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The Trump administration has stymied a request from the Office of Government Ethics, moving to block its petition to reveal which federal employees are former lobbyists who were granted waivers to join the White House, The New York Times reported Monday. The request was made by Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics.

Shaub made his request on April 28, the Times reports, asking for a list of names of administration employees who'd received such a waiver, enabling them to accept a political appointment despite having worked as a lobbyist or private lawyer within the last two years. The rule against such appointments stems from an executive order President Trump signed in January to limit lobbyists joining government similar to one signed by former President Barack Obama in 2009 but the Trump administration has "hired them at a much higher rate than the previous administration," the Times notes.

On May 17, Shaub received a letter in response from White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, asking him to "stay the data call" and withdraw his request. Mulvaney questioned Shaub's legal standing to demand the information in the first place, writing, "This data call appears to raise legal questions regarding the scope of OGE's authorities." In a statement issued by the Office of Management and Budget on Sunday, the administration questioned Shaub's motives, saying the nature of his request "implies that the data being sought is not being collected to satisfy our mutual high standard of ethics."

While Trump, like Obama, reserves the right to issue the waivers, the Obama administration automatically made each waiver public and offered an explanation of why it was issued. "It is an extraordinary thing," Shaub told the Times of the White House's refusal to honor his request. "I have never seen anything like it." Read more at The New York Times. Kimberly Alters

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Trump attacked Michelle Obama for visiting Saudi Arabia ...

Obama will join Merkel at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to highlight his foundation's new global effort to inspire and support young people active in narrowing inequality, combating climate change, working on public health, empowering women and girls and boosting young entrepreneurs.

"He and Mrs. Obama have been pretty clear that the foundation will have a global reach. They want to be really involved in programing throughout the world," an Obama Foundation official said.

The program will draw on Obama's own heritage as a grassroots organizer who built a campaign from the bottom up and eventually created a political movement with his 2008 election victory. Obama also held events during almost every foreign tour he made as President, talking to young people about their aspirations and ideas. But his new venture won't be confined to politics.

"When they're talking about young leaders they are not just talking about politicians, they are talking about who is the person, let's say, in the Brazilian rainforest who is working on really amazing renewable energy ideas," the foundation official said.

"They just need a little bit of a bump and they could be a game changer. How do we connect them with someone in Borneo working on the same thing that could benefit from the knowledge of the person working in the Brazilian rainforest?"

On Thursday, Obama and Merkel will have a conversation titled "Being Involved in Democracy: Taking on Responsibility Locally and Globally," stressing the role of faith-based organizations at the congress of the German Evangelical Protestant church which takes place every two years.

Obama's appearance in Germany will coincide with President Donald Trump's first trip to Europe and will inevitably promote comparisons about their relative popularity across the Atlantic and their policies.

But the Obama Foundation official said Merkel extended the invitation to Obama last spring, well before Trump was elected and made his own plans to attend the NATO summit in Brussels and the G7 summit in Sicily.

Obama has no plans to discuss politics or his successor's presidency and is hoping to focus on his foundation's goals, the aide said.

Obama and Merkel forged a close friendship during his presidency, as she wrestled with issues like the European financial crisis and Russia's annexation of Crimea as Europe's most powerful political leader.

The German Chancellor is running for her fourth term in September and Trump is the third US President she has encountered after first taking office during George W. Bush's administration.

Obama, in one of his first major post-presidential appearances, said he had been impressed with the sharp, astute and tolerant nature of young people he met on his travels.

"Are there ways in which we can knock down some of the barriers that are discouraging young people about a life of service? And if there are, I want to work with them to knock down those barriers," he said in April at the University of Chicago.

His foundation will look for ways to partner with local organizations working in areas like faith-based programs, academia, government and civil society.

Thursday's event will also feature four young people -- two Germans and two Americans -- who epitomize his focus on local organizing and community work.

They include Sierra Sims, a teacher, and Imani Abernathy, an actor, both from the South Side of Chicago. The Germans are social worker Filiz Kuyucu and student Benedikt Wichtlhuber from Mannheim.

Sims said in an audio interview released by the foundation that she used to play teacher as a girl and wonder if her dream of becoming one would ever be realized because of the opposition she faced in her community growing up.

"Now I get to nurture the seventh- and eight-graders who have those kinds of goals and aspirations. It is just life coming back around, full circle," she said.

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Obama to join Merkel at Germany's Brandenburg Gate - CNN

Former President Obama was spotted golfing at a resort Tuscany, Italy, over the weekend.

TMZ reports that Obama was spotted golfing at the Castiglion Del Bosco Resort in Tuscany. Its unclear who the former president was playing with, but TMZ video shows Obama driving a golf cart around the course.

After remaining out of the public eye during the first few months of President Trumps term, Obama has slowly begun re-entering the public sphere. In April, he gave his first public speech since leaving office, speaking about civic engagement to a crowd of students at the University of Chicago.

Earlier this month he gave a speech at the Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan, where he called for people to become more engaged in the democratic process.

"People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don't work," Obama said.

"But as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve. And if you don't vote and if you don't participate and if you don't pay attention, then you'll get policies that don't reflect your interests."

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Obama spotted golfing at Tuscan resort - The Hill (blog)

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To understand why Donald Trumps speech in Riyadh on Sunday was such a profound abandonment of his stated or at least strongly implied principles on the fight against terrorism, its helpful to quickly remember how his two most recent predecessors approached the problem rhetorically. For all their foreign-policy differences, after all, former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush sounded fairly similar notes in how they talked about terrorism. Both emphasized that the U.S. is not at war with Islam. Both made it clear that they viewed religiously inspired terror attacks perpetrated by Muslims to be perversions of the faith, not a reflection of its true values. And both touted the importance of building fruitful alliances with the Muslim world, particularly on matters of terrorism and security.

During Obamas two terms in office, he received a huge amount of criticism for sticking to this approach. Critics accused him of refusing to use the term Islamic extremism, of downplaying the threat of terrorism, and of being politically correct in his refusal to acknowledge the role of the faith itself in the security challenges facing so much of the world. Some of these critiques came from mainstream Republicans. Other, more vociferous and spittle-flecked iterations came from members of the far-right anti-Muslim counter-jihadist movement centered around organizations like Frank Gaffneys Center for Security Policy. This group, which includes David Horowitz, Debbie Schlussel, and others, believes America is, in fact, at war with the Muslim faith itself (though, in their view, the mainstream is in denial about this). As Voxs Zach Beauchamp put it in his indispensable article on the subject, these figures comprise a vast and growing ecosystem that exists just out of sight of most Americans one that has spent years pushing the notion that there is a creeping, quiet plot to take over America from within. Muslims are inherently warlike, argue the Gaffneys of the world, will never assimilate, and deep down, no matter what else they want to claim, are hoping to run roughshod over the democratic West, replacing its norms and institutions with Sharia law.

This toxic and bigoted view has spread far and wide, helped along by the explosion of far-right outlets like Breitbart and its (even) less rigorous and fair-minded cousins in recent years. Which is why so many people were disturbed to see Trump appoint Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka, all of whom subscribe to these views, to prominent positions within his administration (Bannon has called Gaffney, who has spread some truly unhinged conspiracy theories about the Obama administrations supposed connection to terror groups, one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.) On the other hand, Trump has also appointed more orthodox foreign-policy figures like James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, and whatever one thinks of them and their records, they are not counter-jihadists. In fact, they likely view Gaffneyesque hysteria as a hindrance to truly understanding and fighting back against terrorism (thats the near-consensus among other members of their intellectual community, at least).

So there has always been an ideological battle raging within the administration. And if you take Trumps remarks today at anything like face value an admittedly fraught exercise given his tendency to hurl himself violently off-script at any moment the McMaster cohort has routed the opposition.

As you read the following transcript of those remarks, remember that they were delivered by a president who railed at Hillary Clinton for not using the term Islamic to describe the threat of terrorism; who proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the U.S.; who later signed an executive order banning refugees and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, a move that foreign-policy experts agreed served no useful security purpose; who criticized the apology tour Obama ostensibly conducted early in his first term; who has called for the murder of ISIS members families; and who appointed the aforementioned counter-jihadists to positions of power. Yet this is what Trump said in Riyadh:

Whats remarkable about these excerpts is how closely they track with Obamas rhetoric, and progressive rhetoric on this subject more generally. His observation that terrorists (meaning ISIS in this case) kill more Muslims than anyone else is a frequent liberal rebuttal to the Gaffneyesque view that Muslims themselves are the problem. The word Islamic, meanwhile, was uttered by Trump three times, but not once was it followed by extremism or terrorism.

Now, to be fair, there were also elements of the speech that had a bit of a Trumpian flair to them naturally, Trump bestowed upon the Middle East the responsibility to drive out terrorists without acknowledging just how many of those terrorists have been created by past U.S. foreign-policy blunders. And Trump didnt take the usual tack of referencing the golden age of Islamic thought and culture, seeming instead to reference a disproportionate number of historical wonders Giza, Luxor and Alexandria that predated the faiths rise in the Middle East. So it might be the case that Trumps most ardent supporters can squint, spin around a few times to dizzy themselves, and claim to see in his remarks coded references to his once-muscular-sounding approach to fighting extremism. (Many counter-jihadists like Gaffney believe that everyday Muslims practice taqiyya the practice, almost entirely fictional and based on misreadings of Islamic law, of lying about their real-world intentions to advance the goals of jihad and Shariah. Maybe Gaffney can justify Trumps remarks to himself by claiming Trump is engaging in an American version of taqiyya to appease all those damn p.c. liberals.)

Theres a broader policy context here, too, of course, that its important to not lose sight of. During the speech, Trump touted a $110 billion arms deal he just signed with the Saudis at a time when Saudi Arabia has been accused by many rights organizations of the near-indiscriminate bombing and killing civilians as part of an ongoing fight against Houthi rebels in Yemen. In fact, one of the Obama administrations final significant foreign-policy acts was to block the sale of some weapons to the Saudis specifically because of the Kingdoms conduct in Yemen. For Trump to have signed this agreement and to have done so as he explicitly signaled a lack of desire to make any demands of our Saudi allies with regard to their human-rights abuses is a serious moral failure. The Yemenis living in fear of American-supplied weaponry probably arent all that interested in whether or not Trumps rhetoric is Islamophobic. (Trump to Reward Saudi War Crimes With Weapons went the headline of an article by a Human Rights Watch researcher.)

But still: Words and framing do matter in the long run, especially when it comes to a subject like terrorism in which the words politicians do and dont use have taken on such a heightened political potency. And overall its hard to read Trumps speech and not view it as a forceful rebuke to the worldview advanced by Miller and Bannon. Which is particularly odd given that it was supposedly written by Miller himself. This sort of incoherence and short-term flip-flopping isnt new to Trump, of course, but think about all the people who supported him because of his supposed toughness on the questions of terror and jihad. He just gave a speech extolling Islam, extolling the Saudis themselves, and specifically denouncing the idea of an inherent link between terrorism committed in the name of Islam and the faith itself. Even if, as all the evidence suggests, were in a new political world where nothing matters and everything is crazy and even if tomorrow Trump returns to his more explicit anti-Muslim rhetoric this is a shocking turnaround.

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Trump's Speech in Saudi Arabia Was More Obama Than Bannon - New York Magazine

Former President Barack Obama will be in Berlin on Thursday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and two young adults with ties to Chicago at the first international event of his Obama Foundation, as it happens, the same day President Donald Trump attends a NATO Summit in Brussels.

Obamas first post-presidential Foundation public event was the May 3 unveiling of the model of his Obama Center campus, to be built in Jackson Park.

The complex is projected to open in 2022, and Obama has been making the point that his Foundation is developing programs and events and is not waiting for the buildings to be constructed to get started. Empowering young leaders in various walks of life, not just politics or government, will be a central part of the Obama Foundation mission.

Merkel invited Obama to Germanys Kirchentag a festival marking the 500 years since the German Protestant Reformation before the November election, with the celebration to include other world leaders.

With Trump in Brussels at his first NATO Summit, and Obama in Berlin at the first international public event of his post-presidency, the split-screen potential on Thursday highlighting the contrast is almost certain.

On Thursday, Obama and Merkel will focus on civic engagement with two men and two women all in their 20s outdoors, at Berlins famed Brandenburg Gate, with the Foundation co-hosting the conversation titled, Being Involved in Democracy: Taking on Responsibility Locally and Globally.

This event is a way to make clear to the world that the Foundation plans to be very active internationally, the Obama Foundations Bernadette Meehan told me on Sunday.

And by bringing in the four young people, we really were trying to signal that the priority initially for the President and Mrs. Obama is to really try to get young people involved and give them a voice . . . and make them feel they are going to be a focus of the work the Foundation is doing, Meehan said.

In 2013, Obama became the fourth U.S. president to speak near the citys famous landmark, coming after Presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

However, in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., wanted to deliver a campaign speech from Brandenburg Gate, Merkel was cool to the notion of his using it for electioneering. Instead, he attracted a crowd of about 200,000 at the nearby Tiergarten, a major park in Berlin.

On Thursday, Obama and Merkel will discuss faith and government with the upcoming generation of young adults who include:

Sierra Sims, 24, a Dolton resident who teaches Social Studies to seventh- and eight-graders on Chicagos South Side at Providence Englewood Charter School while working on a masters degree from DePaul University in Educational Leadership.

Sims is a congregant at Trinity United Church of Christ, the church Obama and his family attended before quitting during the 2008 presidential campaign because of inflammatory comments from its then leader, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Imani Abernathy, 26, is a musician and singer who volunteers with Chicagos HHW Vocal Arts Ensemble, an after-school program she participated in as a youth. Now employed at SMS Assist, she debuted recently at the ETA Creative Arts Foundation center on Chicagos South Side.

The two Germans are from Mannheim. One of them, Johannes Benedikt Wichtlhuber, 21, this fall will be a student at Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. St. Louis on the citys North Side.

The Foundation is headquartered in Hyde Park, and its international work will run out of its Washington branch office, steered mainly by Meehan, a former Foreign Service Officer who was a spokeswoman for Obamas National Security Council, and Ben Rhodes, who was Obamas deputy national security adviser.

A foundation source told me when it comes to Trump and Obama in Brussels and Berlin on Thursday, the only thing we told the Kirchentag was were looking to put on a pro-active positive agenda on behalf of the Foundation and talking about (Obamas) vision for what he and Mrs. Obama can do in the world.

Our only request was the conversation can go where it will, the source said, with the point being this was not set up as an event related to Donald Trump. We have our own message to talk about. Obama has been pretty clear he is not going to go around commenting on every single thing.

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Obama with Merkel in Berlin: Foundation's first international progam - Chicago Sun-Times