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Anthony Scaramucci, the new communications director of President Donald Trumps White House, once went head-to-head with President Barack Obama during a televised event on CNBC.And it didnt go well for Scaramucci, who at the time was a hedge fund manager.

I represent the Wall Street community, we have felt like a piata, Scaramucci said during the 2010 Q&A session, adding that investors felt like theyd been whacked with a stick.

I certainly think that Main Street and Wall Street are connected, Scaramucci said. And if were going to heal the society and make the economy better, how are we going to work towards that, healing Wall Street and Main Street?

I have been amused over the last couple of years, this sense of somehow me beating up on Wall Street, Obama replied. I think most people on Main Street feel they got beat up on.

The audience cheered. Scaramucci tried to interject, but Obama held him off.

Theres a big chunk of the country that thinks that I have been too soft on Wall Street, Obama added to more cheers. Thats probably the majority, not the minority.

Check it out in the clips above.

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Obama Shut Down Anthony Scaramucci In The Most Presidential Way Possible - HuffPost

A former adviser to President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaRegulators to mull future of controversial 'Volcker Rule' Trump-drawn NYC sketch heads to auction Former Obama adviser: Scaramucci has 'non-traditional job description' MORE on Monday said it's not "unusual" for people who disagree with presidents to work for them, adding, however, that Anthony Scaramucci has a "nontraditional job description" for aWhite House communications director.

During an interview on CNN's "New Day," Anita Dunn was asked how Scaramucci who has in the past disagreed with President Trump will fit in as thehead of the president's communications team.

"It's not unusual for people who in the past have disagreed with a candidate to end up working with him, especially when you've gone through a contested primary process," Dunn said.

"This does seem to be a rather aggravated exampled of that."

Dunn said Scaramucci made the decision to be Trump's spokesperson.

"What's interesting about his approach to the job is that rather than seeing it as a job where he's communicating the administration's priorities out to the public, at least initially, he seems to see this job as one where he has to communicate to the president how great he is."

Dunn called that a "nontraditional job description" for the White House communications director.

Scaramucci's hiringlast weekspurred a shake up of the White House communications staff.

During a press briefing on Friday, Scaramucci emphasized his love and support for the president.

He also went on a Twitter purge Friday, deleting yearsold tweets bashing his new boss and supporting positions such as gun control.

Link:
Former Obama adviser: Scaramucci has 'non-traditional job description' - The Hill

In a Monday morning tweet, President Donald Trump seemed to give Attorney General Jeff Sessions a piece of advice about what it would take to get onto his good side again: start up an investigation of the former Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.

The president wrote the tweet above in the context of discussing a recent admission from Sen. Chuck Schumer that Democrats should stop blaming alleged Russian election interference for Clintons loss in 2016 to Trump.

As is often the case, Trumps emphasis on Clinton seems to have been spurred on by recent programming decisions at his favorite television channel, Fox News, where calling for investigations into her past has been a hot topic of late.

Trying to re-open Department of Justice inquiries into Clintons alleged misdeeds is a contradiction to statements Trump made when he was the president-elect last December when he told New York Times reporters, I dont want to hurt the Clintons, and that prosecuting Hillary Clinton would be very, very divisive for the country.

The rights renewed interest in investigating Clinton is also a reversal of Republicans earlier outrage at what they said was the former administration of Barack Obama politicizing law enforcement, particularly of the Internal Revenue Service.

The tax collection agency has come under heavy fire from the right after it was accused of improperly delaying the non-profit incorporation requests of Tea Party groups. A subsequent internal review by the agencys inspector general found that several IRS employees had violated government policies but later investigations by the FBI and the Department of Justice found that no laws had been violated.

Despite multiple accounts(including first-hand ones) that some Tea Party groups have scammed their donors, Republican politicians have insisted that the IRS caution about groups claiming to be affiliated with the movement was a deliberate strategy to harm conservatives.

In a 2015 speech calling for the abolishment of the IRS, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz argued the agency should be completely dismantled because it had been fundamentally compromised.

The last two years have fundamentally changed the dynamics of this debate [on the tax code], he said. As we have seen the weaponization of the IRS, as we have seen the Obama administration using the IRS in a partisan manner to punish its political enemies.

Months into the Trump administration, Republicans are still calling for further investigations into the agency. In April, two GOP congressmen formally called for a second DOJ investigation into the tax collection agency.

Taxpayers deserve to know that the DOJs previous evaluation was not tainted by politics, Reps.Kevin Bradyand Peter Roskam, respectively the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and the panels tax policy subcommittee wrote in an open letter to Sessions.

Now that hes the president, it seems like Trump is aware that he cannot directly tell Sessions to prosecute Clinton but his tweet all but asks the attorney general, and Republicans in Congress, to do just that. So much for not politicizing law enforcement.

Read more:
Conservatives were angry when they thought Obama was going after political opponents - Salon

The Trump administration is proposing to completely repeal Obama-erastandards governing hydraulic fracturing on federal land.

The proposal from the Interior Departments Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is due to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register.

The landmark 2015 regulation set standards in areas such as disclosure of fracking chemicals and integrity of well casing.

It was the Obama administrations attempt to update decades-old regulations to account for the explosive growth in fracking for oil and natural gas in recent years.

The repeal is the latest in a long string of environmental regulations from Obama that Trump is working to undo.

Interiors stream protection rule for mountaintop removal mining was repealed by Congress, and the agency has taken action on its own to stop Obamas pause on coal mining on federal land.

The Environmental Protection Agency, meanwhile, has started to undo major regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, water pollution, methane pollution and more.

Trump officials say in the proposal released Monday that the Obama regulation is largely duplicative of state and tribal standards, and would cost the oil and gas industry up to $45 million a year to comply.

Considering state regulatory programs, the sovereignty of tribes to regulate operations on their lands, and the preexisting authorities in other federal regulations, the proposed rescission of the 2015 final rule would not leave hydraulic fracturing operations entirely unregulated, the BLM writes in the proposal.

The BLM did not indicate that it intends to replace the rule

The rules enforcement has been on hold since last July, when a federal judge in Wyoming overturned it, ruling that the BLM does not have the authority to regulate fracking at all. The Obama administration appealed that decision, but the case is now on hold due to the Trump administrations reconsideration of the rule.

The rollback follows on President Trumps campaign promise to repeal regulations that limit the production and use of fossil fuels.

He signed an executive order in March to that effect, specifically naming the BLM fracking rule as one that needed formal review.

Publication Tuesday of the fracking rule repeal proposal will kick off a 60-day period when the agency will gather comments from the public. At that point, it will make any necessary changes to the rule before publishing a final version.

After the final version is published, environmental groups, Democratic states and other supporters of the Obama rule may sue the BLM to try to undo the repeal.

Read this article:
Trump administration seeks to repeal Obama fracking rule - The Hill

Barack Obama and Tom Perez / Getty Images

BY: Susan Crabtree July 24, 2017 5:00 am

A whistleblower is making some of the same complaints against the Obama administration over its record of providing congressionally mandated payouts to nuclear workers as Barack Obama did about the George W. Bush administration's.

Obama, when he was a senator in the middle of his White House bid, admonished the Bush Labor Department over complaints of bureaucratic bungling and intentional efforts to deny or drag out payouts to workers who lost their health building the nation's Cold War nuclear arsenal.

"There is no question that when it comes to this program, this administration has been more than willing to ignore the law when it disagrees with Congress' intent," Obama, who repeatedly tried to advocate on behalf of sick workers in his home state of Illinois, told the Rocky Mountain News in 2008.

"It must be remembered that these laws were passed by a Republican majority in Congress," Obama continued. "While many workers or their families have been compensated, there is no doubt that what Congress intended when it created this program simply has not materialized, and as a result, many deserving workers have been left out by the current legislation."

Obama went on to say in the interview that he found it "deeply troubling" that the Bush administration would "assume that these workers are lying about their work conditions and their illnesses."

"The great irony of the situation is that this program was created because the government misled these workers for so many years" about the toxicity of work conditions at nuclear weapons facilities.

The program, which Congress created in 2000 and the Bush administration had the job of implementing, had a rough early history.

Beset by administrative cost run-ups while compensating a paltry number of workers in its first years, lawmakers in 2004 moved the program, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program, from the Energy Department to the Labor Department and installed an ombudsman to oversee complaints and report them to Congress.

Compensation awards sharply increased, but complaints persisted that Labor officials were narrowly interpreting the law to deliberately deny awards to workers who Congress intended to cover or dragging out the process until workers simply died. A bipartisan group of critics on Capitol Hill held a series of hearings and pressed the Bush administration to make changes to ensure the program was more claimant-friendly.

After Obama was elected president, Democrats predicted the incoming Obama administration would be a lot more "sympathetic" to the plight of the nuclear workers and help make the program more responsive with faster compensation awards.

Sen. Mark Udall (D., Colo.), one of the program's top champions along with Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), said in January 2009 he had met with Hilda Solis, Obama's choice for his first Labor secretary, and had put the problems with the compensation program "at the top of my list" of discussion items.

"I believe this administration will be a lot more sympathetic to these Cold War warriors," Udall said at the time.

Nine years later, an internal Labor Department whistleblower is voicing many of the same complaints against the Obama administration and its record of administering the compensation program for nuclear workers and their survivors.

Stephen Silbiger, a senior attorney at the Labor Department, told the Washington Free Beacon that Labor Secretary Tom Perez ignored years of his complaints about the open "hostility" he said some officials exhibited toward claimants, many of whom are too poor and sick to fight the agencys denials and red tape in federal court.

Additionally, he and other critics have said government officials are often purposely thwarting workers' attempts to seek the compensation by writing regulations that made qualification much more stringent to than Congress intended, failing to disclose the application rules, changing eligibility rules midstream, and delaying compensation for years until the sick workers died.

Silbiger takes exception to Perez's argument earlier this year that Republicans are repealing Obamacare because they don't "give a shit about people."

In fact, he says that quip contradicts what he saw at the Labor Department during Perez's and Solis's time running the agency.

Silbiger, an attorney in the Labor Department's Solicitor's Office, said another department lawyer seemed intent on denying some claimants their benefits and narrowly interpreting the statute governing the program to do so. On several occasions during staff meetings over the last several years, Silbiger said an attorney in the Solicitor's Office expressed disdain for some claimants and said he hoped they would never receive their benefits.

He also cited a ruling by a federal judge in New Mexicolast year that overturneda Labor Department's denial of compensation to a nuclear worker's widow as proof that the attorneys were narrowly interpreting the law in order to deny awards.

Link:
Obama Faulted the Bush Administration for Failing Nuclear Workers in 2008 - Washington Free Beacon