Trump enters the stage

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OPINIONPublished March 27, 2019 Last Update 8 hrs ago
Andy Puzder: How Mueller’s report cleared Trump, and exposed the deep state

To paraphrase the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the greatest trick the deep state ever pulled off was convincing Americans that it didn’t exist. While Baudelaire was, of course, speaking of the devil, it seems an appropriate phrase. It expresses perhaps the most significant aspect of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report. There is a deep state, and it just got caught using a lie to try to reverse a presidential election.

In this respect, Mueller’s report did more than simply exonerate President Trump and his campaign from patently fake claims of Russian collusion. It did more than validate his election victory. It proved beyond any doubt, for anyone from either side of the aisle willing to listen, that the deep state exists, respects no bounds on its power, has no allegiance to the truth, and, left unchecked, threatens the very foundations of our constitutional democracy.

This is not to say there is a coordinated group of conspirators that gathers in smoke-filled rooms; just that there is undeniably a power that comes with many government positions. While the majority of those in government are honorable people who respect the limits placed on their power by our Constitution and traditions, there are always those who believe they have a higher purpose, and are willing to use government power to manipulate events and further their political beliefs. A distrust of common Americans – the deplorables – can ignite a temptation to use that power to achieve a goal the deep state deems significant, even if it may subvert our democracy.

HOW LONG HAS MUELLER KNOWN THERE WAS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA COLLUSION?

The American people have intuited the deep state’s existence. They elected Donald Trump in part because he promised to “drain the swamp” and take on the systemic corruption of the D.C. establishment. In this instance, the Democrats, along with a cabal of unelected bureaucrats and certain supportive elements of the media, responded by trying to take down the duly elected president. Some of those involved sincerely believed the unsubstantiated allegations of “Russian collusion.” Others always knew – or clearly should have known – that the claims against President Trump were politically motivated fabrications.

Our nation and our institutions are strong, however, and this deep state effort failed to bring down our president. According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary, Mueller concluded that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities . . . despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.” That’s definitive.

True believers remain incredulous, but Mueller deserves credit for sticking to the truth despite the deep state pressure to do otherwise. He also deserves credit for taking an approach that enhanced his Report’s credibility. While it took what seemed like an unduly long time to conclude the investigation, it was undeniably thorough.

Mueller also assembled a team that included a number of Hillary Clinton supporters to investigate the claims of Russian collusion. The fact that even these potentially biased investigators were unable to find evidence of collusion following an extensive and unrestricted investigation is a compelling reason to believe the Mueller report’s conclusion. In retrospect, it was a smart move by Mueller, enhancing his report’s credibility. Had he hired a staff of Trump supporters, the Democrats could credibly have attacked the report as biased. Now, they cannot. Kudos to Special Counsel Mueller for that.

Mueller declined to reach any conclusions on the charge of obstruction of justice, properly leaving it “to the Attorney General to determine whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.” After reviewing the report’s findings, Barr stated that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” stressing that this decision was made without regard to Department of Justice rules forbidding criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

Rosenstein’s involvement in that determination is significant. It was Rosenstein who appointed Mueller in the first place, and Rosenstein who authorized Mueller to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” – language that opened the door to investigating possible obstruction of justice. His concurrence in the Attorney General’s no obstruction conclusion enhances its credibility.

Let’s be honest about it. The collusion probe was a politically motivated, deep state effort to lay the groundwork for impeaching President Trump – a mission Democratic Party operatives spearheaded with cooperation from partisan elements in the FBI and supported by a barrage of fake news coverage that all but assumed an unsubstantiated claim that a duly elected president colluded with Russia to win an election were true. As we now know, it was simply untrue.

President Trump also had powerful allies – the American people and the truth. Mueller’s report proves that Trump’s campaign message was accurate from the start – there really is a deep state, and it only tolerates those who play by its rules. Mueller’s report doesn’t just vindicate the president; it validates what he’s been saying about the corrupt D.C. establishment ever since he embarked on the road to the White House.

Those who would continue this circus of investigations and unsubstantiated accusations should be on notice: Mueller’s report was a wake-up call for the American people, and there is another election on the horizon.

Andy Puzder was chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants for more than 16 years, following a career as an attorney. He was nominated by President Trump to serve as U.S. labor
Fox News

©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Rebecca Falconer
3 hours ago
Trump: FBI officials committed treason in Russia probe
President Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” Russia would’ve preferred Hillary Clinton as commander-in-chief.
Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
President Trump told Fox News’ “Hannity” Wednesday FBI officials investigating possible Russia links to his campaign had “committed treason.”

What he’s saying: “They wanted an insurance policy against me,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity, referring to former FBI officials Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, who upset him previously over anti-Trump campaign texts. “And what we were playing out until just recently was the insurance policy. They wanted to do a subversion. It was treason … We can never allow these treasonous acts happen to another president.”

The big picture: Strzok was fired from the FBI in 2018 because of his anti-Trump texts with his then-colleague Page in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. He had worked on the Hillary Clinton email server investigation and joined Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation but was kicked off the team and demoted when the texts surfaced.

Why it matters: This is Trump’s first interview since Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation concluded, and he didn’t hold back in the wide-ranging phone interview.

On the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: Trump said he would release the FISA warrants and related documents used by the FBI to investigate his campaign in full and unredacted. He told Hannity he wanted to “get to the bottom” of how the long-running Russia collusion narrative began.

On the Mueller investigation: Trump called it “an attempted takeover of our government, of our country, an illegal takeover.”

On William Barr: Trump said it would never have happened Attorney General William Barr in the position from the start of his presidency. Barr said in a summary of the Mueller report Sunday finding no evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia. On obstruction of justice, Barr said the report “does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

On Russia: Trump said Russia would’ve “much rather” had Hillary Clinton as president than himself. “I will tell you this about Russia; if they had anything on me, it would have come out a long time ago,” he said. “You look at all of the different things.”

On the Green New Deal, spearheaded by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “I really do want to campaign against it,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. The new green deal is going nowhere.”

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DONALD TRUMP
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Puerto Rico’s Governor Officially Sick of Trump’s Shit

Samantha Grasso
Today 1:13pm

Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló and President Donald Trump

Following a very strange, inaccurate presentation by President Donald Trump to Republican senators earlier this week on the amount of federal disaster relief funds given to Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has sent a message to the president essentially telling him that he’s tired of Trump’s bullshit.

“If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” Rosselló said in an interview with CNN. “It would be a mistake to confuse courtesy with courage.”

Rosselló is currently in Washington to meet with members of Congress in an effort to grant Puerto Rico statehood, CNN reported, which Rosselló views as necessary to receive the disaster recovery funds it needs to continue the nearly-two-year-long process after Hurricane Maria.

At a weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, Trump, with the help of a misleading visual aid, questioned why Puerto Rico was getting $91 billion in aid, when Texas received $29 billion and South Carolina got $1.5 billion in aid for disaster recovery from storms. Puerto Rico, in fact, has not received even close to $91 billion—that figure is closer to the amount of damage the hurricane caused to the island, according to the Washington Post.

Following Trump’s joust at Puerto Rico, the latest in months of attacks on the island’s finances and accusations that it’s spending irresponsibly, Rosselló said Trump’s comments “are below the dignity of a sitting President of the United States. They continue to lack empathy, are irresponsible, regrettable and, above all, unjustified.”

“I invite the president to stop listening to ignorant and completely wrong advice,” Rosselló said at the time.

His thoughts shared with CNN today hit at Trump even harder. From CNN (emphasis mine):

Rosselló said the President is working off of bad information provided by White House officials.

“It’s unfortunate that we are having to hear this. These statements lack empathy, but more so they lack the true facts of the matter,” Rosselló said in response to Trump’s comments. “They’re not aligned with the truth and reality, No. 1. And No. 2, I just think we have to end this battle of words and just recognize we’re not his political adversaries, we’re his citizens,” the governor added.

[…]

“He treats us as second class citizens, that’s for sure,” he said. “And my consideration is I just want the opportunity to explain to him why the data and information he’s getting is wrong. I don’t think getting into a kicking and screaming match with the President does any good. I don’t think anyone can beat the President in a kicking and screaming match. What I am aiming to do is make sure reason prevails, that empathy prevails, that equality prevails, and that we can have a discussion.”

It’s not just Trump treating the Puerto Ricans with disrespect, but his administration too. Puerto Rican officials told CNN that on Wednesday, they were told by White House senior officials including trade adviser Peter Navarro that Puerto Rico was being too adamant in setting up a meeting between the governor and Trump. “You guys have to fucking stop with the meeting request,” one official reportedly said, while Navarro reportedly added: “Your governor is fucking things up.”

I don’t know, y’all. Maybe if the president actually gave a shit about helping Puerto Rico and the people who live there recover from the worst disaster to hit the island in modern history, Puerto Rican officials wouldn’t have to hound him for a meeting. But sure, Rosselló’s the one “fucking things up” here.

Either way, if Trump thinks dealing with Puerto Rico is going to get any easier any time soon, he’s got another thing coming—last week, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, an even more ferocious critic of the president and his response to Hurricane Maria, announced that she would run for governor of Puerto Rico in 2020.

Splinter Staff Writer, Texan

© 2018 Gizmodo Media Group

----------------------------’


It took Trump 90 seconds to lie about the “Mueller report” during Michigan speech
The president then took a victory lap.
By Aaron Rupar on March 28, 2019 9:40 pm

Less than two minutes into President Donald Trump’s speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he lied about special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

“The collusion delusion is over,” Trump said on Thursday night, in his first speech since Attorney General Bill Barr announced some of Mueller’s key conclusions on Sunday. “The special counsel completed its report and found no collusion and no obstruction.”

It is not true, however, that the special counsel exonerated Trump of obstruction of justice. While we still can’t say for sure what the special counsel said — all we know of Mueller’s final report came by way of a brief summary of it sent to Congress on Sunday by Barr, Trump’s hand-picked attorney general — even Barr’s letter acknowledged Mueller did not exonerate Trump of obstruction.

“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him,” says Mueller’s report, according to one of the few direct quotations from the special counsel’s report included in Barr’s summary.

Barr, together with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, made the subsequent decision to clear Trump of possible obstruction of justice charges. The public still hasn’t seen the final report, which the New York Times reported on Thursday is over 300 pages long. It remains unclear if the special counsel intended for Barr and Rosenstein to resolve the obstruction question, or if he primarily meant to use his report to present evidence to Congress.

It’s also not not quite the case that Mueller said “no collusion,” as Trump claimed. According to another quotation from the report included in Barr’s summary, Mueller concluded that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” But not establishing a conspiracy is not the same as finding no evidence of collusion at all.

After falsely claiming total exoneration, Trump used Barr’s letter to go on the attack against some of his most prominent Democratic critics — including the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, who went viral earlier in the day when he responded to a Republican effort to compel him to resign during a hearing by reciting the major pieces of evidence suggesting the Trump campaign did in fact collude with Russia.

“Little pencil-neck Adam Schiff,” Trump said, prompting boos from the crowd. “He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter. But I saw him today — ‘well, we don’t really know, there could still have been some Russia collusion.’ Sick. Sick. These are sick people.”

While Trump and his allies have spent the week crowing over the fact that the special counsel apparently won’t be indicting Trump or any additional associates of his, it remains unclear when members of Congress or the public will be able to see more of the Mueller report beyond the less than 100 words quoted in Barr’s summary.

Following a phone call with Barr on Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (NY) said the attorney general made it clear that he won’t meet an April 2 deadline Democrats set for making the report public.

“We’re not happy about that, to put it mildly,” Nadler said, according to the Times.

During his speech in Michigan, Trump did not bother trying to explain the apparent disconnect between his misleading declarations of total exoneration on one hand, and his administration’s apparent reluctance to release the Mueller report on the other. After all, if the report is as exonerating as Trump has indicated, then why not make it public and take yet another victory lap?

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc.

Dee Margo, the Republican mayor of El Paso, met with Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan when the federal official visited the border in the city on Wednesday and declared the system there to be “at breaking point”.

Margo told NPR shortly after that that the idea of shutting the border in response to the current migration surge would not be helpful.

He put the problem down, in the big picture, to the lack of “intestinal fortitude” exhibited on either side of the aisle in Congress on immigration laws for the past three decades.

Immediately on the ground, if the president closes the border next week, the effects will immediately be dramatic, if that’s not stating the obvious. Just in El Paso, Margo pointed out that:

“We have a hundred billion-plus in trade back and forth in imports and exports. We have six of the 28 bridges that cross from Texas to Mexico…We have 23,000 legal pedestrians that come north every day. We’ve got 13 million vehicles that come north every year.

“It affects us all the way around, from commerce - and the wait times on the bridges are approaching two hours, that’s an environmental issue, while cars are just sitting there idling. It’s a major problem.

“But the issue is not just Mexico and whatever they’re doing. The issue is the lack of action by our Congress to deal with this.”

Updated at 1.11pm EDT
Facebook Twitter
12.46pm

Politicians disagree about whether there is a crisis at the border and, if there is, to what extent it is self-inflicted by America’s own dysfunctional immigration policies.

My colleagues Amanda Holpuch, taking to experts from her well-informed purchase in New York, and Nina Lakhani, who’s based south of the US-Mexico border and reports from Mexico City, analyze the latest and jointly write today:

US authorities’ failure to keep up with a steep increase in Central American families seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border has left El Paso aid workers, churches and city government scrambling to respond.

After a sudden surge in arrivals, migrants have been crowded into hotels, churches and even held under a bridge behind a chain-link fence and razor wire while their asylum claims are processed.

The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commissioner, Kevin McAleenan, said the number of new arrivals in March is expected to reach 100,000, including 55,000 family members. “The immigration system is at breaking point,” he told reporters on Wednesday.

The chaotic scenes in El Paso are the result of a regional crisis in which growing numbers of Central American families flee violence, corruption and poverty – only to come up against failed migration polices in Mexico and the US.

Comedy writer and political observer Nick Jack Pappas isn’t laughing.

He tweeted: “$558 billion in goods flow across the U.S.- Mexico border in both directions, making Mexico our third-biggest trading partner for goods. Closing the border would cost billions.”

Pappas then continues, including a think tank quote: “If you are thinking about a total shutdown of the border, then it’s hundreds of millions of dollars A DAY – maybe a billion.” - Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute. Our economy would stall. The U.S. would become one of Trump’s failed businesses.

The Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies demand the detention of migrants entering the US unlawfully, even if they are claiming asylum after escaping violence and crushing poverty in Central America.

Most migrants are arriving from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, a region my world affairs colleague in Washington, Julian Borger, has described, politically, as “a hell the US helped create” with its foreign policy.

The federal agencies on the front line, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are overwhelmed.

Hundreds of migrant families who’ve crossed the border are packed under a highway overpass on the border in El Paso, in western Texas, next to the border processing station, behind razor wire and fencing, as CBP struggles to figure out where to put them.

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U.S.
DONALD TRUMP DEFENDERS ARE FAILING TO ACCEPT REALITY OVER MUELLER’S REPORT, JOHN BRENNAN’S SPOKESMAN SAYS
By Shane Croucher On 3/29/19 at 7:52 AM EDT
John Brennan Donald Trump Mueller Report

Former Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan testifies before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on Capitol Hill, May 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. Brennan has accused President Donald Trump of treasonous behavior.

U.S. DONALD TRUMP RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

A spokesman for former CIA Director John Brennan has accused President Donald Trump and his defenders over the Mueller report of failing to accept reality amid criticism of the ex-intelligence chief.

Trump has claimed total exoneration by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which is confidential and has so far only been briefly summarized in public by Attorney General William Barr.

But Barr’s summary states explicitly that Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, does not exonerate Trump on the charge of obstruction of justice.

The president attacked Brennan in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday night, calling the intelligence veteran sick and saying he was not good at his former job.

“Let’s not forget that the special counsel’s investigation resulted in indictments against 34 people and three entities on nearly 200 separate criminal charges,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.

“Five associates of the president have been convicted, and another is awaiting trial. Those who think nothing happened and who are now going after critics of the president aren’t accepting reality and they are just playing politics.”

Trump and Brennan, who was director of the CIA from 2013 to 2017, have clashed over the president’s approach to Russia.

The former intelligence head, who has worked for Republican and Democratic presidents, is a fierce and frequent critic of Trump. In response to the criticism, Trump revoked Brennan’s security clearance.

At an infamous joint press conference with Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin after the pair met for private talks, the U.S. president cast doubt on the conclusion of his own intelligence agencies that the Kremlin sought to interfere in the 2016 election.

On Twitter following the press conference, Brennan suggested Trump is a traitor whose comments were impeachable.

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors,’” Brennan tweeted. “It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin.”

In the final days before Mueller finished his report and handed it to the attorney general, Brennan speculated that there could be last-minute indictments of Trump family members, though he caveated that he did not know anything about the investigation.

In the end, there were no further indictments. But Trump and his supporters seized on Brennan’s comments to MSNBC, accusing him of making a phoney prediction.

“I think Brennan’s a sick person, I really do,” Trump told Hannity in an interview giving his thoughts about the Barr summary of the Mueller report.

“I believe there’s something wrong with him…For him to come out of the CIA and act that way was so disrespectful to the country, and to the CIA, and to the position he held.

“He was not considered good at what he did. He was never a respected guy. Tough guy, but not a respected guy. But he lied to Congress. And the other night before the report came out, he predicted horrible things. The things he said were horrible.”

Barr has so far only released a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings in his book-length report, which spans more than 300 pages.

The attorney general intends to release at least some of the report into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in April.

The U.S. intelligence community concludes that Russia attempted to sway the election in Trump’s favor. Mueller indicted many Russian intelligence officers over election interference.

According to Barr’s summary, Mueller’s report did not find that the president, his campaign, or any of its associates conspired or coordinated with Russia to influence the election.

Barr also noted that Mueller did not exonerate Trump on charges of obstruction of justice related to the special counsel’s long-running investigation.

But the special counsel also did not conclude that the president committed a crime.

Trump’s critics accuse the president of meddling with the investigation by constantly discrediting it as a politically motivated witch hunt, attacking Mueller’s witnesses, and taking action such as firing the former FBI Director James Comey when he had oversight of the probe.

Mueller deferred the decision to prosecute on the obstruction charges to Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who declined to pursue Trump.

“On the issue of obstruction of justice, Brennan believes it is too important to be dismissed by a Trump-appointed AG with a predetermined view on presidential accountability to the rule of law, and that we all need to see the report,” Brennan’s spokesman told Newsweek.

“As for the president and his own actions, Brennan will leave to others how it is possible that one can engage with a foreign power in a most unethical, unprincipled, and unpatriotic way without violating criminal statutes.

“But Mueller determined those actions weren’t illegal and Brennan fully accepts that.”

The spokesman added that Americans should expect much more of a president than the ability to escape criminal liability. “Traits such as decency, honesty, integrity, and competence in our president sure would be nice,” he said.

The president is still the subject of multiple investigations spanning his political, business and personal life.

Among those investigating Trump are various House committees, which plan to use the Mueller report to advance their own probes, including connections between Russia and his campaign, and the Southern District of New York.

Donald Trump on Wind Power Is ‘Malicious Ignorance’

© Copyright 2019 NEWSWEEK

‘This Is Lunacy’: Scalise Calls Out Schiff for Continuing to Push Trump-Russia Collusion ‘Lie’

Mar 29, 2019 // 8:23am |
House Minority Whip Steve Scalise joined the “Fox & Friends” hosts Friday morning to call out Democrats for continuing to push the Trump-Russia collusion “lie.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), an outspoken critic of President Trump who is facing calls to resign for continuing to push collusion claims despite Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings.

“What is the president afraid of? Is he afraid of the truth, that he would go after … a respected chairman of a committee in the Congress? I think they’re just scaredy cats,” Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.

Scalise (R-La.) said Democrats are ignoring the facts in their continued pursuit of the Russia “witch hunt.”

He lamented that Democrats have become the party of “constant harassment of the president.”

“For the last two years, Adam Schiff’s been going around saying he’s got more than circumstantial evidence of collusion. And they’ve been hanging their hat on the Mueller report. They were convinced there would be evidence of collusion and all these indictments. And there was none,” Scalise said.

Despite that, Schiff and his fellow Democrats will never admit that they were wrong, Scalise said.

“They just move on and make some other baseless accusation. … Whatever they’re gonna say next, just consider the source.”

‘This Is a Big Circle’: Sen. Paul Claims Brennan Internally Pushed ‘Fake Steele Dossier’

‘Totally, Profoundly Dishonest’: Gingrich Slams Schiff for Continued Collusion Claims

Schiff Blasts ‘Unpatriotic’ Actions of Trump Campaign, Insists ‘Collusion’ With Russia Occurred
Latest from Fox News Channel
1 Wallace: It’s Not Premature for Trump to Take ‘Victory Lap’ After Receiving ‘Clean Bill of Health’ on Collusion

©2019 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lunacy or Collusion?

In the vernacular of contra-indicated state of affairs, at what point do impressions signal a state of affairs when this difference becomes of tripartite concern? At what point do the paradoxical asertions cross the line from individual psychic breaks to social-national~international urgency where appearing fissures signal particular projective breaks?
World social nationalism in itself is particularly an ominous label, where from any shrewd politician would want to steer clear of, but it seems like that line was already passed unnoticed, and a newer no holds policy has been reintegrate on assumptions yet to be determined.

This entails risk taking on a new plateau, one with which a desperation could be unearthed .

This is most probably why, Miller , as Pontious once had, washed his hands.

This is way thicker then even a crucifixion would suggest, because it is never transparent here who or what the victims are, not to mention the victims are the very ones who unwarily become the agents .

This confusion seeks clarity, a clarity that is at once desired and further obfuscated.

It’s called slipping a nice fat check to Mueller for scrapping the report.

Politicians in back rooms
Rich people with heirlooms
Handshakes at clambakes
Clear the record for namesake
You don’t believe they’re all this fake?

c’mon meno
or should I call you Janet Reno?

Caliphornia.

:confused:

youtu.be/YlUKcNNmywk

Not really, but perhaps it’s too late in the game for that.

this thread must be so therapeutic.

I wont mention to immensity of the wealth difference in favour of the anti trump charade vs what the actual base controls.
Instead, I will just cheer you on. This is going to be a hell of an interesting elections.

peteforamerica.com/meet-pete/

Forever.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2FMhBg0h_8[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FES7QLDVLKo[/youtube]

Compare this to Pete, though. The Dems have come a long way. Of course Biden is even more macho dan Arnold is, but you have to wonder if he ll really run.

americanpossibilities.org/? … lcEALw_wcB

I bet 3/4 75 % for he will run even before looking at the published odds if there is any, of winning.

ODDS TO WIN THE 2020 UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Name Odds
Donald Trump +175
Bernie Sanders +650
Kamala Harris +650
Joe Biden +650
Beto O’Rourke +900
Andrew Yang +2200
Pete Buttgieg +2800
Sherrod Brown +2800
Elizabeth Warren +3000
Amy Klobuchar +3300
Cory Booker +3300
Tulsi Gabbard +4000
Mike Pence +4500
Kirsten Gillibrand +4500
Nikki Haley +5000
Michelle Obama +6600
John Hickenlooper +6600
John Kasich +6600
Julian Castro +7500
Howard Schultz +7500
Mitt Romney +8000
Oprah Winfrey +8000
Marco Rubio +10000
Mark Cuban +10000
Eric Garcetti +10000
Michael Avenatti +10000
Tom Wolf +10000
Orrin Hatch +10000
Rahm Emanuel +10000
Paul Ryan +10000
George Clooney +10000
Joe Kennedy III +10000
Ted Cruz +10000
Rand Paul +10000
Ben Shapiro +10000
Bill Gates +10000
Hillary Clinton +12500
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson +12500
Andrew Cuomo +12500
Mitch Landrieu +12500
Chris Murphy +12500
Tom Steyer +12500
Terry McAuliffe +12500
Martin O’Malley +12500
Tammy Duckworth +15000
Bob Iger +15000
Jeb Bush +15000
Mark Zuckerberg +15000
Tim Kaine +15000
Trey Gowdy +15000
Ivanka Trump +15000
Kanye West +15000
Chelsea Clinton +20000
Leonardo DiCaprio +20000
Will Smith +20000
Joe Rogan +25000
Tom Brady +25000

Harris, Biden and Sanders are projected equally at almost 75% less likely, then the incubant, which is a wide spread, but can change dramatically, if Trump’s political and economic fronts change for the worse substantially.

If he holds on, then Biden may increase his lead considerably, opting finally to run. The barometer is very uncertain, and this will be a wild ride, affordably.


The Mueller investigation is over. QAnon, the conspiracy theory that grew around it, is not.
Why a conspiracy theory with an expiration date will endure.
By Jane Coaston on March 29, 2019 5:30 pm

Trump supporters displaying QAnon posters at a rally for President Donald Trump on July 31, 2018, in Tampa, Florida. NurPhoto via Getty Images
One would think that a conspiracy theory that’s based on the idea that special counsel Robert Mueller and President Donald Trump are working together to expose thousands of cannibalistic pedophiles hidden in plain sight (including Hillary Clinton and actor Tom Hanks) and then send them to Guantanamo Bay would be doomed. Mueller’s investigation has ended and Attorney General Bill Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report has been published — all without any mention of pedophiles, cannibals, or child murderers.

One would be wrong.

As evidenced by Trump’s Thursday night rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, QAnon — a conspiracy theory that took root in online forums before bursting into the public eye in early 2018 — is alive and well.

It’s not just left-leaning or mainstream outlets that have argued the conspiracy theory’s inherent, and pervasive, ridiculousness. Major supporters of the president have denounced QAnon as a “grift” and a “scam.” Many of the conspiracy theory’s allegations — like that Hillary Clinton was executed by lethal injection in February — are patently false (and wild).

But the people who follow QAnon don’t care. In their view, QAnon — a conspiracy theory that alleges hundreds of thousands of child-eating pedophiles are due to be arrested any day now by Trump and Mueller (oh, and John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive) — is bringing America together.

A quick refresher on #QAnon
QAnon is a conspiracy theory based around an anonymous online poster known as “Q” — a pseudonym that comes from the Q-level security clearance, the Department of Energy equivalent of “Top Secret.” Beginning on October 28, 2017, Q began posting on the 4chan message board /pol/ about Hillary Clinton’s imminent arrest. Followers of Q became known as QAnon, and they began awaiting “The Storm,” during which all of Trump’s enemies, including Rep. Adam Schiff and others, would be arrested and executed for being murderous child-eating pedophiles.

From a QAnon Twitter user, March 29, 2019.
I wrote about QAnon last year, when the conspiracy theory first gained attention in mainstream circles. And as I wrote then, most, if not all, of Q’s posts and predictions were unadulterated nonsense.

In a posting on November 1, 2017, Q said that on November 3 and 4, John Podesta, chair of Clinton’s 2016 campaign, would be arrested, military control would take hold, and “public riots would be organized in serious numbers to prevent the arrest and capture of more senior public officials.” Q posted, “We will be initiating the Emergency Broadcast System (EMS) during this time in an effort to provide a direct message (avoiding the fake news) to all citizens. Organizations and/or people that wish to do us harm during this time will be met with swift fury – certain laws have been pre-lifted to provide our great military the necessary authority to handle and conduct these operations (at home and abroad).”

Obviously, none of this happened. There were no public riots or mass arrests or the use of emergency broadcasts. (In fact, the Emergency Broadcast System went out of service in 1997, replaced by the Emergency Alert System.)

But none of QAnon’s most fervent followers seemed to care. And even with the release of Barr’s summary of the Mueller report — which, though very short, would probably have mentioned the indictments of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton had they been included in the document — QAnon believers aren’t deterred.

We will never see the end of QAnon
And that’s why, despite everything that’s taken place over the last week, QAnon will persist — because QAnon wasn’t built on facts, but on almost religious fervor. In fact, that’s how most conspiracy theories work. As I wrote last year:

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are “self-sealing” — meaning that evidence against them can become evidence of their validity in the minds of believers, according to Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor at the University of Bristol who studies conspiracy theories and conspiracists. Trying to disprove a conspiracy theory thus usually only serves to reinforce it.
Take conspiracy theorists who believed, falsely and without evidence, that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had secretly died earlier this year and her death was being withheld from the American public by the government. As SCOTUSblog found in a case study it conducted, RBG conspiracy believers whom the blog confronted with evidence that the justice had not, in fact, passed away, reacted by leaning into the conspiracy theory even further.

Two users insisted that Ginsburg was dead. According to one, with over 15,000 followers: “Nope, that’s a body double if ever there was one.” And as another user, with over 435,000 followers, suggested, “That’s total hoax and a planned delay – bet she’s dead.”
And that’s just one conspiracy theory. QAnon — which began relatively simply as a conspiracy theory about the Mueller investigation — now includes references and allusions to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and “false flag” mass shootings. That means that the end of the Mueller investigation won’t end QAnon. Nothing will.

As Travis View, a conspiracy theory researcher and QAnon expert, wrote on QAnon in the Washington Post on March 26:

… failed predictions and misplaced expectations haven’t damaged the size or enthusiasm of the QAnon community. They persist in their faith that high-level Democrats will be arrested at any moment, weathering several more disconfirmations of Q’s legitimacy and trustworthiness. Some QAnon followers even claim that failed predictions are irrelevant, because dates that pass without incident serve the purpose of tricking the evil “cabal” they imagine they’re fighting.
Like 9/11 trutherism and moon-landing truthers, QAnon, it appears, is with us for good.

© 2019 Vox Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Iii
The day North Korea talks collapsed, Trump passed Kim a note demanding he turn over his nukes
Published 4 Hours Ago Updated 2 Hours Ago
Reuters
During talks in Hanoi last month, U.S. President Donald Trump passed a piece of paper to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un calling on the leader to hand over the country’s nuclear weapons
After Kim received the document during a meeting of the two leaders at Hanoi’s Metropole hotel on Feb. 28, the summit collapsed
The document took a hard line on North Korea’s denuclearization, calling for Kim to turn over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel
U.S. President Donald Trump walks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi on February 28, 2019.
Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump walks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a break in talks at the U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi on February 28, 2019.
On the day that their talks in Hanoi collapsed last month, U.S. President Donald Trump handed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a piece of paper that included a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States, according to the document seen by Reuters.

Trump gave Kim both Korean and English-language versions of the U.S. position at Hanoi’s Metropole hotel on Feb. 28, according to a source familiar with the discussions, speaking on condition of anonymity. It was the first time that Trump himself had explicitly defined what he meant by denuclearization directly to Kim, the source said.

A lunch between the two leaders was canceled the same day. While neither side has presented a complete account of why the summit collapsed, the document may help explain it.

The document’s existence was first mentioned by White House national security advisor John Bolton in television interviews he gave after the two-day summit. Bolton did not disclose in those interviews the pivotal U.S. expectation contained in the document that North Korea should transfer its nuclear weapons and fissile material to the United States.

The document appeared to represent Bolton’s long-held and hardline “Libya model” of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly. It probably would have been seen by Kim as insulting and provocative, analysts said.

Trump had previously distanced himself in public comments from Bolton’s approach and said a “Libya model” would be employed only if a deal could not be reached.

The idea of North Korea handing over its weapons was first proposed by Bolton in 2004. He revived the proposal last year when Trump named him as national security advisor.

The document was meant to provide the North Koreans with a clear and concise definition of what the United States meant by “final, fully verifiable, denuclearization,” the source familiar with discussions said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The State Department declined to comment on what would be a classified document.

After the summit, a North Korean official accused Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “gangster-like” demands, saying Pyongyang was considering suspending talks with the United States and may rethink its self-imposed ban on missile and nuclear tests.

The English version of the document, seen by Reuters, called for “fully dismantling North Korea’s nuclear infrastructure, chemical and biological warfare program and related dual-use capabilities; and ballistic missiles, launchers, and associated facilities.”

Aside from the call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel, the document had four other key points.

It called on North Korea to provide a comprehensive declaration of its nuclear program and full access to U.S. and international inspectors; to halt all related activities and construction of any new facilities; to eliminate all nuclear infrastructure; and to transition all nuclear program scientists and technicians to commercial activities.

The summit in Vietnam’s capital was cut short after Trump and Kim failed to reach a deal on the extent of economic sanctions relief for North Korea in exchange for its steps to give up its nuclear program.

The first summit between Trump and Kim, which took place in Singapore in June 2018, was almost called off after the North Koreans rejected Bolton’s repeated demands for it to follow a denuclearization model under which components of Libya’s nuclear program were shipped to the United States in 2004.

Seven years after a denuclearization agreement was reached between the United States and Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, the United States took part in a NATO-led military operation against his government and he was overthrown by rebels and killed.

‘Miserable fate’
Last year, North Korea officials called Bolton’s plan “absurd” and noted the “miserable fate” that befell Gaddafi.

After North Korea threatened to cancel the Singapore summit, Trump said in May 2018 he was not pursuing a “Libya model” and that he was looking for an agreement that would protect Kim.

“He would be there, he would be running his country, his country would be very rich,” Trump said at the time.

“The Libya model was a much different model. We decimated that country,” Trump added.

The Hanoi document was presented in what U.S. officials have said was an attempt by Trump to secure a “big deal” under which all sanctions would be lifted if North Korea gave up all of its weapons.

U.S.-North Korean engagement has appeared to be in limbo since the Hanoi meeting. Pompeo said on March 4 he was hopeful he could send a team to North Korea “in the next couple of weeks,” but there has been no sign of that.

Jenny Town, a North Korea expert at the Washington-based Stimson Center think tank, said the content of the U.S. document was not surprising.

“This is what Bolton wanted from the beginning and it clearly wasn’t going to work,” Town said. “If the U.S. was really serious about negotiations they would have learned already that this wasn’t an approach they could take.”

Town added, “It’s already been rejected more than once, and to keep bringing it up … would be rather insulting. It’s a non-starter and reflects absolutely no learning curve in the process.”

North Korea has repeatedly rejected unilateral disarmament and argues that its weapons program is needed for defense, a belief reinforced by the fate Gaddafi and others.

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week” program after the Hanoi summit, Bolton said the North Koreans had committed to denuclearization in a variety of forms several times “that they have happily violated.”

“We define denuclearization as meaning the elimination of their nuclear weapons program, their uranium enrichment capability, their plutonium reprocessing capability,” Bolton said.

© 2019 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved. A Division of NBCUniversal

Jonathan Swan
7 hours ago
Trump goes it alone
President Trump walking away juxtaposed over a presidential document.

President Trump and his chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, have realized they’re passing no major legislation through this divided Congress.

Why it matters: No sooner had Trump put out his budget than the conversation among many Capitol Hill Republicans turned to what they expect will eventually happen: No grand spending deal between Democrats and Republicans, and instead perhaps a continuation of 2019 spending levels through 2020.

Reality check: Forget infrastructure. Forget any serious action to rein in the national debt. Forget entitlement reform. Forget fixing the nation’s broken immigration system.

And yes, forget health care. Trump may want to revisit the Affordable Care Act, but he doesn’t have a lot of company in the GOP.
Instead, the Trump team is busy figuring out ways to go over the heads of Congress. (The one exception is drug pricing.)
What to expect: More executive orders, more foreign deals sealed by a presidential signature rather than congressional approval, and more creative applications of the law — for example, declaring a national emergency to build the wall — to get Trump what he wants.

David McCabe, Gigi Sukin

------‘---------’-‘’‘’-‘’-----------'-----

© Copyright Axios 2019


TheHill

NATIONAL SECURITY
March 30, 2019 - 12:38 PM EDT
Questions mount over Mueller, Barr and obstruction

Questions are mounting over special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice as lawmakers on Capitol Hill await the release of his report.

While Barr’s four-page letter to Congress on Sunday silenced suspicions Mueller would charge Trump or members of his campaign with conspiring with the Russian government, its contents only amplified the mystery surrounding the obstruction inquiry.

It remains unclear why Mueller declined to make a decision one way or another on whether Trump impeded his investigation, and Democrats have grown increasingly skeptical of Attorney General William Barr’s judgment that the evidence was insufficient to accuse Trump of obstruction. They also argue he is not a neutral arbiter.

Lawmakers are unlikely to get answers for weeks, as the Justice Department combs through Mueller’s 300-plus-page report to determine what can be publicly released.

Barr told Congress on Friday that he expects to have the report prepared for public release by mid-April, after officials scrub it of grand jury material, sensitive national security information and details that could impact ongoing investigations.

In the meantime, Democrats are focused on a lengthy memo Barr penned last year criticizing the obstruction inquiry and labeling the theory Trump impeded the probe by firing FBI Director James Comey “fatally misconceived.”

Some legal experts have described Mueller’s decision to not make his own call on obstruction charges as unusual. Regulations governing Mueller’s appointment required him to submit a report to Barr laying out why he prosecuted or declined to prosecute certain crimes.

“It is a little unusual because there is a charging decision, and either someone is charged or the prosecution is declined - a declination. It’s more unusual for a prosecutor to say, I don’t know or I don’t know enough to reach a firm conclusion,” said Jack Sharman, a defense attorney at Lightfoot, Franklin & White and a former special counsel to Congress during the Whitewater investigation.

Some say it’s possible that Mueller meant to lay out the facts and let Congress decide on whether Trump obstructed the investigation or that he meant for Barr, a political appointee, to ultimately make the call.

Mueller was also keenly aware of the Justice Department policy not to indict a sitting president, which may have affected his reasoning.

Some argue Barr overstepped his bounds by making his own judgment on obstruction without releasing Mueller’s report or the evidence backing it up.

Others say it was Barr’s call to make given Mueller’s decision to not make a decision.

“It doesn’t say what happens if Mueller says, I’m unable to make a determination,” Steven Cash, a lawyer at Day Pitney and former counsel to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), said of Mueller’s original mandate.

Broadly, legal experts agree that proving obstruction of justice is difficult; it requires establishing that the offender acted to impede an official proceeding and that he or she acted with “corrupt intent.”

Doing so would almost certainly require Mueller to interview Trump in order to get to the bottom of his reasons for firing Comey or taking other actions that the special counsel likely examined, such as his tweets attacking then-attorney general Jeff Sessions and calling on him to end Mueller’s probe.

Mueller never reached an agreement with Trump’s personal lawyers on an interview and ultimately did not pursue a subpoena to compel his testimony. Why he did not subpoena Trump is another mystery.

“The fact that we ended up right on a tightrope on whether or not it was obstruction underscores how important it was for Mueller to interview or subpoena Trump,” said Elie Honig, a defense attorney at Lowenstein Sandler and a former federal prosecutor.

Barr’s letter, quoting from Mueller’s report, notes that Mueller recognized “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference” and suggests that makes it more difficult to prove the president was deliberately improper in his actions.

There is also debate as to whether a president can be accused of obstructing justice; some argue that Trump has the constitutional authority to remove Comey and order the Justice Department who and who not to investigate.

House Democrats are pushing for the full and immediate release of Mueller’s report as well as the underlying evidence, saying they cannot assess the findings until they see all the details the special counsel collected in the course of his 22-month investigation. Republicans, including Trump, are also in favor of the release of Mueller’s report.

Democrats have pointed to the June memo that Barr, a former attorney general under George H.W. Bush, penned to the Justice Department and White House, suggesting that he was biased in his handling of Mueller’s report, particularly on the question of obstruction.

In that memo, which was reported on soon after Trump nominated him for attorney general, Barr argued that Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s firing of Comey was “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law” and “would do lasting damage to the Presidency and to the administration of law within the Executive branch.”

Democrats say they want to hear from Mueller, not Barr.

“We want to be clear, and I think that this letter that Barr wrote last Sunday underscores Congress’s view that we do not want anything in the words of the attorney general. We want to see Robert Mueller’s words. That’s very critical,” a House Democratic aide told reporters at a meeting in the Capitol on Thursday.

Democrats are demanding that Barr meet an April 2 deadline to produce Mueller’s full report to Congress. Barr on Friday said Justice would have the report ready for public release by mid-April or sooner.

Barr also told Congress on Friday that he would not provide the White House an advanced copy of the report to review for issues of executive privilege.

“Everyone will soon be able to read it on their own,” Barr wrote. “I do not believe it would be in the public’s interest for me to attempt to summarize the full report or to release it in serial or piecemeal fashion.”

The contents of this site are ©2019 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc.

Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on 28 March.

From victory to vengeance: Trump scents blood in 2020 fight
The president celebrated the Mueller report – but then his latest effort to invalidate Obamacare left some feeling he ‘stepped all over that message’

@SabrinaSiddiqui
Sun 31 Mar 2019 09.17 EDT First published on Sun 31 Mar 2019 01.00 EDT
It felt like a victory lap. At a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Thursday night, surrounded by a sea of red Make America Great Again hats, a defiant Donald Trump held the podium before a raucous crowd.

Trump Fed pick was held in contempt for failing to pay ex-wife over $300,000

“After three years of lies and smears and slander, the Russia hoax is finally dead,” the president declared in a 90-minute speech.

Basking after the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which clouded the first two years of his presidency, Trump falsely claimed “total exoneration”.

He vowed retaliation against some of his sharpest critics and suggested consequences for the media were in order. He spoke of doing away with Barack Obama’s healthcare law. And he threatened to shut down the US-Mexico border as early as next week.

It was a stark reminder of how Trump views his executive authority and a glimpse of his looming fight for re-election.

He is much more likely to be re-elected today than he seemed at the end of last week

Michael Steele
“He is much more likely to be re-elected today than he seemed at the end of last week,” said Michael Steel, a Republican operative who was an aide to former House speaker John Boehner. “I think that Democratic oversight activities will continue, but this definitely took the wind out of their sails.”

However, Trump’s legal perils are far from over. According to a short letter to Congress by attorney general William Barr, the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election did not clear Trump of wrongdoing. Mueller did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump obstructed justice, specifically stating that his report “does not exonerate” the president.

Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between Trump aides and Moscow, which the president said supported his longstanding claim of “no collusion”. Left unclear was what the special counsel had to say of repeated contacts between Trump associates and Russian nationals, and lies to prosecutors about such communications.

On Friday, Barr said that by mid-April he would make public a redacted version of the Mueller report, which is nearly 400 pages long. The attorney general faced criticism after drawing his own conclusion, in his letter to Congress, that Mueller did not have sufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

In a second letter released on Friday, Barr said his initial assessment was not intended to be a summary of the Mueller report and that the American public “would soon be able to read it on their own”.

‘Russia hoax is finally dead’: Donald Trump wrongly claims ‘total exoneration’ at rally – video
Trump nonetheless seized on Barr’s rendering of the Mueller report.

“There are a lot of people out there that have done some very, very evil things, some bad things, I would say some treasonous things against our country,” Trump told reporters last Sunday. “And hopefully people that have done such harm to our country – we’ve gone through a period of really bad things happening – those people will certainly be looked at. I’ve been looking at them for a long time.”

On Fox News, Trump’s most prominent boosters chimed in.

“This must be a day of reckoning for the media, for the deep state, for people who abuse power, and they did it so blatantly in this country,” said Sean Hannity, who ranks among Trump’s closest allies.

It could be a reset but it’s not going to be, because the president is congenially incapable of resetting

Rick Tyler
“If we do not get this right, if we do not hold these people accountable, I promise you, with all the love I can muster for this country and our future for our kids and grandkids, we will lose the greatest country God has ever given man. We will lose it.”

Initial polls showed little change in public perception of the Mueller investigation or potential wrongdoing by Trump.

A CNN survey found nearly 60% of Americans believed Congress should continue to investigate, while 56% said they did not believe Trump had been exonerated of collusion, even though Barr’s letter said the special counsel could not establish a criminal conspiracy. Perhaps most tellingly, 86% said the findings would not affect their vote in 2020.

“The political divide is virtually the same,” said Rick Tyler, a former aide to Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. “If you didn’t like Trump before, you don’t like him anymore now. If you like Trump, you still like him.”

“It could be a reset but it’s not going to be, because the president is congenially incapable of resetting.”

‘The party of healthcare’
Indeed, in the immediate wake of what some called the best week of his presidency, Trump returned to the impulsive style of governing that has prompted disorder and left his own party flatfooted.

In a major shift, the administration announced on Wednesday it would back a legal effort to fully invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly known as Obamacare, a move that would threaten healthcare coverage for millions of Americans, an issue which proved central to November’s midterm elections, in which Democrats regained the House.

At his Michigan rally Trump renewed his call to toss out the ACA, insisting Republicans would come to be known as the ‘party of healthcare’. Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP
Trump’s move came over the objections of Barr and Alex Azar, his health secretary. The House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, reportedly told Trump the move made no sense, given Republicans do not have a plan to replace the ACA and would be unable to move legislation.

“Members feel like [the Mueller report announcement] was great and Trump stepped all over that message with the Obamacare lawsuit announcement,” a House GOP aide told Axios.

Trump intervenes in case of Navy Seal charged in stabbing of Isis prisoner

Tyler said: “While I can argue lots of different structures that would be better than Obamacare, that would be like overthrowing a foreign government with no replacement government. The result would be chaos.”

Undaunted, at his Michigan rally Trump renewed his call to toss out the ACA, insisting Republicans would come to be known as the “party of healthcare”. And he didn’t stop there.

Trump also vowed to shut down the Mexico border “next week”, a move that would do significant damage to the US economy. Mexico is a vital trading partner but Trump complained it was not doing enough to stop illegal immigration.

Trump received familiar support from Fox. But other Republicans warned Trump not to jeopardize an otherwise positive moment.

“I think it’s a good thing for America that a detailed and thorough investigation concluded that the president of the United States is not a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign power,” said Steel.

“I do think there’s some danger that in the hubris of his response, the president makes mistakes.

© 2019 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

cnn.com/2019/03/31/media/sn … index.html


Rolling Stone

POLITICS

What Would Happen If Trump Actually Closed the U.S.-Mexico Border
Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said that it would take “something dramatic” to prevent the action

RYAN BORT
APRIL 1, 2019 11:25AM EDT

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters during a visit to Lake Okeechobee and Herbert Hoover Dike at Canal Point, Fla., . President Trump increased attention on the Jussie Smollett case when, two days after Smollett reported the attack, he told reporters at the White House that he saw a story about Smollett. “It doesn’t get worse, as far as I’m concerned,” Trump said. Smollett said his attackers yelled, “This is MAGA country,” a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Two days after prosecutors drop charges against Smollett the president tweeted that the FBI and Department of Justice will “review the outrageous Jussie Smollett case” and calls the case an embarrassment to our NationEmpire Cast Member Attack, Canal Point, USA - 29 Mar 2019
Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/REX/Shutterstock
After capping the last season of Border Crisis with a dramatic national emergency declaration, the Trump administration is searching for bold ways to keep ratings high as asylum-seeking migrants continue to head toward the United States. Last week saw the president cut off hundreds of millions in aid to three Central American nations. This week could see him close the U.S.-Mexico border entirely, a move that would do little more than devastate the economy.

Trump first threatened to do so on Friday before continuing to escalate tension on Twitter over the weekend. On Sunday night, he attacked Democrats for “allowing a ridiculous asylum system and major loopholes to remain as a mainstay of our immigration system,” while bashing Mexico for “doing NOTHING.” He also warned that the United States could take a harder line toward those seeking asylum. “Homeland Security is being sooo very nice, but not for long!”

He was back at it again Monday morning.

After threatening to close the border on Friday, Trump announced that the United States will be cutting $500 million in aid to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador as a way to punish these countries for not preventing their citizens from fleeing to the U.S. border. “We were paying them tremendous amounts of money,” the president told reporters in Florida. “We’re not paying them anymore, because they haven’t done a thing for us.”

The move makes little sense. Northern Triangle nations are not actively sending their citizens to the U.S. border, as Trump seems to believe, and stripping them of aid would bring an end to several programs designed to keep Guatemalas, Hondurans and El Savladorians at home. Trump Trump has threatened to do this in the past, but this time it’s for real. Later on Friday, the State Department issued a statement confirming the action. “We are carrying out the president’s direction and ending FY 2017 and FY 2018 foreign assistance programs for the Northern Triangle,” it read. “We will be engaging Congress as part of this process.”

Trump also threatened to close the border entirely, as he did in December while seeking nearly $6 billion in funding for a border wall. “If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week,” he tweeted on Friday. “This would be so easy for Mexico to do, but they just take our money and ‘talk.’ Besides, we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc.), that the Border closing would be a good thing!”

Again, this does not appear to be an empty threat, as it has been in the past. On Sunday, Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told ABC it would take “something dramatic” for the president not to close the border this week. “Why are we talking about closing the border?” he said. “Not for spite and not to try to undo what is happening, but simply because we need the people from the ports of entry to go out in the desert and patrol where we don’t have any wall.”

© 2019 PMC. All rights reserved.

Trump border closing? Republicans, Chamber of Commerce question president’s latest threat
JOHN FRITZE AND ELIZA COLLINS | USA TODAY | 2 hours ago

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to close the nation’s Mexican border or large sections of it next week, a potentially drastic step affecting both nations’ economies, if Mexico does not halt illegal immigration at once. (March 29)
AP
WASHINGTON – Border-state Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce balked Monday at President Donald Trump’s latest threat to close the U.S.-Mexico border, arguing the move would damage the nation’s economy.

Frustrated by an influx of migrant families arriving from Central America, Trump has ratcheted up his rhetoric on sealing the border, threatening that his administration could close ports as early as this week if Mexico doesn’t do more to stem the flow of arrivals.

But a number of Republicans representing border states urged caution, noting Mexico was the nation’s third-largest trading partner last year. Others, including Republican leaders, stayed quiet as they sought to assess the seriousness of Trump’s threat, which he has made previously without following through.

“The president made that statement out of frustration. I don’t think he’s going to actually shut off the border,” Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told a forum in Washington on Monday.

“It would have a significant impact on our economy,” he added.

“I understand the president’s frustration, but the unintended consequences of that, I think, would be bad for everybody,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

Several Republicans on Capitol Hill didn’t seem to see the president’s threat as something immediate and instead focused on the need to deal with immigration.

“What do you mean, shut it down?” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., responded when asked about Trump’s threat.

White House officials did not respond to a request for comment Monday.

View | 12 Photos
President Trump holds campaign rally in Michigan
Illegal immigration remains lower than it was during the 1990s and 2000s, when Border Patrol agents regularly apprehended more than 1 million undocumented immigrants a year at the southern border. But the administration has pointed to a spike in Central American families making the journey north.

In February, Border Patrol agents apprehended 66,450 people illegally crossing the southern border. A record high 36,174 of those (54%) were members of families and 6,825 (10%) were unaccompanied minors, according to Border Patrol data.

Speaking to reporters Friday, Trump said there is a “very good likelihood that I’ll be closing the border next week” to address the issue. White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that the administration would need to see “something dramatic” to hold short of sealing the U.S. Mexico-border.

The idea has drawn tepid a response from some within Trump’s party.

“It’s my view that we’ve got to keep the legitimate trade and travel and cross-border commerce happening at the ports entry while we also need to secure our border and address this crisis,” Sen. Martha McSally, R-Arizona, told reporters Monday.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., wouldn’t directly say whether he would support closing the border.

“What the president seems to be doing right now is trying to work with Mexico and with Central America, and say, ‘If we don’t find a way to work together to stop this, then I’m going to have to find a way that’s a blunt object to do it,’” Lankford said.

At least one Democrat said the threat of border closure was real.

“I think you’ve gotta take him seriously,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also weighed in Monday, urging the administration to consider the costs to domestic exporters. The leading business organization said it shared the administration’s concern about a “massive influx of migrants” but said the best response is for Congress to attempt a broader overhaul of immigration law.

Mexico must use its very strong immigration laws to stop the many thousands of people trying to get into the USA. Our detention areas are maxed out & we will take no more illegals. Next step is to close the Border! This will also help us with stopping the Drug flow from Mexico!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2019
"Even threatening to close the border to legitimate commerce and travel creates a degree of economic uncertainty that risks compromising the very gains in growth and productivity that policies of the Trump administration have helped achieve,” said Neil Bradley, the group’s executive vice president and chief policy officer.

The Commerce Department estimates $502 billion in goods crossed the border in trucks and trains last year, roughly $1.4 billion a day. That doesn’t include products shipped by air and sea.

Administration officials have said the border has reached its “breaking point,” forcing Customs and Border Protection to use extreme measures to keep up. One of those changes has been to start releasing migrants into the streets of border communities, breaking with the administration’s practice of detaining them as long as possible.

Trump’s proposal has met with support from some Republicans, while many others have not commented. Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, initially advised Trump against declaring an emergency at the border to free up federal funding for the wall, but then backed the move once Trump acted.

“Well, I mean, what are we supposed to do?” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a Trump ally told “Fox News Sunday.” “So if the president feels like that the only way to control this problem is to move the people from the port of entry to the ungoverned spaces where we need a wall, I will support him. I hope we don’t have to do that.”

Trump threatened to close the border several times last year, but the administration did not follow through on the threat.

“Mexico should move the flag waving Migrants, many of whom are stone cold criminals, back to their countries,” Trump tweeted in late November. “We will close the Border permanently if need be.”

Originally Published 3 hours ago
Updated 1 hour

© Copyright Gannett 2019


POLITICO

Trump bewilders GOP allies on immigration ahead of border visit
As the administration weighs immigration actions, even Trump officials and Hill Republicans aren’t sure what to make of his talk of closing the Mexican border.

By ANITA KUMAR, TED HESSON and BURGESS EVERETT

04/01/2019 07:55 PM EDT

Donald Trump
Some Hill Republicans warned that any dramatic disruption to regular traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border could bring President Donald Trump into a new confrontation with his own party. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo

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President Donald Trump is thrusting his hardline posture on immigration back to the fore this week, with plans for a Friday trip to the southern border and possible new executive actions to restrict border crossings.

But days after Trump renewed his longstanding threat to shut down the southern border entirely, even administration officials and congressional Republicans were bewildered and guessing at his next move on a defining issue of his presidency.

And some Hill Republicans warned that any dramatic disruption to regular traffic across the U.S.-Mexico border could bring Trump into a new confrontation with his own party, whose leaders warn that closing parts or all of the border would wreak economic havoc.

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to require that greater numbers of non-Mexican asylum seekers stay in Mexico while they wait for their cases to be resolved and to speed up the reassignment of 750 customs officers to process arriving migrants.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is considering closing some of the lanes at ports of entry or preventing certain types of vehicles or people from crossing the border as he tries to force Mexico to increase its enforcement, three outside advisers told POLITICO.

“He’s trying to get Mexico’s attention,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that advocates for tighter restrictions on immigration.

The administration already has taken some of those actions, though they have gotten little attention. Customs and Border Protection said in a March 29 memo to shipping companies, importers and other businesses that it would halt a Sunday screening program for commercial trucks at a Nogales port of entry and blamed an “unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis” for the cutback.

The administration is considering ways to reduce the number of people crossing into the U.S. That could mean closing some lanes at ports of entry or limiting who is allowed to cross to day workers only. Another proposal under discussion would bar passenger vehicles — but not commercial trucks — from crossing the border.

But closing the border or even limiting the flow of people through the ports of entry would not prevent migrants from attempting to cross the border illegally.

Even some people close to the White House called Trump’s remarks “bluster” and predicted he would not close off the border from one of its largest trading partners. Mexico is the United States’s third-largest trading partner with more than $600 billion in cross-border trade last year.

“I understand the president’s frustration but the unintended consequences of that would be bad for everybody: economic, diplomatic,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who questioned how such a move could disrupt negotiations with Mexico to handle migrations from the Northern Triangle. “I take him very seriously. But I think we should have a longer conversation about unintended consequences.”

“It’s part of the way he negotiates but I’m not sure that’s a particularly good idea and I’m not sure it gets the desired result,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune of South Dakota of the potential closed border. “Tactically it doesn’t get a result and probably has a lot of unintended consequences … there’s a lot of bilateral trade at the border.”

Trump will travel to Calexico, Calif., to tour the border on Friday on west coast swing that also includes 2020 campaign fundraising. The White House has not disclosed details of the trip.

CONGRESS

McConnell shuts down the Pelosi agenda
By HEATHER CAYGLE and BURGESS EVERETT
Asked whether he thinks Trump is serious about closing the border, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) replied: “Oh, I have no idea. You’d need to ask him that.”

Trump has made cracking down on immigration a central theme of his presidency but has struggled to get his proposals past Congressional Republicans. In February, he declared a national emergency to unlock Pentagon funds he can unilaterally steer to a border wall as well as use money from other projects. That action was immediately challenged in court.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he takes the president “seriously” and wants more details about how it would affect trade and the economy. Romney was one of a dozen Republicans who rebuffed Trump’s emergency request last month, revealing a sharp intraparty divide over border politics.

Most Republicans agree there is a crisis on the border but disagree with tactics like closing ports of entry and the emergency request.

According to a current and a former DHS official familiar with the situation, Trump is once again considering creating a so-called immigration czar, a single person in charge of an issue that impacts a dozen departments and agencies, including Homeland Security, State, Justice, Labor, Housing and Health and Human Services. The position would not need Senate confirmation.

Some of the people being considered are Francis Cissna, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services; Thomas Douglas Homan, former acting director of Immigration and Customs, former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, according to the former DHS official. Michael Neifach, who worked for former President George W. Bush, was approached about the job last year, the former official said.

The White House did not respond to questions Monday. But On Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted that Trump’s talk of bold action should not be dismissed. “It certainly isn’t a bluff. You can take the president seriously," she told Fox News.

Trump on Friday renewed past threats to close the border after his administration announced it was at a “breaking point” processing the paperwork at the border, where agents are seeing an influx of migrants. Border Patrol arrested more than 66,000 migrants in February, the highest monthly total since March 2009 – and officials have said the numbers rose higher still last month. “Mexico is going to have to do something, otherwise I’m closing the border,” declared Trump, who is said to fixate on border crossing statistics.

Trump has long criticized Mexico for failing to halt Central American migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras from coming to the U.S. border. But he had not previously put a timeline on his threat to close the border.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen ordered an expansion of the administration’s “remain in Mexico” strategy, which forces certain non-Mexican asylum seekers to wait in Mexico pending resolution of their asylum cases in the U.S.

FOREIGN POLICY

Trump seeks to cut aid to 3 Central American nations
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
The secretary said her department would expand the policy — formally known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols” — “to return hundreds of additional migrants per day.” The program already has been launched at and between several ports of entry in California and Texas.

In a memo to Customs and Border Protection, Nielsen also called for the agency to accelerate a plan to reassign 750 customs officers to assist with Border Patrol efforts to process and house incoming migrants.

She added in a related announcement that CBP should explore reassigning more personnel, but should notify her if it details more than 2,000 employees to emergency border work.

Story Continued Below

“The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it,” she said in a written statement. “We will not stand idly by while Congress fails to act yet again, so all options are on the table.”

The number of family members intercepted at the southwest border soared in March, according to preliminary CBP statistics. While overall arrests remain below the higher levels of 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, the Trump administration argues families and children present unique humanitarian and security issues.

Nielsen last week urged Congress to provide additional resources to deal with the growing number of migrants. In addition, she pressed lawmakers to change immigration laws to permit children to be detained for more than 20 days — the current limit set by a federal court order — and to allow for the swift deportation of unaccompanied minors from Central America.

The Trump administration has implemented a number of hardline policies to deter illegal immigration and asylum seekers, only to see a record number of family members caught crossing the border in recent months. Border Patrol estimated that it arrested more than 55,000 family members in March, a 520 percent increase over the same month a year earlier.

Trump last week ordered the State Department to slash aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras because those nations haven’t taken enough action to deter migrants from traveling northward. The State Department informed congressional offices in recent days that it would redirect $450 million in fiscal year 2018 funding to the countries and examine already-committed funds to see if they could be rerouted.

“Cracking down and being harsher has not deterred anybody from coming,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Ultimately what would stop people from coming is if those countries improve the conditions on the ground.”

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC

The US Capitol is seen in Washington DC.

Opinion
Congress must investigate Trump. But it must also be strategic about it
Laurence H Tribe
Investigations should be undertaken more with a view to legislating for the future than coming to terms with the past

@tribelaw
Mon 1 Apr 2019 06.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 1 Apr 2019 09.57 EDT
Rarely have the demands of constitutional democracy and the rule of law been in greater tension with the imperatives of progressive politics. Fidelity to the constitution and the primacy of law over naked power call for a determined effort by Congress to unearth the full truth about Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the election, and since assuming office.

Enough collusion talk. It’s time to focus on Trump’s corruption | Michael Paarlberg

Congress has a duty to look into the president’s offenses in seizing the White House and whether, having arrived at the pinnacle of power, he obstructed efforts to uncover the details of his corrupt ascent and to disclose the many facets of his interference with investigations into those details.

At the same time, one would have to be politically blind not to see that the vast majority of voters care far less about those matters than about kitchen table issues like health care and economic opportunity for this generation and the next. People have become all but immune even to undeniable evidence that Donald Trump is guided not by our national interest but by his own greed for power and by the leverage that hostile foreign nations are able to exert over his decisions. Ironically abetted by the daily barrage of frightening revelations about their leader, Americans have become so eager to move on that they have little patience left for seemingly abstract matters of legal principle and democratic legitimacy.

Americans have become so eager to move on that they have little patience left for seemingly abstract matters of legal principle and democratic legitimacy

Yet it would be an inexcusable dereliction of duty for those with responsibility to get to the bottom of our democratic predicament to shut down their inquiries – or even to conduct them out of the full view of the public. There are those in the Democratic party who would prefer to have these investigations recede from center stage. And many Trump supporters remain eager to hang the albatross of endless investigation around the necks of Democrats and to identify the Democratic party more with dwelling in the past than with planning for a better future. But it is unlikely that the House judiciary, intelligence and oversight committees will be tempted to give either of these groups what they want.

The skillfully drafted 24 March letter by attorney general William Barr was shamefully misleading and provides no reason to drop the investigation into Trump’s wrongdoing. It buried the lede – that the long-awaited report of special counsel Robert Mueller “does not exonerate” the president – in a fog of inconclusive verbiage. And it will long obscure the truth that Trump and his close associates sought the unlawful help of a hostile foreign power in the quest for the presidency, gladly accepted that help while committing serious campaign finance crimes designed to bury stories that might derail his campaign, and have been taking steps ever since to reward the assistance they received, conducting America’s foreign policy in a way that would be inexplicable were it not for Trump’s personal and business interests. Though Barr cannot undo the harm he has done already, he must at least provide the entire unredacted Mueller report immediately to the House intelligence and judiciary committees, as demanded.

All but the most uncritical loyalists of the president appear to have agreed that the special counsel’s responsibility was to decide whether the president had obstructed justice, regardless of the justice department’s policy regarding the indictment of a sitting president – not to punt on that critical responsibility at the very end. I would like to think in light of Mueller’s reputation as a straight shooter, that he hadn’t intended to leave that issue in the hands of the obviously partisan attorney general.

Rather, I suspect Mueller’s report will support the conclusion that, as with previous such situations, his intent was to leave the obstruction issue to the House of Representatives, as part of its investigation into potentially impeachable offenses. If that is the case, then attorney general Barr’s decision to take the matter out of Congress’s hands was wholly inexcusable. Presumably Congress will probe that decision when Barr testifies in the House shortly. But that testimony will necessarily move the national focus once again to the Mueller report and the issue of possible impeachment – arguably a dangerous distraction from the perspective of those vying for the Democratic nomination to the presidency.

What, then, is to be done by those who recognize both the need to bring a positive political agenda to the fore if Trump’s reign is to be limited to a single term and the need for relentless investigation to inform both Congress and the public at large?

The longer the Trump administration remains in power, the more deeply it will deform the institutions and norms undergirding constitutional democracy

The first step is to recognize that there is no magic way to untangle that Gordian knot. There’s a reason that not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good has become a cliché. It happens to be sound advice. It is undeniable that public investigation into Trump, even if not emphasized on the campaign trail or in political ads, might to some degree undercut the political message of candidates on the stump seeking to topple the incumbent president in 2020. But that political reality cannot be permitted to deter the search for truth.

That said, there is every reason for investigators in Congress and elsewhere to be savvy in their emphasis. The financial entanglements – including unconstitutional acceptance of emoluments from foreign governments and their agents – that are compromising this administration in often hidden ways range far beyond Moscow. They reach such foreign capitals as Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Doha in Qatar, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates and Istanbul in Turkey. Unearthing the corrupting influence on Trump, Jared Kushner, and others in the far-reaching swamp surrounding and propping up this president and shaping his policies should be prioritized as a matter of public perception over what will invariably appear to be a rerun of a too familiar movie about the Kremlin, about the firing of FBI director James Comey, and about the president’s many other efforts in plain view to obstruct the inquiry into Russian collusion.

Even though it is a legal fallacy to claim that obstructing justice is no big deal unless the person interfering with a legitimate inquiry is guilty of an underlying crime – just ask Richard Nixon – it has become a political reality in our time. This is a reality that the Barr letter exploited, and one that Congress should take into account in setting its investigatory priorities.

This isn’t to deny the importance of designing new legislation that might be enacted after 2020 to make presidential abuses of the pardon and other executive powers both more transparent and less likely, and to contain foreign intrusion into our electoral processes that the current administration has done nothing to deter. It is, however, to suggest that investigations into obstruction and election interference should be undertaken more with a view to legislating for the future than with a view to coming to terms with the past.

The longer the Trump administration remains in power, the more deeply it will deform the institutions and norms undergirding constitutional democracy. In order to limit this president to a single term in office, little could matter more than to be strategic about deploying the indispensable investigatory weapons available to us, principally through congressional hearings. But to be strategic about the use of those weapons must not come to mean silencing them.

Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb university professor at Harvard, where he has taught constitutional law for 50 years. A celebrated author and supreme court advocate, his latest book is To End A Presidency: The Power of Impeachment (with Joshua Matz), released in paperback with a new epilogue in March .

© 2019 Guardian News & Media

POLITICO

Congress fears Trump could stumble over next fiscal cliff
Lawmakers will try to ink a deal, but Trump could blow up their plans.

By SARAH FERRIS

04/02/2019 05:02 AM EDT

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
Administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are pushing for a “clean” debt ceiling hike that extends the federal borrowing limit without making other policy changes. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A looming battle between President Donald Trump and Democrats over government spending and the debt limit could make the 35-day government shutdown look like a blip.

A series of budget deadlines converge in the coming months that could leave Washington on the precipice of another shutdown, $100 billion in automatic spending cuts and a full-scale credit crisis. And lawmakers are openly worried about stumbling over the edge.

“It could all go terribly wrong,” House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) said.

Some top Democrats have begun quietly pushing for a grand bargain to simultaneously raise the debt ceiling and Congress’ stiff budget caps — avoiding market turmoil and staving off harsh cuts to domestic and defense programs, according to multiple lawmakers and aides.

But the White House, focused on Trump’s reelection bid, is resisting talk of another massive deal that could cost as much as $350 billion over two years. Administration officials, led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are instead pushing for a “clean” debt ceiling hike that extends the federal borrowing limit without making any other policy changes.

The fiscal fights will reach a boiling point this fall — around the same time that Congress must pass its annual funding bills, which is guaranteed to dredge up the same border wall fight between Trump and Democrats that sent the government sputtering into a five-week shutdown.

By September, lawmakers could be faced with a fiscal cliff rivaling that of 2011, when another divided government nearly defaulted on its debt.

“This is the Congress of the United States. Of course there will be a cliff,” said a senior Republican lawmaker involved with the budget negotiations.

The conflict is still at arm’s length for most of Washington. Talks between House and Senate leaders have only just begun, and while there’s some hope that a deal could come together as soon as this spring, neither party has finalized its strategy.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Nancy Pelosi are confident they can avert a doomsday scenario in which the U.S. government fails to pay its bills for the first time in history, according to lawmakers and aides. Senate Republicans eager to defend their majority in 2020 will be in no mood for any shenanigans surrounding the debt limit.

Officials in both parties say they’re committed to reaching a deal to avoid sequestration and lift the budget caps. Without a bipartisan agreement, the Pentagon would be forced to slash $71 billion from the next fiscal year’s budget, with an additional $55 billion cut from domestic programs.

The White House, however, isn’t on board.

“We’ve been saying that we should move beyond these unaffordable, dollar-for-dollar caps deals that hold defense spending ransom to billions of dollars in wasteful discretionary spending,” a senior administration official said.

CONGRESS

And with an erratic Trump still demanding money for his southern border wall and angry about accepting a previous deal to boost spending, some lawmakers fear how the White House will handle such a fraught moment.

“My biggest concern is that there are irrational people who are willing to risk the country’s financial status for hyperbolic gain and that there are folks out there who’ve forgotten compromise.” Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), an Appropriations Committee member, said in an interview.

The first key question for Democrats and Republicans is whether to try to strike a deal that would lift the debt ceiling and budget caps at the same time. Entangling the two — in theory — would offer just enough incentive for both parties to hold their noses and ink the deal.

“That’s what deals are for — to put some things in that one side doesn’t love and some things that the other side doesn’t love,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a top Democratic spending negotiator. “Sweeteners and bitter pills for both — and hope that we get there.”.

A broader accord could also relieve some pressure on party leaders in both the House and Senate. Republicans, for instance, would be hard-pressed to vote against boosting the Pentagon budget, while Democrats rarely, if ever, vote against raising the debt limit.

That could deliver just enough votes for an otherwise unpopular budget deal — expected to total as much as $350 billion over two years, aides say — that will inevitably become a partisan battle over funding in the first full year of a Democratic House and Republican Senate.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has told other Democratic leaders that they should not rule out a broader deal.

“It should remain an option to do them together and remove two major drivers of uncertainty at the same time before that uncertainty metastasizes,” a Democratic aide said of his thinking.

But the tactic could also backfire.

Democrats say they can’t rule out the possibility that Trump would deploy the same “shoot-the-hostage” strategy that he did during the border fight, when he embraced the shutdown as a nod to his conservative base even after Congress refused to fund the wall.

HEALTH CARE

How killing Obamacare could backfire for Trump
By SARAH KARLIN-SMITH and BRIANNA EHLEY
Border security will again be in play this year. Trump demanded $8.6 billion for a border wall with Mexico in his latest budget plan, even as the fate of his emergency declaration at the border lies with the courts.

As Trump embraces the 2020 campaign in earnest, he could easily decide to demand border funding as part of the broader deal — effectively daring Democrats to risk international financial turmoil if they refuse to grant money for wall construction.

The risk is heightened, some lawmakers say, by Trump’s circle of advisers, including acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, who as a congressman threatened to refuse to raise the debt limit in 2011 until then-President Barack Obama agreed to deep spending cuts.

And Trump’s own budget chief, Russ Vought, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he supported attaching spending cuts to debt ceiling hikes.

Vought — who was only narrowly confirmed when he joined the administration — has also indicated that he could deploy some budget tricks to guarantee funding for the Pentagon, regardless of the threat of automatic spending cuts set to take effect at year’s end.

The stakes are higher — along with the levels of anxiety in both parties — after the longest shutdown in U.S. history. This time, Trump could fuel an international financial crisis if the government breached the debt ceiling.

“I’m fearful. It’s going to be really ugly,” said one House Republican appropriator, who has been involved with past talks.

Publicly and privately, the White House has said it wants a no-drama debt ceiling lift. That would mean none of the spending cuts that Republicans have demanded in past years. But this time, Democrats see the debt limit as a potential pressure point to persuade Trump to agree to another massive budget agreement.

The administration has indicated to lawmakers that it wants to delay any budget deal beyond the Sept. 30 government funding deadline to maximize its leverage, ensuring fights over a possible shutdown, automatic spending cuts and debt ceiling align toward the end of the year.

Meanwhile, another little-known math problem could severely complicate Congress’ ability to produce a two-year budget deal: the $350 billion budget boost being discussed could actually cost more than $2 trillion on paper.

Because lawmakers would be technically phasing out the 10-year Budget Control Act sequester, its cost would not only include the two years’ worth of spending hikes, it would also account for many years of future projected spending increases, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars that the government had “saved” during the sequester.

The final cost, as much as $2 trillion over a decade, according to a source familiar with the process, would even exceed the cost of the GOP tax law.

Nancy Cook and Caitlin Emma contributed to this report.

© 2019 POLITICO LLC


ABCNews
Trump lashes out at Puerto Rico’s ‘incompetent or corrupt’ politicians after Senate fails to advance disaster aid bill
By Morgan Winsor
Apr 2, 2019, 7:22 AM ET

President Donald Trump directed his outrage at Puerto Rico on Monday night, calling the U.S. territory “a mess” and its politicians “incompetent or corrupt,” after Senate Democrats clashed with their Republican counterparts over sending more disaster aid money.

Senators took test votes on two competing measures – one drafted by Senate Republicans and another passed by Democratic-led House of Representatives earlier this year – that would allocate billions of dollars in aid to U.S. states and territories ravaged by hurricanes, flooding, wildfires and other natural disasters in recent months. But neither piece of legislation got the support required to advance to a full floor vote. Democrats shot down the GOP legislation while Republicans rejected the House-passed bill, which proposes more aid for Puerto Rico than the Republican version.

Democrats said they wanted the federal government to release the money already appropriated to Puerto Rico in a previous relief package, in addition to hundreds of millions of dollars more. Republicans echoed Trump’s claims that Puerto Puerto Rico has been given much more than disaster-hit states and hasn’t spent the money wisely.

“The Democrats today killed a Bill that would have provided great relief to Farmers and yet more money to Puerto Rico despite the fact that Puerto Rico has already been scheduled to receive more hurricane relief funding than any ‘place’ in history. The people of Puerto Rico,” Trump posted on Twitter, “are GREAT, but the politicians are incompetent or corrupt. Puerto Rico got far more money than Texas & Florida combined, yet their government can’t do anything right, the place is a mess - nothing works.”

“FEMA & The Military worked emergency miracles but politicians like,” Trump continued. “the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health. 91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!”

Carmen Yulin Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, the capital, responded to Trump’s remarks in her own tweets. She called the president “unhinged” and accused him of lying about the inadequate response to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a Category 4 hurricane that made landfall on the island in September 2017 and caused some $100 billion in damage.

“Pres Trump continues to embarrass himself & the Office he holds. He is unhinged & thus lies about the $ received by PR. HE KNOWS HIS RESPONSE was innefficient [sic] at best. He can huff & puff all he wants but he cannot escape the death of 3,000 on his watch. SHAME ON YOU!” Cruz tweeted.

“Mr President I am right here ready to call you on every lie, every hypocrisy and every ill fated action against the people of Puerto Rico. My voice,and the voices of the people of Puerto Rico, will continue to unmask your insentive [sic], incapable & vindictive ways. SHAME ON YOU!” Cruz tweeted again.

The storm struck as Puerto Ricans still were recovering from Hurricane Irma, which unleashed heavy rain and high winds just two weeks earlier.

Though 64 people died as a direct result of Hurricane Maria, an estimated 2,975 died as a result of its aftermath, according to Puerto Rico’s most recent official counts based on a study, published in August of 2018, conducted by George Washington University and the University of Puerto Rico.

A car drives on a damaged road in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Humacao, Puerto Rico on Oct. 2, 2017.
Jeremy Kirkland, general counsel to the Inspector General’s Office at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, announced last Tuesday that his office has launched an internal investigation at the request of Congress to investigate whether there was any “interference” in the distribution of aid money to Puerto Rico.

Over the weekend, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer penned an op-ed in The New York Daily News, saying the Trump administration “has yet to disperse nearly $20 billion in long-term recovery and mitigation funds for Puerto Rico, more than a year after they were approved by Congress and a year-and-a-half after the historic hurricanes made landfall.”

“[The president] claims that Puerto Rico is getting $91 billion in disaster relief,” Schumer wrote, “but no one can discern where he’s getting that figure, which is many times higher than the actual number.”

ABC News’ Stephanie Ebbs, Anne Flaherty, Joshua Hoyos and Trish Turner contributed to this report.

© 2019 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.

The Trump Impeachment
Unfit To Lead
Trump doesn’t know Puerto Rico is part of the USA. Seriously.

Puerto Rico remains devastated after Hurricane Maria due to lack of adequate funding and resources. Yet, in another racisTwitterer tirade, Trump bashes Puerto Rico pols who “only take from the USA!”

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA…

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent,

:heavy_check_mark:
@AndrewLearned
We should fire the President of Puert

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA…

He should really get the President of Puerto Rico on the phone to hash this out.

Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take .

We need to fire the President of Puerto Rico. #PuertoRicoUSA #PuertoRico

6:26 AM - Apr 2, 2019 · New York, NY
See Beth Frank’s other Tweets
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What can we expect though from a President who gets his information from sources like Fox News?

Rick Wilson
:heavy_check_mark:
@TheRickWilson
· 5h
Puerto Rico is the USA you racist lout.

:heavy_check_mark:
@exavierpope
Of course 45 doesn’t know Puerto Rico is the USA, he gets his policy from a network that thinks Mexico is 3 countries and Africa is 1 pic.twitter.com/NXncjSjdSD

399
5:34 AM - Apr 2, 2019 · Chicago, IL
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135 people are talking about this
Trump’s recent outburst was in reaction to Democrats’ refusal to accept a package for Puerto Rico that falls short:

On Monday, Democratic leaders balked at the $600 million for Puerto Rican food stamps in the $13.45 billion package, arguing it wasn’t enough. But Republicans refused to back a Democratic House bill that failed to account for the historic Midwestern flooding, as it passed before that catastrophe. Democrats have said they support paying for flood relief and attempted Monday to amend their House bill with that money, a move the GOP blocked.

In his tweets, Trump raised a familiar, contested figure for disaster relief in Puerto Rico. Although the president has repeatedly claimed that $91 billion has been spent there, that figure actually reflects a high-end, long-term estimate for recovery costs; a fraction of that has so far been budgeted, and even less has been spent.

[Here’s why Trump says Puerto Rico is getting $91 billion in disaster relief]

The president also took aim at Cruz, San Juan’s outspoken mayor who has often taken Trump to task over the federal response to Hurricane Maria, which killed an estimated 2,975 people on the island.

“FEMA & the Military worked emergency miracles, but politicians like the crazed and incompetent Mayor of San Juan have done such a poor job of bringing the Island back to health,” Trump tweeted. “91 Billion Dollars to Puerto Rico, and now the Dems want to give them more, taking dollars away from our Farmers and so many others. Disgraceful!”

Qasim Rashid, Esq.
:heavy_check_mark:
@QasimRashid
This is a flat out lie. Puerto Rico has NOT “got $91B.”
•$91B is due incrementally over the next 20 years
•~$11B has been delivered
•3,000 Americans still died due to Federal Govt failures

We must demand better from our leadership. This is wrong. washingtonpost.com/politics … er-relief/

Donald J. Trump
:heavy_check_mark:
@realDonaldTrump
Puerto Rico got 91 Billion Dollars for the hurricane, more money than has ever been gotten for a hurricane before, & all their local politicians do is complain & ask for more money. The pols are grossly incompetent, spend the money foolishly or corruptly, & only take from USA.

The idiot only knows how to lie, steal, con, cheat, grope women, demean, debase, mock, spew buffoonery, lie, steal, oh I said that, ok whatever, he just doesn’t know his ass from a hole .

‘National Enquirer’ Owner Makes Surprising Admission About Trump

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Daily Sound and Fury

TRUMP EFFECT
Trump, McConnell clash on closing the border
“If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “100 percent.”

“Security is more important to me than trade,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. Joshua Roberts / Reuters
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April 2, 2019, 2:59 PM ET / Updated April 2, 2019, 3:30 PM ET
By Jonathan Allen and Rebecca Shabad
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he is “100 percent” prepared to shut down the U.S. border with Mexico to block an influx of migrants.

“If we don’t make a deal with Congress, the border’s going to be closed,” he told reporters in the Oval Office. “100 percent.”

At almost the same time, less than two miles down Pennsylvania Avenue, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said that might be a financial disaster for Americans.

“Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country, and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing,” McConnell said, noting that he agrees with the president that there is “a border crisis.”

The disagreement between the top two Republicans in Washington illustrates again the ongoing tension between the president and his own party in Congress as lawmakers try to bat down Trump proposals they believe are ill-advised politically, on policy grounds or both.

McConnell also said Tuesday that he and Trump now see eye to eye on waiting until after the 2020 election to work on health care legislation following Trump’s promise to move earlier. McConnell had balked at that idea. And last week, Trump quickly retreated on two of his own budget proposals — cuts for the Special Olympics and Great Lakes restoration — after hearing criticism from GOP members of Congress.

But it remains to be seen whether he will back off on the border, a signature issue for him that he views as critically important both as a policy matter and in terms of fulfilling a key promise from his 2016 campaign. Increasingly, Trump has shown a willingness to go it alone when Congress rejects his immigration and border-control plans.

On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen directed Customs and Border Protection to send up to 750 additional officers to the border to assist with a policy designed to keep asylum-seekers in Mexico while they await adjudication of their cases. NBC News first reported on that decision last week. The number could be increased to 2,000, according to the department.

Earlier this year, Trump shut down parts of the federal government for five weeks over a demand that Congress provide $5.7 billion to fund new barriers along the border. After he reopened the agencies, he and Congress agreed to a border package that included money for technology upgrades and about 55 miles of new fencing but prohibited the construction of a solid wall.

Trump then announced he would unilaterally transfer previously appropriated money from the Pentagon’s accounts for building military bases and other areas of the government to build more wall without congressional approval — a move that immediately drew lawsuits from state attorneys general who argue he acted outside his constitutional authority as president.

Trump said Tuesday that he now wants Democrats in Congress to accede to his long-held goals of rewriting the visa lottery system and rules that give favor to family members of people who already have immigrated to the United States.

“Congress has to meet quickly and make a deal,” he said.

Though experts have sounded a similar note to McConnell, warning that shutting the border could hurt the U.S. economy — goods worth more than $1.5 billion cross the border on a daily basis — Trump said that’s a secondary concern for him.

“Security is more important to me than trade,” he said.

Trump also addressed his recent decision to cut off aid to three Central American countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — from which many of the migrants have traveled to the U.S. border.

Critics say that decision will likely create more, not fewer, refugees from those countries.

Trump framed it as a natural response to what he views as the failure of the recipients of U.S. aid to give reciprocal value.

“They don’t do anything for us,” he said, and have been “taking advantage of the United States” for many years. “They arrange these caravans, and they don’t put their best people in those caravans … We’re not going to have it anymore.”

Jonathan Allen is a Washington-based national political reporter for NBC News who focuses on the presidency.

© 2019 NBC UNIVERSAL

IM

News > World > Americas > US politics

Trump erupts over congress demand for Mueller report just hours before deadline for release
‘It won’t happen!’

Donald Trump has vented his frustration over House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s subpoena for the release of the full Mueller report, just hours before a deadline set by congress for its disclosure.

Mr Trump wrote that “NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY” those who want the Mueller report to be made available in full to the public, suggesting that it should not be released.

House Democrats have demanded that the report is made available by the end of today, and Mr Trump sent the tweet as that deadline approached. That deadline is expected to be missed, and House Democrats are readying further legal processes to require the findings and their underlying evidence to be made public.

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That refusal – and Mr Trump’s explosive tweet – puts Mr Trump and his attorney general in a fight against Democratic politicians.

Read the latest on Trump and US politics in The Independent’s live blog.

While attorney general William Barr has made public a summary of the report, Mr Mueller’s full findings remain unknown and Democrats have demanded to know if the report found evidence of wrongdoing beyond the claims of collusion with the Russian state.

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“In 1998, Rep.Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton,” he posted on Twitter. “No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!”

Ivanka and Jared Kushner given security clearance despite grave risks

Though Mr Trump is correct in suggesting that a number of Democrats opposed the release of the full report to the public, it was in fact made freely available in full.

Soon after that first post, Mr Trump posted a follow-up that attacked Mr Mueller and mocked Democrats for their interest in the report.

“Robert Mueller was a God-like figure to the Democrats, until he ruled No Collusion in the long awaited $30,000,000 Mueller Report,” he wrote. “Now the Dems don’t even acknowledge his name, have become totally unhinged, and would like to go through the whole process again. It won’t happen!”

He then tweeted once again to suggest the the focus was distracting from his work in running the country.

“There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff. It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country!”

POLITICO

Trump changes tune on public release of Mueller report
By ANDREW DESIDERIO and KYLE CHENEY

04/02/2019 04:35 PM EDT

Donald Trump
President Donald Trump’s posture on Tuesday made Democrats more skeptical that the president will not invoke executive privilege to block the release of certain parts of the Mueller report. | AP Photo/Evan Vucci

President Donald Trump appeared to backpedal on Tuesday from his initial desire for special counsel Robert Mueller’s report to be released to Congress and the public, a sharp diversion from his enthusiastic calls for the release of the highly anticipated report.

In a series of tweets, Trump disparaged congressional Democrats for their efforts to obtain the full report; noted that one of them had opposed the public release of grand jury information from independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report on Bill Clinton; and tweeted a Fox News clip of lawyer Alan Dershowitz emphasizing that the Justice Department could keep the entire Mueller report confidential.

Multiple White House officials said Trump’s posture on releasing the report hasn’t changed, and Trump himself said Tuesday afternoon that he intends to defer entirely to his attorney general, William Barr. But Trump has unmistakably reined in his previous zeal for releasing the report publicly, which he first telegraphed last week while claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him.

Though Mueller’s 400-page report is expected to conclude that no Americans criminally conspired with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf, there are indications that it will include damaging information about Trump and his associates — including evidence suggesting Trump may have attempted to interfere with the investigation.

Democrats — who are gearing up to issue a subpoena for the full report on Wednesday — said Trump’s sudden hostility toward their efforts to obtain the report suggests he’s nervous about what Mueller found.

“It looks like the president … is concerned about that. He ought to live up to what he said earlier,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) “He ought to support the full release. None of that should be redacted. But clearly he’s concerned about that coming out. If he is feeling so confident about what [the report] says, then you would think he would urge its full release. But clearly he’s not. And you’d have to ask him why.”

“The president said he wanted it to be public, too,” added Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the Intelligence Committee. “So it’s not us being desperate, it’s him apparently thinking about re-trading a deal. Donald Trump re-trading a deal? Shocker.”

Trump initially celebrated the report’s conclusions, as summarized by Barr last week. But as Democrats in Congress have escalated their efforts to obtain Mueller’s report and evidence, the president is now indicating he has reservations about allowing his Justice Department to fork over the full report to lawmakers.

“There is no amount of testimony or document production that can satisfy Jerry Nadler or Shifty Adam Schiff,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning, naming two top House Democrats seeking the report. “It is now time to focus exclusively on properly running our great Country!”

In a letter to lawmakers last week, Barr referred to Trump’s public statements about his desire for the report to be released, insisting that he would not share the report with the White House in advance to allow Trump to claim executive privilege.

But Trump’s posture on Tuesday made Democrats even more skeptical that the president will not invoke executive privilege to block the release of certain parts of the Mueller report that might make him look bad.

“Remember — there was no vow not to assert executive privilege. The attorney general said he had no intention of saying it because he was relying on the president’s public statements that he didn’t need it,” Himes said. “But no, I’ve always been skeptical that the White House was not going to make an effort to redact embarrassing information.”

Trump separately singled out Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, for his opposition in the late 1990s to releasing grand jury information from Starr’s report on Clinton. Nadler has urged Barr to seek a court order to release grand jury information from the Mueller report.

“In 1998, Rep. Jerry Nadler strongly opposed the release of the Starr Report on Bill Clinton,” Trump tweeted. “No information whatsoever would or could be legally released. But with the NO COLLUSION Mueller Report, which the Dems hate, he wants it all. NOTHING WILL EVER SATISFY THEM!”

IMMIGRATION

Trump bewilders GOP allies on immigration ahead of border visit
By ANITA KUMAR, TED HESSON and BURGESS EVERETT
Nadler declined to comment on Trump’s attacks, but Daniel Schwarz, a spokesman for the Judiciary Committee, noted that Congress had already received Starr’s underlying evidence, and that Nadler was opposed to making such evidence public.

“Our expectation is that Attorney General Barr will be as forthcoming now as Mr. Starr was in 1998,” Schwarz said. “The attorney general should provide the full Mueller report to Congress, with the underlying materials, at which point we will be in a better position to understand what Special Counsel Mueller uncovered during his investigation.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders echoed Trump and said Democrats “will never be satisfied.”

“They’re sore losers,” she said of the Democrats, five months after they won back the House of Representatives from Republicans. “They lost in 2016. They lost because they tried to convince all of America of something we all knew was untrue — that the president had colluded with Russia.”

Anita Kumar contributed to this story.

© Tue Apr 02 17:20:24 EDT 2019 POLITICO LLC

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Trump’s most troubling characteristics were all on display during an event with the NATO secretary
Trump mistakenly said his father is from Germany, urged Congress “to get rid of judges,” and struggled with the word “origins.”
By Aaron Rupar on April 2, 2019 4:35 pm

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and President Donald Trump talk to reporters at the White House on April 2, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
During an Oval Office event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump either lied or got confused about where his father was born, admitted that closing the border with Mexico will be economically harmful to the US (but threatened to do it anyway), pushed a baseless conspiracy theory, and repeatedly struggled to say the word “origins.”

Oh, and he urged Congress to “get rid of judges” who are making it harder for his administration to summarily deport migrants — a position in tension with the idea that the United States is a nation of checks and balances that respects the rule of law.

Even by Trump’s standards, it was a troubling performance.

Trump began by threatening to close the border with Mexico as soon as this weekend, but urged Congress to “meet quickly and make a deal” before he has to do it.

“What we have to do is Congress has to meet quickly and make a deal. I could do it in 45 minutes,” he said. “We need to get rid of chain migration, we need to get rid of catch and release, and visa lottery, and we have to do something about asylum, and to be honest with you, we have to get rid of judges.”

Closing the border is a threat Trump has made on and off for months, and one he started making with renewed vigor last week out of frustration that Mexico isn’t able to stop every Central American migrant from reaching the US’s southern border. But in the wake of last November’s midterm election, Trump’s demand that Congress do his bidding ignores an inconvenient truth: Democrats now control the House and have no interest pursuing the draconian immigration policies he prefers.

Asked moments later if he has concerns that closing the border could be harmful to the US economy, Trump admitted that “sure, it will have a negative effect on the economy,” but added, “we’re going to have security in this country. That’s more important than trade.”

Trump’s comments were a complete reversal from last Friday, when he mistakenly argued that closing the border “will be a profit-making operation” because of the US’s trade deficit with Mexico. In fact, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell admits, closing the border would be economically disastrous. Not only that, but Trump’s position ignores the reality that immigrants — both documented and otherwise — commit crimes at lesser rates than native-born Americans.

Trump went on to baselessly accuse the governments of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala of conspiring to send migrant caravans toward America’s southern border.

“They don’t put their best people in these caravans,” Trump said. “We’re not going to have them in the United States.”

The rest of the press event didn’t get much better
When a reporter got around to asking Trump about NATO, the president launched into his usual talking points about how Germany doesn’t spend enough on defense. But in a ridiculous twist, Trump suggested he has warm feelings for the country because his father, Fred Trump, was born there.

“My father is German, was German,” Trump said. “Born in a very wonderful place in Germany.”

Trump was either lying or confused. Fred Trump was born in New York City.

Trump also promoted his new, as-of-yet-unspecified health care plan at the event: “We’re going to have a phenomenal health care. … We will be showing you at the appropriate time. It’s much better than Obamacare,” he said. He then concluded by deflecting a question about whether he’ll support the release of the Mueller report by accusing Obama-era intelligence officials of “treasonous” behavior.

But in the process, Trump repeatedly mangled the word “origins,” on three separate instances saying “oranges” instead.

Eventually, Trump was able to say that “people did things that were very, very bad for our country, and very, very illegal. And you could even say treasonous.” Reporters were then ushered out of the room.

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