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The federal agency that oversees the care of unaccompanied migrant children acknowledged to CBS News on Wednesday that a 10-year-old girl from El Salvador died in its custody on Sept. 29, 2018. The child's death had not been previously reported. She was the first of six migrant children to die in U.S. custody — or soon after being released — in the past eight months.Mark Weber, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in a statement to CBS News that the girl had a history of congenital heart defects. Weber said when she entered the care of an Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) facility in San Antonio, Texas, on March 4, 2018, she was in a "medically fragile" state."Following a surgical procedure, complications left the child in a comatose state. She was transported to a nursing facility in Phoenix, Arizona for palliative care in May after release from a San Antonio hospital," Weber said. "On September 26, she was transferred to an Omaha, Neb., nursing facility to be closer to her family. On September 29, the child was transported to Children's Hospital of Omaha where she passed due to fever and respiratory distress."ORR did not release additional details about the girl, whose death was the first of a migrant child in federal custody since 2010, according to officials from ORR and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Manuel Castillo, Consulate General of El Salvador in Aurora, told CBS News his office had no knowledge of the girl's death. Castillo said the office was caught off guard by the news, and was hoping CBS News report would help him track down the family. Castillo said concerned local residents called him, saying, "We can't let this happen again." In an interview with CBS News Wednesday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, accused the administration of concealing the girl's death."I have not seen any indication that the Trump administration disclosed the death of this young girl to the public or even to Congress," Castro said. "And if that's the case, they covered up her death for eight months, even though we were actively asking the question about whether any child had died or been seriously injured. We began asking that question last fall."Castro, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said he is going to demand more information from the government about the girl."We're going to make immediate inquires to HHS to find out what happen to this young girl," Castro said.Officials are required to notify local child welfare authorities and report such deaths internally, but are not required to announce them to the public.The five other deaths involved children from Guatemala. On Monday, a 16-year-old boy died at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. A Border Patrol official said Monday that the boy, Carlos Hernandez Vásquez, was brought there the day before, after he told personnel at the McAllen, Texas immigrant processing center that he felt sick. Border Patrol announced Tuesday that the McAllen facility had suspended intake of new immigrants because it "identified a large number of subjects in custody with high fevers whom are also displaying signs of a flu-related illness." The center resumed normal operations Wednesday afternoon. The four other deaths in U.S. government custody occurred among children either detained by Border Patrol, or released by the agency to a hospital.On April 30, another 16-year-old, Juan de León Gutiérrez, was sent to Southwest Key Casa Padre, a Brownsville, Texas, facility. He died nine days later in a hospital bed. On May 14, a 2 ½-year-old died after being apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso in April.On Christmas Eve last year, an 8-year-old boy, Felipe Gómez Alonzo, died from the flu. And on Dec. 8, 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin, died of a bacterial infection.
WASHINGTON — A key congressional committee has already gained access to President Donald Trump’s dealings with two major financial institutions, two sources familiar with the House probe tell NBC News, as a court ruling Wednesday promised to open the door for even more records to be handed over.Wells Fargo and TD Bank are the two of nine institutions that have so far complied with subpoenas issued by the House Financial Services Committee demanding information about their dealings with the Trump Organization, according to the sources. The disclosures by these two banks haven’t been previously reported. Both TD Bank and Wells Fargo declined to comment for this story.Wells Fargo provided the committee with a few thousand documents and TD Bank handed the committee a handful of documents, according to a source who has seen them. The committee, led by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., is especially interested in the president’s business relationship with Russia and other foreign entities.Appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball" Wednesday, Waters said "we don't have information to share with you at this time about what we've learned from the documents."A federal judge ruled Wednesday that two other banks — Deutsche Bank and Capital One — can hand over financial documents related to their dealings Trump and his businesses to Congress. The Trump family had sued to prevent those two banks from complying with the congressional subpoena and the ruling paves the way for the committee to now have access to years of financial records from at least four financial institutions.The documents that have been provided so far are a fraction of those requested by Waters, whose committee has also sent subpoenas to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto-Dominion Bank and JP Morgan Chase. The Royal Bank of Canada is in the process of complying with the subpoena, according to a source. The other banks have missed the subpoena deadline of May 6.The development comes as House Democrats are internally debating whether to move forward with launching an impeachment inquiry of the president or not.Deutsche Bank has been the Trump Organization’s biggest lender, financing more than $2 billion in loans to the president during his business career, and he still owes the bank at least $130 million, according to Trump’s latest financial disclosures.The subpoenas, details of which have not been released to the public, are predicated on the notion that Congress has access to the information under the Bank Secrecy Act, which allows Congress access to financial information to search for money laundering, according to a person who has seen them.“The potential use of the U.S. financial system for illicit purposes is a very serious concern,” Waters said in April when she issued the subpoenas. “The Financial Services Committee is exploring these matters, including as they may involve the President and his associates, as thoroughly as possible pursuant to its oversight authority, and will follow the facts wherever they may lead us.”The office of the committee's ranking member, Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., did not respond to requests for comment.The Waters probe is just one of numerous confrontations between House Democrats and the president over his financial information.The receipt of documents suggests progress for House Democrats who have often been frustrated in their efforts to, in some cases, conduct oversight but they have had progress in recent days. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta this week said that Congress has the legal authority to request information from the president’s personal accounting firm Mazars USA.An NBC News analysis finds that at least 14 different Democratic-led House committees are investigating various aspects of Trump and his presidency, with 50 different inquiries that are seeking documents from the executive branch or outside entities.Much of the focus for House Democrats has been on efforts across multiple committees to gain access to an unredacted version of the Mueller report, which the Justice Department recently moved to block after Trump asserted executive privilege.While lawmakers have been stymied in obtaining additional documentation that could be central to an obstruction of justice case against the president or members of his administration, accessing bank records could provide new momentum for an investigation centered around questions of whether foreign individuals or governments hold financial leverage over the president, his family or his businesses.
It seems to me we still haven’t quite found the vocabulary to capture the true insanity at the core of the big argument that President Trump and the White House are making these days.On Wednesday, Trump showcased this argument’s various elements in a brief but rambling set of remarks with reporters. The remarks came after Trump abruptly cut off a meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), because he was in a rage over something Pelosi said earlier in the day:President Trump abruptly ended a meeting with Democratic leaders on Wednesday, saying he was unable to work with them on legislation following comments by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that he was “engaged in a coverup.”...“Instead of walking in happily to a meeting, I walk in to look at people who said I was doing a coverup,” Trump said, adding that he can’t work on infrastructure “under these circumstances.”In those remarks, Trump took exception to Pelosi’s claim that he has engaged in a coverup by saying this:It turns I’m the most — and I think most of you would agree to this — I’m the most transparent president, probably in the history of this country. We have given — on a witch hunt, on a hoax — the whole thing with Russia was a hoax, as it relates to the Trump administration and myself. It was a total, horrible thing that happened to our country.The “horrible thing” that happened to our country wasn’t the Russian attack on our political system, which was a “hoax,” but the difficulties created for the president by the efforts to get to the bottom of it.Regardless, right now, here’s what’s going on with this “most transparent president.” Trump’s administration appears to be breaking the law to prevent the release of his tax returns, which every other president in the past 50 years has released. He is successfully leaning on his former White House counsel, Donald McGahn, to defy a congressional subpoena, even though McGahn witnessed alleged extensive obstruction of justice by the president that likely rose to criminality.The attorney general appointed by this “most transparent president” is refusing to release the full, unredacted Mueller report and underlying evidence to Congress, even though that report is to a great extent about that foreign attack on our political system.Related to that, the White House is claiming that Democrats have no legitimate legislative purpose in seeking those Mueller materials, even though Democrats have clearly articulated just such a purpose: to further safeguard our elections against outside attack.As Trump once again revealed in today’s ramble, he continues to insist this attack never happened — which, of course, supports the larger absurdity here, that further fleshing out special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings with the aim of safeguarding our elections doesn’t constitute a legitimate legislative purpose.Indeed, Trump’s position is now that everything House Democrats are doing is illegitimate. In his ramble, he claimed he privately told Schumer and Pelosi this:“I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that. That’s what I do. But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So, get these phony investigations over with.”These “phony investigations” include an effort to establish as much as possible about what Mueller established regarding Trump’s abuses of power, to determine whether institutional reforms are necessary in response. One example of such reform is the bill introduced by Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) that would require that Congress be informed of investigative evidence against someone who has been pardoned by the president in connection with an investigation into him or his family members. Mueller’s report documented Trumpian abuses of the pardon power.These phony investigations also include an effort to get Trump’s tax returns to determine whether the Internal Revenue Service is enforcing tax laws against the president, which he dismisses even though he recently boasted that he has dabbled in tax dodging as a “sport," and even though an internal IRS memo says the request is perfectly legitimate.And these phony investigations include trying to safeguard our elections against future attacks that his own intelligence officials say are a clear and present threat. This is just a partial list.For Trump, none of this constitutes legitimate oversight or legislative motive. And even as Trump is demanding that Democrats drop all of it, effectively neutering their own oversight role entirely, he is simultaneously demanding that they constructively engage with him. We haven’t figured out how to convey just how crazy all of this really is.
President Trump has personally and repeatedly urged the head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to award a border wall contract to a North Dakota construction firm whose top executive is a GOP donor and frequent guest on Fox News, according to four administration officials.In phone calls, White House meetings and conversations aboard Air Force One during the past several months, Trump has aggressively pushed Dickinson, N.D.-based Fisher Industries to Department of Homeland Security leaders and Lt. Gen. Todd Semonite, the commanding general of the Army Corps, according to the administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The push for a specific company has alarmed military commanders and DHS officials.Semonite was summoned to the White House again Thursday, after the president’s aides told Pentagon officials — including Gen. Mark Milley, the commander of the U.S. Army — that the president wanted to discuss the border barrier. According to an administration official with knowledge of the Oval Office meeting, Trump immediately brought up Fisher, a company that sued the U.S. government last month after the Army Corps did not accept its bid to install barriers along the southern border, a contract potentially worth billions of dollars.Trump has latched on to the company’s public claims that a new weathered steel design and innovative construction method would vastly speed up the project — and deliver it at far less cost to taxpayers. White House officials said Trump wants to go with the best and most cost-effective option to build the wall quickly.“The President is one of the country’s most successful builders and knows better than anyone how to negotiate the best deals,” said Sarah Sanders, White House press secretary. “He wants to make sure we get the job done under budget and ahead of schedule.”Fisher’s chief executive, Tommy Fisher, has gone on conservative television and radio, claiming that his company could build more than 200 miles of barrier in less than a year. And he has courted Washington directly, meeting in congressional offices and inviting officials to the Southwest desert to see barrier prototypes.Even as Trump pushes for his firm, Fisher already has started building a section of fencing in Sunland Park, N.M. We Build the Wall, a nonprofit that includes prominent conservatives who support the president — its associates and advisory board include former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon, Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, ex-congressman Tom Tancredo and former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach — has guided an effort to build portions of the border barrier on private land with private funds.The first section is expected to be unveiled soon. Fisher-branded equipment and workers were visible this week preparing the site outside El Paso, within feet of the International Boundary Monument No. 1, placed in 1855 at the beginning of the effort to delineate the Mexican border. The stretch is the only area in the region without a barrier, in part because it crosses rugged terrain.Scott Sleight, an attorney for Fisher, said in a statement Thursday that Fisher Industries is committed to working with the federal government to secure the border and has developed a patent-pending installation system that allows the company to build fencing “faster than any contractor using common construction methods.”“Fisher has invited officials of many agencies and members of Congress to demonstrate what we believe are vastly superior construction methods and capabilities,” Sleight said. “Consistent with the goals President Trump has also outlined, Fisher’s goal is to, as expeditiously as possible, provide the best quality border protection at the best price for the American people at our Nation’s border.”Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, has joined in the campaign for Fisher Industries, along with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), an ardent promoter of the company and the recipient of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Fisher and his family members, according to campaign finance records. Cramer, in an interview Thursday, said the Trump administration has shown a great deal of interest in his constituent’s company.“He always brings them up,” Cramer said, noting that he spoke with Trump about Fisher twice — once in February and again on Thursday. Each time, Trump said he wanted Fisher to build some of the barrier, Cramer said.Cramer said Trump likes Fisher because he had seen him on television advocating for his version of the barrier: “He’s been very aggressive on TV,” Cramer said of the CEO.“You know who else watches Fox News?” Cramer asked.Trump’s repeated attempts to influence the Army Corps’ contracting decisions show the degree to which the president is willing to insert himself into what is normally a staid legal and regulatory process designed to protect the U.S. government from accusations of favoritism. It also shows how a private company can appeal to the president using well-placed publicity and personal connections to his allies — and the president’s willingness to dive into the minutiae of specific projects.But Trump’s personal intervention risks the perception of improper influence on decades-old procurement rules that require government agencies to seek competitive bids, free of political interference.A senior White House official explained Trump’s advocacy for Fisher Industries by saying the president was told the company was cheaper than others and could build the wall faster. The official said that Trump would prefer another company if he learned it could do the work cheaper and faster than Fisher has promised.The official said Trump had not told Semonite he must award the contract to the company but had repeatedly brought up Fisher Industries as an option because he sees the process as too expensive and too slow. Trump wants to see hundreds of miles of border barrier completed within the next two years.Trump has taken an intense interest in the border barrier project, expressing frustration with the pace of progress on a structure he views as key to his reelection campaign. Several administration officials have said the president requires frequent briefings from his staff and has given specific but shifting instructions to Semonite and DHS leaders on his preferred tastes and design specifications.Most recently, the president has insisted the structure be painted black and topped with spikes, while grumbling to aides that the Army Corps contracting process is holding back his ambitions. At the White House meeting Thursday, he said he doesn’t like the current design for the wall’s gates, suggesting that instead of the hydraulic sliding gate design, the Army Corps should consider an alternative, according to an administration official: “Why not French doors?” the president asked.Trump also dismissed concerns about cost increases and maintenance needs associated with applying paint to the structure, insisting the barrier be black, the administration official said. He also wants the flat steel panels removed from the upper part of the fence, which he considers unsightly, preferring sharpened tips at the end of the steel bollards.The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.The Army Corps, with a reputation for rectitude, discipline and impartiality, is the designated contracting authority for the border barrier project, developing specifications, awarding contracts and ensuring legal and regulatory compliance.“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of our contracting process,” said Raini W. Brunson, a spokesperson for the Army Corps, who referred questions about Trump’s conversations with Semonite to the White House.The president ordered the reassignment of defense funds to the barrier project after Democrats denied his request for $5 billion. Instead, the agreement to end the government shutdown included $1.4 billion for the barrier. Since then, with Trump promising to build 400 miles of fencing by next year, the Pentagon has pledged to provide at least $2.5 billion more.Fisher was one of the six companies that built border wall prototypes outside San Diego in 2017, but the company’s concrete design did not afford the see-through visibility that Homeland Security officials wanted. While many of the companies declined to discuss their prototypes with reporters, Tommy Fisher was an eager booster for his plan, criticizing the steel bollard design and professing that a more expensive concrete version would be better.When Fisher began promoting a steel version of the barrier that he said could be installed faster and cheaper, the Army Corps said the design did not meet their requirements and lacked regulatory approvals.“The system he is proposing does not meet the operational requirements of U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” an official said. DHS officials also told the Army Corps in March that Fisher’s work on a barrier project in San Diego came in late and over budget.Fisher has alleged improprieties with the border wall procurement process and sued the government on April 25.Tommy Fisher has made repeat appearances in conservative media including Fox News, touting his plan and denouncing “bureaucracy” for holding back construction progress. His pitch has become something of a conservative cause celebre, and in April Fisher hosted a demonstration of his construction techniques in Arizona with a groups of lawmakers including Cramer, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Rep. Matt Gaetz, (R-Fla.), and Kobach, the immigration hard-liner who the president had been considering as a possible DHS secretary.Fisher this week told radio listeners in North Dakota that he was using private donations to build a section of border wall to show off his superior construction methods, which involve using heavy equipment to hold multiple steel panels in place as they are anchored into the ground. He said he knows Trump will be impressed.“The Corps said it couldn’t be done, but now the Border Patrol has seen it,” Fisher said, of his construction project, in an interview Wednesday on “The Flag,” a show on North Dakota’s WZFG News. “They’ve been out each day and the proof’s in the pudding, and after that it’s going to open up a whole new narrative about how border security should be handled, who should construct it, and the border agents will finally get what they deserve. And we’ll prove it in a half mile stretch where they said it couldn’t be done.”Collecting private donations, a group called We Build the Wall has raised $22 million for the cause. The group has announced a raffle for a “wall reveal ceremony” it said will be attended by its “MAGA All Star board of advisers.”“Witness history made on completion of the first privately funded section of the border wall!” it reads. Cramer said Fisher is working with We Build the Wall. The group did not respond to a request for comment.Trump has repeatedly brought up Fisher after hearing about the company in early 2019, administration officials said.In an earlier meeting with military and DHS officials in the Oval Office, Trump said the government was getting ripped off by current contractors — and that Fisher could do it for less than half the price, and with concrete. “The president got very spun up about it,” said one person with direct knowledge of the meeting.Officials from the Army Corps and DHS then met with Kushner several times to explain why Fisher wasn’t the best deal. Kushner was intimately interested in the cost of the wall and why other companies were being chosen over Fisher, administration officials said. Trump repeatedly told advisers that Fisher should be the company, administration officials said, and he has remained focused on the cost of the wall and how slow its progress has been.Army Corps of Engineers officials evaluated Fisher’s proposal and said they didn’t meet the requirements of the project — and that their proposal was cheaper because it wasn’t as high quality, or as sophisticated, in their view.Finally, officials, including then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, went into the Oval Office this spring and explained that Fisher could bid, but that the company’s proposal needed to change.Nielsen and Semonite separately explained that the president could not just pick a company. Nielsen did not respond to a request for comment.Trump remained frustrated, saying that Fisher said they could build it cheaper and faster. “He said these other guys were full of s---,” the official said.Fisher was added to a pool of competitors after the Army Corps came under pressure from the White House, administration officials said.On Tuesday, after Semonite was called to a meeting with Cramer on Capitol Hill, the senator posted a photograph of the encounter to Twitter, saying he had “discussed border wall construction” with Army Corps leaders.Cramer said he was glad the president is so involved in the process. Cramer said he was elected to cut through Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy.“Good for him. It’s why he is the president of the United States. He knows a thing or two about building big projects,” Cramer said. This is why he’s president.”Cramer said he has long known the Fisher family and that he is not advocating for the company because its ownership has donated money to his campaigns.“I was doing it before they were a financial contributor,” he said. “For no other reason than the fact that he’s a constituent of mine.”Cramer said he had gone down to the border to see Fisher’s “show and tell” demonstration. The senator said he has discussed the company with Semonite, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and others.Tommy Fisher and his wife gave more than $10,000 — the maximum allowable contributions — to Cramer in 2018 as he ran for Senate, campaign finance records show. Fisher was Cramer’s special guest at Trump’s State of the Union speech in February, and the CEO said he shook the president’s hand afterward.Trump backed Cramer last year in his campaign to unseat Democrat Heidi Heitkamp. During his Senate run, Cramer appeared in a social media video at Fisher headquarters in North Dakota, driving an excavator.“Here at Fisher Industries in Dickinson, N.D. I tested just how easy it is install a panel of wall myself,” Cramer wrote on Twitter.
At this point in the Trump presidency, “Infrastructure Week” is less a date on the calendar than it is a “Groundhog Day”-style fever dream doomed to be repeated.Roughly two years after the White House first came up with the idea of discussing, for all of seven days, the pursuit of a bipartisan agreement to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges and broadband networks, President Trump more or less torpedoed those plans on Wednesday in a Rose Garden speech. In the process, he gave Democrats a helpful sound bite when he said he would not pursue a legislative agenda while under investigation by House committees.He also gave them another opportunity to charge that Mr. Trump, who has promised to deliver on an infrastructure plan since his first days in office, doesn’t really care about working together on one at all.“I knew he was looking for a way out,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her fellow Democrats who had gathered in the Cabinet Room for the meeting with the president, according to two people familiar with the scene. “We were expecting this.”If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Long ago, the political and pundit class began to recognize any mention of infrastructure-themed events as a catchall joke symbolizing any substantive — if pie-in-the-sky — policy objective destined to go nowhere.During the first Infrastructure Week, in June 2017, White House aides dutifully plugged along with topical messaging, hoping to distract from more pressing controversies, until Mr. Trump closed out a Rose Garden event by accusing James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, of committing perjury in his congressional testimony about the president’s behavior during an investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.“Yesterday showed no collusion, no obstruction,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a leaker.”Nearly two years on, Mr. Trump has repeatedly talked about big-dollar plans to help Americans suffering from crumbling infrastructure. Though the plans Mr. Trump has agreed to have only grown more ambitious — the most recent figures put the total package at $2 trillion, doubling his campaign-era promise of $1 trillion — the president had so far avoided specifics about how he would come up with that amount of money.Any infrastructure package faced slim-to-none odds on Capitol Hill to begin with, but for a brief moment this spring, something seemed as if it could happen. Democratic congressional leaders emerged from a meeting at the White House in April and announced the president had agreed to pursue the $2 trillion plan.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said that there had been “good will” in the meeting and that it was “different than some of the other meetings that we’ve had.” Standing alongside Ms. Pelosi, he said the group planned to meet again in three weeks.Then came a partisan derailment that had the makings of a disappointing “Game of Thrones” finale — if all of the characters had pledged to work together, only to let the toilets overflow in Westeros. The three-minute meeting prompted Mr. Trump’s latest noninfrastructure speech on Wednesday, in which he accused Ms. Pelosi of saying he was engaged in waylaying House investigations.“What happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” Mr. Schumer said — not that what happened in the Rose Garden minutes later was exactly sedate.Instead of mentioning bridges and roads, Mr. Trump, repeating at least one theme from two years before, said that there was no collusion, and that the investigation into his campaign and his behavior was little more than a hoax. And instead of a visual that might have shown the cost of, say, repairing the nation’s interstates, Mr. Trump brought a White House-sanctioned sign, posted just under the presidential seal, titled “Mueller Investigation by the Numbers.”The only major change in this repeat situation has been Ms. Pelosi’s role. In 2017, as the House minority leader, she called the original Infrastructure Week “little more than a Trojan horse.” But for this season’s short-lived reprisal, she returned as speaker of the House. After Wednesday’s abortive meeting, she responded by saying she would pray for the president.Democrats may have a point when they say Mr. Trump has little interest in reaching a deal: Inside the White House, the original Infrastructure Week was never really about what was advertised, according to a person with knowledge of the original planning: It began as a public relations stunt to distract from Mr. Comey’s testimony.In a meeting before Mr. Comey’s visit to Capitol Hill, White House aides said they would need something else to change the subject. The idea of promoting a bipartisan discussion on meeting a pressing national need as a diversion was also suggested by aides seeking to put distance between the president and several other controversies.Those episodes included Mr. Trump’s criticism that Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, was lax on combating terrorism, and an accusation that the Justice Department had produced a watered-down version of his travel plan to bar visitors from predominantly Muslim nations.A day later, Mr. Trump stepped into the Rose Garden and accused Mr. Comey of perjury.Infrastructure Week was born out of chaos. Now it looks as if it might die that way, too. On Wednesday, the person with knowledge of the original planning said the entire effort had “gone horribly wrong, spinning out of control.”
President Trump has set a very hard line against cooperating with congressional investigations involving himself, denying basically every request for disclosure or testimony. It has been up to those beneath him to figure out how to make it work, practically and legally.It isn’t going well so far.Trump’s deny-and-delay strategy has rather quickly run into a series of setbacks. To wit:A federal judge last week practically laughed at a Trump lawyer’s argument that Congress had no authority to investigate a president for corruption unless it pertained to legislation. The judge soon ruled Trump’s accounting firm must give his financial records to Congress.Another federal judge on Wednesday denied the Trump team’s requested injunction to block congressional subpoenas for his banking records from Deutsche Bank and Capital One.NBC News reported that two other financial institutions, TD Banks and Wells Fargo, have already provided information about their financial dealings with Trump.The New York legislature on Wednesday passed a bill, which will soon be signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D), giving Congress access to Trump’s state tax returns.The Justice Department at the last minute Wednesday acceded to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff’s (D-Calif.) request for redacted material and underlying evidence from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation. Schiff was threatening to enforce a subpoena against Attorney General William P. Barr to get the information.The Washington Post reported Wednesday that a confidential draft memo from inside the IRS found that the Treasury Department had to furnish any tax return Congress requested. Similar to the legal argument over Trump’s financial records, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has withheld Trump’s returns by saying Congress needs to have a legitimate legislative interest. The memo, though, allows for no such exception.Most of these won’t be the final words on the matters involved. Trump’s legal team can and will appeal the first one. The second was just about a temporary injunction and is also subject to further legal action. The New York bill is subject to legal challenge. And the IRS draft memo was never the official position of the agency.But all of these things taken together underscore that Trump’s absolutist strategy toward blocking Congress from gathering information is extremely bold and subject to plenty of defeats. When you declare “We’re not turning anything over” and leave it to those around you to figure out how to construct their own portions of the stonewall, you’re bound to lose plenty. When you argue Congress has no right to investigate you for corruption — even though Congress has long investigated presidents for corruption (think: Watergate and Whitewater) and even though the Justice Department has recognized Congress’s “investigatory powers” — you’re attempting to create a really ambitious new precedent.Then again, Trump’s strategy here was never really about winning all of these battles. As The Post’s Philip Bump has written, it’s more about delaying things and drawing out the clock ahead of the 2020 election. And if he wins a few, all the better.As with most things Trump, the only thing preventing him from pursuing this aggressive deny-and-delay strategy is shame or political blowback. And Trump has shown a remarkable capacity to avoid both of those things. If you’re not going to pay a price with your core supporters, after all, why not throw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall and hope it sticks?Trump declared Wednesday, “I don’t do coverups” — despite a long history of obscuring alleged sexual affairs, misleading about the Trump Tower meeting, and reports indicating he inherited his father’s wealth through what the New York Times declared to be “outright fraud.” Whether there’s anything that needs covering up, we don’t know. But if there is, it’s not going swimmingly so far.
President Trump likes to accuse House Democrats of trying to re-litigate the Mueller report via investigation and subpoena. But for every Mueller-report-related investigation, there are approximately one and a half non-Mueller-related congressional probes of Trump, his businesses and his administration. Congress is looking into his finances, his handling of hurricane-damaged Puerto Rico, and more.Of course, even if you accept Trump’s premise that Congress is beating a dead horse on Russian interference in U.S. elections, it’s part of Congress’s job to pick up where special counsel Robert S. Mueller III left off. (Or, as in the case of the ongoing Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee, to retrace some of his steps.) The Mueller report was necessarily narrow, looking specifically at whether any crimes were committed as Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It’s Congress’s job to fill in the picture.Below are the questions congressional investigations are trying to answer, categorized into Mueller-related and non-Mueller-related. For more, The Washington Post’s Rachael Bade and Seung Min Kim have more details on 20 congressional investigations that Trump is blocking in some way. I have ranked the six most potentially damaging Trump investigations. Finally, here’s a regularly updated reader’s guide to the big fights between Trump and Congress.Congressional probes that follow up on the Mueller report1. What does the full, unredacted Mueller report say?2. Did Trump obstruct justice?3. What was the extent of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, from the Senate’s perspective?4. Why did Attorney General William P. Barr frame the report in a flattering light for Trump?5. What light can special counsel Robert S. Mueller III shed on the report and Barr’s handling of it?6. Did Trump try to fire the special counsel and then order former White House counsel Donald McGahn to lie about it?7. Is the FBI still investigating Trump’s ties to Russia (regardless of the end of the special counsel’s probe)?8. Did Trump make any foreign policy decisions to enrich himself, specifically with his attempts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, or in his existing business ties with Saudi officials, to enrich himself?9. Did Trump’s businesses have any money laundering ties, specifically related to Russia?10. What did Trump say to Russian President Vladimir Putin in private, especially a meeting in Helsinki where he seized an interpreter’s notes from it and instructed the translator not to talk?Probes that are totally unrelated to Mueller and Russia1. Is there something damaging in Trump’s tax returns?2. Did Trump inflate his net worth to get business deals or deflate it to avoid real estate taxes?3. Did Trump lie about getting Jared Kushner a security clearance?4. Did Trump play a role in illegal hush-money payments during the campaign to women alleging affairs with him?5. How did the Trump administration come up with and carry out its policy to separate children from families at the border?6. What was the deal with a Trump idea to bus migrants to his political opponents’ districts?7. What was Trump aide Stephen Miller’s role in firing senior leaders at the Homeland Security Department?8. What was the deal with a decision to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 Census?9. How is Trump’s declaration that there’s a national emergency at the border legal?10. Was the Trump administration’s response to Puerto Rico’s hurricane damage enough?11. Why is the Trump administration proposing sharing nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia?12. What’s the deal with Ivanka Trump and other White House officials doing official work on private email?13. Why were U.S. diplomats left out of a meeting between Kushner and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman?14. What was Trump’s involvement, if any, in stopping the FBI from moving out of its aging headquarters?15. Is Trump illegally benefiting from owning a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C.?16. And what were the lease details of the Trump International Hotel with the federal government?17. Why did the Trump administration decide to take the aggressive step of asking a court to completely invalidate Obamacare?
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump held up and read from a sheet of paper in the Rose Garden this past week as he argued he’s been hounded by investigators in the Russia probe for no reason. “Nearly 500 search warrants,” says the page, from an ABC News graphic. “More than 2,500 subpoenas.” And: “19 special counsel lawyers & 40 FBI agents worked the case.”If that sounds like overkill by the Robert Mueller inquiry, it’s only half the story.Trump did not show or quote from a second page that goes with the graphic, laying out the results of the investigation. Among them: “37 total indicted … 26 Russians indicted … 4 people sent to prison … 7 guilty pleas.” In Trump’s telling, it’s all a hoax.Selective accounting like that has been a constant in Trump’s rhetoric.A look at some of his recent statements, on the Russia investigation, the border, the economy and more:TRUMP INVESTIGATIONSTRUMP: “I don’t do cover-ups.” — Rose Garden remarks Wednesday to reporters.THE FACTS: Federal prosecutors may not agree with that assertion, which he made in response to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s accusation that the president was engaged in a cover-up. Trump spoke after breaking off an infrastructure meeting when Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., came to the White House for it.Prosecutors’ court filings in December said Trump directed his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to make payments to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal during the 2016 presidential campaign. Both women alleged they had extramarital affairs with Trump, which the White House denies.In particular, the Justice Department says the hush money payments were unreported campaign contributions meant to influence the outcome of the election. That assertion makes the payments subject to campaign finance laws, which restrict how much people can donate to a campaign and bar corporations from making direct contributions.Trump has said the payments were “a simple private transaction,” not a campaign contribution.Separately, the Mueller report found that Trump dictated his son Trump Jr.’s misleading statement about a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower to cloak its purpose.Cohen, who pleaded guilty last year to campaign finance crimes in connection with those payments, had previously implicated Trump. The department’s filings backed up Cohen’s claims.The Mueller report said Trump learned in summer of 2017 that the news media planned to report on the meeting at Trump Tower between senior campaign officials and Russians offering derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.Trump directed aides not to disclose the emails setting up the meeting. Before the emails became public, the president also edited a press statement for Donald Trump Jr. by deleting a line that acknowledged that the meeting was “with an individual who (Trump Jr.) was told might have information helpful to the campaign” and instead said only that the meeting was about adoptions.That episode was among 10 identified by the Mueller investigation of possible obstruction of justice by Trump. Mueller said in his report that he could not conclusively determine that Trump had committed a crime or that he hadn’t.___TRUMP: “ILLEGAL Witch Hunt.” — tweet Wednesday.THE FACTS: Trump is wrong to suggest, as he has done before, that the FBI acted illegally by investigating him. The FBI does not need to know if or have evidence that a crime occurred before the bureau begins an investigation.Many investigations that are properly conducted ultimately don’t find evidence of any crime. The FBI is empowered to open an investigation if there’s information it has received or uncovered that leads the bureau to think it might encounter a crime. Apart from that, the investigation into the Trump campaign was initially a counterintelligence investigation rather than a strictly criminal one, as agents sought to understand whether and why Russia was meddling in the 2016 election.___TRUMP: “The greatest Hoax in American History.” — tweet Wednesday.THE FACTS: A two-year investigation that produced guilty pleas, convictions and criminal charges against Russian intelligence officers and others with ties to the Kremlin, as well as Trump associates, is not a hoax.Mueller charged 34 people, including the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and three Russian companies. Twenty-five Russians were indicted on charges related to election interference, accused either of hacking Democratic email accounts during the campaign or of orchestrating a social media campaign that spread disinformation on the internet.Five Trump aides pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller, and a sixth, longtime confidant Roger Stone, is awaiting trial on charges he lied to Congress and engaged in witness tampering.Mueller’s report concluded that Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was “sweeping and systematic.” Ultimately, Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign. But the special counsel didn’t render judgment on whether Trump obstructed justice, saying his investigators found evidence on both sides.___BIDENTRUMP, on Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden: “He’s not from Pennsylvania. I guess he was born here but he left you, folks. … He left you for another state and he didn’t take care of you because he didn’t take care of your jobs. He let other countries come in and rip off America.” — Montoursville, Pennsylvania, rally Monday.THE FACTS: It’s true that Pennsylvania-born Biden left the state without taking care of jobs for the people he left behind. He was a boy, 10 or 11, when his family moved to Delaware in 1953.___TRADETRUMP on his trade dispute with China: “I’ll be honest, we are getting hundreds of millions of dollars brought into our country. We’ve never gotten 10 cents. We are getting hundreds of billions of dollars coming into our country.” — remarks to reporters Thursday.THE FACTS: This is not true. The tariffs he’s raised on imports from China are primarily if not entirely a tax on U.S. consumers and businesses, not a source of significant revenue coming into the country.A study in March by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Columbia University and Princeton University, before the latest escalation, found that the public and U.S. companies were paying $3 billion a month in higher taxes from the trade dispute with China, suffering $1.4 billion a month in lost efficiency and absorbing the entire impact.It’s also false that the U.S. never collected a dime in tariffs before he took action. Tariffs on goods from China are not remotely new. They are simply higher in some cases than they were before. Tariffs go back to the beginning of the U.S. and were once a leading source of revenue for the government. Not in modern times. They equate to less than 1% of federal spending.___BORDERTRUMP: “Our country is full. We don’t want people coming up here. Our country is full. We want Mexico to stop. We want all of them to stop. Our country is packed to the gills. We don’t want them coming up.” — Pennsylvania rally Monday.THE FACTS: Trump’s declaration that the U.S. is too “full” to accept migrants due to an overwhelmed southern border is his latest flip-flop. It turns out the U.S. is only “full” in terms of the people Trump doesn’t want.Just last month, the president had made clear that more migrants are needed due to an improving economy.“We have companies pouring in. The problem is we need workers,” he told Fox Business Network on April 28.“We need people to come in,” Trump said at a Wisconsin rally on April 27.Immigrants as a whole make up a greater percentage of the total U.S. population than they did back in 1970, having grown from less than 5 percent of the population to more than 13 percent now. In 2030, it’s projected that immigrants will become the primary driver for U.S. population growth, overtaking U.S. births.___TRUMP: “The wall is being built as we speak. We’ll have almost 500 miles of wall by the end of next year.” — Pennsylvania rally Monday.THE FACTS: It’s unclear how Trump arrives at 500 miles (800 km), but he would have to prevail in legal challenges to his declaration of a national emergency or get Congress to cough up more money to get anywhere close. Those are big assumptions.So far, the administration has awarded contracts for 244 miles (390 km) of wall construction, but more than half comes from Defense Department money available under Trump’s Feb. 15 emergency declaration. On Friday, a federal judge in California blocked Trump from building key sections of the wall with that money; a separate challenge is before a judge in New York.Nearly all of what Trump has awarded so far is for replacement barriers and fencing, not new miles of wall. Even if Trump prevails in court, all but 14 miles (22 km) of those awarded contracts replace existing barriers.The White House says it has identified up to $8.1 billion in potential money under the national emergency, mostly from the Defense Department.Customs and Border Protection officials say the administration wants Congress to finance 206 miles (330 km) next year. The chances of the Democratic-controlled House backing that are between slim and none.___ECONOMYTRUMP: “My Administration is achieving things that have never been done before, including unleashing perhaps the Greatest Economy in our Country’s history.” — tweet Wednesday.TRUMP: “Most successful economy, perhaps, in our country’s history.” — remarks to reporters Wednesday.THE FACTS: The economy is solid but it’s not one of the best in our country’s history, no matter how many times he asserts it. Trump is also claiming full credit for an economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in mid-2009.The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the first quarter of this year. That growth was the highest in just four years for the first quarter.In the late 1990s, growth topped 4 percent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached on an annual basis under Trump. Growth even reached 7.2 percent in 1984.While the economy has shown strength, it grew 2.9% in 2018 – the same pace it reached in 2015 — and simply hasn’t hit historically high growth rates.___TRUMP claims “the best unemployment numbers in history.” — Pennsylvania rally.THE FACTS: The 3.6% unemployment rate in the latest report is not the best in history. It’s the lowest since 1969, when it was 3.5%. The U.S. also had lower rates than now in the early 1950s. And during three years of World War II, the annual rate was under 2%.___HEALTH CARETRUMP: “Drug prices are coming down, first time in 51 years, because of my administration.” — remarks Wednesday to reporters.THE FACTS: Trump continues to ignore an increase in drug prices.The Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index for prescription drug prices shows an increase of 0.3% in April compared with the same month last year. The index tracks a set of medications, both brand names and generics, and Trump has frequently made his boast since the updated numbers showing higher costs came out.Other independent studies point to increasing prices for brand-name drugs as well and more overall spending on medications.An analysis of brand-name drug prices by The Associated Press showed 2,712 price increases in the first half of January, compared with 3,327 increases during the same period last year. However, the size of this year’s increases was not as pronounced.Both this year and last, the number of price cuts was minuscule. The information for the analysis was provided by the health data firm Elsevier.An analysis by Altarum, a nonprofit research and consulting firm, found that in 2018, spending on prescription drugs was one of the main factors behind a 4.5% increase in U.S. health spending. Spending on prescription drugs grew much faster than in 2017, according to the study.___TRUMP: “We will always protect pre-existing conditions.” — Pennsylvania rally.THE FACTS: He’s not protecting health coverage for patients with pre-existing medical conditions. His Trump administration instead is pressing in court for full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including provisions that protect people with pre-existing conditions from health insurance discrimination.Trump and other Republicans say they’ll have a plan to preserve those safeguards, but the White House has provided no details.Obama’s health care law requires insurers to take all applicants, regardless of medical history, and patients with health problems pay the same standard premiums as healthy ones. Bills supported in 2017 by Trump and congressional Republicans to repeal the law could undermine protections by pushing up costs for people with pre-existing conditions.
The New York Times published a shocking article over the Memorial Day long weekend about the Trump regime’s dangerous policies on climate change. But one quote in the article really stuck out:“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies.Yes, that’s a real quote. But it’s actually from 2014, during one of Happer’s appearances on CNBC long before he joined the Trump regime in September 2018. And the entire TV segment is even weirder than that one quote suggests, if you can believe it.Happer, who has no background in climate science, shouts down one of the hosts and tells him to “shut up,” which might explain why he’s been embraced by the Trump regime. President Trump, who most recently suggested that his political opponents are guilty of treason, really enjoys a TV fight.You really need to watch the entire segment, which is absolutely nuts.//www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqxcY8YWh8MFrom William Happer’s 2014 exchange with CNBC’s Squawk Box hosts Joe Kernen and Andrew Ross Sorkin:Joe Kernen: How much confidence at this point do you have in models that show a 2 percent increase in celsius over the next hundred years?William Happer: I don’t anything has any confidence in them. I certainly don’t have confidence in them.Joe Kernen: I’m immediately going to get nailed that you’re funded by Exxon or by the hydrocarbon industry. Do you have any vested interest? Any conflicts that cause you to have these views that many people would say are anti-science or at least against the scientific community?William Happer: Well, you know, I consider myself part of the scientific community...Joe Kernen: You must get a lot of flak, don’t you professor? Don’t you get a lot of flak?William Happer: Of course. So what? When Galileo had his tiff with the church, he got a lot of flak too.Andrew Ross Sorkin: Professor, I have some issues with all of this, because you don’t believe in climate change at all. You made a comment...William Happer: Just a minute! Just a minute! Just a minute! I believe in climate change! Shut up!Andrew Ross Sorkin: Sir, I’m open to all ideas. You made a comment back in 2009 comparing climate change to the Holocaust. And my question is, are you suggesting when you made that comment, that climatologists and climate scientists are the equivalent of Hitler and Nazis? That’s what it seems like you are trying to say.William Happer: You know, I get called a denier and anyone who objects to all of the hype gets called a denier. That’s supposed to make me a Holocaust denier. You know, I’m getting tired of that and the comment I made was that the demonization of carbon was just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world and so were the Jews.Andrew Ross Sorkin: How much money did you take from Exxon over the years in the aughts up to 2008?William Happer: I haven’t taken a dime from Exxon. I have not taken one dime from Exxon.Andrew Ross Sorkin: The foundation that you work for, they didn’t take money? You weren’t paid by them?William Happer: I don’t work for the foundation. I’m a trustee of the Marshall Institute and I’m proud of it. The Marshall Institute, for example, stood for missile defense, which has saved a lot of lives in Israel over the last two weeks, no thanks to many of its opponents.Joe Kernen: Alright, professor, we appreciate your time today.That last bit about Happer taking money from the oil giant Exxon was probably in reference to his role at the conservative think tank, the George C. Marshall Institute, which received $715,000 from Exxon-Mobil between 1998 and 2008. Happer was the chairman of the Marshall Institute from 2006 until 2015. While Happer may not have “taken a dime’ directly from Exxon, his organization took plenty of dimes.The 2009 comments that are referenced in the segment can still be found online:“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer, the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, said in an interview. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”As the New York Times notes, the 79-year-old Happer has also taken a lot of money from Robert and Rebekah Mercer, far right wing billionaires who have funded climate denial campaigns and helped President Trump win the 2016 election as his largest donors.These idiots are going to get us all killed, aren’t they? It sure seems like it. And if they don’t get us killed through completely ignoring climate science, I’m sure they’ll find another way.The Trump regime has plenty of ways to inflict pain with its parade of elderly sadists. And as others have noted time and time again, the cruelty is the point[/size][/b]
Last month, President Trump revived one of his preferred descriptors for the tax cuts that he signed into law in December 2017."We promised that these tax cuts would be rocket fuel for the American economy, and we were absolutely right,” Trump said at a roundtable event in Minnesota.He used that “rocket fuel” line before the tax cuts passed, too, pledging that the cuts would inject new energy into an already strong economy. Sure, independent analysis figured that the cuts would cause the deficit to spike. But Trump allies pledged that the cuts would spur so much economic growth that the bill would end up increasing tax receipts, as people and companies paid higher taxes on their higher incomes. Companies would bring money back from overseas and use the cuts to expand operations. The law would, in short, pay for itself, some proponents claimed, with the net effect of increasing wages and employment."At the heart of America's revival are the massive tax cuts that I signed into law a year ago,” Trump said at an event for the National Association of Realtors in May. “And they are like rocket fuel for America's economy."It’s a bit odd for Trump to claim that tax cuts signed into law in December of his first year in office are responsible for “America’s revival,” given that the unemployment rate dropped from 4.7 percent in January 2017 to 4.1 percent the month the law was enacted — and, 16 months later, is only at 3.6 percent. (Especially given that the decline has been fairly steady since 2010.)It’s also a bit odd because while year-over-year economic growth has increased since the last quarter of 2017, it has been increasing since the second quarter of 2016.But it’s particularly odd because analysis released this month by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service shows that the effects of the tax law have been at best minimal."In 2018, gross domestic product (GDP) grew at 2.9%, about the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO’s) projected rate published in 2017 before the tax cut. On the whole, the growth effects tend to show a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy,” the report's summary reads in part. “Although growth rates cannot indicate the tax cut’s effects on GDP, they tend to rule out very large effects particularly in the short run."That's followed by a number of other “althoughs,” which serve as rebuttals to common assertions made by Trump and his allies.Although the economy did grow, the cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves. “[T]he combination of projections and observed effects for 2018 suggests a feedback effect of 0.3% of GDP or less,” the report reads — “5% or less of the growth needed to fully offset the revenue loss from the Act.” In other words, 95 percent of the increase in the deficit wasn’t offset at all.Although wages grew, they grew more slowly than GDP. “If adjusted by the GDP deflator, labor compensation grew by 2.0%,” it reads at another point. “With labor representing 53% of GDP, that implies that the other components grew at 3.8%. Thus, pretax profits and economic depreciation (the price of capital) grew faster than wages.” Or, put another way, companies saw a greater increase in earnings than workers did. Modest inflation-adjusted wage growth “is smaller than overall growth in labor compensation and indicates that ordinary workers had very little growth in wage rates,” the report states.Although money was repatriated from offshore tax shelters, the money doesn’t appear to have been used for investment in expanding the companies. “[M]any factors can affect net capital inflows,” it reads, “including domestic borrowing by the government and domestic saving, but the evidence does not suggest a surge in investment from abroad in 2018.”Although the repatriation and cuts occurred, “relatively little” went to the worker bonuses that Trump celebrated after the cuts were signed into law. “One organization that tracks these bonuses has reported a total of $4.4 billion,” the report states. “With US employment of 157 million, this amount is $28 per worker. This amount is 2% to 3% of the corporate tax cut, and a smaller share of repatriated funds.”Put directly, the CRS report finds no justification for Trump’s dubious claims that the tax cuts served as a significant boost to the economy, much less played a central role in “America’s revival.”The impression that’s given isn’t “rocket fuel.” It’s something more akin to “water poured onto concrete.”
To some Democrats, impeaching President Trump is not just about whether findings of the Mueller report show that he broke the law. It’s an umbrella punishment for all the ways he’s deviated from the presidential norm.Here are some common arguments that the 39-and-counting House Democrats who support the start of impeachment proceedings are making for why Trump should be impeached, in addition to the Mueller report.He’s obstructing Congress’s probes: If the Mueller report outlining 10 areas of potential obstruction of justice by Trump didn’t sell them on impeachment, then Trump’s actions since the redacted report was released have. Trump is blocking some 20 probes into him and his administration, often blatantly. Last week came the breaking point for many Democrats. Under pressure from Trump, former White House counsel Donald McGahn — a key witness in Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel and lie about it — ignored a subpoena to testify to Congress.The argument here goes: If Congress can't stand up for itself now, when will it?“This is a fight for our democracy,” said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), announcing in a tweet the day McGahn didn’t show up that he now supports opening an investigation into what “high crimes and misdemeanors” Trump may have committed, also known as an impeachment inquiry.He’s going around Congress every time he can’t get what he wants: Congress said no to funding his border wall, so Trump declared a national emergency to pull money from elsewhere to construct it. He fired the heads of the Department of Homeland Security over Congress’s objections. Last Friday, his administration announced he’s using another presidential power to declare an emergency to sell arms to Saudi Arabia over Congress’s objections and without letting Congress chime in as it usually does.Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who supports an impeachment proceeding, mentioned the Saudi arms deal as one reason she supports it. She told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “And he turned around and pretty much ignored Congress’s decision; a bipartisan decision.”Congress can’t get anything done until he’s impeached: This is a parallel argument to those who argue that Congress should consider impeaching Trump because he’s blocking congressional investigations into him. This extends to legislation as well.“All of the good legislation is being killed either in the Senate or by President Trump himself,” Rep. Norma J. Torres (D-Calif.) told The Fix, explaining how the Mueller report made her support impeachment. Another reason, she said, is that Trump doesn’t want to seem to engage on anything with Congress. (A month after this conversation, Trump walked out of a meeting with congressional leaders on infrastructure.)"So he’s blocking every effort from Democrats to get anything done,” Torres continued, “and this is why I’m saying if the people’s agenda isn’t being listened to by the GOP or President Trump, then we need to meet them where they want to be met. And that is a political debate about all of the things President Trump has been doing regarding the rule of law and holding himself above the law."He’s deserved it for a while now: The hardcore Democrats on impeachment decided Trump should be impeached well before the Mueller report was released. Just the fact that his campaign was being seriously investigated for potential conspiracy with the Russians was enough for them."But now the American people, whether they say it or not, they know that this man is dangerous,” House Financial Services Committee Chairman Maxine Waters (D-Calf.) said in April, before the unredacted version of the Mueller report was released. “That certainly, he conspired with the Kremlin and with the oligarchs of Russia."Rep. Al Green (D-Tex.) said on the House floor in March that Trump should be impeached for his administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the border, or his “very fine people” comment about violent, self-proclaimed white-nationalist protesters in Charlottesville in 2017.“If you are corrupting society, if you are creating harm to society, if you are causing things to happen in society that are unacceptable to the people in the United States of America, an unfit president can be impeached for those misdeeds that corrupt and harm society,” Green said.It’s now or never: The closer it gets to the 2020 presidential election, the more potent Trump’s argument becomes that Democrats are just trying to impeach him to avoid having to unseat him at the ballot box. So, impeachment supporters say, Democrats who are on the fence about impeachment should get on board soon, before it’s too late.“I know there should not be political considerations,” Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Tex.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee that would begin proceedings against Trump, told Politico, “but in practical terms the longer we wait, my fear is the closer we get to political season.”
t is tempting for normal people to ignore our president when he starts ranting about treason and corruption at the FBI. I understand the temptation. I’m the object of many of his rants, and even I try to ignore him.But we shouldn’t, because millions of good people believe what a president of the United States says. In normal times, that’s healthy. But not now, when the president is a liar who doesn’t care what damage he does to vital institutions. We must call out his lies that the FBI was corrupt and committed treason, that we spied on the Trump campaign, and tried to defeat Donald Trump. We must constantly return to the stubborn facts.Russia engaged in a massive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Near as I can tell, there is only one U.S. leader who still denies that fact. The FBI saw the attack starting in mid-June 2016, with the first dumping of stolen emails. In late July, when we were hard at work trying to understand the scope of the effort, we learned that one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers knew about the Russian effort seven weeks before we did.In April 2016, that adviser talked to a Russian agent in London, learned that the Russians had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails, and that the Russians could assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Clinton. Of course, nobody from the Trump campaign told us this (or about later Russian approaches); we had to learn it, months after the fact, from an allied ambassador.But when we finally learned of it in late July, what should the FBI have done? Let it go? Go tell the Trump campaign? Tell the press? No. Investigate, to see what the facts were. We didn’t know what was true. Maybe there was nothing to it, or maybe Americans were actively conspiring with the Russians. To find out, the FBI would live up to its name and investigate.As director, I was determined that the work would be done carefully, professionally and discretely. We were just starting. If there was nothing to it, we didn’t want to smear Americans. If there was something to it, we didn’t want to let corrupt Americans know we were on to them. So, we kept it secret. That’s how the FBI approaches all counterintelligence cases.And there’s the first problem with Trump’s whole “treason” narrative. If we were “deep state” Clinton loyalists bent on stopping him, why would we keep it secret? Why wouldn’t the much-maligned FBI supervisor Peter Strzok — the alleged kingpin of the “treasonous” plot to stop Trump — tell anyone? He was one of the very few people who knew what we were investigating.We investigated. We didn’t gather information about the campaign’s strategy. We didn’t “spy” on anyone’s campaign. We investigated to see whether it was true that Americans associated with the campaign had taken the Russians up on any offer of help. By late October, the investigators thought they had probable cause to get a federal court order to conduct electronic surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page. Page was no longer with the campaign, but there was reason to believe he was acting as an agent of the Russian government. We asked a federal judge for permission to surveil him and then we did it, all without revealing our work, despite the fact that it was late October and a leak would have been very harmful to candidate Trump. Worst deep-state conspiracy ever.But wait, the conspiracy idea gets dumber. On Oct. 28, after agonizing deliberation over two terrible options, I concluded I had no choice but to inform Congress that we had reopened the Clinton email investigation. I judged that hiding that fact — after having told Congress repeatedly and under oath that the case was finished — would be worse than telling Congress the truth. It was a decision William Barr praised and Hillary Clinton blamed for her loss 11 days later. Strzok, alleged architect of the treasonous plot to stop Trump, drafted the letter I sent Congress.And there’s still more to the dumbness of the conspiracy allegation. At the center of the alleged FBI “corruption” we hear so much about was the conclusion that Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lied to internal investigators about a disclosure to the press in late October 2016. McCabe was fired over it. And what was that disclosure? Some stop-Trump election-eve screed? No. McCabe authorized a disclosure that revealed the FBI was actively investigating the Clinton Foundation, a disclosure that was harmful to Clinton.There is a reason the non-fringe media doesn’t spend much time on this “treason” and “corruption” business. The conspiracy theory makes no sense. The FBI wasn’t out to get Donald Trump. It also wasn’t out to get Hillary Clinton. It was out to do its best to investigate serious matters while walking through a vicious political minefield.But go ahead, investigate the investigators, if you must. When those investigations are over, they will find the work was done appropriately and focused only on discerning the truth of very serious allegations. There was no corruption. There was no treason. There was no attempted coup. Those are lies, and dumb lies at that. There were just good people trying to figure out what was true, under unprecedented circumstances.
The White House asked Navy officials to obscure the USS John S. McCain while President Trump was visiting Japan, Pentagon and White House officials said Wednesday night.A senior Navy official confirmed he was aware someone at the White House sent a message to service officials in the Pacific requesting that the USS John McCain be kept out of the picture while the president was there. That led to photographs taken Friday of a tarp obscuring the McCain name, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.When senior Navy officials grasped what was happening, they directed Navy personnel who were present to stop, the senior official said. The tarp was removed on Saturday, before Trump’s visit, he added.The White House request was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.The crew of the McCain also was not invited to Trump’s visit, which occurred on the USS Wasp. But a Navy official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was because the crew was released from duty for the long holiday weekend, along with sailors from another ship, the USS Stethem.A senior White House official also confirmed that they did not want the destroyer with the McCain name seen in photographs. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the president was not involved in the planning, but the request was made to keep Trump from being upset during the visit.Trump tweeted Wednesday night that he wasn’t involved.“I was not informed about anything having to do with the Navy Ship USS John S. McCain during my recent visit to Japan. Nevertheless, @FLOTUS and I loved being with our great Military Men and Women - what a spectacular job they do!” he wrote.The Journal reported that Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan knew of the White House’s concerns and approved military officials’ efforts to obscure it from view. But that wasn’t the case, said Army Lt. Col. Joseph Buccino, a spokesman for Shanahan.“Secretary Shanahan was not aware of the directive to move the USS John S. McCain nor was he aware of the concern precipitating the directive,” Buccino said.The U.S. Navy reportedly went to great lengths to shield Trump from seeing the ship. Officials told the Journal they first covered it with a tarp, then used a barge to block the name and gave the sailors on the ship the day off, the Journal reported. A Navy official told The Washington Post that the barge was moved before the event involving Trump.Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Navy spokesman, said that images of the tarp covering the ship are from Friday, and it was taken down Saturday.“All ships remained in normal configuration during the President’s visit,” he said in an email, challenging the suggestion that a barge was moved to block it.The Navy’s one-star admiral in charge of public affairs, Rear Adm. Charles Brown, also tweeted Wednesday night: “The name of USS John S. McCain was not obscured during the POTUS visit to Yokosuka on Memorial Day. The Navy is proud of that ship, its crew, its namesake and its heritage.”Before John McCain’s death in August 2018, the Navy added the senator’s name to the ship, already named the USS John McCain after his father and grandfather, both admirals. The ship is stationed in Japan, where it’s being repaired after a fatal crash in 2017.Trump has continued to speak ill of the late senator in his public remarks and on social media. Meghan McCain, who is quick to come to her father’s defense, immediately blasted Trump on Twitter.“Trump is a child who will always be deeply threatened by the greatness of my dads incredible life,” Meghan McCain tweeted. “There is a lot of criticism of how much I speak about my dad, but nine months since he passed, Trump won’t let him RIP. So I have to stand up for him. It makes my grief unbearable.”Mark Salter, McCain’s long time speechwriter and co-author, tweeted, “Perhaps the late Senator’s Armed Services Committee colleagues will have questions about this for the acting SecDef, whose confirmation ought to be in jeopardy.”Trump began attacking McCain during the presidential campaign when he said McCain wasn’t a war hero because he’d been captured. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than five years.The president also blames McCain for voting against a Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Trump often says the law would be gone if not for McCain, which isn’t true.McCain did not want Trump at his funeral, but his presence was felt in the eulogies past presidents and friends gave. Meghan McCain offered the most direct rebuke of the current president, using his campaign slogan as a not-so-veiled dig.“The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” she said in her eulogy for her father.