🦃 Good Monday morning. Enjoy the short week.
- See a clip from our interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook on last night's "Axios on HBO."
🦃 Good Monday morning. Enjoy the short week.
After a federal court ruling on Friday restored the White House press pass of CNN's Jim Acosta, the West Wing moved almost immediately to once again contest his access, sources involved in the negotiations tell me.
CNN is fighting back, and is expected back in court as soon as today.
Why it matters: This is a high-risk confrontation for both sides. It turns out that press access to the White House is grounded very much in tradition rather than in plain-letter law.
How CNN sees the fight ... Brian Stelter, CNN's chief media correspondent, wrote in his Reliable Sources newsletter last night:
How the White House sees the fight ... Sanders said Friday in an interview with her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, filling in for Sean Hannity: "We've laid out in a letter to CNN and their team what we think were some of the missteps that their reporter made at the press conference on November 7th."
"[T]radition has been in the past that the White House Correspondents' Association determines who sits in [the press] room and who sits in those individual seats," Sanders continued.
Trump, asked about the Acosta ruling by Chris Wallace on "Fox News Sunday," said: "If he misbehaves, we’ll throw him out or we’ll stop the news conference."
Silicon Valley has a big and growing problem: Americans have rising concerns with its most popular products, and a growing majority wants big social media companies regulated, according to a poll by SurveyMonkey for “Axios on HBO.”
In the past year, there has been a 15-point spike in the number of people who fear the federal government won’t do enough to regulate big tech companies — with 55% now sharing this concern.
About 40% of Americans still feel that social media is a net positive for society.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of respondents said they sleep with their phone in or next to their bed. That jumps to 73% among millennials.
Bill McKibben, who was in his 20s when he wrote "The End of Nature" for The New Yorker in 1989 ("about what we then called the greenhouse effect"), has a show-stopping piece in the magazine's new issue ...
"With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable":
"All this has played out more or less as scientists warned, albeit faster. What has defied expectations is the slowness of the response."
Looks like the president has a nickname picked out for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:
Chris Wallace to President Trump on "Fox News Sunday: "Where do you rank yourself in the pantheon of great presidents?" ...
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook leaders the company is at war, requiring him to lead like a wartime general, The Wall Street Journal's Deepa Seetharaman reports (subscription).
Why it matters: "Zuckerberg’s new approach is causing unprecedented turmoil atop Facebook, driving several key executives from the company."
"This spring, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg, 49, that he blamed her and her teams for the public fallout over Cambridge Analytica ... Sandberg later confided in friends that the exchange rattled her, and she wondered if she should be worried about her job."
"The latest crop of U.S. Rhodes scholars has more women than any other single class, and almost half of this year's recipients of the prestigious scholarship to Oxford University in England are either immigrants or first-generation Americans, the Rhodes Trust announced." (AP)
Illustration: Rebecca Zisser/Axios
Behind President Trump’s aggressive rollback of environmental regulations are a small handful of moves that look like they might have come from the Obama administration — and some of them even did. Amy Harder examines a few in her "Harder Line" energy column.
During the book auction, he was simply an "unnamed White House aide."
The unnamed aide was Cliff Sims, 33, former special assistant to the president and director of White House message strategy, who had unusual access to Donald Trump during the campaign and as president.
From a forthcoming news release: "After standing at Donald Trump’s side on Election Night, Cliff Sims joined him in the West Wing [and] soon found himself pulled into the President’s inner circle as a confidante, an errand boy, an advisor, a punching bag, and a friend. Sometimes all in the same conversation."
"Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former mayor of New York City, is donating $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, to create a fund that would help low-income and moderate-income students attend without having to worry about the cost, his charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, announced," per the N.Y. Times' Anemona Hartocollis.
Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg's close adviser, told me:
Dick Cheney: The Movie ... "Vice: The Untold True Story That Changed the Course of History," coming at Christmas.
"McKay is ready for the backlash. From the left, for humanizing Cheney. From the right, for denigrating him."