

• By Damian Paletta and Steven Mufson
• 
  
• Unlike former president Bill Clinton’s initiative to reinvent government, Trump’s plan appears to be more expansive, with a goal of finding programs and perhaps whole agencies that could be eliminated.
  • By Dan Balz
  • • • 
        
    • The budget plan, which calls for the elimination of four independent cultural agencies — the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — also would radically reshape the nation’s cultural infrastructure.  
   Philip Kennicott and Peggy McGlone.
  
  
  The 53-page budget plan offers the clearest snapshot yet of Trump’s priorities. Yet it is also far shorter and vaguer than White House budget plans normally are. One of the missing details is precisely where and how many jobs would be eliminated across the federal government.
  
  
  And the Trump administration proposed to eliminate a number of other programs, particularly those that serve low-income Americans and minorities, because it questioned their effectiveness. This included the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which disburses more than $3 billion annually to help heat homes in the winter. It also proposed abolishing the Community Development Block Grant program, which provides roughly $3 billion for targeted projects related to affordable housing, community development and homelessness programs, among other things.    including the popular Meals on Wheels.                 The Legal Services Corporation  would be axed entirely.
  
  
  The chances of Mr. Trump’s first budget passing Congress in its current form are slim. Many of the proposals would be nonstarters for Democrats, and some would be problematic for Republicans. 
  “I think one of the reasons they’re proposing them [big spending cuts] is that they know they won’t ever get through Congress,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). “They know they’d be a disaster for their own party if they did. It makes for a great talking point. It actually fits on a tweet.”
  There were several areas in which Trump proposed increasing spending. He proposed, for example, $168 million for charter school programs and $250 million for a new private-school choice program, which would probably provide tuition assistance for families who opt to send their children to private schools.
  The biggest increase in spending would be directed at the Pentagon, but the budget plan does not make clear where the new $54 billion would go.He proposed new money to hire border security agents and immigration judges.
  And he requested $1.7 billion in new funding this year and an additional $2.6 billion in new funding in 2018 to begin construction of a wall along the border with Mexico.
   A broader budget will be released in the spring that will include Mr. Trump’s tax proposals as well as the bulk of government spending — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other entitlement programs.
  Mr. Trump also made choices demonstrating that parts of America will be more first than others — and some of the budget losers, it turns out, may be some of the very constituencies that have been most supportive of the new president during his improbable rise to power.
  While border guards will have more prisons to lock up unauthorized immigrants, rural communities will lose grants and loans to build water facilities and financing to keep their airports open. As charter schools are bolstered, after-school and summer programs will lose money. As law enforcement agents get more help to fight the opioid epidemic, lower-income Americans will have less access to home energy aid, job training programs and legal services.
  Among the agencies to be cut off, for instance, would be the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal-state agency founded in 1965 to promote economic development and infrastructure in some of the poorest parts of the United States.

The GOP masterminds behind the Obamacare sabotage Despite Republican rhetoric, the Affordable Care Act isn’t collapsing. 

DANA MILBANK, WASHINGTON POST

Grassley accuses law enforcement officials of withholding information in Trump-Russia probe

The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, a Republican, accused Justice Department officials of lying outright when they promised to share information about ongoing department probes with lawmakers conducting oversight.

• By Karoun Demirjian and Ed O'Keefe

The FBI's caginess on whether it's investigating Trump's ties to Russia. 


The FBI won't confirm the investigation The Washington Post and other organizations have reported. Republicans in Congress would very much like to launch their own various investigations into Russia meddling in the election — and possibly Team Trump's ties — but they feel like the FBI is stonewalling them by withholding what it knows.

Former aides to longtime EPA critic Inhofe are now reshaping the agency Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) has called climate change the “greatest hoax” ever perpetrated on Americans, once bringing a snowball to the Senate floor to suggest that Earth could not be warming in any dangerous way. Now, with some of his closest allies in the upper ranks of the EPA, he is upending the nation's energy and environmental policies. By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis  •  Read more »