Maggie Haberman

President Donald Trump removed Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, from the National Security Council’s cabinet-level “principals committee.” The shift was orchestrated by Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, who insisted on purging a political adviser from the Situation Room where decisions about war and peace are made.

Bannon resisted the move, even threatening at one point to quit if it went forward, according to a White House official who, like others, insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Bannon’s camp denied that he had threatened to resign and spent the day spreading the word that the shift was a natural evolution, not a signal of any diminution of his outsize influence. His allies said privately that Bannon had been put on the principals committee to keep an eye on Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. With Flynn gone, these allies said, there was no need for Bannon to remain, but they noted that he had kept his security clearance.

A pair of White House officials played a role in providing House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) with the intelligence reports that showed that President Donald Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies. The revelation that White House officials assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports — which Chairman Nunes then discussed with President Trump — is likely to fuel criticism that the intelligence chairman has been too eager to do the bidding of the Trump administration while his committee is supposed to be conducting an independent investigation of Russia’s meddling in the last presidential election.

Chairman Nunes has also been faulted by his congressional colleagues for sharing the information with President Trump before consulting with other members of the intelligence committee. The congressman has refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe coming to the committee with sensitive information. He disclosed the existence of the intelligence reports on March 22, and in his public comments he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.

All presidents lunch with major news anchors. But a recent White House gathering was different. The President kept his guests 30 minutes beyond the allotted hour, was gracious and spoke so much that he left his lunch untouched — a recognition, those close to him say, that he must sell himself to the Washington news media because he believes the people who work for him cannot. President Trump, after all, had conceded only the day before on national television that “in terms of messaging, I would give myself a C or a C-plus.” In the same interview, on “Fox & Friends,” the President described his press secretary, Sean Spicer, as “a fine human being.” The language struck close Trump associates as a dismissive turn from a man who relishes hyperbole.

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of President Trump, said that the President was experiencing “a lot of angst” about his negative coverage. A master media manipulator and storyteller, candidate Trump went without a traditional press secretary during the presidential campaign, preferring to field queries on his own. Now he is increasingly taking command of his administration’s message making, and privately expressing frustration with a White House press office under siege amid leaks and infighting.

President-elect Donald Trump conceded for the first time that Russia had carried out cyberattacks against the two major political parties during the presidential election, but he angrily rejected unsubstantiated reports that Moscow had gathered compromising personal and financial information about him that could be used for extortion. In a chaotic news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in Manhattan nine days before he is to be sworn in as the nation’s 45th president, President-elect Trump compared United States intelligence officials to Nazis, sidestepped repeated questions about whether he or anyone in his presidential campaign had had contact with Russia during the campaign, and lashed out at the news media and political opponents, arguing that they were out to get him.

Steven Terner Mnuchin, a financier with deep roots on Wall Street and in Hollywood but no government experience, is expected to be named President-elect Donald J. Trump’s Treasury secretary, apparently. Mnuchin, 53, was the national finance chairman for President-elect Trump’s campaign. He began his career at Goldman Sachs, where he became a partner, before creating his own hedge fund, moving to the West Coast and entering the first rank of movie financiers by bankrolling hits like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar.”

As Treasury secretary, Mnuchin would play an important role in shaping the administration’s economic policies, including a package of promised tax cuts, increased spending on infrastructure and changes in the terms of foreign trade. He could also help lead any effort to roll back President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and opening to Cuba by reimposing sanctions on Tehran and Havana.

She is a woman and an immigrant, a fixture of the Republican establishment for two decades. She is a savvy and professional practitioner of the capital’s inside game. And now she is going to work for President-elect Donald J. Trump. Trump named Elaine L. Chao as his choice to be the next secretary of transportation, elevating someone whose background and experience are in many respects completely at odds with the brash and disruptive tenor of his anti-Washington campaign. His transportation secretary is likely to be one of the more essential players. President-elect Trump, a real estate magnate, has said that infrastructure redevelopment will be a priority of his first 100 days in office. And Chao has experience — politically and personally — in navigating the competing centers of power in the capital. She is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a conservative from Alabama who became a close adviser after endorsing him early in his campaign, to be the attorney general of the United States. While Sen Sessions is well liked in the Senate, his record as United States attorney in Alabama in the 1980s is very likely to become an issue for Democrats and civil rights groups expected to give it close scrutiny. While serving as a United States prosecutor in Alabama, Sessions was nominated in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. But his nomination was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee because of racially charged comments and actions. At that time, he was one of two judicial nominees whose selections were halted by the panel in nearly 50 years.

The appointment of Sen Sessions is expected to bring sweeping change to the Justice Department as it operated under Loretta E. Lynch and her predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., who, when he was nominated to be the first black attorney general, pledged to make rebuilding the civil rights division his top priority. Several former Justice officials predicted that Sen Sessions would reverse the emphasis on civil rights and criminal-justice reform that Holder put in place.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered the post of national security adviser to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, potentially putting a retired intelligence officer who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat in one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy. General Flynn, 57, a registered Democrat, was President-elect Trump’s main national security adviser during his campaign. If he accepts President-elect Trump’s offer, as expected, he will be a critical gatekeeper for a president with little experience in military or foreign policy issues. General Flynn stunned former colleagues when he traveled to Moscow in 2015 to appear alongside Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at a lavish gala for the Kremlin-run propaganda channel RT, a trip General Flynn admitted he was paid to make and defended by saying he saw no distinction between RT and US news channels such as CNN.

President-elect Donald Trump chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose friendship with the House speaker, Paul Ryan, could help secure early legislative victories. President-elect Trump named Stephen Bannon, a right-wing media provocateur, his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist, signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Bannon and of a continuing disdain for the Republican establishment.

The dual appointments — with Bannon given top billing in the official announcement — instantly created rival centers of power in the Trump White House. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Bannon ran for much of the past decade.

Hillary Clinton discussed her work at the State Department, called for young women not to take criticisms personally and rapped the media for treating powerful women with a double standard at the kickoff of “Women in the World” in New York City.

Midway through the panel, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman asked Clinton if there is “still a double standard in the media in how we talk about women in public life?”

“There is a double standard,” Clinton said, adding, “We have all experienced it [or seen it]. The double standard is alive and well, and I think in many respects the media is the principal propagator of its persistence,” she added. “And I think the media needs to be, you know, more self-consciously aware of that.” She added that her advice to women who want to, as Friedman put it, “rise up in the world” is that they have the task of making other people, “predominantly” men who they will deal with, relate to them and listen to their ideas.