President Trump will lay out on Friday a broad strategy to reduce prescription drug prices, but in a break from one of his most popular campaign promises, he will not call for Medicare to negotiate lower prices with drug manufacturers, senior administration officials said.

The White House will issue a blueprint that represents “the most comprehensive plan to tackle prescription drug affordability of any president,” a senior official told journalists on Thursday night.

Asked if the plan would include direct negotiations by Medicare, the official said, “No, we are talking about something different.”

“We are not calling for Medicare negotiation in the way that Democrats have called for,” the official said later. “We clearly want to make important changes that will dramatically improve the way negotiation takes place inside the Medicare program.”

As he campaigned for the presidency, Mr. Trump boldly broke with his party and embraced a longstanding Democratic proposal when he called for the federal government to use its buying power to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare recipients. The proposal was popular with voters but not with other Republican politicians, who had been battling it for years. (...)

(...) That’s flat wrong. In fact, the last time that service members didn’t receive an annual pay increase was in 1983.

And that was only because of a one-time technical quirk. (...)

So how about that missing increase in 1983? That was the year Congress began starting pay raises on Jan. 1 of the new year, rather than the first day of the government’s fiscal year in October. So service members received their pay at the start of the fiscal year a few months earlier, just not during the calendar year, Harrison said.

Beyond that, you have to go back to 1961 to find a calendar year without a military pay increase.

President Trump on Wednesday hailed the release of three U.S. detainees in North Korea, but in negotiating with Kim Jong Un, the Trump administration may have played into Pyongyang's history of "hostage diplomacy," harshly criticized by National Security Adviser John Bolton when Barack Obama was president.

Bolton has been one of the strongest critics of North Korea’s long history of detaining and imprisoning foreign visitors and then using them as leverage for talks with U.S. leaders.

Bolton admonished Obama in 2009 for engaging in “political ransom” with North Korea after Obama dispatched another former president, Bill Clinton, to negotiate the release of two American journalists. Bolton argued it put humanitarian aid workers, academics and other Americans at risk. It also gave the north "political legitimacy" and emboldened Iran and other autocracies to take similar steps to gain leverage on the United States.

"Despite decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so," Bolton, who worked as ambassador to the United Nations for President George W. Bush, wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post that year.

"The reporters' arrest, show trial and subsequent imprisonment (twelve years hard labor) was hostage taking, essentially an act of state terrorism," Bolton added. "So the Clinton trip is a significant propaganda victory for North Korea, whether or not he carried an official message from President Obama.”

This week, as Trump's national security adviser, Bolton called the release of the three Americans a demonstration of the North Korea’s sincerity. (...)

Trump had hinted at a potential development in their case last week in a tweet: "As everybody is aware, the past Administration has long been asking for three detainees to be released from a North Korean Labor camp, but to no avail. Stay tuned!"

He did not mention that two of the Americans had been detained after he became President.

A company at the center of widening questions involving President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen is listed as the organization behind a string of websites targeted toward white nationalists and other members of the alt-right.

Columbus Nova, a company whose U.S. chief executive, Andrew Intrater, and Russian investment partner Viktor Vekselberg have both reportedly been interviewed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team, is listed as the registrant behind a handful of domains for websites named after the alt-right that were created during the 2016 election.

It is unclear if any of these websites were launched or ever hosted content.

These sites include Alt-right.co, Alternate-right.com, Alternate-rt.com, Alt-rite.com, and other similar combinations, which were all registered in the two days following a speech given by then candidate Hillary Clinton in August 2016 in which she excoriated the far-right movement known for its extremist, racist, anti-Semitic and sexist viewpoints. The sites are not currently operational.

The unexpected federal raid of the his offices last month has raised the specter of a potential criminal charges for Cohen, who The Post reported is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violation shortly thereafter. Avenatti’s document appeared to herald the potential that two explosive story lines could converge: the Russia investigation and the $130,000 payout to Daniels, with Cohen at the center.

Avenatti claimed that Vekselberg may have provided funds that “replenished the account” following Cohen’s payments to Daniels. Vekselberg has denied through a spokesman that he or the company he founded, Renova Group, have had any “contractual relationship” with Cohen.