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Former president Barack Obama is making his first campaign foray of 2017, agreeing to stump for Democrat Ralph Northam in his bid to be Virginias next governor.

David Turner, a spokesman for Northam, said the former president agreed this week to hit the campaign trail for Northam, but would not say when or where.

An aide to Obama confirmed that the former president agreed to campaign for Northam during a congratulatory call, although no events have been planned.

The HuffPost first reported Obamas plans to campaign for Northam.

The Virginia governors race, one of just two gubernatorial contests this year, is shaping up as the next high-profile electoral contest in the era of President Trump. It follows a couple of Democratic losses in high-profile special elections to fill congressional vacancies, including a race in Georgia last week that became the most expensive in U.S. history.

Obama, who carried Virginia in 2008 and 2012, could help Northam improve his support among younger voters and solidify his already strong backing from African American voters. Northams strongholds in the Democratic primary were in the Urban Crescent, the heavily populated areas of Northern Virginia, Richmond and Hampton Roads.

Northam faces Ed Gillespie, a longtime Republican operative and party leader, in November. Gillespie spokesman David Abrams dismissed the potential appeal of the former president.

How many Democratic surrogates is it going to take to try to drag the lieutenant governor across the finish line? he said. Virginians deserve to hear from candidates directly, in their own voices, about their own ideas and proposals.

Gillespie recently campaigned with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).

Obama stayed out of the hard-fought Democratic primary this month between Northam and former congressman Tom Perriello. Northam, who beat Perriello, called former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. with an appeal to prevent Obama from endorsing in the race, according to a Democrat familiar with the call.

But Perriello, who lost his seat in Congress over his vote for the Affordable Care Act and then went on to work for the Obama administration, invoked the former president anyway, airing footage of him with Obama in campaign ads.

Since leaving office, Obama has stayed in the political fray, condemning President Trumps travel ban and decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords, as well as Republican attempts to gut his signature health-care law.

(Amber Ferguson,Jorge Ribas,Dalton Bennett/The Washington Post)

But he did not campaign for Democrats in congressional elections this year, though he did cut a video endorsing Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election.

Obama has said redistricting will be his primary cause. He says he wants to help rebuild Democratic strength by preventing Republicans from drawing legislative maps that are favorable to them and will define the political landscape for the next decade. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, chaired by Holder, has made Virginias gubernatorial and House of Delegate races its first campaign targets.

At a Democratic fundraiser in Richmond this month, Holder said Virginia was at the epicenter of the political universe in 2017 and promised that his group would bring Democratic all-stars to the campaign trail.

[Holder says Virginia governors race is chance to send message to Trump]

Obamas predecessor, George W. Bush, largely kept a low political profile after leaving the White House, waiting seven years before he campaigned for his brother Jeb Bushs failed presidential bid.

Bush also has connections to the Virginia contest: He tapped Gillespie to serve as chairman of the Republican National Committee early in his presidential term, and later brought him into the White House as his counselor. The former president attended a March fundraiser for Gillespie in Dallas and wrote a $25,000 check for his gubernatorial campaign.

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Obama returning to campaign trail to stump for Northam in Virginia governor's race - Washington Post

A high-level group in the White House is stonewalling attempts by a government watchdog to obtain records about the Obama administrations so-called unmasking of people on President Trumps campaign and transition teams, according to Judicial Watch.

The government watchdog group told Fox News that the National Security Council, a White House group that advises the president on national security matters and foreign affairs, responded in a May 23 letter that the records have been transferred to President Obamas as-yet-unopened library in Chicago and wont be available to the public for five years.

Judicial Watchs efforts to obtain these documents comes as Fox News broke a story in April regarding National Security Council Adviser Susan Rice being among Obama appointees who during the last presidential election, asked for identities of U.S. citizens linked to the Trump campaign and transition teams who were caught up in U.S. intelligencesurveillance.

Disclosure of thenames of American citizensidentified in the course ofintelligence collection activities is known as unmasking.

Rices personal involvement in unmasking the identities of U.S. persons from [U.S. intelligence] collection activities is extraordinarily unusual and smacks of an unlawful domestic political intelligence operation being run out of the Obama White House, Chris Farrell, director of research and investigation for Judicial Watch, told Fox News.

The president, Congress and law enforcement can gain access to the records. Judicial Watch will fight for them, too.

The secrecy around these materials also is raising hackles for other reasons.

"Itcosts taxpayers over $100 million a year to support presidential libraries thatcan take as long as 100 years to release archival material on how a presidentreallygoverned, said John Fund, former Fox News contributor, and authorof Fraudstersand Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Stealing Elections: How Voter FraudThreatens Our Democracy.

He added: Outrageous. Thisrepresentsa bad deal for taxpayers, awhitewashingof the historical record and a playpen for the politicallyconnected boosters of an ex-president. Reform is urgently needed."

Malia Zimmerman is an award-winning investigative reporter focusing on crime, homeland security, illegal immigration crime, terrorism and political corruption. Follow her on twitter at @MaliaMZimmerman

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Obama administration records on Trump team 'unmasking ...

"It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend," the former senior Obama administration official told the Post. "I feel like we sort of choked."

The Post report details how the CIA's assessment that Putin was directly involved in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the US presidential election in an effort to help Trump prompted the Obama administration to debate dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia. Those included proposed cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and economic sanctions, the newspaper reported.

But President Barack Obama ultimately approved only modest measures: the expulsion of a few dozen diplomats, the closure of two Russian compounds, and narrowly targeted economic sanctions that some who designed them described as largely symbolic, the Post said. Another measure, the planting of cyberweapons in Russia's infrastructure, was still in the planning stages when Obama left office.

While some closest to Obama defend the response, saying that by late summer it was already too late to prevent troves of hacked emails from transferring to WikiLeaks and other groups, others expressed regret, the newspaper said.

Tony Blinken, Obama's former deputy national security adviser, said Friday that the administration took significant action to prevent Russia from interfering with the electoral system itself.

"We made massive efforts so they couldn't do that," Blinken told CNN's Kate Bolduan on "At This Hour." "This led to two things: President Obama issued a very stark warning to President Putin in September at the G-20 conference in China. What we saw, or thought we saw, after that, it looked like the Russians stopped their efforts. But the damage was already done."

The report, which features three-dozen high-level officials, confirms what many Democratic lawmakers already believed about Putin, Sen. Jeff Merkley said Friday on CNN's "New Day."

"Nothing like the extensive hacking effort and manipulation effort could occur without his involvement," the Oregon Democrat told CNN's Alisyn Camerota. "Now we actually know: Yes, Putin directed it."

"He had a specific goal to defeat (Democratic nominee) Hillary Clinton and that explains the huge coordinated effort from the botnets to the trolls," Merkley added.

Officials in the Post article suggested Obama struggled to find a way to respond to Putin without being so aggressive that he would be perceived as trying to influence the election in Clinton's favor -- a point Merkley echoed Friday.

"It is such a dilemma, because if he had acted aggressively, in a way that he had gone public and said, 'This is why we're doing this,' it would have been seized upon as an attempt to bias the election," Merkley said. "So, there was enormous bias in the election because of the Russians, but how do you balance that out without further damaging it? It is an extremely difficult problem."

Rep. Adam Kinzinger said Friday that he didn't find the Post report shocking.

"I think President Trump was legitimately elected by people who voted for him, but this is a very serious issue about defending democracy and our country and integrity of the election system," he told CNN's David Gregory on "New Day." "So we have to go back to countering Russia disinformation. Congress has to work with the White House to give them tools to push back. This is a very serious issue."

The Illinois Republican, who serves on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, said Republicans must take the intelligence about Russia's involvement in the election very seriously to protect future elections.

"The reality is, in two or four years it will serve Vladimir Putin's interest to take down the Republican Party," Kinzinger said. "If we weren't upset about it, we have no right to complain in the future." Also speaking Friday morning on "New Day," White House counselor Kellyanne Conway dismissed the idea that Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election."I think it's very important to show no nexus has been proven between what Russia or any other foreign government tried to do in the actual election result," Conway said. "Really the only person making that case prominently is Hillary Clinton."

"You've got everyone saying that there is no nexus, that not a single vote was changed and we're going to stand by that," Conway added. "We know that Donald Trump won fairly and squarely 306 electoral votes. It had nothing to do with interference."

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WaPo: Obama admin 'choked' on Russia, former official says ...

Obama is expected to campaign for Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a rare decision for a former president. The decision shows that Democrats appear helpless without Obama, hoping that he will help them recapture the magic.

Northam has tried to nationalize the race by positioning himself as an anti-Trump Democrat.

Ive been listening carefully to Donald Trump, and I think hes a narcissistic maniac, Northam saidin his campaign ads during the primaries.

Northam already has an eight-point polling lead over Republican candidate Ed Gillespie in the race, after the Republican nominee nearly lost his primary to challenger Corey Stewart.

A Quinnipiac University poll showsthat 47 percent supported Northam, while only 39 percent backed Gillespie.

The state is currently led by Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee Chairman during Bill Clintons presidency.

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Barack Obama Plans Return to Campaign Trail to Save Democrats

The text of the Senate's 142-page Obamacare repeal bill had been public for just a few hours Thursday when the nation's most influential private citizen weighed in - Barack Obama.

The plan is "not a health care bill," Obama declared in a 939-word message to his nearly 53 million followers on Facebook. "It's a massive transfer of wealth from middle-class and poor families to the richest people in America."

The 44th president did not mention his successor, Donald Trump, but his scathing criticism and urgent tone - imploring his supporters to speak out against the "fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation" - set up a direct public fight with the current White House occupant over the future of the nation's health care system.

"I am very supportive of the Senate #HealthcareBill," Trump wrote in a tweet a short while later. "Look forward to making it really special! Remember, ObamaCare is dead."

The high-stakes confrontation is virtually unprecedented in modern times between a former and current president, and it runs counter to Obama's own professed interest in receding from the limelight. Just days before departing the White House, he joked that he looked forward to not hearing himself "talk so darn much."

Beyond his self-deprecation, Obama explained that he wanted to afford respect to Trump to pursue his own agenda, citing the precedent set by George W. Bush's infrequent public statements after Obama took office in 2009. Instead, since Trump's inauguration, Obama has made clear that he does not intend to stay on the sidelines as Trump, with help from Republican lawmakers, seeks to dismantle his legacy.

Obama spoke out in January after Trump implemented a travel ban on citizens of seven majority-Muslim nations, declaring that "American values are at stake" and that he was "heartened" by protests across the country. This month, Obama criticized Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord that his administration signed in 2015, ruing "an absence of American leadership."

But it is on health care that Obama has perhaps the most to lose and, with his lengthy Facebook statement, has signaled his intention to have the most political influence. Though he opened his message with an attempt to elevate the debate - emphasizing the need to listen to those with opposing points of view - he quickly framed Republican motivations as purely partisan.

"I recognize that repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act has become a core tenet of the Republican Party," Obama wrote, suggesting that the GOP is acting simply to undo "something that Democrats did." His mention of "meanness" in the Senate bill was a swipe at Trump having called the House version of the repeal legislation "mean" during a private meeting with Republican senators last week.

The fight over the Affordable Care Act, the former president's biggest legislative victory, has sharply divided the two major political parties from the start. The bill was approved by Congress without a single Republican vote, after which the GOP successfully used it as a campaign issue against Democrats in the 2010 midterms that led to Republicans taking control of the House.

Now the tables have turned as Republicans attempt to make good on their years-long pledge to overturn the law. House Republicans needed two attempts before they successfully crafted and approved their own repeal bill without bipartisan support.

In recent weeks, Trump has lambasted Democrats as standing in the way.

At a campaign-style rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Wednesday, Trump declared that "Obamacare is a disaster" and added that "if we went and got the single greatest health care plan in the history of the world, we would not get one Democrat vote because they're obstructionists."

Democrats defended Obama's decision to wade into the political fight by accusing Trump of leveling personal attacks against him on a regular basis. In March, Trump, with no evidence, erroneously accused Obama of ordering a wiretap on Trump Tower in New York - an Obama spokesman called the accusation "simply false."

And this week, Trump indirectly criticized Obama for not doing more to secure the release of American college student Otto Warmbier, who died in Cincinnati days after returning home after being detained 17 months in North Korea.

"Donald Trump has invited Barack Obama into the arena," said Simon Rosenberg, founder of NDN, a liberal think tank. "No president has trashed a former president more than Trump has trashed Obama - personally and in terms of his legacy. It's been direct, persistent and out of bounds."

Obama is "obligated" to weigh in, Rosenberg said. "I don't think he wanted to play a major role or to get intimately involved. But it's become very personal. There comes a point where you can't stand aside."

Obama's public influence remains undeniable. Within three hours, his Facebook message had garnered more than 300,000 "likes" and 97,000 shares.

At the same time, his prominence in the debate highlights a dilemma for Democrats who are undergoing a painful search for a galvanizing agenda and new party leader in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump last November.

After Democrat Jon Ossoff's loss in the Georgia special election for a vacant House seat this week, Republicans, including Trump, gloated that they hoped House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., would remain in their jobs, citing their unpopularity with some moderate voters.

"I certainly hope the Democrats do not force Nancy P out," Trump wrote in a tweet. "That would be very bad for the Republican Party - and please let Cryin' Chuck stay!"

The bad news for Trump is that his own job approval ratings have plunged below 40 percent in some recent polls in the wake of his struggles to move forward with his agenda and an ongoing FBI investigation into his campaign's contact with Russian operatives.

By comparison, Obama's approval ratings this month stood at 63 percent, according to Gallup. For that matter, George W. Bush, who left office with just 35 percent of the public supporting him, was at 59 percent approval in the same Gallup survey.

"My guess is that part of the urgency of him weighing in is that a vote is happening within a week," Rosenberg said of Obama. "Trump and the Republicans are drawing him in and it's to their own detriment in doing so. He's still arguably the most popular and potent political force in either party and he can have a big impact."

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'Meanness at the core': Obama jumps back into fray to slam ...