SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China has suspended additional tariffs on some U.S. goods that were meant to be implemented on Dec. 15, the State Council’s customs tariff commission said on Sunday, after the world’s two largest economies agreed a “phase one” trade deal on Friday.
The deal, rumors and leaks over which have gyrated world markets for months, reduces some U.S. tariffs in exchange for what U.S. officials said would be a big jump in Chinese purchases of American farm products and other goods.
China’s retaliatory tariffs, which were due to take effect on Dec. 15, were meant to target goods ranging from corn and wheat to U.S. made vehicles and auto parts.
Other Chinese tariffs that had already been implemented on U.S. goods would be left in place, the commission said in a statement issued on the websites of government departments including China’s finance ministry.
“China hopes, on the basis of equality and mutual respect, to work with the United States, to properly resolve each other’s core concerns and promote the stable development of U.S.-China economic and trade relations,” it added.
Beijing has agreed to import at least $200 billion in additional U.S. goods and services over the next two years on top of the amount it purchased in 2017, the top U.S. trade negotiator said Friday.
A statement issued by the United States Trade Representative also on Friday said the United States would leave in place 25% tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Reporting by Brenda Goh and Steven Bian. Editing by Lincoln Feast.
Mr. Van Drew may already have Democratic challenger. Brigid Harrison, a politics professor at Montclair State University, had been publicly signaling that she was considering a primary challenge to Mr. Van Drew. Already, she has met with many of the county Democratic leaders in the district, as well as Stephen M. Sweeney, the powerful State Senate president.
Now, she says an announcement about her candidacy as a Democrat is imminent.
“At the end of the day, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, what you don’t like is a traitor,” Ms. Harrison said in an interview. “So now, in addition to prioritizing his political career over the direction of the country, Congressman Van Drew is also a traitor to his voters.”
Mr. Van Drew has long had a difficult relationship with many Democrats in his home state, based in part on his support for gun rights. But during his years in the state legislature, he was an important Democratic vote for the southern block of the state, so he was largely spared from intraparty threats.
Still, once he was elected to Congress, Mr. Van Drew began to stray more visibly from the state delegation. He skipped a delegation meeting in Washington with Gov. Philip D. Murphy, the lone lawmaker from New Jersey’s 13 Democratic representatives and senators to do so.
And since he has been publicly indicating he will not vote for impeachment, party leaders in New Jersey have intensified their opposition. Mr. Van Drew had reportedly sought a letter of support from Democratic county leaders to help prop him up after his impeachment vote, but was denied.
Instead, Mr. Suleiman, the powerful Atlantic County chairman, sent the stern letter to Mr. Van Drew.
“Atlantic County Democrats have a tough time as it is facing 100 years of ‘Boardwalk Empire;’ we cannot afford to have Democrats sit on their hands in a presidential year when we usually perform well,” he wrote in a letter first obtained by The New Jersey Globe.
Democrats looking for a health care fight in 2020 have found a key marker with the House drug pricing bill.
The House on Thursday passed the legislation on a largely party-line vote of 230-192. The measure, which would allow the government to negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, has already been declared “dead on arrival” in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Democrats took control of the House in 2018 by campaigning heavily on health care, and members want to repeat that success as they seek to keep control of the House and win the Senate in 2020.
Vulnerable Democrats in swing districts can point to the legislation as keeping a long-held promise to let Medicare negotiate drug prices. Members can show they are focused on kitchen table issues despite the chaos over impeachment.
The bill also gives moderate Democrats in Congress a chance to tout a health care issue that’s separate from the “Medicare for All” debate consuming the Democratic presidential primary.
“If a Democrat wins the White House and the party takes control of the Senate, a bill to allow the government to negotiate drug prices seems much more likely to pass than Medicare for All or even a public option,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health care policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Pelosi spent months in talks with Trump to try to get him to support the bill. During the 2016 campaign, Trump famously broke with his party and said he supported letting the government negotiate drug prices.
“When it comes time to negotiate the cost of drugs, we are going to negotiate like crazy,” Trump said in New Hampshire in early 2016.
The White House distanced itself from Pelosi’s bill and eventually came out against the legislation. Democrats think highlighting Trump’s lack of follow-through on negotiating drug prices for Medicare will be a strong line of attack.
Pelosi said her legislation “delivers on President Trump’s promise to the American people.”
No Democrats voted against the bill, after some last-minute modifications from Pelosi helped pave the way for progressive support.
“It wasn’t an easy process for Democrats. It takes a long time to get the agreement of everyone in the caucus, get a [Congressional Budget Office] score. But it was a big step, and it shows what Democrats would do if they regained power, and that’s important,” said Topher Spiro, vice president for health policy at the liberal Center for American Progress.
Democratic groups are backing up their members with some much-needed monetary support.
The House Democratic leadership PAC launched $2.5 million in ads backing vulnerable House Democrats and touting their votes on the drug bill. It’s the biggest purchase of the 2020 election cycle and is aimed at helping 16 Democrats in districts that are under a constant barrage of GOP attacks.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee also launched a five-figure digital campaign targeting vulnerable Republicans in swing districts.
The Democratic money is important, as Republicans groups are spending heavily to promote an alternative solution.
Immediately following Thursday’s vote, the conservative American Action Network (AAN) announced a $4 million ad campaign attacking the bill.
“Nancy Pelosi’s prescription drug bill is heartless, cruel, and Americans will pay for it with their lives. Her plan as passed today will set back the search for new cures and treatments to even the most debilitating and life-threatening diseases for generations,” AAN President Dan Conston said in a statement.
The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear three cases over President Donald Trump’s financial records next year, and scheduled arguments for its March session.
The arguments are likely to be the most high-profile of the term, and will test the court’s newly constituted conservative majority. A decision is expected by the end of June, in the midst of the 2020 presidential election.
The cases are the first in which Trump’s personal dealings have come before the top court since he became president.
Trump asked the justices to reverse three lower court rulings that would require his longtime accounting firm and two of his banks to hand over financial records to investigators.
The nine-member panel has a 5-4 conservative majority, including two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump is the first president in more than four decades not to voluntarily make his tax records public and has fought vigorously to shield his finances.
Two of the cases involve subpoenas issued by congressional committees led by Democrats in the House of Representatives. One involves an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance into potential violations of New York state law.
The cases raise separate legal questions, but all could turn on a sweeping view of presidential immunity put forward by Trump’s personal attorneys.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Jay Sekulow, the president’s private counsel, said in a statement that “we are pleased that the Supreme Court granted review of the President’s three pending cases.”
“These cases raise significant constitutional issues. We look forward to presenting our written and oral arguments,” he said.
The first case to reach the top court stems from an investigation launched by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining how the Trump Organization accounted for hush-money payments made to two women alleging affairs with Trump in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has denied the affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. His attorneys have argued that the president enjoys temporary immunity from such investigations while in office.
Vance’s office issued a subpoena to the president’s longtime accounting firm Mazars, seeking eight years of the president’s corporate and personal financial records, which the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld.
The second case involves a subpoena issued to Mazars by the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee, which has said that it is pursuing whether new ethics-in-government legislation is needed. That subpoena was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The third case involves subpoenas issued to the president’s lenders, Deutsche Bank and Capital One, by the House intelligence and financial services committees.
Those committees have argued that they are pursuing an investigation into foreign money laundering. The subpoenas seek information about both Trump and his family members. The 2nd Circuit upheld those subpoenas last week.
“We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election,” Wray told ABC in an interview that aired on Monday.
Yet several Republican senators, who will serve as jurors in a likely impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, have pushed the notion of Ukrainian meddling. The strategy, experts said, was to sow enough doubts about Ukraine’s actions to build a case that Trump’s pressure on the country stemmed from legitimate policy concerns, and was not part of a politically motivated shakedown, as Democrats contend.
“I don’t think they need to have a coherent counter-narrative as much as they need to say there’s reason for Trump to worry about corruption in Ukraine and that there’s a long history of corruption there,” said William Howell, a political scientist at the University of Chicago,
On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he believed there was “considerable evidence” that “Ukraine blatantly interfered in our election.”
Last month, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. raised eyebrows when he told Fox News Sunday that he didn’t know whether it was Russia or Ukraine that was behind the 2016 hack of Democratic emails.
“It could also be Ukraine,” Kennedy said, adding: “I’m not saying that I know one way or the other.”
Though he later backtracked on the suggestion that Ukraine might have been behind the email hack, Kennedy told CNN that when it came to 2016 interference in general, “there is a lot of evidence, proven and unproven, everybody’s got an opinion that Ukraine did try to interfere, along with Russia, and probably others, in the 2016 election.”
Trump’s dealings with Ukraine are at the center of two articles of impeachment – on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – that were approved Friday by the House Judiciary Committee. If the articles are adopted by the Democratic-led House, as is widely expected, the matter would go to the GOP-controlled Senate for a trial in January where a two-thirds majority would be required to remove Trump from office.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Fox News on Thursday that he will be in “total coordination” with the White House on the strategy for a trial and said he sees “no chance” the president would be removed.
Democrats have accused Trump of withholding a meeting and military aid from Ukraine to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations that would further his political interests.
During a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, Trump asked the Ukraine president to “do us a favor.” He urged Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Hunter once sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, and to look into allegations of Ukrainian election interference in 2016.
Such allegations have been pushed by Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in numerous media interviews. He has spent months trying to prod Ukraine to investigate the claims and traveled to Ukraine earlier this month.
Giuliani told USA TODAY that he has “compelling evidence of Ukrainians giving DNC and other [Democrats] dirty information” to influence the 2016 election.
Raising ‘questions’ about Ukraine
Several Republican senators have echoed Trump in saying someone should look into claims that Kyiv interfered in the 2016 election, but most have not gone as far as the president and Giuliani in alleging a widespread effort to intervene. Instead, many GOP senators have couched their comments by saying they have “questions” about Ukraine’s actions.
Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa have called for the release of records on whether former Democratic National Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa sought damaging information from Ukraine’s embassy on Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman.
“Contrary to the popular narrative in the ‘mainstream media’ that Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 election has been debunked, or ‘no evidence exists,’ there are many unanswered questions that have festered for years,” Johnson said in a press release announcing the request for documents.
Republicans have argued that Trump’s request for an investigation was driven by policy priorities, not by politics, and that his aim was to push Ukraine to root out corruption.
ButHowell criticized the willingness of Trump’s allies in Congress to give credence to the theory of Ukrainian interference.
“This is a party that is caught in the thrall of Trump,” Howell said, “and Trump is about to be impeached.”
Karen Finney, a veteran Democratic strategist who worked on Clinton’s 2016 campaign, said she believed the strategy was about confusing Americans who may not be closely following the impeachment inquiry.
“It also exemplifies the intellectually dishonest knots that Republicans are having to tie themselves into in order to defend the president,” she said.
CrowdStrike theory
Trump’s claims about Ukraine, now at the center of the impeachment inquiry, can be traced to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling.
Trump has long railed against the Mueller probe, which found that Moscow waged a “sweeping and systemic” interference campaign in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has also repeatedly downplayed the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia interfered.
Intelligence agencies concluded nearly three years ago that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the effort to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” according to a January 2017 report from the Director of National Intelligence. The report also found the Kremlin “developed a clear preference” for Trump.
The discredited theory that the president and Giuliani have repeatedly raised is the role of CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm that investigated the breach of the DNC’s computers in 2016.
“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…the server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump told Zelensky on the July 25 call.
But Trump has floated the possibility that Ukraine was behind the hack and framed Russia. He has also claimed – falsely – that CrowdStrike is owned by a wealthy Ukrainian who sought to cover up the crime by refusing to hand over a physical server to the FBI in its own investigation into the DNC hack. Trump has suggested that server is being concealed in Ukraine.
He repeated the claim during a Nov. 22 “Fox and Friends” interview.
“And I still want to see that server,” he said. “You know, the FBI has never gotten that server. That’s a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”
When pressed if he believed Ukraine was hiding a server, Trump said: “Well, that’s what the word is.”
CrowdStrike is a California-based company founded by American entrepreneur George Kurtz and Dmitri Alperovitch, a Russia-born U.S. citizen who spent all of his adult life in the United States and “has no connection to Ukraine,” according to the company.
DNC Communications Director Adrienne Watson said that not only was there more than one server, but none of the physical and cloud-based servers used in 2015 and 2016 is missing.
“All of the physical servers are accounted for, and anything to suggest otherwise has no basis in fact,” she said. “As we have publicly stated numerous times, we provided copies of all of the servers and related information that the FBI asked for to the FBI in 2016 and continued to cooperate with their investigations.”
Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins security studies professor, said investigators aren’t interested in the hardware, focusing instead on the adversaries’ command and control structure and how they move files out.
“The idea that you physically had an unplugged machine that would contain a smoking gun — that idea just makes no sense,” Rid said.
During the forensic investigation, CrowdStrike used a process called “imaging,” which includes creating a “byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives,” according to a company statement. Investigators also made copies of the hard drive’s memory, capturing evidence that could be lost in a reboot while also monitoring the network’s traffic.
Competing narrative
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Trump’s strategy in pushing the conspiracy theories on CrowdStrike is to provide a competing narrative.
“I don’t think anybody who is spouting these theories can coherently explain them and I think that’s exactly the point. It’s to confuse people and just kind of paint Ukraine as a corrupt place that needs someone to ride in on horseback and save,” said Jankowicz, who is writing a book titled, “How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict.”
Accusations of Ukrainian interference were floated as early as 2016 by Manafort, according to FBI testimony from Manafort’s former deputy Rick Gates.
Manafort is now in prison for concealing millions of dollars he earned from a once-secret lobbying deal he had with Ukraine’s former pro-Russia president.
Giuliani has accusedUkrainian officials of releasing damaging information on Manafort to the U.S. media to tarnish the Trump campaign.
Giuliani has questioned the credibility of the so-called “black ledger,” a document obtained by Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau that showed Manafort received millions in secret cash payments from former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort ultimately pleaded guilty to tax fraud for illegally routing that money to offshore accounts.
A 2017 Politico story has been widely cited by Republicans to back up their argument that Ukraine tried to help Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. While the story said individual Ukrainian government officials sought to undercut Trump by questioning his fitness for office, it also said there was “little evidence” of a top-down effort by Ukraine that resembled the Russian interference.
The story discussed efforts by Chalupa to seek damaging information from the Ukrainian embassy on Manafort.
“If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with,” Chalupa told Politico. “There were no documents given, nothing like that.”
While Chalupa described the embassy as helpful, Ukrainian embassy official Oksana Shulyar denied working with Chalupa or any reporters to get information on Trump or Manafort.
“We have never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort,” Shulyar said.
The DNC said it was not involved with any of her research.
‘Beyond dispute’
“The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016,” Fiona Hill, the former Russia adviser with the White House National Security Council, told the House Intelligence Committee at a hearing last month. “It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.”
In contrast to Trump and Giuliani, most Republican senators have steered clear of embracing the theory that the DNC hack originated in Ukraine. They also have emphasized that they do not dispute the finding that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
But several Republican senators have reinforced the theory of Ukrainian interference by suggesting there are “unanswered questions” about Kyiv’s actions that deserve to be investigated.
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah who often breaks with fellow Republicans when it comes to matters involving the president, rejected the theory that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
“I know that the leaders of other countries may be pulling for one candidate or another in our elections, but it’s one thing to pull for the candidate,” he said. “It’s another thing to interfere as Russia did.”
John Weaver, a longtime Republican strategist and vocal Trump critic, said promoting the Ukraine meddling narrative could backfire for GOP senators at the ballot box.
“They’re looking for any way out of passing the hard judgment on a corrupt president,” he said. “These actions are going to put the Senate at risk for Republicans.”
But Howell, the University of Chicago political scientist, said the strategy might work to the benefit of some Republican senators, given the increasingly populist tilt of the party.
“They’re raising concerns about procedure, they’re raising concerns about the Democratic party and they’re breathing a little bit of life into these conspiracy theories,” he said.
“Populism worldwide traffics in conspiracy theories so, in that sense, I’m not sure we should be all that surprised.”
Thomas Patterson, a Harvard University professor of government and the press who has written extensively on political disinformation, said that even though experts have debunked the theories about Ukraine interference, they could have a major impact not by convincing everyone but by sowing just enough doubt with just enough people.
“It’s just one more thing that gets out there and muddies the water and Trump is very good at muddying the waters,” he said. “You get enough people to believe it and it clouds people’s judgment.”
“The pot calling the kettle black is not something that we should do,” intoned Johnson, in an oblique reference to Gaetz’s own brushes with the law, including a 2008 bust for a charge of driving under the influence. He was arrested after refusing to submit to a Breathalyzer test, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “I don’t know what members, if any, have had any problems with substance abuse, been busted in DUI, I don’t know. But if I did, I wouldn’t raise it.”
BRUSSELS—Boris Johnson’s general election victory, and the likely departure of Britain from the European Union next month, will bring relief to most European governments: Now they can focus on other pressing issues facing the bloc.
Yet Brexit was a rare point of unity for the remaining 27 members and life beyond it could expose divisions among them. It isn’t clear, for example, how cohesive those left in the bloc can be as they confront issues after Britain’s departure—including negotiating new trade relations with the U.K.
All the Democratic presidential candidates slated to participate in next week’s debate have threatened to skip the event if an ongoing labor dispute forces them to cross picket lines on the university campus where the debate will be hosted.
A labor union says it will picket as Loyola Marymount University hosts Thursday’s sixth Democratic debate, and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders responded by tweeting they would not participate if that meant crossing it. Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer and Andrew Yang followed suit.
“The DNC should find a solution that lives up to our party’s commitment to fight for working people. I will not cross the union’s picket line even if it means missing the debate,” Warren tweeted.
Sanders tweeted: “I will not be crossing their picket line.” Biden tweeted: “We’ve got to stand together with @UNITEHERE11 for affordable health care and fair wages. A job is about more than just a paycheck. It’s about dignity.” The other candidates used Twitter to post similar sentiments.
Unite Here Local 11, the union behind the dispute, says it represents 150 cooks, dishwashers, cashiers and servers working on the Loyola Marymount campus. It says it has been in negotiations with a food service company since March for a collective bargaining agreement without reaching a resolution and “workers and students began picketing on campus in November to voice their concern for a fair agreement. The company abruptly canceled scheduled contract negotiations last week.”
“We had hoped that workers would have a contract with wages and affordable health insurance before the debate next week. Instead, workers will be picketing when the candidates come to campus,” Susan Minato, the co-president of Unite Here Local 11, said in the statement.
The Democratic National Committee, which organizes its party’s presidential debates, said it and school officials were not made aware of the issue until the union’s statement and it was looking into the matter.
Loyola Marymount said that it is not a party to the contract negotiations but that it had contacted the food services company involved, Sodexo, and encouraged it “to resolve the issues raised by Local 11.
“Earlier today, LMU asked Sodexo to meet with Local 11 next week to advance negotiations and solutions. LMU is not an agent nor a joint employer of Sodexo, nor of the Sodexo employees assigned to our campus,” the university said in a statement.
“LMU is proud to host the DNC presidential debate and is committed to ensuring that the university is a rewarding place to learn, live, and work.”
This is the second location site set to host the December debate. In October, the DNC announced it would not be holding a debate at the University of California, Los Angeles, because of “concerns raised by the local organized labor community” and was moving the event to Loyola Marymount.
WASHINGTON – A historic vote to impeach President Donald Trump is expected next week in the Democrat-led House of Representatives, a move likely to trigger a trial to remove the president from power early next year in the Republican-controlled Senate.
On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment – abuse of power and obstruction of Congress – moving the articles to a full House vote. A vote in the full House could happen Wednesday or Thursday, according to Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the chairman of the House Rules Committee.
Impeaching Trump equates to nothing more than approving formal charges against him, but is important because it requires the Senate to hold a trial over whether to convict the president of the charges. Impeachment also carries a historical weight because just two presidents in U.S. History – Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 – have been impeached. Richard Nixon resigned before the matter came to a full House vote.
But before the House moves to officially impeach Trump – and well before Senators get a crack at the case – a number of things must happen.
The first is approving the rules for the House vote:
The House vote
McGovern said the panel would meet Tuesday to debate the rules for the floor debate, such as how long debate will last and how many amendments – if any – will be allowed. The Rules Committee is smaller committee than Judiciary, with nine Democrats and four Republicans.
One of the most hotly debated points could focus on the lack of a Judiciary Committee hearing with witnesses chosen by Republicans. The absence of the hearing fuels Republican complaints the process is unfair and partisan. Such a hearing is promised in the House rules, but not the timing. Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., chose not to schedule one before voting.
The Rules Committee will also determine whether to allow votes on Republican amendments to the articles of impeachment on the floor. Democrats could easily block amendments with their majority on the panel. But a hint of what Republicans might propose is evident from five amendments proposed in the Judiciary Committee, such as attempts to remove the articles.
The abuse of power charge relates to Trump withholding first a White House meeting and then $391 million in military aid until Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky announced investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as a debunked allegation Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election.
Trump and congressional Republicans have dismissed the allegation because the president eventually met with Zelensky and released the aid without the announcement of investigations. But Democrats contend he released the aid only after the scheme became public.
The Trump administration directed aides and agencies to defy subpoenas for documents and testimony, although some officials still testified. The defiance is what led to the accusation of obstruction of Congress. Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said Trump’s refusal to cooperate with any congressional subpoena was worse than any president in history, including Nixon.
“Nobody can be a dictator,” Nadler said.
But Republicans argued the articles detailed no specific crimes.
“What we’re debating here, in my opinion, is the weakest case in history,” said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., former chairman of the committee who participated in four impeachments for former President Bill Clinton and three judges. “This bar is so low that what is happening is that a future president can be impeached for any disagreement.”
Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., said presidents have never been forced to comply with every congressional request of every subpoena. The results are often negotiated as part of the checks and balances between the branches, he said.
“There’s no evidence of any impeachable conduct with that,” Johnson said. “It’s very commonplace.”
Democrats control the House with a large enough majority to impeach Trump even if a few members vote no. The chamber has 233 Democrats, 197 Republicans and an independent, Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, who is expected to support impeachment. Four seats are vacant.
If the Democrats are successful in impeaching Trump, the Senate will hold a trial.
The Senate trial
The Senate would then hold a trial to determine whether to convict and remove Trump from office. Conviction and removal would require a two-thirds majority, which is considered unlikely in the Republican-led Senate.
Trump has indicated he would like a swift trial to vindicate himself and would like to call witnesses to undermine the whistleblower complaint about his July 25 call with Zelensky, which sparked the impeachment inquiry in September. White House lawyers are meeting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to negotiate details.
“I’ll do long or short. I’ll do whatever they want to do,” Trump said Friday. “It doesn’t matter.”
Trump continued to deny wrongdoing.
“It’s a witch hunt. It’s a sham. It’s a hoax. Nothing was done wrong. Zero was done wrong,” Trump said. “I think it’s a horrible thing to be using the tool of impeachment, which is supposed to be used in an emergency.”
McConnell said no decision has been made on whether to call witnesses for testimony on the Senate floor after the lawmakers hear opening arguments. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will preside over the trial, but McConnell expected Roberts to submit motions to the Senate for votes on issues such as whether to call witnesses, rather than make rulings himself.
House managers, lawmakers who have not yet been named, but who serve as prosecutors, will make their arguments. Trump’s lawyers will respond. Then McConnell said a majority of the Senate – 51 lawmakers – could vote to either call witnesses or decide that they’ve heard enough.
McConnell said the Senate is obligated to hold the trial, despite the expected outcome.
“I said I would be totally surprised if there were 67 senators who would remove the president,” McConnell said. “That remains my view.”
Democratic concerns about trial
Some House Democrats have voiced concerns about McConnell saying he is working closely with the White House about how to structure the trial. Senators serve essentially as a jury, but Democrats on the Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment are worried McConnell will make decisions favoring his fellow Republican, the president.
“To have the foreman of the jury, the person who sets all of the rules in the Senate for this trial, to come out and say he’s closely coordinating with the chief defendant, the White House, and that he has already decided that it’s not going to happen,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash. “I think that is an outrage, and the American people will think it’s an outrage as well.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said if the House sends articles of impeachment to the Senate, every senator will take an oath to render “impartial justice.”
“Making sure the Senate conducts a fair and honest trial that allows all the facts to come out is paramount,” Schumer said.
.
Contributing: Ledyard King, Christal Hayes, Nicholas Wu and Courtney Subramanian
The stock market’s reaction was tepid, to say the least.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Topline: Although the U.S. and China have finally agreed on an initial deal that’s expected to defuse the 19-month-long trade war and result in a rollback of both existing and scheduled tariffs, the stock market didn’t surge on the news. Instead, markets ended the day largely flat: The S&P 500 finished the day up by less than 0.008%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.012%.
Here’s why stocks didn’t make headway on Friday’s trade news, according to market experts:
The market may have already priced in expectations for an agreement prior to Friday: “Stocks already ran up 7% in just the past two months alone on the belief that a deal would be signed,” notes Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Independent Advisor Alliance.
Some experts remain wary: “The devil remains in the details,” points out Bankrate senior economic analyst Mark Hamrick. “We await further word on purported aspects of the agreement including purchases of U.S. farm goods, intellectual property protections, technology transfers and access to China’s financial sector.”
“Investors are right to be skeptical,” says Joseph Brusuelas, RSM chief economist. “There’s a limited framework to the deal, since both sides just wanted to agree and avoid the looming tariff deadline on December 15th.”
“Contrary to what many believed—and were told in news stories—there is no immediate tariff relief, just an agreement to eventually rollback tariffs later as phase two negotiations progress,” Zaccarelli points out.
“I’m still suspicious of a major rollback on existing tariffs,” Nicholas Sargen, economic consultant at Fort Washington Investment Advisors, similarly argues. “Don’t rule out a selective rollback, since Trump needs to maintain bargaining power—he has to keep his powder dry.”
Crucial quote: “Is this deal enough to give the US economy an added lift? I doubt it because to get that added lift we need businesses to ramp up capital spending—and they’re going to stay on the sidelines until there’s greater clarity and less uncertainty,” Sargen says. “If trade uncertainty was behind us, we’d have gotten a bigger pop in the market.”
What to watch for: “Both sides need to figure out translation and legal framework first—and if they don’t come to an agreement on that this deal could fall apart very quickly,” Brusuelas says. “We’ll have to see if it survives the weekend and into next week.”
Key background: Officials from both sides have been working tirelessly to hammer out a deal ahead of the looming December 15 tariff deadline. Reports came in on Thursday that negotiators had agreed to terms, and President Trump signed off on them later in the day. Wall Street cheered the good news, sending the stock market to new record highs, though the market’s reaction was notably more tempered on Friday, despite further confirmations that an agreement had been reached.
The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear three cases over President Donald Trump’s financial records next year, and scheduled arguments for its March session.
The arguments are likely to be the most high-profile of the term, and will test the court’s newly constituted conservative majority. A decision is expected by the end of June, in the midst of the 2020 presidential election.
The cases are the first in which Trump’s personal dealings have come before the top court since he became president.
Trump asked the justices to reverse three lower court rulings that would require his longtime accounting firm and two of his banks to hand over financial records to investigators.
The nine-member panel has a 5-4 conservative majority, including two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump is the first president in more than four decades not to voluntarily make his tax records public and has fought vigorously to shield his finances.
Two of the cases involve subpoenas issued by congressional committees led by Democrats in the House of Representatives. One involves an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance into potential violations of New York state law.
The cases raise separate legal questions, but all could turn on a sweeping view of presidential immunity put forward by Trump’s personal attorneys.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Jay Sekulow, the president’s private counsel, said in a statement that “we are pleased that the Supreme Court granted review of the President’s three pending cases.”
“These cases raise significant constitutional issues. We look forward to presenting our written and oral arguments,” he said.
The first case to reach the top court stems from an investigation launched by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining how the Trump Organization accounted for hush-money payments made to two women alleging affairs with Trump in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has denied the affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. His attorneys have argued that the president enjoys temporary immunity from such investigations while in office.
Vance’s office issued a subpoena to the president’s longtime accounting firm Mazars, seeking eight years of the president’s corporate and personal financial records, which the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld.
The second case involves a subpoena issued to Mazars by the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee, which has said that it is pursuing whether new ethics-in-government legislation is needed. That subpoena was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The third case involves subpoenas issued to the president’s lenders, Deutsche Bank and Capital One, by the House intelligence and financial services committees.
Those committees have argued that they are pursuing an investigation into foreign money laundering. The subpoenas seek information about both Trump and his family members. The 2nd Circuit upheld those subpoenas last week.
Boris Johnson’s big election victory this week drove another nail into the coffin of the brand of conservative politics Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher first rode to power four decades ago.
As Mr. Johnson’s decisive win in a hotly contested national election illustrated, the conservative movement in the West now has become markedly more populist and nationalist, and appeals to a distinctly more working-class constituency. Fiscal restraint, once a cardinal tenet of conservatism, matters less; rewriting the rules that have…
The talks are complicated, with a lot of variables: how long the trial will last; how much time each side will get to present its case; whether any witnesses will be called, and if so, how many; how documentary evidence will be handled; and so on. There are questions about who will get to speak and where people will sit.
But the central question appears to be whether witnesses will testify. Mr. Trump has said he wants to call Hunter Biden, as well as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who led the fact-finding phase of the impeachment inquiry.
The McConnell camp worries that could open a “Pandora’s box,” as one person close to the senator said, clearing the way for other witnesses and lines of questioning that could reflect poorly on the president. But some House Republicans say it is important to do so.
“I understand their desire to just get it behind us, but the country needs to hear what a farce this was,” Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said Friday. “They really need to bring in witnesses. They are the chance to clean this mess up.”
The Senate has specific rules, revised in 1986, governing impeachment trials. Among other things, once the House adopts articles of impeachment and presents them to the Senate, the Senate must take them up at 1 p.m. the next day (unless it is a Sunday) and consider them six days a week (except Sundays) until it renders a judgment.
The chief justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial, but the format is left to the Senate itself, which can proceed in several ways: The Republican and Democratic leaders may strike an agreement on one or more resolutions governing the proceedings, or, failing that, the resolutions may be adopted by a simple majority of 51 senators. Or there can be no resolutions at all, and senators can introduce motions as they go.
The Supreme Court said on Friday that it will hear three cases over President Donald Trump’s financial records next year, and scheduled arguments for its March session.
The arguments are likely to be the most high-profile of the term, and will test the court’s newly constituted conservative majority. A decision is expected by the end of June, in the midst of the 2020 presidential election.
The cases are the first in which Trump’s personal dealings have come before the top court since he became president.
Trump asked the justices to reverse three lower court rulings that would require his longtime accounting firm and two of his banks to hand over financial records to investigators.
The nine-member panel has a 5-4 conservative majority, including two Trump appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Trump is the first president in more than four decades not to voluntarily make his tax records public and has fought vigorously to shield his finances.
Two of the cases involve subpoenas issued by congressional committees led by Democrats in the House of Representatives. One involves an investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance into potential violations of New York state law.
The cases raise separate legal questions, but all could turn on a sweeping view of presidential immunity put forward by Trump’s personal attorneys.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC. Jay Sekulow, the president’s private counsel, said in a statement that “we are pleased that the Supreme Court granted review of the President’s three pending cases.”
“These cases raise significant constitutional issues. We look forward to presenting our written and oral arguments,” he said.
The first case to reach the top court stems from an investigation launched by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is examining how the Trump Organization accounted for hush-money payments made to two women alleging affairs with Trump in the months before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump has denied the affairs with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. His attorneys have argued that the president enjoys temporary immunity from such investigations while in office.
Vance’s office issued a subpoena to the president’s longtime accounting firm Mazars, seeking eight years of the president’s corporate and personal financial records, which the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld.
The second case involves a subpoena issued to Mazars by the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee, which has said that it is pursuing whether new ethics-in-government legislation is needed. That subpoena was upheld by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The third case involves subpoenas issued to the president’s lenders, Deutsche Bank and Capital One, by the House intelligence and financial services committees.
Those committees have argued that they are pursuing an investigation into foreign money laundering. The subpoenas seek information about both Trump and his family members. The 2nd Circuit upheld those subpoenas last week.
This is a widget area - If you go to "Appearance" in your WP-Admin you can change the content of this box in "Widgets", or you can remove this box completely under "Theme Options"
