Politico

Billionaire investor Wilbur Ross is President-elect Donald Trump's leading candidate for Commerce Secretary, apparently. Ross, 78, is the founder of the private equity firm WL Ross & Co., known for restructuring failed companies, and he's an economic adviser to President-elect Trump. Ross has been a vociferous critic of trade deals negotiated over the last 25 years, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump has vowed to leave unless Mexico and Canada agree to renegotiate on more favorable terms.

“I think there’s a big difference between the impact of trade agreements on corporate America and the impact on Mr. and Mrs. America,” Ross said earlier in 2016. “Corporate America has adjusted to them by investing lots of capital offshore. … What we’re doing is we’re exporting jobs and importing products, instead of exporting products and keeping jobs.” Along with fellow President-elect Trump campaign adviser Peter Navarro, an University of California-Irvine economics and public policy professor, Ross has called for future trade deals to include automatic renegotiation triggers if trade gains “are not distributed fairly” and other “safeguards” including ironclad sanctions against currency manipulation, zero tolerance on intellectual property theft and stringent environmental and health and safety standards.

The White House Correspondents' Association released a statement urging President-elect Donald Trump's transition team to immediately set up a press pool, so that reporters can follow President-elect Trump as he prepares to assume the office of the Presidency. The statement follows the news that President-elect Trump dined with friends and family at the 21 Club restaurant in Manhattan, after reporters that cover him were told that he would be staying in Trump Tower for the rest of the night. President-elect Trump's transition team has said that a formal pool plan is in the works but not yet ready.

"On Tuesday President-elect Trump went out for dinner in New York without a pool of journalists in his motorcade and after reporters were advised that he was in for the night. One week after the election, it is unacceptable for the next president of the United States to travel without a regular pool to record his movements and inform the public about his whereabouts," said WHCA president and Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason. "The White House Correspondents' Association is pleased to hear reassurances by the Trump transition team that it will respect long-held traditions of press access at the White House and support a pool structure. But the time to act on that promise is now. Pool reporters are in place in New York to cover the president-elect as he assembles his new administration. It is critical that they be allowed to do their jobs."

We're learning more about Jeffrey Eisenach, the Trump transition team's point man on telecommunications. In 2014 he co-authored a pitch for Congress to curtail much of the Federal Communications Commission's jurisdiction and responsibilities. Submitted as part of comments to the House communications subcommittee's work on updating the Communications Act, Eisenach and colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute argue that much of the agency's current function is duplicative of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "Congress should rationalize the commission, apportioning the majority of its functions and resources to its sister agencies. In particular, Congress should consider merging the FCC's competition and consumer protection functions with those of the [FTC] thus combining the FCC's industry expertise and capabilities with the generic statutory authority of the FTC," they write.

Eisenach's thinking takes on a new importance as he helps shape Trump's telecom policy and who will carry it out. He declined to elaborate on the 2014 comments, but the full filing is worth a read. While the authors say they don't want to eliminate "important functions" that the FCC should play in the communications world, those responsibilities "would be preserved under the auspices of a new agency with limited jurisdiction and discretion."

House Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) is urging the Federal Communications Commission to press pause on any new regulations. "The notion of instituting new rules and regulations, cramming stuff out the door, is unnecessary, unwanted and unfair - and needs to cease and desist," Chairman Walden said. His message comes as Republicans embrace their newfound control of Washington, and as Chairman Walden himself seeks the role of chairman of the full House Commerce Committee. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has a couple of pending issues on his plate, including his plans to open up the cable-box market and increase competition among business broadband providers.

The Trump transition's new website features pages copied whole-cloth from the site of the nonpartisan and nonprofit Partnership for Public Service's Center for Presidential Transitions, with minimal attribution and no editing. The seemingly rushed copy-and-paste job leaves the site with references to materials that don't exist on the platform -- like a paragraph that points to a "chart below," with no chart below - and a pointer to "our own Center library," which links instead to a resource on the nonprofit's site.

Nonprofit newsrooms around the country are using the results of the presidential election as a fundraising pitch, promising to hold a new administration accountable if readers donate. “All of us are still absorbing the full implications of this week’s election,” wrote Bill Keller, the editor in chief of The Marshall Project.” “We’re wondering what will happen on a wide range of issues we care deeply about … Good public policy must be based on facts. Institutions that gather those facts in a careful and nonpartisan manner need public support more than ever.” The Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica sent similar fundraising pitches recently. CPI told supporters that “now more than ever, independent, fact-based investigative journalism is needed most.” ProPublica asked readers, in the wake of the election, to donate so the newsroom can “hold those in power to account, and to call out abuses.”

No matter who claims the presidency on November 8, the 2016 election was a story about one human being's domination of the media.

Not since 9/11 has a single topic so colonized all of the media territories—print, television, and the Web—as thoroughly as Donald J. Trump did. Exactly how did he do that? It wasn't through brute force: Trump ignored all the orthodoxies, eschewing the traditional campaign-building, almost ignoring the field offices and a "ground game." By April, his campaign had only 94 payrolled staffers compared with Hillary Clinton's 795. No focus groups, no pollsters, practically no outside speech writing, and little in the way of TV ads. He practiced a political version of lean business management. Trump's secret was almost exactly the opposite of what even the best-paid consultant would advise. He has run a media campaign directly against the media, helping himself to the copious media attention available to a TV star while disparaging journalists at every podium and venue. Trump has taken press-baiting further than anyone else in public life would have imagined possible. The Trump campaign playbook, written by him over the past 15 months, is just begging for somebody to pick it up and create shiny things for the press to chase in 2020.

Once again, Donald Trump left his traveling press pool behind while on the campaign trail. Trump, who regularly chastises the press and calls out specific reporters, claiming they don't cover him fairly and don't show the crowds in attendance, showed up 10 minutes early to his rally in Concord (NC). But while Trump gets the benefit of a motorcade that can skip traffic, his accompanying press pool, whose travel is organized by the campaign but paid for by the individual media companies, do not. So, they were at least 15 minutes late to the rally.

For media with cameras, that means there's almost no time to set up (local media, and those who arranged their own travel, were likely already on site, which means the GOP nominee still got some coverage). Unlike all other modern-day candidates, Trump does not allow the press pool to travel with him on his plane. As a result, the press are not necessarily always within the Secret Service "bubble" and do not get the benefit of the motorcade. Though Clinton does travel with her press pool, they are not considered a full "protective pool" and are therefore not with her at all times.

The FBI never asked Hillary Clinton's top aides to turn over all the computers and smartphones they used while Clinton was secretary of state, an omission that is now triggering questions from Republican lawmakers. While the FBI made a concerted effort to obtain all the computers that were used as Clinton's private server and ultimately asked two of Clinton's lawyers for laptops used to review her e-mail messages, investigators never requested or demanded all equipment her top staffers used for work purposes during her four years at State, apparently.

"No one was asked for devices by the FBI," said an anonymous source. The decision left the FBI at least partially dependent on the aides' attorneys' decisions about which messages were work-related and therefore might have contained classified information the agents were looking for. Those messages were turned over to State in response to its request in 2015. GOP lawmakers say the decision not to demand the aides' electronics, or even to ask for them, raises doubts about how the FBI and prosecutors handled the probe.

ProPublica and The Marshall Project have stepped forward to assume control over several data tools from The Sunlight Foundation’s data tools division in an effort to maintain and update the research and analytical tools that Sunlight, an open government advocacy group, can no longer afford to preserve.

ProPublica, the independent investigative newsroom, is taking on five federal legislative tools from Sunlight Labs, including Politiwoops, which tracks deleted tweets from politicians. The Marshall Project, another nonprofit news outlet, will assume control over the Hall of Justice, which contains datasets and research about criminal justice. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money in politics, has also stepped forward to take over two campaign finance data tool, as have The Department of Commerce and Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. ProPublica will assume control over the five tools immediately, ProPublica deputy managing editor Scott Klein said in a post about the changes. Come Election Day, the nonprofit news site will implement a series of larger changes to the tools, and will integrate them into existing ProPublica datasets and tools, he said. The other transfers will be completed on a rolling basis through November 10, Sunlight Labs director Kat Duffy said in a post about the changes. None of the organizations will receive financial assistance from Sunlight in order to take over these projects.