Joe Biden

Tesla head Elon Musk met with senior White House officials Friday to discuss the Biden administration's push to grow the electric vehicle market, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said.

"That meeting did happen today," she told reporters.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who gained notoriety for spouting false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen from former President Donald Trump, accepted his defeat on Friday in the race to be the next chairperson of the Republican National Committee.

Shortly after Lindell suffered a blowout defeat in which he only received four votes, he was approached by Semafor reporter Dave Weigel, and Lindell offered up his opinion on whether he lost a "fair election."

In the past, U.S. Supreme Court justices often had radically different views yet managed to disagree without being disagreeable. Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and far-right socially conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, a Reagan appointee, vehemently disagreed on numerous occasions, yet there was a certain respect between the two of them. And libertarian Justice Anthony Kennedy, another Reagan appointee, was the wild card who often sided with Scalia on economic matters and with Ginsburg on social issues like abortion and gay rights.

But these days, it isn’t unusual to read reports on tensions between the High Court’s Democrat-appointed minority and its GOP-appointed right-wing supermajority. Justice Sonia Sotomayor has even used the word “stench” to describe the Court’s current direction.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel won reelection on Friday despite the fact that her party has suffered three consecutive disappointing election cycles in which it lost the House of Representatives, lost the White House and the Senate, and then regained the House by an unexpectedly slim margin.

Given this record, McDaniel drew challenges to her leadership from attorney Harmeet Dhillon and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, neither of whom were able to round up enough votes to topple her in the final vote tally.

Donald Trump's administration executed 13 federal inmates in his last six months in office -- a stunning increase over three executions in 60 years.

Brandon Bernard, who took part in the 1999 carjacking and murder of youth ministers Todd and Stacie Bagley, was the ninth prisoner put to death in the execution spree after a last-minute plea for clemency from rap producer Jamal Fincher Jones to Trump came too late, just as the 40-year-old man was taken to the execution chamber, reported Rolling Stone.

The leadership team of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is scrambling to control and whip Republican votes in the House, after a series of decisions and rule changes they made to appease the Republican base and secure McCarthy's Speakership votes to begin with have left them with diminished power and new logistical challenges, reported CNN on Friday.

"Their majority is narrow and divided sharply between the moderates – who hail from Biden-won districts and are the reason Republicans have the majority in the first place – and the hardliners who from the outset have asserted themselves as the ultimate deciders of McCarthy’s fate as speaker," reported Lauren Fox and Melanie Zanona. "That dynamic, combined with a lengthy list of concessions McCarthy made in his quest to secure the speaker’s gavel, could make it more difficult for the House GOP to pass even messaging bills – let alone essential and heavier lifts like raising the nation’s borrowing limit or politically dicey questions like whether to impeach President Joe Biden or a member of his Cabinet."

President Joe Biden on Thursday called the 26-year-old who wrestled the gun away from a suspected mass shooter in California, telling him: "You are America."

"I wanted to call and see how you're doing and thank you for taking such incredible action in the face of danger," Biden is heard telling Brandon Tsay on a recording of the call.

Former President Donald Trump on Thursday evening claimed he could end the war between Russian and Ukraine in a single day were he still president.

Writing on his Truth Social platform, the former president wrote an all-caps post declaring that he had an undisclosed plan to make Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky come to a peace deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who nearly a year ago launched a completely unprovoked invasion into his country.

For the last year, President Joe Biden has released a record amount of oil from America's petroleum reserves in order to increase oil supply and lower the price of gasoline that skyrocketed at the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Some Republican lawmakers, however, have criticized Biden for selling so much oil, even though his administration has begun buying it back in recent months to restock the reserves.

In a searing op-ed for The Arizona Republic on Thursday, E.J. Montini tore into Republicans in the Arizona state legislature for changing the rules to exempt themselves from public records law.

"Republicans, using their small majority in the House and Senate, decided this week to exempt lawmakers from public records laws in order to cover up future misconduct," wrote Montini. "That’s not how they described their action, of course. In fact, Republican House Speaker Ben Toma told Capitol Media Services, 'I don’t think there’s any intention on my part to hide anything.' It’s an interesting statement, since what GOP lawmakers did was create rules that allow them to hide their official exchanges from the public."