Media

A Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group filed a lawsuit Monday alleging that President Trump is violating the U.S. Constitution by illegally receiving foreign payments through his businesses.

Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, drew widespread criticism Sunday after she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's press briefing on inauguration crowd sizes, saying the newly minted spokesman had given "alternative facts" to those cited in media reports.

Chuck Todd, of NBC's "Meet the Press," asked Conway early Sunday morning why Mr. Trump had Spicer utter a "falsehood" the first time he formally faced reporters from the White House briefing room.

Miami is not where Jon Cowan expected to be on Inauguration Day.

He was certain he would be holding a champagne glass and toasting the nation's first female president alongside the inaugural parade route at the Washington pub Elephant & Castle. "It was this unbelievable space where we were going to have this large gathering of Democrats," said Cowan, who runs the left-of-center think tank Third Way.

Yvette Clarke, a Democratic congresswoman from Brooklyn, New York, had initially planned on attending Donald Trump's inauguration out of respect for tradition and the institution of the presidency. But last week, she started to waver. "We had the opportunity as members of Congress to attend the intelligence community briefing about what took place in terms of hacking and the intrusion of the Russian government into our electoral processes," she told me.

A steadily growing number of congressional Democrats are refusing to attend Donald Trump's inauguration, sending a message of resistance at the outset of Trump's presidency. It's less clear, however, what exactly that message is, and whether it will do the Democratic Party much good as it attempts to find its way in the Trump era.

Shortly before noon on Friday a military aide will enter the Capitol with President Obama carrying a leather-covered aluminum briefcase with the information and equipment needed to launch nuclear war. Precisely at noon, control of that briefcase will pass to a man who has been described by scores of security experts in his own party as lacking the judgment, temperament and knowledge to command nuclear weapons.

A growing group of Democratic lawmakers will boycott President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration Friday to protest what they described as his alarming and divisive policies, foreign interference in his election and his criticism of civil rights icon John Lewis, a congressman from Georgia.