Politico

A Maryland blogger has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by first lady Melania Trump. Webster Griffin Tarpley, who runs the blog Tarpley.net, has agreed to pay a “substantial sum” and issued a statement apologizing to the first lady and her family, according to a statement from Trump's attorneys. In August, Tarpley published unsubstantiated rumors that the first lady had previously been an “escort” and that she was suffering a “nervous breakdown” because of the presidential campaign. “I posted an article on August 2, 2016 about Melania Trump that was replete with false and defamatory statements about her,” reads Tarpley’s statement. “I had no legitimate factual basis to make these false statements and I fully retract them. I acknowledge that these false statements were very harmful and hurtful to Mrs. Trump and her family, and therefore I sincerely apologize to Mrs. Trump, her son, her husband and her parents for making these false statements.”

President Donald Trump sent a number of tweets to the 23.5 million followers of his personal Twitter account. But they didn’t show up in the tweets of his official Twitter handle @POTUS — raising questions about whether those messages from the most powerful man on Earth will be archived for posterity. Because some of Trump's headline-grabbing, market-moving tweets might never become part of the presidential history books, archivists fear that Americans could be left with an incomplete record of how the United States was governed in the Trump era.

Tired of the election and our latest First 100 Days already? Too bad. Good luck trying to disengage. Thanks to social media, and to the nature of our new president and his administration, politics is suddenly with us always, in every aspect of our lives, including wherever we may look for diversion.

A collection of Silicon Valley executives, engineers and activists are quietly plotting a progressive counterattack against President Donald Trump, a sign of the industry's growing anger at his election victory and actions on immigration.

Through a new organization tentatively called Win the Future, or WTF, the likes of LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus are teaming up with former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach to connect political organizers and shore up progressive candidates and causes ahead of the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. Their early efforts will include building a platform to connect activists and, potentially, a website similar to the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to fund progressive initiatives. The new organization points to a desire by the liberal tech industry to channel its outrage into a broader, more organized resistance.

Federal employees worried that President Donald Trump will gut their agencies are creating new email addresses, signing up for encrypted messaging apps and looking for other, protected ways to push back against the new administration’s agenda. Whether inside the Environmental Protection Agency, within the Foreign Service, on the edges of the Labor Department or beyond, employees are using new technology as well as more old-fashioned approaches — such as private face-to-face meetings — to organize letters, talk strategy, or contact media outlets and other groups to express their dissent.

The goal is to get their message across while not violating any rules covering workplace communications, which can be monitored by the government and could potentially get them fired. At the EPA, a small group of career employees — numbering less than a dozen so far — are using an encrypted messaging app to discuss what to do if Trump’s political appointees undermine their agency’s mission to protect public health and the environment, flout the law, or delete valuable scientific data that the agency has been collecting for years, apparently.

President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Judge Neil Gorsuch, has tackled some of the biggest issues in tech during his time on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, spanning e-mail privacy and Microsoft antitrust and the “Amazon tax.” Judge Gorsuch has also shown skepticism about the Chevron doctrine, whereby federal courts give deference to agencies' interpretation of laws and regulations. Given his experience on the bench and in private practice at a Washington law firm, Judge Gorsuch is likely to be "very strong on First and Fourth Amendment issues involving the internet of things," said Perkins Coie partner Andrew McBride.

Paul de Sa, Ruth Milkman and Jon Wilkins, who left the Federal Communications Commission at the end of Chairman Tom Wheeler’s era, are launching Quadra Partners, an advisory firm aimed at executives and investors in the wireless and broadband sectors. De Sa most recently led the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning, Milkman was Wheeler’s chief of staff and Wilkins headed up the agency’s wireless bureau. They plan to focus on strategy development, new business creation, mergers and acquisition, and public/private investment.

Mexico isn’t the only close ally and trading partner peeved by President Trump’s flurry of executive actions. Trump also has caused alarm in the European Union with a line in his executive order on immigration instructing agencies to exclude foreigners from privacy protections, threatening to undermine years of intense negotiations over the sharing of commercial data and law enforcement information.

Trump’s aides didn’t consult agency officials who hashed out those agreements before he signed the order, apparently — another example of the White House taking action without the usual vetting that past presidents used to avoid a problem exactly like this one. Now those same officials and lawmakers who were blindsided are scrambling to reassure companies and European allies that the executive order doesn’t have the power to undo the agreements. It's not clear if the White House was aware of the agreements, but it didn’t seem to intend to unsettle them. A White House spokesman emphasized that the executive order says it will be “consistent with applicable law” and referred to the European Commission’s statement that the agreements aren’t affected. The two agreements in question are Privacy Shield, negotiated by the Commerce Department and the European Commission to let companies meet data protection requirements when transferring personal data across the Atlantic, and the U.S.-EU Umbrella Agreement, which covers personal data exchanged for preventing and investigating crime and terrorism.

On January 23, President Donald Trump dispatched two aides to scope out the studios of Voice of America, heightening concerns among some longtime staffers that President Trump may quickly put his stamp on the broadcasting arm that has long pushed US democratic ideals across the world.

The arrival of the two aides – both political operatives from Trump’s campaign – comes after Voice of America received blowback for sending out a series of tweets about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claims about inauguration crowd size that looked to some like an endorsement of his false statements. The news outlet later deleted one of the tweets. The concern among some staffers is especially acute because Trump’s administration is getting control over the broadcasting agency just weeks after Congress moved to eliminate the board of directors that had served as an integrity check on the organization, instead consolidating power with a CEO position appointed by the president.

President Donald Trump may be a master of combat on Twitter, but he’s suddenly run into a growing digital uprising — anonymous federal workers who are using social media to tweak the president even as his agencies crack down on information-sharing.

This Twitter rebellion, apparently centered at the National Park Service, is winning cheers from liberal activists who seize on every 140-character outburst for signs of anti-Trump resistance. It’s also forcing Trump’s agencies to mount a whack-a-mole response, as they delete tweets about climate change and order employees to stay quiet online, each time stirring up headlines alleging an information lockdown. President Trump has yet to tweet a response to all the needling. But his team may be realizing months too late that it’s up against a foe it didn’t reckon with: Thousands of federal employees and contractors have access to government Twitter accounts. And of course, anybody can set up a non-government account when the official channels are off-limits.