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"We're not gonna get together, hold hands and sing Kumbaya," said Jamie Hammach, a Trump supporter.

He and five others -- three Democrats and three Republicans in total -- sat down with CNN's Alisyn Camerota at the George Washington University Library. They shared why they are excited, or why they are concerned, and debated the issues.

Hammach said he is looking forward to the change in Washington, while fellow Trump supporters Alex Chalgren and Sara Duncan are hoping to see improvement on the jobs front. Chalgren is the National Deputy Director for Students for Trump.

Among the Democratic voters, Rhea Beddoe is concerned for her fellow immigrants. Owen Evans is worried about how Trump will manage the government and the economy. And Carol Evans, no relation to Owen, believes he has an "anti-Earth agenda." Beddoe is the Director of Special Events for Take the Lead Women, Owen Evans is the Vice President of Membership for the George Washington University College Democrats and Carol Evans is the co-founder of Executive Women for Hillary.

"Life goes on," Hammach said after the Democrats voiced their concerns. "Eight years ago, a lot of us on this side of the table would've been like, 'Oh God, what's happening now?' Eight years from now, or four years from now...you're going to look back and say, 'Yeah, it wasn't that bad.'"

Owen Evans replied that it was not accurate to compare the last transfer of power to current one.

"It's not from Bush to Obama," he said. "Trump is on his own sphere."

The group went on to debate a host of issues -- the meaning of nationalism, how the economy should work and the country's participation in NATO -- until Camerota stepped in.

"Are we all just going to sort of agree that this is a divided country?" she asked.

Carol Evans conceded that they probably would not convince each other of anything, but appreciated the chance to discuss the issues.

"I think it's very important for us to talk," she said.

"It does make me genuinely sad ... when good people say they're fearful," Duncan said. "If I can help anyone else to feel the calm or the excitement that I have, then that's definitely the goal."

Owen Evans summed it up: "I think we need to connect with empathy."

"I like all three of you," he said to the Trump supporters. "And I think if we can recognize that ... that is one of the big steps."

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Democratic and Republican voters: It's important to talk - CNN

Cam Harris, a recent college graduate hoping to build a career as a political consultant, received an unwelcome email from a New York Times reporter this month. As the reporter, Scott Shane, recounted on the front page of Thursdays Times, he had discovered that Harris was the publisher of a fake news site dedicated to smearing Hillary Clinton.

So Harris did what came naturally. He started to spin. First, he admitted that he had written the hoax news articles casting Clinton as a criminal on his site, ChristianTimesNewspaper.com. Eight of his stories attracted enough attention on social networks to merit debunking by Snopes, the fact-checking site, and one of them, published a month before the election, attracted six million readers with the headline, BREAKING: Tens of thousands of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.

But when he was asked about his motives for posting elaborate disinformation about Clinton online over the course of 11 months, Harris was a little more economical with the truth. Even though he had attacked Clinton relentlessly on Twitter during the campaign, and voted for Donald Trump, Harris told The Times that his goals were purely financial. He had focused on potentially damaging fabrications about Clinton, he claimed, simply because those pieces generated more clicks and so more ad revenue than attacks on Trump.

I didnt really have a political motivation whatsoever, he told Shane in a subsequent Facebook Live interview. It was a way to make money.

What Harris failed to mention to The Times, however, is that during the entire time that he was spreading lies about the Democratic presidential candidate, he was employed as a legislative aide and campaign manager for a Republican member of the Maryland state legislature, David Vogt III.

Harris also concealed from The Times that when he sat down to create his anti-Clinton fiction at the kitchen table in his apartment, he was living in Vogts basement in Brunswick, Maryland. As Marylands Frederick News-Post reported on Wednesday, an FEC filing related to Vogts failed race for Congress earlier this year listed the same home address for both the state lawmaker and his young campaign manager, Harris.

Vogt fired Harris Wednesday afternoon, after the Times story went online, and said he had no idea what his young aide and tenant had been up to at that kitchen table. I was shocked to hear that he could do such a thing, the legislator told The Washington Post.

Harris backed that account in a text message to the Frederick News-Post. Delegate Vogt was not involved in any way, he wrote.

He then posted a long statement on Twitter, which included a brief apology and a longer discourse on the dynamics behind the spike in election-related fake news.

But even if Vogt was entirely unaware of the anti-Clinton hoaxes regularly published by his aide, the fact that these pieces were produced by a Republican operative during an election campaign suggests that at least some of what we now refer to as the new phenomenon of fake news might be better described by using an older term: dirty tricks.

Seen through that lens, Harris like the many other Trump supporters who concocted fake medical records or spread malicious rumors about Clinton in the guise of news reports is part of a long tradition exemplified by Watergate-era dirty tricksters like Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser.

As Stone boasts on his website, he was the youngest member of the staff in President Richard Nixons re-election camping in 1972, the notorious CREEP Committee for the Re-Election of the President. In a New Yorker profile, Jeffrey Toobin explained that Stones work for CREEP began when he dropped out of college and found a way to dupe reporters into printing false news:

Stone moved to Washington to attend George Washington University, but he became so engrossed in Republican politics that he never graduated. He was just nineteen when he played a bit part in the Watergate scandals. He adopted the pseudonym Jason Rainier and made contributions in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance to the campaign of Pete McCloskey, who was challenging Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1972. Stone then sent a receipt to the Manchester Union Leader, to prove that Nixons adversary was a left-wing stooge.

Top photo: Cameron Harris in Annapolis, Md., Jan. 16, 2017.

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Major Fake News Operation Tracked Back to Republican Operative - The Intercept

Corey Lewandowski, President Donald Trumps first of three campaign managers, suggested this week on a Virginia radio show that the thought of a Republican politician delegitimizing Barack Obamas presidency was insane.

The Democrats are trying to say he is not a legitimate candidate, Lewandowski said. Can you imagine just for a second if a Republican congressman would havegone out and say this about Barack Obama and continued that narrative? It would be an uproar in the mainstream media.

Lewandowskis former boss, of course, gavea prominent voiceto the birther movement, popularizing the conspiracy theory that posited Obama was born in Kenya and therefore was not legally eligible to be president.

In September, after Lewandowski was replaced as campaign manager for attacking a reporter, Trump held a press conference in his Washington, D.C. hotel to publicly admit that Obama was indeed born in the United States, despite his previous claims that suggested otherwise.

After all those years of doubting Obamas birth certificate, Trump is ironically dealing with his own legitimacy concerns. Following reports from the U.S. intelligence community which indicated that Russia hacked high-ranking Democrats to deliberately tilt the election in Trumps favor, 66 congressmen have announced that they will not be attending his inauguration.

Republicans, especially those closest to Trump, and even Trump himself, have expressed shock and outrage that elected officials would choose to boycott the presidents swearing-in ceremony.AlthoughDemocrats symbolic gesture appears to have successfully riled up Republicans, Trump will still be taking over the Oval Office and his policy platform will come with him.

This is a fundamental and wholesale change coming to Washington and it is going to be unlike anything this town has seen in a lifetime, Lewandowski said on the John Fredericksshow. He understands the serious nature of what he is about to undertake. And he understands the world is watching.

Listen to Corey Lewandowskis radio appearance here:

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Corey Lewandowski cannot imagine a Republican congressman denouncing Barack Obama's legitimacy An error ... - Salon

'A New Era of the Republican Party': Voices From Trump's Inauguration New York Times On Friday, thousands of Americans will stand before the U.S. Capitol to watch President-elect Donald J. Trump be sworn into office. The New York Times asked readers who are planning to attend the inaugural festivities to tell us about why they're ...

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'A New Era of the Republican Party': Voices From Trump's Inauguration - New York Times

RICHMOND A Virginia lawmaker blasted fellow Republicans as cowards Thursday for rejecting his bill to regulate the use of bathrooms and locker rooms in schools, highway rest stops and other government-owned buildings.

You campaign one way and come down here and kill things silently, Del. Robert G. Marshall (Prince William) fumed at members of a GOP-controlled House subcommittee after they used an unrecorded voice vote to dispatch with his bill. He said their actions were disgusting.

Marshall had proposed legislation similar to what passed with great controversy in North Carolina last year. His bill would have required people to use the restroom that corresponds with the gender on their original birth certificates.

[Virginia lawmaker proposes a bathroom bill to restrict public bathroom use by transgender people]

He softened the measure somewhat as the House General Laws subcommittee took it up in an afternoon hearing, proposing an amendment to strike the word original from the legislation. The amendment would have allowed those who undergo sex-reassignment therapy or surgery and who have their birth certificates changed to reflect that to use the bathroom associated with their gender identity.

If someone goes through the process of changing their sex I dont think its very smart because such people have very high rates of self-harm. Thats documented, not from me, he said. But if they go through that, fine. Let them use that bathroom.

Marshall said the purpose of the bill was to protect women and girls from predatory men who might pretend to be transgender to gain access to areas where women are undressed.

Dubbing his bill the Physical Privacy Act, Marshall bristled at its more common description as the bathroom bill. He said his main concern was not bathrooms, where stalls provide a measure of privacy, but public locker rooms, where women could be forced to undress and shower in full view of men who claim to be transgender.

A handful of conservative and liberal activists testified for and against the measure. Then, with no discussion among the subcommittees five Republicans and two Democrats, Del. Barry D. Knight (R-Virginia Beach) moved to lay the bill on the table. The action kills the bill unless the subcommittee reverses itself within a weeks time, Marshall said.

One member, Del. Thomas C. Wright Jr. (R-Lunenburg), raised a finger in a manner that seemed to indicate he opposed the motion. The vote tally was unrecorded, as is typical for voice votes.

Subcommittee members continued with their meeting after the vote and were not immediately available for comment.

They dont even want to defend their oath, Marshall said later. Thats disgusting.

Marshall had never expected the bill would become law, at least not under Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), who had vowed to veto it if it got to his desk. But he hoped to pressure Republican leaders to let it get to the floor of the House.

One of the most vocal conservatives in the General Assembly, Marshall has often accused Republican leaders of killing his social-issue bills to avoid controversy.

An earlier version of this article erroneously reported that Marshall used the word disgusting to describe the legislators, rather than their actions. The story has been corrected and updated.

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In Virginia, Republican-led committee kills transgender 'bathroom bill' - Washington Post