With Bannon Pick, Trump Invites Alt-Right Into White House

So far, the Trump camp has not responded to the criticism of Bannon, and what has come out of the campaign has not been encouraging. “Bannon is going to be keeper of the image of Trump as a fighter against the status quo, and Reince is going to utilize his personal connections with the speaker and others, to make the trains run on time,” Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio state official and a member of the Trump transition team, told The Wall Street Journal. When you are trying to convince America that its new leader is not a fascist, it’s best not to make any Mussolini references.

NSA Chief: WikiLeaks Hacks of Democrats' Emails Were a "Conscious Effort by a Nation-State" | Mother Jones

The WikiLeaks release of internal emails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign constituted a "conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect," the head of the National Security Agency said Tuesday.

"There shouldn't be any doubt in anybody's mind," NSA Director Michael S. Rogers said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. "This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance. This was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily." Rogers acknowledged in October that Russians were behind the hacks.

News that the DNC had been compromised broke earlier this June, when hacker Guccifer 2.0 released a trove of documents containing campaign emails and memos—most notably emails implying that the committee favored Clinton over Sen. Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary. The release of the emails led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

WikiLeaks also published thousands of emails from John Podesta, Clinton's campaign chair. Though Russia was long suspected of being behind the hacks, US officials did not formally accuse the Russian government of orchestrating the cyber attacks until October. In November, just four days before the election, DNC officials told Mother Jones they had found evidence that the DNC headquarters may have been bugged and had submitted a report to the FBI.