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By Brian J. White and Jaclyn Reiss Globe Staff April 19, 2017

If President Trump didnt like those inauguration photos, just wait until he sees the ones from Wednesdays New England Patriots visit.

There were a lot of no-shows from the Patriots as the team met with Trump at the White House to honor their Super Bowl victory. Photos taken on Wednesday and in 2015, when the team visited President Obama after their previous championship, clearly show the impact of the absentees.

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The number of people standing behind the president is noticeably smaller in the 2017 photo about 50, compared with about 120 in 2015.

The New York Times first pointed out the comparison.

This year, several Patriots players said they would not be attending, some specifically citing Trumps comments and behavior as the reason why.

Tom Brady did not attend, saying in a statement Wednesday that he is attending to personal family matters. Trump did not mention Brady in his remarks.

On Wednesday, 34 Patriots players were in Washington for the ceremony Jabaal Sheard, James Develin, Julian Edelman, Jimmy Garoppolo, David Andrews, Marcus Cannon, Cameron Fleming, Stephen Gostkowski, Rob Gronkowski, Jacoby Brissett, Sebastian Vollmer, Chris Hogan, Nate Ebner, Malcolm Mitchell, Matt Lengel, Nate Solder, Glenn Gronkowski, Darius Kilgo, Justin Coleman, Rob Ninkovich, Joe Cardona, Trey Flowers, Brandon King, Kyle Van Noy, Jordan Richards, Matthew Slater, Eric Rowe, Geneo Grissom, Elandon Roberts, D.J. Foster, Shea McClellin, Joe Thuney, Ted Karras, and Jonathan Jones.

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Martellus Bennett, Chris Long, Devin McCourty, Donta Hightower, Alan Branch, and LeGarrette Blount were not at the ceremony,saying previouslythat they do not agree with either Trumps behavior or his policies.

Also not in the photo above are Brandon Bolden, Dion Lewis, James White, Danny Amendola, Michael Floyd, Vincent Valentine, Barkevious Mingo, Malcolm Butler, Patrick Chung, Duron Harmon, Logan Ryan, Cyrus Jones, Ryan Allen, Jonathan Freeny, Tre Jackson, Greg Scruggs, Chris Barker, Tyler Gaffney, Woodrow Hamilton, and Devin Lucien, according toa countby the Providence Journals Mark Daniels.

During the ceremony, Trump said seven wounded warriors had also joined in for the event.

No word yet on if White House press secretary Sean Spicer will arrange a news conference to dispute the number of Patriots at the ceremony.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/File 2015

A look at the Patriots who visited the White House in 2015, when President Obama was in office.

Al Drago/New York Times

A look at the members of the New England Patriots who visited the White House and President Trump today.

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Daily updates and analysis on national politics from James Pindell.

Rachel G. Bowers of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

Continued here:
These photos show the Patriots' White House turnout for Trump vs. Obama - The Boston Globe

American Oversight, a group of Democratic lawyers, is suing the Justice Department and FBI over President Trump's tweeted allegation that he was wiretapped by then-President Barack Obama. Eric Thayer/Getty Images hide caption

American Oversight, a group of Democratic lawyers, is suing the Justice Department and FBI over President Trump's tweeted allegation that he was wiretapped by then-President Barack Obama.

Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET

A group of Democratic lawyers is suing the Justice Department and FBI over President Trump's tweeted allegation of wiretapping ordered by then-President Barack Obama.

American Oversight is demanding records that support or disprove Trump's March 4 tweet, "Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower."

Austin Evers, the group's director, told NPR, "We can get a straight, factual answer in the courts, by asking an unspinnable question: Do you have records to support the president's tweets?"

Besides the tweet, Trump has talked about the wiretap claim, while FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee in open session that his agency had "no information" about such alleged wiretaps. The lawsuit cites those public discussions to argue that the records are no longer classified.

American Oversight sued after the Justice Department rejected, and the FBI ignored, its Freedom of Information Act requests.

In a second case also filed Wednesday, American Oversight demands records in the evolving story of Russian interference in the presidential campaign. It seeks records on White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus' communications with the FBI regarding Russian contacts with Trump associates and the campaign.

And it seeks Attorney General Jeff Sessions' list of foreign contacts, which he would have filed before his Senate confirmation hearing. That was the hearing where Sessions failed to recall meetings with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. The lawsuit says the list "would address a significant question regarding the integrity of a senior government official."

Asked for comment about either lawsuit, the White House referred NPR to the Justice Department.

Organized this winter, American Oversight is a group of former Obama administration lawyers that is using FOIA to monitor the performance and conduct of Trump administration agencies. Wednesday's lawsuits are the first, but Evers said more than 100 FOIA requests have been submitted.

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Trump's Wiretap Tweets Bring Lawsuit Seeking Proof - NPR

If you thought Hillary Clintons handling of her email fiasco was puzzling, youre not alone. Even President Obama was befuddled by the way his former adversary handled the situation, noting that it reminded him of how he beat her in the 2008 primaries. In the new book by The Hills Amie Parnes and Sidewires Jonathan Allen, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clintons Doomed Campaign, released today details what should have been a winnable election for the career politician thatturned into an abject nightmare over largely avoidablemistakes.

For starters, the book details how Obama was at a loss for why Clinton, who had been his secretary of state, would set up what turned out to be an unauthorized and unsecure server to conduct all of her official business. It was a breach of government protocol concerning the collection and preservation of all electronic communications. Moreover, it did present a possible national security risk that drew the attention of the FBI. The second thing that perplexed him was how she handled it(via The Hill):

Clinton's actions, according to Parnes and Allen, reminded Obama of some of the qualities that helped him win the Democratic primary in 2008. The book also includes an anecdote from July 2016 when Clinton and Obama traveled aboard Air Force One to their first joint campaign rally. FBI Director James Comey said on the same day as the event that he would not recommend charges against Clinton over her use of the private server.

Despite what Clintonites might think, this was a story. A presidential candidate, and member of one of the most successful and ruthless political machines, might have compromised national security and mishandled classified information with this homebrew server. Ensuring that the opposite occurs while in office is at the core of the presidential oath. The Clintons didnt seem to care, nor were they going to admit that they did something wrong (via USA Today):

You know who did care? Voters. Young people flocked to her primary opponent Bernie Sanders in droves and her appalling deficit on trust and honesty because of this email fiasco killed her on character issues. The damage was irreparable. No one really found her likable, relatable, or authentic. She had no economic message. Her campaign shunned white working class voters, who turned out for Donald Trump en masse. She may have had a resume, but Hillary Clinton as president was never going to happen. Still, political introspection eludes Clinton.

The former first lady and now two-time presidential loser attended the liberal Women in the World Summit earlier this month, where she says that misogyny, Russia, FBI Director James Comey, and Wikileaks were the top four reasons for her defeat. CNN commentator Kirsten Powers aptly noted that something is missing here: Hillary Clinton. She was the top of the ticket, though she bore no responsibility for the most shocking loss in American political history? Powers mentioned how this isnt helpful in moving on from this stinging defeat.

Well, Russias impact on the election through propaganda through state-funded media and the deployment of social media trolls wasnt really a factor in tilting the election. The emergence of fake news also didnt play a pivotal role; Facebook also said that these stories didnt sway the election. Regarding FBI Director Comey, he wanted to detail the level of Russian interference in an op-ed last summer, the Obama White House stopped him. Moreover, the FBI was only involved because Clinton engaged in setting up a private email system for official use that (again) befuddled key members of the party, like the leader of the DemocratsPresident Obama. Misogyny was really not at issue since 52 percent of white women (and 62 percent of white working class women) voted for Trump. Yes, liberals learned the hard way your race, gender, ethnicity, or religion does not peg you to a certain political ideology or party. The notion of a womens voting bloc voting in unison, especially when a woman is on a major ticket, proved to be a myth. The Democratic National Security server hacks could have been mitigated if they had better security measures, like the ones installed at the Republican National Committee. As for Podesta, wellyou can blame an IT staffers typo in an email for opening the floodgates on that treasure trove. Still, there were other campaign decisions from Clinton and her staff that helped kill her presidential hopes (via NYT):

[]

Shattered underscores Clintons difficulty in articulating a rationale for her campaign (other than that she was not Donald Trump). And it suggests that a tendency to value loyalty over competence resulted in a lumbering, bureaucratic operation in which staff members were reluctant to speak truth to power, and competing tribes sowed confusion, angst and infighting.

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Despite years of post-mortems, the authors observe, Clintons management style hadnt really changed since her 2008 loss of the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama: Her teams convoluted power structure encouraged the denizens of Hillaryland to care more about their standing with her, or their future job opportunities, than getting her elected.

[]

As described in Shattered, Clintons campaign manager, Robby Mook who centered the Clinton operation on data analytics (information about voters, given to him by number crunchers) as opposed to more old-fashioned methods of polling, knocking on doors and trying to persuade undecideds made one strategic mistake after another, but was kept on by Clinton, despite her own misgivings.

Mook had made the near-fatal mistakes of underestimating Sanders and investing almost nothing early in the back end of the primary calendar, Parnes and Allen write, and the campaign seemed to learn little from Clintons early struggles. For instance, her loss in the Michigan primary in March highlighted the problems that would pursue her in the general election populism was on the rise in the Rust Belt, and she was not connecting with working-class white voters and yet it resulted in few palpable adjustments.

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In chronicling these missteps, Shattered creates a picture of a shockingly inept campaign hobbled by hubris and unforced errors, and haunted by a sense of self-pity and doom, summed up in one Clinton aides mantra throughout the campaign: Were not allowed to have nice things.

The email is one of the many parts of the iceberg that sunk the Clinton ship, withits public disclosure and the botched handling of it (remember the cloth remark?)prompting the former first lady toeventually go dark on press conference for almost a year, proved to be a harbinger of things to come. The lack of reaching out to white working class voters, which often causes consternation among the more progressive and diversity-obsessed members of the Left, was on the minds of some staffers and nothing changed. Its a major tweak that could have tilted the election. Trump won these folks by a three-to-one margin, if it were two-to-one2016 might have ended differently. Still, the data showed that the Democratic base was large enough to shun these voters, who number in the tens of millions. In all, some members of Team Clinton saw the torpedo coming at them, they tried to warn upper management, and their decision was to go full steam ahead into it. The handling of the email server proved to be emblematic of how this campaign was runright into the ground.

Last Note: Let's not forget thatObama hademailed Clinton using a pseudonym dating back to 2012. The Obama White House said theyknew of Clinton's private server, and that the president did correspond with her on that address,but added that henever knew it was used for official use.In 2015, the yearThe New York Timesfirst reported on the server,Obama said hefound that out about the arrangement in the news. So, what was with the pseudonym, then?

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'Political Malpractice': Obama Couldn't Understand Clinton's Handling Of Her Email Fiasco - Townhall

Shortly after the 2008 election, President Obamas soon-to-be chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, infamously declared, You never let a serious crisis go to waste.

He elaborated: What I mean by that (is) its an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

Disasters, such as the September 2008 financial crisis, were thus seen as opportunities. Out of the chaos, a shell-shocked public might at last be ready to accept more state regulation of the economy and far greater deficit spending. Indeed, the national debt doubled in the eight years following the 2008 crisis.

During the 2008 campaign, gas prices at one point averaged over $4 a gallon. Then-candidate Obama reacted by pushing a green agenda as if the cash-strapped but skeptical public could be pushed into alternative energy agendas.

Obama mocked then-Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palins prescient advice to drill, baby, drill as if Palins endorsement of new technologies such as fracking and horizontal drilling could never ensure consumers plentiful fuel.

Instead, in September 2008, Steven Chu, who would go on to become Obamas secretary of energy, told the Wall Street Journal that, Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.

In other words, if gas prices were to reach $9 or $10 a gallon, angry Americans would at last be forced to seek alternatives to their gas-powered cars, such as taking the bus or using even higher-priced alternative fuels.

When up for re-election in 2012, President Obama doubled down on his belief that gas was destined to get costlier: And you know we cant just drill our way to lower gas prices.

Yet even as Obama spoke, U.S. frackers were upping the supply and reducing the cost of gas despite efforts by the Obama administration to deny new oil drilling permits on federal lands.

U.S oil production roughly doubled from 2008 to 2015. And by 2017, the old bogeyman of peak oil production had been put to rest, as the U.S. became nearly self-sufficient in fossil fuel production.

Viewing the world in apocalyptic terms was also useful during the California drought.

In March 2016, even as the four-year drought was over and California precipitation had returned to normal, Gov. Jerry Brown was still harping on the connection between climate change and near-permanent drought.

We are running out of time because its not raining, Brown melodramatically warned. This is a serious matter were experiencing in California, as kind of a foretaste.

Foretaste to what, exactly?

In 2017, it rained and snowed even more than it had during a normal year of precipitation in 2016.

Currently, a drenched Californias challenge is not theoretical global warming, but the more mundane issue of long-neglected dam maintenance that threatens to undermine overfull reservoirs.

Brown had seen the drought as a means of achieving the aim of regimenting Californians to readjust their lifestyles in ways deemed environmentally correct. The state refused to begin work on new reservoirs, aqueducts and canals to be ready for the inevitable end of the drought, even though in its some 120 years of accurate record keeping California had likely never experienced more than a four-year continuous drought.

And it did not this time around either.

Instead, state officials saw the drought as useful to implement permanent water rationing, to idle farm acreage, and to divert irrigation water to environmental agendas.

Well before this years full spring snowmelt, over 50 million acre-feet of water has already cascaded out to sea (liberated, in green terms). The lost freshwater was greater than the capacity of all existing (and now nearly full) man-made reservoirs in the state, and its loss will make it harder to deal with the next inevitable drought

No matter: Progressive narratives insisted that man-caused carbon releases prompted not only record heat and drought, but within a few subsequent months also record coolness and precipitation.

And in Alice in Wonderland fashion, just as drilling was supposedly no cure for oil shortages, building reservoirs was no remedy for water scarcity.

In the same manner, neglecting the maintenance and building of roads in California created a transportation crisis. Until recently, the preferred solution to the states road mayhem and gridlock wasnt more freeway construction but instead high-speed rail as if substandard streets and highways would force millions of frustrated drivers to use expensive state-owned mass transit.

These days, shortages of credit, water, oil or adequate roads are no longer seen as age-old challenges to a tragic human existence. Instead of overcoming them with courage, ingenuity, technology and scientific breakthroughs, they are seen as existential teachable moments.

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Hanson: The downside of Obama's apocalyptic progressivism - The Mercury News

Alyssa Mastromonaco sits with President Barack Obama aboard Air Force One in 2012. Mastromonaco served as the president's director of scheduling and advance from 2009 until 2011, then became his deputy chief of staff for operations from 2011 until 2014. Pete Souza/The White House hide caption

Alyssa Mastromonaco sits with President Barack Obama aboard Air Force One in 2012. Mastromonaco served as the president's director of scheduling and advance from 2009 until 2011, then became his deputy chief of staff for operations from 2011 until 2014.

Former Obama staffer Alyssa Mastromonaco is well acquainted with the privilege and sleeplessness of working in the White House: "I basically ran on adrenaline, almost, for six years," she says.

Mastromonaco began as President Obama's director of scheduling and advance, then became his deputy chief of staff for operations. Her responsibilities ran the gamut from overseeing the confirmation process for Cabinet secretaries to managing the president's daily schedule and foreign travel.

Mastromonaco remembers boarding Air Force One for the first time as a "humbling, awe-inspiring" experience. "There is nothing like walking off the steps of Air Force One," she says. "You always feel so proud. ... The reception, too, of other people in countries, when they see that beautiful blue and white plane, it always gives you goose bumps."

But, she adds, the presidential plane wasn't always the most comfortable way to travel especially on overnight flights. "There aren't beds for us on Air Force One," Mastromonaco says. "We had those Snuggies that you buy on QVC and we would sleep on the floor ... and then you'd get up and everybody shares two bathrooms."

Though Mastromonaco loved her work for the president, the unrelenting pace took a toll on her. In 2014, she decided to move on. Now an executive at A&E Networks, Mastromonaco revisits her White House years in a new memoir, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?

On being available at all hours

You always had to be available. When I became deputy chief of staff, [I] got a secure communications system that was in my bedroom, made it quite warm, because there was an actual server next to your bed and my apartment was not that big, but you could always be reached. Sometimes at 3 o'clock in the morning the red phone rings and it's the situation room and something's happened. ... I could never say I was off, ever.

On getting briefed about how to prepare for a national emergency situation

Oddly, it was very reassuring. When you sit down with the folks who again, from administration to administration, keep this process alive and have this information, you sit down and they brief you and you're like, "Oh wow, if something happens, actually everybody does know what to do. ... I can't believe I'm seeing what would happen if a nuclear missile was launched from X and how long it would take to get here and what happens," but it is comforting to see that these processes are pretty well socialized. Everybody knows them.

On protecting the president from threats, especially with modern technology

A lot of people, of course, compared us to President Clinton and how President Clinton got out more and he did these sort of sweeping, beautiful events like at the Grand Canyon when he would sign bills, and what people didn't realize is that not only is Barack Obama the first African-American president, he was a post-9/11 president, which is a totally different beast, and also it was the first presidency that was completely within the age of social media. ...

When people talk about the uptick of threats that the Secret Service would report, so much of that was because of the advent of Facebook and Twitter. It was easier to make the threats for people to count.

So when we were first getting started, none of us wanted to ever put anyone at unnecessary risk. ... But for us, there were a lot of grand ideas that people had; one of them was having him do an event on the Triborough Bridge [in New York] and I knew that there was no way on earth that the Secret Service was going to allow that. ... It's just such a different world. Technology is so different. You can detonate a bomb with a cellphone; we know that now.

On knowing that it was time to leave her job

By about the end of 2012 I was in my office with [political strategist] David Plouffe and I was typing while I was talking to him, because I can do that, and he said, "Alyssa what are you doing?" I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "None of the words on your computer screen are words." I looked and it was just gibberish, basically. I realized that I wasn't quite right, that something was off. ...

It turned out they gave me a gross neurological exam that I was basically functioning sort of on like 50 percent of my capacity and that I was very sleep-deprived. ... It was a sign that I was probably coming to the end of my time and that I was so lucky to have had such incredible experiences, but maybe it was time for someone with fresh legs to take over and have the same experiences that I did. ...

I prided myself on being creative and being an "idea machine," and my ideas just weren't flowing. I was becoming the person who sat at the table and when someone had an idea, I'd be the one who said, "We did that, it didn't work. We did that in 2011." It was like I had too much memory, I had been there too long, and so I decided it was time for me to go, because I wanted to leave on a high note. ... I was glad to decide on my own terms it was time to go, and it was a really nice send-off.

Radio producers Sam Briger and Heidi Saman and Web producers Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey contributed to this story.

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'I Basically Ran On Adrenaline': A Staffer Remembers Obama's ... - NPR