Lordy, there are MORE tapes!

The Daily Beast is reporting that professional reality show villain Omarosa Manigault-Newman secretly taped Donald Trump during her time in the Oval Office as Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison. Her new book "UNHINGED: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House" comes out next week.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell The Daily Beast that Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the infamous former Apprentice star who followed Trump to the White House, secretly recorded conversations with the president—conversations she has since leveraged while shopping her forthcoming “tell-all” book, bluntly titled UNHINGED.

For months, it has been rumored that Manigault had clandestinely recorded on her smartphone “tapes” of unspecified private discussions she had in the West Wing. Audio actually does exist, and even stars Manigault’s former boss.

Good thing Trump only picks the best, most loyal and trustworthy people.

Omarosa Secretly Recorded Trump—And Played the Audio for People, Sources Say [Lachlan Markay, Asawin Suebsaeng, Maxwell Tani/Daily Beast] [Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images] Read the rest

Pretty logical place to hide, if you ask me.

Secret Service agents grabbed Martese Maurice Edwards today when he showed up for work at the White House, where he worked as a private contractor for the WH National Security Council.

A man by that same name is wanted for attempted first-degree murder in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Read the rest

The DC-based transparency group Property of the People successfully sued the White House to force it to disclose its visitor logs; now, in collaboration with Propublica, those logs are online as a free, searchable database. Read the rest

On Jimmy Kimmel Live, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer talked about his work with the Trump administration. In this 20-minute long interview, Kimmel gets Spicer to talk about how he got the job in the first place, his thoughts on Donald Trump's tweets, how he felt about Melissa McCarthy's portrayal of him, and more. Read the rest

The US Office of Government Ethics has silently reversed its longstanding policy banning anonymous "gifts" to White House employees who have started legal defense funds after being accused of malfeasance. Read the rest

Michael "Rands" Lopp spotted something beautiful about this White House photo: everyone in it who doesn't have the word "president" in their job title has been fired.

Only the best people.

Here's the season 1 winner of the blunder games, as shot by Jonathan Ernst with Reuters. Read the rest

That's wild, you can't even see all the new listening devices. Read the rest

Bravo, CNN artist Bill Hennessy.

CNN equated the briefing to a Supreme Court argument -- an on-the-record event at which cameras are banned.

Hennessy has been a Washington-based courtroom sketch artist for decades. He has covered a wide range of cases, including the Clinton impeachment proceedings, terror suspect trials, and Guantanamo Bay detainee hearings. He worked for CNN at the Supreme Court on Thursday.

Hennessy's presence highlighted the significant change in White House access that has taken place recently. Press secretaries for Democratic and Republican presidents have held on-camera briefings on a regular basis for the past quarter century. But the Trump White House has been cutting back on the frequency and the length of on-camera briefings.

What's amazing is how angry conservatives are about CNN doing this. I'd call them snowflakes, but they've already melted into salty little puddles. Read the rest

Vice compiled this terrific compilation of White House reporters' reactions as they listen to Sean Spicer. If you don't laugh, you'll cry.

Read the rest

Yesterday's anonymously sourced New York Times story is the most detailed picture yet of the bizarre, brooding nightmarescape that is the Trump White House: it's not just the cut-throat power games (and Steve Bannon tricking Trump into helping him stage a coup); it's a big, complicated government building whose knowledgeable core has been purged, leaving the new administration literally in the dark. Read the rest

Ladies and gentlemen, the bookcase of the Old State Department Library at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. (via Bookshelf) Read the rest

Donald Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer inaugurated his first day on the job by telling easily falsifiable lies about the relative sizes of the Trump inauguration crowds and those of the Obama administration. Read the rest

Every year Chief White House photographer Pete Souza rounds up his best photos, and this year’s collection is especially poignant as it’s the last one of the Obama administration. Souza was looking for “behind-the-scenes moments that give people a more personal look at the President and First Lady.” The whole collection is available over on Medium and a few of my favorites are below:

[via Medium] Read the rest

In The Competition Initiative and Hidden Fees, the White House's National Economic Council documents the widespread use of deceptive "service charges" that businesses levy, allowing them to advertise prices that are wildly divergent from what you'll actually pay -- think of the $30, unavoidable "resort fees" added to a hotel bill; the $25 "processing fees" added to concert tickets, the random fees added to telecom bills, etc, all adding up to billions transferred away from American shoppers to big business. Read the rest

In a set of photos posted to his Instagram, White House photographer Pete Souza detailed a snowman-related prank the staff pulled on President Obama. Here's a photo of the snowmen in question:

Waiting for some snow.

A post shared by Pete Souza (archived) (@petesouza44) on Dec 9, 2016 at 2:01pm PST

In a later photo Souza writes:

Sometimes you gotta have fun. For the past three weeks, there have been four snowmen on display in the Rose Garden (see photo in earlier post). We’ve been joking that we should move the snowmen a few feet closer to the Oval Office every day to see if anyone noticed. Then we realized the snowmen were too heavy to easily lift. But finally this morning before the President came to the office, some helpful staff—I won't say who—moved all the snowmen so each one was peeking through a different window into the Oval. This photo was taken this afternoon as the President signed end-of-the-year bills.

Sometimes you gotta have fun. For the past three weeks, there have been four snowmen on display in the Rose Garden (see photo in earlier post). We've been joking that we should move the snowmen a few feet closer to the Oval Office every day to see if anyone noticed. Then we realized the snowmen were too heavy to easily lift. But finally this morning before the President came to the office, some helpful staff--I won't say who--moved all the snowmen so each one was peeking through a different window into the Oval.

In September 2015, President Obama raised the ceiling of refugees, many of them Syrian, who would be welcomed to the United States in the coming year from 70,000 to 85,000. While a wonderful humanitarian move, it also posed huge problems for the already-overwhelmed, byzantine systems in place to process refugee applications admissions. That's when the White House's crack tech team, the United States Digital Service, stepped in to help. The US Digital Service was born out of the disaster of Healthcare.gov, when the White House called in top-notch geeks from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to fix the disastrous Obamacare website. This year, they focused on how to get more refugees through the door. For a Webby Awards exclusive feature, I commissioned the talented journalist Lauren Smiley to tell the story of the US Digital Service and their sprint to bring in 85,000 refugees. From Lauren's feature:

When the photo of a Syrian toddler washed up on a Turkey beach appeared in his newsfeed, Jason Wu was getting restless. It was September of last year, and he’d just left his job as a product manager at Facebook’s Silicon Valley HQ—in some ways, exactly the kind of job he’d wanted back as a UC Berkeley computer science student. But at 29, having been ensconced in cush startup culture of T-shirt swag and free meals surrounding the challenging technical work, he was starting to mull a new question: “To what end?” Considering the options, he didn’t want to join one of the many mobile app companies proliferating in the valley that solved the problems of the same wealthy young people who make them.

Several years ago, a new apartment building went up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue SE in Washington DC. That's a few miles from the better known 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, aka the White House. A car lot was previously on the apartment building property, then registered as 1550 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, but the developers thought it would be a hoot to petition for the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue SE address. They got it. From WTPO:

Residents say they often get funny looks or disbelief when they have to give their address or hand over their driver’s licenses. Carlos Gutierrez, 39, and other residents said they get asked: “You live at the White House?”

The address has produced headaches for some residents. One early resident of the building, Daniel Perry, 36, said Amazon.com initially wouldn’t take orders to the address, though that’s since been sorted out. Another resident said even now, she sometimes has difficulty ordering online. A recent order for a pair of summer sandals required calling the company, she said.

Residents have to make sure that anyone sending them mail puts the all-important “SE” after the address. The correct zip code — 20003 — is also key. The White House’s ZIP code is 20500.

A goof means the mail might eventually get to the correct recipient, but because the president’s mail gets extra security screening, any resident’s mail with an incomplete address could be significantly delayed.

Mail mix-ups happen the other way, too. Errant letters for the first family arrive at the building every so often and sit unopened by the residents’ mailboxes until the U.S.