Bill and Renay Regardie are shown to the corner table. The one that was Hillary’s favorite in her time at the State Department, though she and Bill (Clinton, that is) sat all over, before his vegan diet made the rich Tuscan fare here off limits. We’re at i Ricchi, the Italian restaurant on 19th Street in Washington, two blocks down from Dupont Circle. Its longtime owner, Christianne Ricchi, comes over and gives the Regardies a hug. In a different Washington century, i Ricchi needed no introduction, and nor did Bill and Renay. “In the 1990s when Bill Regardie would come to dinner, everyone woul ..read more

Back in 2010, when the government of Qatar was trying to sell its long-shot World Cup bid, they needed a dirty trick to beat the United States. The job fell to a Beltway PR operative named Phil Elwood. At the time, the assumption was that the cup would go to the Americans. But the strategists working on Qatar’s effort had an idea about how to change the dynamic: Convince soccer’s governing body that Washington was actually divided about hosting the lucrative tournament. “No fingerprints,” Elwood’s boss told him. Elwood’s mind jumped from soccer to PE class, and from PE class to the national al ..read more

WEST PALM BEACH — Susie Wiles, the people who know her the best believe, is a force more sensed than seen. Her influence on political events, to many who know what they’re watching, is as obvious as it is invisible. The prints leave not so much as a smudge. It’s a shock when she shows up in pictures. Even then it is almost always in the background. She speaks on the record hardly ever, and she speaks about herself even less. Last month, though, on the afternoon of the day of the Republican primary in Florida, here Wiles was — sitting outside a Starbucks, at a table with an umbrella she picked ..read more

After the inaugural Thirsty Awards last year, which recognized our most shamelessly media-seeking members of Congress, we wondered if we could reup the prizes for a second year. We were doubtful. Could there possibly be enough attention-hungry members to come up with a new list of the few, the proud, the thirsty? Ladies and gentlemen, our lawmakers outdid themselves. This is Washington, after all, and it’s Washington in the Donald Trump and social media age. Building seniority, developing relationships and forging cross-aisle consensus for incremental gains is out. None of that is going to get ..read more

After Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finishes his trial with Donald Trump, he’ll have to turn to Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced former Hollywood mogul saw his 2020 conviction on sex crimes charges overturned Thursday by New York’s top court in a 4-3 decision that shocked the public. But Catherine A. Christian, a former prosecutor who spent more than 30 years in the Manhattan DA’s Office, wasn’t surprised. “A number of us were expecting that it probably would be reversed if there was some sort of intellectual honesty, because you don’t want to make bad law for bad defendants,” Christi ..read more

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Donald Trump. As he stands trial in Manhattan in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a U.S. president, stuck in a courtroom four days a week, he’s also running a reelection bid that, if successful, could effectively save him from his various criminal prosecutions. Meanwhile, the gritty lower-Manhattan courtroom at 100 Centre Street where Trump is spending his days remains something of an enigma to the public. There are no cameras, and much of the trial proceedings have been withheld from public view thanks to New York’s antiquated court system and some unus ..read more

When news broke one Saturday night in March 2023 that President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration was withdrawing, Mark Walker was the reporter on duty in the New York Times Washington bureau. Assigned to write up the news, Walker asked the White House for a comment just before midnight. Assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan was still up and emailed a quote blaming the withdrawal on a barrage of “unfounded Republican attacks.” After going through edits, Walker’s 502-word story was posted on the Times’ website in the wee hours Sunday morning. Then all hell broke ..read more

PALO ALTO, California — Walk around the airy Stanford campus or step into a venture firm’s charmless office on Sand Hill Road. Drive up US-101 to San Francisco for cocktails at a beautiful Russian Hill home to take in the sunset over the Bay with startup founders and investors. And you can’t miss it. It’s not (only) the animal spirits AI-raging in Silicon Valley. The last time that the place was this hot was after the iPhone came out in 2007, says one top venture capitalist, “except that the tech world is like 10 times larger now than it was then.” There’s something bigger that hits you. It’s ..read more

NEW YORK CITY — Brian Glenn was about to go live. Amid the hundreds of reporters crowded outside a Manhattan courthouse on the first morning of Donald Trump’s criminal trial last week, Glenn, the director of programming for Right Side Broadcasting Network, would be delivering the news from the circus straight to hundreds of thousands of faithful MAGA viewers. Glenn looked like a typical television newscaster, but a bright blue and white pin he wore on the lapel of his suit set him apart from others in the press corral: It featured a big, bold “47” — a nod to Trump’s possible return to the pres ..read more

There are no atheists in foxholes and few isolationists in high office. Confronted with sobering briefings revealing Ukraine on the brink of collapse, Speaker Mike Johnson made the leap from Benton, Louisiana (pop. 2,048) congressman to custodian of the trans-Atlantic alliance. “It was the intelligence, it was the Europe generals who are in charge of the freedom of the world and of course it was the developments as well, everything has escalated,” Johnson told me, alluding to the conversations he had with the American brass at European Command. If those developments, namely Ukraine running out ..read more