Paul Ryan

Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto beat President Trump to the punch Thursday — telling the White House that he has canceled his trip to Washington because of Trump’s insistence on building a border wall.

Mike Pompeo was sworn in on the night of Jan. 23 as director of the CIA at a crucial time for U.S. national security as intelligence - traditionally a nonpartisan issue - has been thrust into the political arena.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Jan. 17 shortened the prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. military intelligence analyst who was responsible for a 2010 leak of classified materials to anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the biggest such breach in U.S. history. 

In a city bound by tradition, every president taps a legislative affairs director to work with Congress. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears ready to use a legislative whip like none other: Twitter.

On Sunday, president-elect Donald Trump appointed Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, his White House Chief of Staff.

Greek-American Washington insider Priebus was chosen from a shortlist of names that also included Steve Bannon, the right-wing media boss who took over Trump’s presidential campaign in its final weeks.

After The Washington Post published a leaked 2005 video in which Trump bragged to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush about how he was able to grope women because he’s famous, finally some Republicans in Congress are beginning to distance themselves from Trump.

With his campaign in crisis, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed on Oct. 8 to stay in the race despite calls from more than two dozen prominent Republicans for him to drop out following the release of a recording of him making lewd comments about women.

Both Trump's wife and his running mate criticized his words, saying they were insulting and indefensible. 

The U.S. House of Representatives, defying a veto threat by President Barack Obama, overwhelmingly passed Republican-backed legislation on Nov. 19 to suspend Obama's program to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees in the next year and then intensify the process of screening them.

President Barack Obama slammed US "hysteria" about the security risks posed by Syrian refugees Nov. 17 as Republicans took steps aimed at freezing White House programs to resettle them in the wake of the Paris attacks.

In an unusually fierce rebuke, Obama struck out at his political foes, accusing them of demonizing "widows and orphans."  

The US Senate passed a bipartisan, two-year budget deal early on Oct. 30 that boosts federal spending by $80 billion, reduces a government shutdown threat and raises the debt ceiling through the end of Barack Obama's presidency.