One day after the Senate Majority Leader proclaimed the Russia investigation, “Case closed” in a speech on the Senate floor – and hours after President Trump declared the same on Twitter – multiple news organizations reported Wednesday that the Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a subpoena for additional testimony by Donald Trump Jr. on the Russia probe, a surprise action by a committee controlled by Republicans in the Senate.
News of the Trump Jr. subpoena emerged just as the House Judiciary Committee was voting on Wednesday to find Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over the full Mueller Report – as it was a sharp reminder that while the President has declared the Russia investigation to be over, it is still going forward, even in the GOP-controlled Senate.
The reported subpoena drew a rebuke from the top Republican in the U.S. House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
“It’s time to move on,” McCarthy said, echoing the mantra of GOP leaders and the White House.
It was not immediately clear why the Senate Intelligence Committee – which has already questioned the President’s son – would want Trump Jr. back for more Q&A.
While Trump Jr. has testified multiple times before Congress, the Mueller Report showed that the Special Counsel’s office never interviewed him during the Russia probe.
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On page 125 of the Mueller Report, investigators said during the review of the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that Trump Jr. “declined to be interviewed” by the Special Counsel.
On page 317 of the Mueller Report, there was a redaction dealing with Trump Jr., which some experts believe is also about the inability of a grand jury to hear testimony from the President’s son.
Trump Jr. proclaimed his vindication as the redacted version of the Mueller Report was being released in April:
While the Senate Intelligence Committee was making news about Trump Jr., the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday added to the pressure by Democrats on Attorney General William Barr, as that panel joined the House Judiciary Committee in issuing a subpoena for the full Mueller Report, along with counter-intelligence information involved in the investigation.
“DOJ has responded to our requests with silence and defiance,” said panel chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). “Congress needs the material. We will not be obstructed.”
Just as Republicans said it was time to ‘move on,’ the refrain from Democrats was that the Trump White House and the Justice Department were engaging in a pattern of obstruction against legitimate oversight by the Congress.
“The Attorney General of the United States is stonewalling,” said Rep. Ted Deutch (R-FL).
But Republicans were having none of that.
“Democrats need to get over it,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).
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Denver voters have narrowly approved a ballot initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. The ordinance effectively bars the city from criminally prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them.
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Denver voters have narrowly approved a ballot initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. The ordinance effectively bars the city from criminally prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them.
Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images
Denver voters narrowly approved a grassroots ballot initiative to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms, commonly referred to as psychedelic mushrooms.
What appeared to be a failed effort on the evening of Tuesday’s referendum made an unexpected comeback the following afternoon, when Denver election officials released the final count. It showed a slim majority of 50.56% voted in favor of ordinance 301.
The action doesn’t legalize psilocybin mushrooms, but effectively bars the city from criminally prosecuting or arresting adults 21 or older who possess them. In the ballot language, adults can even grow the fungus for personal use and be considered a low priority for Denver police. The changes could take effect as soon as next year.
What happened in Denver may be the start of a much larger movement, which seeks safe access to psilocybin for its purported medicinal value. Supporters point to research, suggesting psilocybin is not addictive and causes few ER visits compared to other illegal drugs. Ongoing medical research shows it could be a groundbreaking medicine for treatment-resistant depression and to help curb nicotine addiction.
In Iowa, a Republican lawmaker recently proposed two bills to remove the drug from the state’s list of controlled substances. And in Oregon and California, campaigns are working to get similar issues on the ballot for the 2020 elections.
Kevin Matthews, director of the Denver campaign, often recounted his personal experience of using mushrooms to treat what he described as a crippling depression. He told NPR that the results from the Denver voteproves society’s perception of psychedelics has changed.
“Our victory today is a clear signal to the rest of the country that Americans are ready for a conversation around psilocybin,” he said.
Officials with the DEA office in Denver said they will continue prosecuting cases of psilocybin possession and trafficking. Under federal law, it remains a Schedule 1 drug that’s considered to have “no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
24 Democrats voted yes and 16 Republicans voted no to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt.
In yet another dramatic escalation in the ongoing battle between House Democrats and the Trump administration, the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed the Justice Department for Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s full, unredacted report and the underlying evidence.
The subpoena comes hours after the House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for not providing the same materials. Republicans have maintained that the report contains sensitive grand jury materials that must be redacted by law, at least for now.
The intelligence committee subpoena ostensibly requires Barr to produce the documents by May 15.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and the top Republican on the committee, California Rep. Devin Nunes, have asked for the unredacted Mueller report for several weeks.
Schiff said in a statement that the Justice Department “has repeatedly failed to respond, refused to schedule any testimony, and provided no documents responsive to our legitimate and duly authorized oversight activities.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., arrives for a Democratic Caucus meeting in Washington back in March. Schiff, the focus of Republicans’ post-Mueller ire, says Mueller’s conclusion would not affect his own committee’s counterintelligence probes. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
“As both the special counsel and the Department of Justice have recognized, the Congress has a vital constitutional role in evaluating misconduct by the executive branch, including the president, and to assess and refine laws that address the ‘sweeping and systematic’ invasion of our democracy by Russia,” Schiff said. “We therefore need these materials in order to do our job.
“The department’s stonewalling is simply unacceptable.”
Schiff concluded: “The department repeatedly pays lip service to the importance of a meaningful accommodation process, but it has only responded to our efforts with silence or outright defiance. Today, we have no choice but to issue a subpoena to compel their compliance. If the department continues to ignore or rejects our requests, we will enforce our request in Congress and, if necessary, the courts.”
Meanwhile, New York Democrat Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, said the full House will soon vote on the panel’s recommendation to hold Barr in contempt.
The committee’s 24-16 vote on contempt for Barr was along party lines and came after hours of debate. Ahead of voting, the White House invoked executive privilege, claiming the right to block lawmakers from seeing the full document.
Nadler called the executive privilege claim an “assertion of tyrannical power by the president” that “cannot stand.”
Nadler additionally characterized the situation as a “constitutional crisis,” although he did not explain what exactly had occurred that would have defeated existing constitutional safeguards and mechanisms. It was also unclear how House Democrats could enforce any contempt vote.
Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec, on the other hand, said it was disappointing that members of Congress “have chosen to engage in such inappropriate political theatrics.”
She added that Barr made “extraordinary efforts” to provide Congress and the public with information about Mueller’s work.
South Dakota Republican Sen. John Thune says House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler’s comments are hyperbolic.
In searing, no-holds-barred remarks ahead of the contempt vote, House Judiciary Committee Republican Jim Jordan charged at Wednesday’s explosive hearing that Democrats were out to “destroy” Barr as a way to derail the Justice Department’s ongoing review of alleged misconduct by the intelligence community.
Jordan, R-Ohio, asserted that Barr was legally required to withhold portions of Mueller’s report on Russian meddling in U.S. politics.
Democrats, Jordan said, effectively put Barr in an unwinnable position: He could either release the full Mueller report in violation of the law and federal procedure, or keep the redactions and face a partisan contempt proceeding.
“Bill Barr is following the law, and what’s his reward?” Jordan asked toward the beginning of a hearing on whether to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. “Democrats are going to hold him in contempt.”
Barr was set to testify before the House panel earlier this month, following his remarks before the Senate, but pulled out. Said to be at issue: Dems’ insistence that committee staff — rather than members of Congress — ask the questions. That brouhaha, Jordan suggested, was a cynical sideshow designed to mask Democrats’ intentions.
“I don’t think today is actually about getting information,” Jordan continued. “I don’t think it’s about getting the unredacted Mueller report. I don’t think last week’s hearing was actually about having staff question the attorney general. I think it’s all about trying to destroy Bill Barr because Democrats are nervous he’s going to get to the bottom of everything. He’s going to find out how and why this investigation started in the first place.”
Fox News’ Brooke Singman, Mike Emanuel, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The father of a Colorado teenager who died protecting classmates from a school shooter said he had actually discussed with his son what to do if he was ever confronted by a gunman.
“You don’t have to be the hero,” John Castillo told NBC News on Wednesday, recalling his words to his son, Kendrick Castillo.
But the younger Castillo, who hoped to study electrical engineering in college, rejected that advice, telling his dad he wouldn’t think twice about acting to save others if ever face-to-face with an armed intruder.
“‘You raised me this way. You raised me to be a good person. That’s what I’m doing,'” John Castillo quoted his slain son as saying.
Kendrick Castillo’s classmates said the 18-year-old lunged at one of the shooters at STEM School Highlands Ranch in suburban Denver on Tuesday, taking fatal gunfire — but giving others the precious moments they needed to take cover.
“That’s when Kendrick lunged at him, and he shot Kendrick,” classmate Nui Giasolli told TODAY on Wednesday, “giving all of us enough time to get underneath our desks, to get ourselves safe, and to run across the room to escape.”
Giasolli said Kendrick Castillo, along with classmates Jackson Gregory and Lucas Albertoni, all engaged the shooter and likely saved her life.
“I think I wouldn’t be standing here right now, I think I wouldn’t be able to tell the stories for how brave Kendrick was, how brave Jackson and Lucas and everybody were because they made that choice to sacrifice themselves so that all of us could go home that night,” Giasolli said.
Friend and classmate Kevin Cole said it didn’t surprise him at all when he learned Kendrick Castillo put himself into the line of fire.
“Kendrick was one of the nicest people at that school by far,” Cole said. “He always helped others whether he knew them or not. He didn’t have a secret motive … It didn’t matter if he knew them personally, if they were new students he was always that person who was there to help.”
Cole fondly recalled how Kendrick Castillo was always helping him with their shared interest of robotics programming.
“And he helped me learn Javascript. This was all back in ninth grade, so many years ago,” Cole said. “And he still hasn’t changed to this day.”
Kendrick Castillo was fatally shot at a STEM School in Highlands Ranch, Colorado.John Castillo / via Facebook
Distraught dad John Castillo said he can’t fathom how life will go on without his teenage son.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him in our lives,” John Castillo said. “It’s never going to be the same.”
He added: “I don’t know why this happened to such a good kid.”
Both of Kendrick’s parents work for hotels, his dad is an engineer who maintains heating systems for Marriott properties, and his mom, Maria Castillo, an employee at a Ritz-Carlton. A lack of material wealth never seemed to bother the youngster, his dad said.
The young man’s family was seated in the front row, just behind the prosecutor’s table, at suspect Devon Erickson’s initial count appearance Wednesday afternoon. As they sobbed, members of the community who were also in the court hugged them.
“We raised him to be selfless,” John Castillo said. “He never saw that having stuff, being wealthy was important.”
The father visited some of the wounded at the hospital following Tuesday’s shooting.
“I’m so happy the other kids were safe. One kid told me that, ‘He jumped up and charged him, he saved our lives,'” John Castillo said, lamenting how close his 12th-grade son came to graduation. “He only had three days left of school.”
David K. Li is a breaking news reporter for NBC News.
WASHINGTON – The Senate Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed Donald Trump Jr., according to a published report.
The subpoena is in relation to Russia investigation matters, Axios reports.
The move will pit a Republican-led congressional committee – chaired by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) – against the Republican White House. This also marks the first time one of the president’s children has been handed a subpoena.
While special counsel Robert Mueller was conducting his investigation, committees in both the House and Senate were carrying out their own.
While the House Intelligence Committee’s probe broke down due to partisan bickering between committee leaders Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation’s bipartisan spirit has remained intact between Burr and ranking member, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)
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Kendrick Castillo, 18, was killed in the shooting at his school
A teenager died in a shooting at a Colorado high school – days before his graduation – while charging one of the attackers, his classmates say.
Eighteen-year-old Kendrick Castillo was the only fatality in Tuesday’s assault allegedly by two students near Denver.
Eight other pupils were injured before the assailants were arrested.
The attack took place just 8km (5 miles) from Columbine High School, the site of one of the country’s most notorious shootings 20 years ago.
America’s latest school shooting unfolded at the STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – School Highlands Ranch in an affluent suburb of Denver.
Image copyright The Denver Post via Getty Images
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A school staff member comforts a child after the shooting
‘I wish he had gone and hid’
Classmate Nui Giasolli told US media she was in her British literature class when one of the suspects turned up late and pulled out a gun.
Kendrick lunged at the gunman, “giving us all enough time to get underneath our desks to get ourselves safe, to run across the room to escape”, she said.
He said it was not surprising to him that Kendrick was said to have charged one of the shooters as they entered a classroom.
“I wish he had gone and hid,” said Mr Castillo, “but that’s not his character.
“His character is about protecting people, helping people.”
Kendrick was an only child. Mr Castillo said he and his wife are “in a haze”.
The 18-year-old was passionate about science and robotics.
He was going to study at a local college in the autumn, planning to major in engineering, his father said.
Another STEM senior, Brendan Bialy, is also being praised as a hero for helping subdue one of the gunmen.
Image copyright Brendan Bialy/Instagram
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Brendan tackled one of the gunmen
Brendan is a recruit for the US Marine Corps but was not trained specifically on active shooter protocols.
Marine Capt Michael Maggitti said in a statement that Brendan’s admirable courage “resulted in the safety and protection of his teachers and fellow classmates”.
Kendrick and Brendan are not the only examples of student heroism recently during a shooting.
Last month at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, a 21-year-old student, Riley Howell, died while tackling a gunman, buying classmates crucial moments to escape, said police.
Image copyright Facebook, courtesy of Devon Erickson
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Devon Erickson, 18, has been named as one of the suspects
How did the Colorado shooting unfold?
Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock said the attack happened just before 14:00 local time (20:00 GMT) on Tuesday.
He told reporters the two attackers came in through an entrance that did not have a metal detector and attacked students in two locations.
Both suspects were pupils at the charter school.
There were around 1,800 students on campus at the time of the attack, Sheriff Spurlock said.
Officers arrived on scene within minutes.
“We did struggle with the suspects to take them into custody,” the sheriff said.
Media captionHow much do US students fear school shootings?
What is known about the suspects?
Police initially misidentified the younger one – a juvenile not named by police – as male.
“We originally thought the juvenile was a male by appearance,” Sheriff Spurlock said.
He declined to comment on local media reports that the suspect is transgender and transitioning from female to male.
The other suspect has been identified by police as 18-year-old Devon Erickson.
He made his first court appearance on Wednesday, facing one count of first-degree murder and 29 of attempted first-degree murder.
The defendant hung his head as he sat between two lawyers.
Image copyright Reuters/Courtesy Shreya Nallapati
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Students and staff wait outside near the STEM School during the shooting
The sheriff said it is not yet clear if anyone was deliberately targeted. Search warrants have been issued for both suspects’ homes.
One student at the school told CBS News Mr Erickson had talked about inflicting harm and sadness.
“I always thought he was just messing around and stuff, but sometimes he did hint at it here and there,” Michael Schwartz said.
One parent, named in local media as Fernando Montoya, said his 17-year-old son was shot three times and wounded.
“He said a guy pulled a pistol out of a guitar case and started to shoot,” Mr Montoya told ABC affiliate Denver 7.
Josh Dutton, 18, told AP news agency he used to be friends with Mr Erickson at a former school but had not seen him in four years.
He said he bumped into Mr Erickson, who was wearing all black, at a railway station on Sunday and he was much thinner and did not seem interested in talking.
The president goes on the defense on Twitter after the New York Times reports on his ‘decade in the red’; Kevin Corke reports from the White House.
The New York Times no doubt considers it quite a coup to have obtained and published President Trump’s tax return information from 1985 to 1994. But doing so violated Trump’s right under federal law to the confidentiality of his tax returns.
The Times – which reported that Trump’s businesses lost $1.17 billion during the 10-year period – has no more right to Trump’s tax returns than it has to mine or those of any of you reading these words.
Confidentiality, as the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held in 1991 in U.S. v. Richey, is essential to “maintaining a workable tax system.”
Taxpayer privacy is “fundamental to a tax system that relies on self-reporting” since it protects “sensitive or otherwise personal information,” said then-Judge (now Supreme Court Justice) Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1986 in another case when she served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of The New York Times story, tax returns themselves, as well as tax return information such as these IRS transcripts (which are a summary of the tax returns), are protected from disclosure by federal law.
Federal law – 26 U.S.C. §7213(a)(1) – makes it a felony for any federal employee to disclose tax returns or “return information.” Infractions are punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine as high as $250,000 under the Alternative Fines Act (18 U.S.C. §3571).
Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of The New York Times story, tax returns themselves, as well as tax return information such as these IRS transcripts (which are a summary of the tax returns), are protected from disclosure by federal law. And this provision applies to private individuals as well as government employees, a fact that should be considered by the New York Times’ source.
According to the newspaper, it did not actually obtain Trump’s tax returns but “printouts from his official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, from someone who had legal access to them.”
The Times quotes a lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, as saying that the tax information in the story is “demonstrably false” and that IRS transcripts, particularly from the days before electronic filing, are “notoriously inaccurate.” However, that claim is disputed by a former IRS employee now at the liberal Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
The president tweeted Wednesday in response to the Times story: “Real estate developers in the 1980’s & 1990’s, more than 30 years ago, were entitled to massive write offs and depreciation which would, if one was actively building, show losses and tax losses in almost all cases. Much was non monetary. Sometimes considered ‘tax shelter,’ … you would get it by building, or even buying. You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes….almost all real estate developers did – and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport. Additionally, the very old information put out is a highly inaccurate Fake News hit job!”
Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of The New York Times story, tax returns themselves, as well as tax return information such as these IRS transcripts (which are a summary of the tax returns), are protected from disclosure by federal law. If the newspaper obtained this information from an employee of the IRS, that employee will be in big trouble if he or she is identified.
Could the editors and reporters at the New York Times be prosecuted for publishing this information?
Section (a)(3) of the law makes it a felony for any person who receives an illegally disclosed tax return or return information to publish that return or that information. But it’s unknown if the bar on publication by a media organization could survive a First Amendment challenge.
What we do know is that in previous incidents, the government did not attempt to prosecute the publisher of tax return information. In 2014, the IRS agreed to pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 to settle a lawsuit after an IRS clerk illegally disclosed the organization’s tax return.
The clerk gave the tax return to Matthew Meisel, a former employee of Bain & Company, who gave it to the Human Rights Campaign (a political opponent of the National Organization for Marriage).
The tax return was then posted on the HRC website and published by the Huffington Post. Although the IRS paid to settle the lawsuit, none of the individuals or organizations involved in the illegal disclosure and publication were prosecuted.
If such a prosecution were attempted, there is no doubt that a First Amendment challenge would be filed.
The courts would then have to answer an important question: Are the interests of the government in an effective tax system and that of citizens in maintaining the confidentiality of their financial information outweighed by the First Amendment right of the press, and by and the public’s interest in obtaining financial information on elected officials?
In the midst of this illegal disclosure to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced Monday that he would not comply with a demand by the House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass, to provide the committee with copies of tax returns filed by Trump and eight of his companies for the last six years.
Mnuchin sent a letter to Neal telling him that “the Supreme Court has held that the Constitution requires that Congressional information demands must reasonably serve a legitimate legislative purpose.”
The Treasury secretary is correct. Numerous court decisions hold that legislative investigations must have a legitimate legislative purpose. Mnuchin says that Neal’s request “lacks” such a legitimate purpose.
The court decisions supporting Mnuchin’s decision include the 1957 decision in Watkins v. U.S., in which the Supreme Court told the House Un-American Activities Committee that “there is no congressional power to expose for the sake of exposure” the “private affairs of individuals.”
Rep. Neal has claimed that the legislative purpose of getting the Trump tax returns is to examine how the IRS audits presidents. But as Trump’s legal counsel has pointed out, Neal didn’t ask for the tax returns of any other presidents and hasn’t asked any questions of any kind about IRS policy and procedures for such audits.
Mnuchin tells Neal in his letter that he is willing to provide the congressman with complete information on “how the IRS conducts mandatory examinations of Presidents, as provided by the Internal Revenue Manual.”
If examining how the IRS audits presidents is really Neal’s legislative purpose – as opposed to simply wanting to expose anything embarrassing the committee finds in Trump’s tax returns – IRS information on its policies and procedures would be the only information the House committee would need.
So the Treasury Department has put House Democrats in check for now. It will probably be up to the courts to see who achieves checkmate when it comes to the Trump’ tax returns.
Now the interests of protecting the privacy of taxpayers warrants the opening of a government investigation to find the leaker who provided the Trump tax information to The New York Times.
The IRS and the U.S. Justice Department should investigate how this disclosure happened, find out who did it, and prosecute anyone who violated the law.
The president speaks at a Make America Great Again rally.
President Trump announced Wednesday night his administration would allocate $448 million in federal aid to communities in Florida affected by last year’s Category 5 Hurricane Michael, all while blasting Democrats standing in the way of his policies, at a raucous “Make America Great Again” rally in Panama City Beach.
“In the wake of the terrible storm, this extraordinary community pulled together and showed the world your unbreakable spirit,” Trump told supporters. “Today, I’m doing the most allowed by law to support the people of Florida. Because of the severity of the storm — Category 5 — we will have the federal government pay for 90 percent of the cost in many circumstances.”
The White House has blamed “Democrat obstruction” for a stoppage in recovery work, with about 120 projects being deferred. The president’s opposition to more hurricane aid for Puerto Rico has sparked a standoff with congressional Democrats that has blocked some assistance to the island and elsewhere, including the Florida Panhandle.
“The money is coming immediately,” the president added. “No games, no gimmicks, no delays, we’re just doing it.”
The president repeated his claim that Puerto Rico had received $91 billion to help it recover from 2017’s Hurricane Maria, which he called “the most money we’ve ever given to anybody. We’ve never given $91 billion to a state. We gave Puerto Rico $91 billion … and they don’t like me.”
President Trump speaks at Make America Great Again rally in Panama City Beach, Florida.
Producing a bar graph printout from his suit coat pocket, Trump showed the amount of aid given to Puerto Rico compared to other disaster-hit states. “I didn’t want to spend on a big board because that costs the government too much money,” he joked before complaining that leaders on the island territory “want more money. They got $91 billion, the largest amount of money ever given for a hurricane to a state … and that’s the way it is.”
“I think that the people of Puerto Rico are very grateful to Donald Trump for what we’ve done for them,” the president said. “That was a bad storm.” The White House has said the $91 billion figure includes about $50 billion in expected future disaster disbursements that could span decades, along with $41 billion already approved. Actual aid to Puerto Rico has amounted to about $11 billion so far.
In response to the president’s remarks, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., issued a statement accusing Senate Republicans of being “more committed to hurting our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico than healing communities everywhere.
“Meanwhile, the President has doubled down on Republicans’ callousness, deliberately delaying assistance payments to Puerto Rico and inflicting more needless suffering on the Americans who are still reeling from his Administration’s disastrous response to the hurricanes,” Pelosi added. “And so, hard-hit communities from the Florida panhandle to the Midwest are stuck waiting for the GOP-controlled Senate to pass a bill to help them. We are now just weeks away from another hurricane season and Republicans continue to delay and play politics. When disaster strikes, all Americans deserve to know that their government is there for them.”
That vote came after the president invoked executive privilege in order to prevent lawmakers from seeing the full unredacted report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian activities during the 2016 election.
Trump slammed Democrats in his speech for wasting time and resources on the Russia investigation, which he said led to nothing.
“Instead of wasting time, energy, taxpayer dollars on partisan stunts, hoaxes and witch hunts, Democrats should be focused on building up our country,” the president said. “No collusion, no obstruction, no anything … Two years on a witch hunt, almost $40 million, 20 Trump haters … after two years, nothing!”
Mueller’s report concluded that the two-year-long investigation into the Trump campaign found no evidence of collusion between Trump’s associates and the Russian government. The report did not, however, come to a conclusion on the separate question of whether Trump obstructed justice as president. House Democrats have subpoenaed the full unredacted report, as well as the underlying evidence Mueller used to come to his conclusions, but the Department of Justice has denied those requests.
“It is a disgrace. We have to focus on infrastructure, we have to focus on lowering medical prices and medicine, always focus on our military and our vets, which we’ve done,” the president said. “It’s time to stop this nonsense.”
Trump has said the Democrats’ attempts to see the full report were merely an effort to damage him politically ahead of next year’s election. The administration also has rejected efforts by Democrat-led House committees to investigate Trump’s business dealings or tax returns as well as the West Wing’s security clearance procedure.
The president took several shots at rival Democrats in the 2020 White House race Wednesday night, calling them “some real beauties” and mock-pleading: “Let’s just pick somebody, please, and let’s start this thing.” He joked that he would like to see South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg negotiating trade deals with China, saying, “That will be great.”
Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist says taking away President Trump’s tax law would mean higher taxes for the average family.
“We have a choice between Sleepy Joe [Biden] and Crazy Bernie [Sanders], and I’ll take any of them,” said Trump at another point in the rally, before adding: “Democrats are now the party of high taxes, high crime, open borders, late-term abortion, witch hunts and delusions. The Republican Party is the party for all Americans. We want to make America great again, that’s what we’re doing.”
Trump also highlighted the American economy, calling it “the envy of the world.”
“Our growth number came in for the first quarter, which is almost always the lowest quarter of the year historically, 3.2 percent, crushing expectations,” he said.
The president added that since the election, his administration has created nearly 6 million new jobs, including 500,000 manufacturing jobs and nearly 700,000 construction jobs. Trump said had he promised those numbers during the 2016 campaign, the mainstream media would say he exaggerated them.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio weighs in on the trade talks with China and the effect on lawmakers within Capitol Hill.
Trump also noted the unemployment rate has reached its lowest point in 49 years and told supporters not to worry about this week’s talks between U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators, including his threat to increase tariffs on nearly all Chinese imports at the end of the week. “They [China] broke the deal” in talks meant to de-escalate a year-long trade war, he said.
“We won’t back down until China stops,” Trump said. “The era of economic surrender is over.”
Prior to the rally at the Aaron Bessant Park Amphitheater, Trump visited Tyndall Air Force Base, which took a serious hit from Hurricane Michael. The White House said almost all 700 structures on the base were damaged, roughly one-third were destroyed and 11,000 base personnel evacuated.
Fox News Flash top headlines for May 8 are here. Check out what’s clicking on Foxnews.com
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decried U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s support for disputed Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro Wednesday as “disgusting” and “not in either of our countries’ best interests.”
“It is disgusting to see leaders, in not only the United Kingdom but the United States as well, who continue to support the murderous dictator Maduro,” Pompeo said during a joint news conference alongside his U.K. counterpart Jeremy Hunt. “It is not in either of our country’s best interests for those leaders to continue to advocate on their behalf.”
Pompeo did not name Corbyn in his remarks, but the opposition leader repeatedly has criticized what he’s called “outside interference” in Venezuela by the U.S. and other Western powers who have recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the South American country’s rightful leader.
The United Nations says more than 2 million Venezuelans have left their home country over the last three years; Ellison Barber reports from Riohacha, Colombia.
“The Venezuelan people have spoken through their constitutional mechanism. They have put Juan Guaidó as their interim president. He is the duly elected leader there. Maduro is on borrowed time,” Pompeo said. “To see American leaders, or leaders from this country, to continue to provide support and comfort to a regime that has created so much devastation, so much destruction … no leader in a country with Western democratic values ought to stand behind them.”
Hunt joined in the attack, calling out John McDonnell, who as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer is the second-ranking person in the Labour leadership. In January, McDonnell and other prominent Labour politicians signed a letter to the Guardian newspaper decrying what they called “the US attempt at regime change” in Venezuela.
“This is a country [Venezuela] where three million people have fled the country, GDP has gone down by 40 percent in the last four years, people can’t access basic medicine and people are rifling through rubbish bags to get food,” Hunt said. “John McDonnell describes this as socialism in action and people need to draw their own conclusions about what his plans might be for the U.K.”
Has the Trump administration’s push for regime change in Venezuela run out of steam? Insight from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“We oppose outside interference in Venezuela, whether from the US or anywhere else,” a Labour spokesperson told Business Insider. “The future of Venezuela is a matter for Venezuelans.”
The letter signed by McDonnell and others echoed the language used by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who has accused the Trump administration of “bullying” the Venezuelan government and claimed that the White House’s policies had “kind of helped lead the devastation” in that country. That prompted a biting response from Vice President Pence, who told Fox News last week: “The congresswoman doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
On Tuesday, Pence said the U.S. would extend sanctions to all members of Venezuela’s Supreme Court if they continue to prop up Maduro. The U.S. already has lobbed sanctions on about 150 officials and businesses in the country. On the same day, the court opened a criminal investigation against six opposition lawmakers for allegedly “betraying the homeland” and “instigating an insurrection” following last week’s failed uprising.
Maduro has fallen under increasing international pressure after he was elected last year to a second six-year term that critics said was rigged. Russia, China and Cuba, among other countries, have supported Maduro while the U.S. and more than 50 other nations have backed Guaidó.
A group of mostly European nations said Tuesday it was looking to send a high-level delegation to Caracas in the coming days. European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini made the announcement in Costa Rica after a meeting of the countries. The International Contact Group has aimed to facilitate free presidential elections in Venezuela as soon as possible, a goal that it’s shared with Guaidó.
Maduro has said he’s the target of a U.S.-engineered coup plot and has denounced the Guaidó-led congress, instead recognizing a rival assembly packed with government loyalists set up in 2017.
Authorities say two suspects used a number of weapons to open fire at the Highlands Ranch STEM School, killing one student and wounding eight others; Alicia Acuna reports from Highlands Ranch, Colorado.
The student who was killed Tuesday during a shooting at his school in Colorado reportedly leaped at one of the suspects, saving the lives of his classmates.
Kendrick Castillo, an 18-year-old senior at the STEM School Highlands Ranch, was fatally shot when two suspects opened fire in a classroom at the K-12 charter school located south of Denver.
While in a British literature class, Castillo, according to a fellow student at the school, “lunged [at the suspect],” and was shot because of it.
Nui Giasolli told NBC News’ “Today” show on Wednesday that Castillo’s actions “[gave] all of us enough time to get underneath our desks, to get ourselves safe, and to run across the room to escape.”
Kendrick Castillo, 18, died on Tuesday during a school at the STEM School Highlands Ranch in Colorado. <br data-cke-eol=”1″> (Rachel Short via AP)
The student said the gunman showed up late to class and “the next thing I know, he is pulling a gun and is telling nobody to move.”
Castillo’s father, John, told KMGH-TV that his son is a hero and wants the world to remember that. “I want people to know about him,” he said.
Another student, Brendan Bialy, also tried to subdue one of the shooters, according to officials. A member of the Marines’ Delayed Entry Program, he put his own safety at risk and showed “courage and commitment” in helping tackle a gunman.
Marine Capt. Michael Maggiti said Bialy’s “decisive actions resulted in the safety and protection of his teachers and fellow classmates.”
Authorities identified one of the shooting suspects as Devon Erickson, 18. The other suspect was said to be a juvenile and has not yet been identified.
Nine students in total were shot before the suspects were taken into custody, officials said. The two had a “number of weapons,” which included two handguns, according to Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock. He noted neither suspect was old enough to buy or own the guns.
Colorado allows people 18 and older to buy “long guns,” such as shotguns, rifles and semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, from dealers with federal firearms licenses. Anyone trying to buy a firearm in the state must undergo background checks conducted by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
Douglas County District Attorney George Brauchler noted on Wednesday that the shooting was the fifth within a 20-mile radius of the school in the past two decades. He cited Columbine, the 2012 theater shooting in the Denver suburb of Aurora, a 2013 shooting at Arapahoe High School and last year’s fatal shooting of a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy.
Castillo’s actions came one week after another student, 21-year-old Riley Howell, also heroically jumped at a gunman who opened fire on a classroom at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Howell was also killed in that shooting.
A lawyer for the younger Mr. Trump declined to comment.
The June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting was the main focus of investigators’ questions during Senate Judiciary Committee testimony the following year. Investigators were particularly interested in what — if anything — Mr. Trump told his father about what had transpired. Repeatedly, he told them that he said nothing to President Trump — either before the meeting or after.
“I wouldn’t have wasted his time with it,” he said.
But Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime lawyer, recalled being in a meeting at Trump Tower when Donald Trump Jr. told his father about a planned meeting “to obtain adverse information about Clinton,” according to the report by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, citing Mr. Cohen’s testimony.
“From the tenor of the conversation, Cohen believed that Trump Jr. had previously discussed the meeting with his father, although Cohen was not involved in any such conversation,” Mr. Mueller’s investigators wrote.
The special counsel considered bringing charges against some of the participants in that meeting but ran up against questions about whether they knew the meeting might violate federal bans on foreign contributions to elections, the report said.
The House Judiciary Committee prepared to vote Wednesday morning to hold Mr. Barr in contempt, despite a threat issued late Tuesday night from the Justice Department that it would ask the president to invoke executive privilege over the materials the Democrats are demanding.
Committee Democrats did not take kindly to the department’s threat.
“In the coming days, I expect that Congress will have no choice but to confront the behavior of this lawless administration,” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee’s chairman, said late Tuesday. “The committee will also take a hard look at the officials who are enabling this cover-up.”
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, released a blistering statement:
“The American people see through Chairman Nadler’s desperate ploy to distract from the President’s historically successful agenda and our booming economy. Neither the White House nor Attorney General Barr will comply with Chairman Nadler’s unlawful and reckless demands,” she wrote.
that occurred in his neighborhood a few hours before his team’s playoff game against the Portland Trail Blazers.
“That’s a community I live in. I know thoughts and prayers are never enough, but … from myself, our team, our organization, our thoughts and prayers with all those families, students, school administrators, everybody that was there today,” Malone said in a
Sheriff’s officials said an 18-year-old male student was killed and several students were wounded in the shooting at a STEM School Highlands Ranch, which is about 15 miles south of the Pepsi Center, where the Nuggets play.
Authorities have taken two students into custody after the shooting in the affluent community of Highlands Ranch near where two students shot and killed 13 people at Columbine High School 20 years ago.
Malone said Tuesday’s shooting happened minutes from his house in the Highlands Ranch community.
“It’s not just Highlands Ranch. It’s not just Colorado. This is an epidemic. It continues to happen,” Malone said. “That’s the frustrating thing. How do you stop it? Again, gun control, laws, whatever it might be — I’m not a politician; I don’t want to sit up here on a soap box. I just want everybody back in Highlands Ranch to know we’re with you. That’s really important for them to know.”
Malone said his wife contacted him Tuesday afternoon to tell him about the shooting. The couple has two daughters who attend school nearby.
“The thing that makes you angry is that she’s telling me how scared my daughters are in their schools, texting her,” Malone said. “They didn’t know what’s going on. They just saw lockout. Where is this shooter? Is it at our school? Some other school?
“When kids go to school, they should be going to school to learn, have fun, be with their friends, not be worried about an active shooter.”
Malone was leery of addressing the tragedy with his team before Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals, saying it’s a “conversation and a subject maybe on an off day.” “These are scary times for everybody and you have to find a way to be mentally tough and get through it,” Malone said. “It’s just frustrating. It makes you angry. It hits home. That’s how I felt today.”
Weighing on him was how to address the shooting with his children.
“Great question,” Malone said. “I’m texting my daughter, telling her she’s going to be OK. I don’t even know if she will be OK. This is every parent’s worst nightmare. When you see your kids go to school in the morning, it’s, ‘Have a great day’ and (you) assume everything is going to be all right.”
National Security Advisor John Bolton announced that the U.S. is sending the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Group and a bomber task force to the Middle East. Buzz60, Buzz60
Iran’s president announced on Wednesday that the nation would stop complying with some parts of the nuclear accord it signed with world powers as President Donald Trump’s administration has ratcheted up economic and military pressure on Tehran.
Hassan Rouhani said his country would reduce its compliance with the 2015 deal. The declaration came on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s complete withdrawal from an agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.
Rouhani said Iran will start keeping excess uranium and “heavy water” from its nuclear program inside the country – as opposed to selling it internationally – in a move that effectively amounts to a partial breach of the deal. He also set a 60-day deadline for new terms to its nuclear accord, absent the U.S., with Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the European Union or threatened to resume higher uranium enrichment.
“We felt that the nuclear deal needs a surgery and the painkiller pills of the last year have been ineffective,” Rouhani said in a nationally televised address.
“This surgery is for saving the deal, not destroying it.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who was in Moscow, tweeted: “After a year of patience, Iran stops measures that (the) U.S. has made impossible to continue.” Zarif warned world powers have “a narrowing window to reverse this.”
The announcement came as the White House has appeared to inch closer toward a military confrontation with Iran than at any other time during Trump’s presidency. The Pentagon has redirected aircraft bombers and a carrier strike group to the Middle East after claiming it intercepted intelligence indicating that Iran or its proxies in the region might be preparing attacks on American military troops and facilities.
Last month, Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp, an elite wing of the nation’s military that is also a broad pillar of the state and whose tentacles extend to a large role in economic, political and social affairs, a terrorist organization.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took an unscheduled trip to Iraq on Tuesday where he told reporters that he met with Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and briefed Iraqi officials on the “increased threat stream that we had seen” from Iranian forces.
“We talked to them about the importance of Iraq ensuring that it’s able to adequately protect Americans in their country,” Pompeo said.
“I think everyone will look at the Iranian decision and have to make their own assessment about how much increased risk there is,” he added.
There are about 5,000 U.S. troops serving in Iraq. After pulling out of the nuclear deal, the Trump administration has renewed crippling economic sanctions on Iran that have isolated the nation economically and harmed its capacity to export oil.
America’s top diplomat is due to give an address later Wednesday in London where the topic of rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran is likely to come up again. There was no immediate response from the White House to Rouhani’s announcement.
Former President Barack Obama, whose administration negotiated the nuclear deal, sought to block Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons through diplomacy. The Trump administration, by contrast, has not been shy in its preference for a campaign of “maximum pressure” on Iran and has cut off all contact with the regime as its attempts to bring its oil revenues down to zero through increasingly hard-hitting sanctions.
European signatories to the nuclear accord have meanwhile attempted to stay in the nuclear agreement by establishing a financial mechanism, known as INSTEX, intended to help them circumvent U.S. sanctions, but it has yet not been fully implemented.
While the Pentagon and White House officials have insisted they are not seeking a war with Iran, political scientists and Iran-watchers have expressed concern that the Trump administration’s growing, aggressive posture toward Tehran is a reflection of Pompeo’s and National Security Adviser John Bolton’s long-harbored dislike of the country.
“The (nuclear deal) is doing what it was designed to do: preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. As such, the deal is too important to be allowed to die,” the directors of 18 foreign affairs think tanks and research institutes wrote in a joint letter published Wednesday as Iran signaled that the accord’s total collapse is possible.
“I’m deeply worried that the Trump administration is leading us toward an unnecessary war with Iran,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in a statement late Tuesday.
“Let me make one thing clear: The Trump administration has no legal authority to start a war against Iran without the consent of Congress.”
WASHINGTON/BEIJING (Reuters) – The diplomatic cable from Beijing arrived in Washington late on Friday night, with systematic edits to a nearly 150-page draft trade agreement that would blow up months of negotiations between the world’s two largest economies, according to three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources briefed on the talks.
The document was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands, the sources told Reuters.
In each of the seven chapters of the draft trade deal, China had deleted its commitments to change laws to resolve core complaints that caused the United States to launch a trade war: theft of U.S. intellectual property and trade secrets; forced technology transfers; competition policy; access to financial services; and currency manipulation.
U.S. President Donald Trump responded in a tweet on Sunday vowing to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods from 10 to 25 percent on Friday – timed to land in the middle of a scheduled visit by China’s Vice Premier Liu He to Washington to continue trade talks.
The stripping of binding legal language from the draft struck directly at the highest priority of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer – who views changes to Chinese laws as essential to verifying compliance after years of what U.S. officials have called empty reform promises.
Lighthizer has pushed hard for an enforcement regime more like those used for punitive economic sanctions – such as those imposed on North Korea or Iran – than a typical trade deal.
“This undermines the core architecture of the deal,” said a Washington-based source with knowledge of the talks.
“PROCESS OF NEGOTIATION”
Spokespeople for the White House, the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a briefing on Wednesday that working out disagreements over trade was a “process of negotiation” and that China was not “avoiding problems”.
Geng referred specific questions on the trade talks to the Commerce Ministry, which did not respond immediately to faxed questions from Reuters.
Lighthizer and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin were taken aback at the extent of the changes in the draft. The two cabinet officials on Monday told reporters that Chinese backtracking had prompted Trump’s tariff order but did not provide details on the depth and breadth of the revisions.
Liu last week told Lighthizer and Mnuchin that they needed to trust China to fulfil its pledges through administrative and regulatory changes, two of the sources said. Both Mnuchin and Lighthizer considered that unacceptable, given China’s history of failing to fulfil reform pledges.
One private-sector source briefed on the talks said the last round of negotiations had gone very poorly because “China got greedy”.
“China reneged on a dozen things, if not more … The talks were so bad that the real surprise is that it took Trump until Sunday to blow up,” the source said.
“After 20 years of having their way with the U.S., China still appears to be miscalculating with this administration.”
FURTHER TALKS THIS WEEK
The rapid deterioration of negotiations rattled global stock markets, bonds and commodities this week. Until Sunday, markets had priced in the expectation that officials from the two countries were close to striking a deal.
Investors and analysts questioned whether Trump’s tweet was a negotiating ploy to wring more concessions from China. The sources told Reuters the extent of the setbacks in the revised text were serious and that Trump’s response was not merely a negotiating strategy.
Chinese negotiators said they couldn’t touch the laws, said one of the government sources, calling the changes “major.”
Changing any law in China requires a unique set of processes that can’t be navigated quickly, said a Chinese official familiar with the talks. The official disputed the assertion that China was backtracking on its promises, adding that U.S. demands were becoming more “harsh” and the path to a deal more “narrow” as the negotiations drag on.
Liu is set to arrive in Washington on Thursday for two days of talks that just last week were widely seen as pivotal – a possible last round before a historic trade deal. Now, U.S. officials have little hope that Liu will come bearing any offer that can get talks back on track, said two of the sources.
To avert escalation, some of the sources said, Liu would have to scrap China’s proposed text changes and agree to make new laws. China would also have to move further towards the U.S. position on other sticking points, such as demands for curbs on Chinese industrial subsidies and a streamlined approval process for genetically engineered U.S. crops.
The administration said the latest tariff escalation would take effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday, hiking levees on Chinese products such as internet modems and routers, printed circuit boards, vacuum cleaners and furniture.
The Chinese reversal may give China hawks in the Trump administration, including Lighthizer, an opening to take a harder stance.
Mnuchin – who has been more open to a deal with improved market access, and at times clashed with Lighthizer – appeared in sync with Lighthizer in describing the changes to reporters on Monday, while still leaving open the possibility that new tariffs could be averted with a deal.
Trump’s tweets left no room for backing down, and Lighthizer made it clear that, despite continuing talks, “come Friday, there will be tariffs in place.”
Additional reporting by Chris Prentice in NEW YORK, and Jing Xu and Ben Blanchard in BEIJING; Editing by Simon Webb and Brian Thevenot
Brian Rabbitt (right) has managed to largely stay out of the public eye as he handled the Russia investigation from multiple sides. | Alex Wong/Getty Images
Brian Rabbitt’s role reveals the carousel nature of the Russia probe, which has seen key players switching positions over the last two years.
Brian Rabbitt has seen the Russia investigations through from start to finish — from several sides.
At the beginning, Rabbitt was in the White House, helping the new administration navigate congressional probes into Moscow interference in the 2016 presidential election. At the end, Rabbitt was at the Justice Department as chief of staff to Robert Mueller’s boss, Attorney General William Barr, as Barr determined how to describe the special counsel’s investigation to the public. In between, Rabbitt prepped Barr for Mueller questions during his Senate confirmation.
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Rabbitt’s behind-the-scenes role reveals the carousel nature of the Russia probe, which has featured a number of players switching positions over the last two years. And it highlights the ethical challenge numerous DOJ and White House officials have had to grapple with as a result — whether to recuse themselves from working on the investigation at all.
Barr rejected calls to step back because of a 19-page memo he wrote before joining the administration contesting the legal grounds for Mueller’s obstruction-of-justice investigation. His predecessor, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, also fended off recusal calls over his full-throated cable news denunciations of Mueller’s probe. And Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, actually did recuse himself and therest of his personal office because of the prominent surrogate role he played during the Trump campaign.
At the White House, counsel Don McGahn in mid-2017 chose to have his entire office stop working on Russia-related matters because staffers had been privy to some of the incidents under investigation.
So when Rabbitt became Barr’s chief of staff in February, he sought out the agency’s ethics officials to determine whether he could advise on Russia matters, given his prior work in the White House counsel’s office. The officials cleared Rabbitt, and within weeks he was assisting on what would become some of the most consequential decisions to date of Donald Trump’s presidency.
“Yes, in an abundance of caution, I requested guidance from career ethics officials and was cleared to advise and work with the attorney general on these issues,” Rabbitt told POLITICO in an email exchange.
Now, three months into his DOJ job, Rabbitt has played several key roles during the culmination of the Mueller investigation.
The 36-year-old conservative attorney called the White House on a March Friday afternoon to inform Emmet Flood, a former colleague and friend then serving as the president’s lead Mueller-response lawyer, that the special counsel’s work was officially over.
Two days later, Rabbitt made another call to Flood, this time to read aloud Barr’s four-page letter summarizing the special counsel’s top-line conclusions on collusion and obstruction of justice. (That Sunday morning, Rabbitt also delivered three boxes of donuts to reporters staked out for weekend duty at DOJ headquarters awaiting the release of Mueller’s findings.)
Rabbitt declined to comment about what specific role he played in helping Barr handle the nuances of the Mueller report, decisions that have since become a lightning rod of controversy and even drew a rare complaint from the special counsel that the attorney general “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work on the Russia probe over that mid-March weekend.
During Barr’s Senate hearing last week into the Mueller investigation, Rabbitt also whispered repeatedly into the attorney general’s ear as he looked to his staff for help on some questions.
“People should jump me if I’m wrong,” Barr said on more than one occasion, a reference that seemed aimed at his chief of staff and the other aides sitting nearby.
Rabbitt joined the Trump administration in March 2017 from the Washington, D.C., offices of Williams & Connolly, a law firm well known for its partners’ representation of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Rabbitt said in an email he wanted to start out in the Trump Justice Department, but his resume made its way to McGahn, who offered him a job.
While working for McGahn, Rabbitt had a first-floor desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. His main portfolio involved legal issues surrounding the deregulation of the financial services industry, as well as helping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau make its first transition into a GOP administration. He also worked on the confirmations for Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.
As one of the few White House lawyers with experience in trial litigation, Rabbitt was also tapped to help in the early stages of the Russia probe, as several House and Senate investigations were just getting started and FBI Director James Comey wouldpublicly confirm a federal probe into possible links between the Trump campaign and Moscow’s election meddling efforts.
“He did a few simple things,” said one former White House colleague who declined to elaborate.
“Let’s just leave it with what you have,” added a second former colleague, who also declined further comment.
In an email exchange with POLITICO, Rabbitt said he was “involved as a lower-level junior lawyer in some of the early congressional inquiries on Russia-related matters.”
Former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb was more fulsome with his praise.
“We worked closely on complex matters and I admired the judgment he displayed — judgment mature beyond his years!” he said in an email.
From the start, Rabbitt’s work has been almost entirely out of the public eye. And in the end, the Northern Virginia native managed to stay out of the legal fire himself. While several of his former White House colleagues’ names, notes and testimony are cited in the Mueller report, Rabbitt is nowhere to be found.
By the summer of 2017, Rabbitt and the rest of the White House counsel’s office were recused from working on the Russia probe, which by that point had morphed from the FBI investigation Comey had confirmed into the special counsel’s probe. McGahn made the recusal decision, Cobb explained last year, because many of his own attorneys “had been significant participants” surrounding key episodes at the center of the Russia probe, including the firings of Comey and national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Rabbitt left the White House that November to work for the SEC, starting out as a senior lawyer on enforcement and then moving into Clayton’s office as a senior policy adviser. Former colleagues say Rabbitt’s tenure at the White House during the Russia probe was wearing.
“A year in the White House counsel’s office is like 10 years in a normal job,” one of them said.
Rabbitt said he made the change for a “great opportunity to work for a great team and fantastic chairman at the SEC on issues related [to] what I had done in private practice.”
Rabbitt then leapt at the chance to work for Barr. He has known the attorney general since the mid-2000s, when he became close friends with Barr’s middle daughter, Patricia, while the two worked together at the U.S. attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va.
“Bill Barr eventually became a mentor to me,” Rabbitt said in an email about his current boss, who previously served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.
His Justice Department job actually started before Barr had been sworn in as attorney general. Rabbitt served as the sherpa for Barr’s Senate confirmation, helping the nominee prepare for a hearing loaded with questions about his allegiance to Trump and how he’d handle the release of a final Mueller report.
“He was always super prepared and thoughtful in his comments and was kind of issues-fodder extraordinaire,” said Reginald Brown, a former senior George W. Bush White House aide who also helped Barr in his Senate confirmation. “You can see why Bill liked him on the substance and it was just clear the relationship between them was one of complete trust.”
“That confirmation could have been a controversial one,” Brown added. “It wasn’t. That was in significant part to the quality of [Rabbitt’s] thinking and approach.”
People who know both men say it was a natural fit, offering the attorney general who had been out of government for more than 25 years a window onto Capitol Hill and inside the Trump White House.
“He has a set of relationships across the Trump administration that Bill might not have. He has the ability to be his eyes and ears across town,” said Brown.
Serving as Barr’s right-hand-man has meant a lot of Mueller — it’s the issue that has dominated the attorney general’s first three months on the job.
“There’s obviously been a lot of Mueller. He’s involved in everything the attorney general is involved in,” said one of his former White House colleagues.
Rabbitt, however, never became part of the probe itself. While other former White House colleagues had sat for questioning in the Mueller investigation — McGahn himself spent more than 30 hours with investigators — Rabbitt said the special counsel team didn’t interview him as a witness and he didn’t need to get his own personal lawyer.
Still, Rabbitt nonetheless considered whether another recusal was necessary when Barr became Mueller’s main supervisor, taking over from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Rabbitt is actually one of several original McGahn hires now serving in the Barr Justice Department. The attorney general’s senior staff also includes deputy chief of staff John Moran and senior adviser Claire McCusker Murray — both worked in the White House counsel’s office with Rabbitt. And former Trump White House associate counsel James Burnham also now has a lead role on DOJ’s civil side representing the administration in trial courts around the country.
The Barr-Rabbitt relationship marks a big change from the first team at DOJ, which started out with Sessions and chief of staff Jody Hunt. Sessions recused all of his staff in the attorney general’s office from working on the Russia probe, which opened the door for Rosenstein to take the lead appointing and then supervising Mueller. Whitaker, a former federal prosecutor from Iowa and frequent conservative TV commentator, replaced Hunt in September 2017 and later became the acting attorney general after Trump ousted Sessions the day after the November 2018 midterms.
“Could I have seen him be Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff? No. Because that’d be weird,” said one of Rabbitt’s former White House colleagues. “Given the fact Bill Barr is the attorney general, it makes all the sense in the world.”
One person died and at least eight students were injured, several seriously, after shots were fired just before 2 p.m. in the middle school at STEM School in Highlands Ranch today, May 7, according to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.
An unidentified adult and a juvenile male, both STEM students, are in custody.
The Douglas County Sheriff’s Office tipped off the public to the incident at 2:04 p.m., when it tweeted this: “Unstable situation, shots fired at STEM school at Ridgeline and Plaza. Avoid area. Media go to north side of AMC.”
The K-12 public charter school, formally known as STEM School Highlands Ranch, serves over 1,850 students and is part of the Douglas County School District.
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Updated at 6 p.m.: This story has been updated to reflect that one person died in the shooting.
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
Over all, Mr. Trump lost so much money that he was able to avoid paying income taxes for eight of the 10 years. It is not known whether the I.R.S. later required changes after audits.
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, journalists at The Times and elsewhere have been trying to piece together Mr. Trump’s complex and concealed finances. While The Times did not obtain the president’s actual tax returns, it received the information contained in the returns from someone who had legal access to it. The Times was then able to find matching results in the I.R.S. information on top earners — a publicly available database that each year comprises a one-third sampling of those taxpayers, with identifying details removed. It also confirmed significant findings using other public documents, along with confidential Trump family tax and financial records from the newspaper’s 2018 investigation into the origin of the president’s wealth.
The White House’s response to the new findings has shifted over time.
Several weeks ago, a senior official issued a statement saying: “The president got massive depreciation and tax shelter because of large-scale construction and subsidized developments. That is why the president has always scoffed at the tax system and said you need to change the tax laws. You can make a large income and not have to pay large amount of taxes.”
On Saturday, after further inquiries from The Times, a lawyer for the president, Charles J. Harder, wrote that the tax information was “demonstrably false,” and that the paper’s statements “about the president’s tax returns and business from 30 years ago are highly inaccurate.” He cited no specific errors, but on Tuesday added that “I.R.S. transcripts, particularly before the days of electronic filing, are notoriously inaccurate” and “would not be able to provide a reasonable picture of any taxpayer’s return.”
Mark J. Mazur, a former director of research, analysis and statistics at the I.R.S., said that, far from being considered unreliable, data used to create such transcripts had undergone quality control for decades and had been used to analyze economic trends and set national policy. In addition, I.R.S. auditors often refer to the transcripts as “handy” summaries of tax returns, said Mr. Mazur, now director of the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.
In fact, the source of The Times’s newly obtained information was able to provide several years of unpublished tax figures from the president’s father, the builder Fred C. Trump. They matched up precisely with Fred Trump’s actual returns, which had been obtained by The Times in the earlier investigation.
Mr. Trump built a business licensing his name, became a television celebrity and ran for the White House by branding himself a self-made billionaire. “There is no one my age who has accomplished more,” he told Newsweek in 1987, adding that the ultimate scoreboard was “the unfortunate, obvious one: money.” Yet over the years, the actual extent of his wealth has been the subject of much doubt and debate. He broke with four decades of precedent in refusing to release any of his tax returns as a presidential candidate, and until now only a few pages of his returns have become public. Last year’s Times investigation found that he had received at least $413 million in 2018 dollars from his father.
The new tax information does not answer questions raised by House Democrats in their pursuit of the last six years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns — about his recent business dealings and possible foreign sources of financing and influence. Nor does it offer a fundamentally new narrative of his picaresque career.
But in the granular detail of tax results, it gives a precise accounting of the president’s financial failures and of the constantly shifting focus that would characterize his decades in business. In contrast to his father’s stable and profitable empire of rental apartments in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Trump’s primary sources of income changed year after year, from big stock earnings, to a single year of more than $67.1 million in salary, to a mysterious $52.9 million windfall in interest income. But always, those gains were overwhelmed by losses on his casinos and other projects.
The new information also suggests that Mr. Trump’s 1990 collapse might have struck several years earlier if not for his brief side career posing as a corporate raider. From 1986 through 1988, while his core businesses languished under increasingly unsupportable debt, Mr. Trump made millions of dollars in the stock market by suggesting that he was about to take over companies. But the figures show that he lost most, if not all, of those gains after investors stopped taking his takeover talk seriously.
In Washington, the struggle over access to Mr. Trump’s tax returns and other financial information has sharpened in recent days, amid partisan warfare over the findings in the Mueller report. On Monday, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said he would not deliver the tax returns to the Ways and Means Committee. And after vowing that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas” from House Democrats, the president has filed lawsuits against his banks and accounting firm to prevent them from turning over tax returns and other financial records.
In New York, the attorney general’s office is investigating the financing of several major Trump Organization projects; Deutsche Bank has already begun turning over documents. The state attorney general is also examining issues raised last year by The Times’s investigation, which revealed that much of the money Mr. Trump had received from his father came from his participation in dubious tax schemes, including instances of outright fraud.
The first of the two previous glimpses of the president’s tax returns came from his 1995 filings, pages of which were anonymously mailed to The Times in 2016. They showed that Mr. Trump had declared losses of $915.7 million, giving him a tax deduction so substantial that it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying federal income taxes on hundreds of millions of dollars of income for almost two decades. Several months later, the journalist David Cay Johnston was mailed pages of Mr. Trump’s 2005 returns, which showed that by then he had significant sources of income and was paying taxes.
The Art of Losing Money
The year was 1985, and Mr. Trump appeared to be on top of the world.
He was still riding high from the completion of his first few projects — the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Trump Tower and another Manhattan apartment building, and one Atlantic City casino. He also owned the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League.
As the year played out, he borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to fuel a wave of purchases, acquiring a second casino ($351.8 million), a Manhattan hotel ($80 million), the Mar-a-Lago property in Florida ($10 million), a New York hospital he intended to replace with an apartment building ($60 million) and an undeveloped expanse of railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan ($85 million), where he planned to construct an entire neighborhood, including a 150-story tower envisioned as the world’s tallest.
For the first time, Forbes’s ranking of the wealthiest Americans listed Mr. Trump individually, independent of his father — with an estimated net worth of $600 million that included the real estate empire Fred Trump still owned.
“What I have done is build the most beautiful buildings in the best locations,” Donald Trump told the magazine.
But what the newly revealed tax information makes clear is that, with his vast debt and other expenses on those properties, Mr. Trump’s fortunes were already on the way down.
His yearly carrying costs on the rail yards would rise to $18.7 million. He would not be able to convert Mar-a-Lago into a moneymaking club for another decade. The apartments on the hospital site would not be ready for sale, as Trump Palace, until 1990, and another residential project would be stalled for years. The football league would soon fold.
Because his businesses were generally created as partnerships, the companies themselves did not pay federal income taxes. Instead their results wound up on Mr. Trump’s personal ledger.
Beyond the $46.1 million loss that his core businesses logged in 1985, Mr. Trump’s tax information shows that he carried over $5.6 million in losses from prior years. The I.R.S. data on one-third of high-income tax returns that year lists only three taxpayers with greater losses.
In his letter, Mr. Harder, the president’s lawyer, took issue with comparing the tax returns of “a real estate developer to the returns of all taxpayers.” But most of the high-income taxpayers appeared, like Mr. Trump, to be business owners who received what is known as pass-through income. (That data does not include businesses, like most large corporations, that pay their taxes directly.)
The next years were a time of continued empire building. The information also documents, year by year, a time of gathering loss. Here is how it added up.
In 1986, he bought out his partners in Trump Tower and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. He bought an apartment building in West Palm Beach for $43 million. His business losses for the year: $68.7 million.
A Deal Maker in Financial Distress
Every year from 1985 through 1994, Donald J. Trump reported a negative adjusted gross income on his tax returns. That number grew as new losses were combined with those from prior years. The New York Times previously found that Mr. Trump declared an adjusted gross income in 1995 of negative $915.7 million.
Rich Harris and Andrew Rossback/ The New York Times
About two weeks before the stock market crash of Oct. 19, 1987, he spent $29 million on a 282-foot yacht. Months later he bought the Plaza Hotel for $407 million. He recorded $42.2 million in core business losses for 1987, and $30.4 million for 1988.
In 1989, he bought a shuttle operation from Eastern Airlines for $365 million. It never made a profit, and Mr. Trump would soon pump in more than $7 million a month of his dwindling cash to keep it airborne, New Jersey casino regulators, who closely monitored his finances in those years, found.
Mr. Trump’s business losses that year soared to $181.7 million.
Then came the Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino, which opened in April 1990 saddled with more than $800 million in debt, most at very high interest rates. It did not generate enough revenue to cover that debt, and sucked revenue from his other casinos, Trump’s Castle and Trump Plaza, pulling them deep into the red.
As a result, 1990 and 1991 represented the worst years of the period reviewed by The Times, with combined losses of $517.6 million. And over the next three years, as Mr. Trump turned over properties to his lenders to stave off bankruptcy, his core businesses lost an additional $286.9 million.
The 10-year total: $1.17 billion in losses.
Mr. Trump was able to lose all that money without facing the usual consequences — such as a steep drop in his standard of living — in part because most of it belonged to others, to the banks and bond investors who had supplied the cash to fuel his acquisitions. And as The Times’s earlier investigation showed, Mr. Trump secretly leaned on his father’s wealth to continue living like a winner and to stage a comeback.
This is not to say that Mr. Trump never made money on a deal. One that turned out quite well came in 1985, when he bought the Hotel St. Moritz in Manhattan for $73.7 million. Mr. Trump has said he sold it for $180 million in 1989. His tax information showed long-term capital gains of $99.8 million, accounting for the vast majority of such gains in the 10 years reviewed by The Times.
But that rich payday was overwhelmed by his business losses, and Mr. Trump still paid no federal income taxes that year.
Some fraction of that ocean of red ink represented depreciation on Mr. Trump’s real estate. One of the most valuable special benefits in the tax code, depreciation lets owners of commercial real estate write down the cost of their buildings.
In “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump points to one of his Atlantic City casinos to illustrate the magic of depreciation. If the casino’s cost was $400 million, he says, he would be able to depreciate it at a rate of 4 percent a year, allowing him to shelter $16 million in taxable income annually.
But while this example is intended to show the benefits of depreciation, it also demonstrates that depreciation cannot account for the hundreds of millions of dollars in losses Mr. Trump declared on his taxes.
The tax code also lets business owners like Mr. Trump use losses to avoid paying tax on future income — a lucrative deduction intended to help troubled businesses get back on their feet. Mr. Trump’s losses over the years rolled into the $915.7 million free pass from income taxes — known as net operating loss — that appeared on his 1995 returns.
The newly revealed tax information sheds light on how those net operating losses snowballed. By 1991, they had grown to nearly $418 million, accounting for fully 1 percent of all the losses that the I.R.S. reported had been declared by individual taxpayers that year. And the red ink continued to accumulate apace.
Because Mr. Trump reported a negative adjusted gross income in each of the 10 years, he was not allowed to deduct any charitable contributions. So while he has boasted of making large donations at the time, the information obtained by The Times shows no such itemized deductions. Potential deductions could have been carried over to a future year, should Mr. Trump have reported a positive income.
A Vulture’s Appetite
As losses from his core enterprises mounted, Mr. Trump took on a new public role, trading on his business-titan brand to present himself as a corporate raider. He would acquire shares in a company with borrowed money, suggest publicly that he was contemplating buying enough to become a majority owner, then quietly sell on the resulting rise in the stock price.
The tactic worked for a brief period — earning Mr. Trump millions of dollars in gains — until investors realized that he would not follow through. That much has been known for years. But the tax information obtained by The Times shows that he ultimately lost the bulk of the gains from his four-year trading spree.
The figures do not include an itemization of individual trades. But The Times was able to align the reported total gains with details on trades publicly documented by casino regulators at the time.
As with many things Trump, his adventures in the stock market were more image than substance, helped greatly by news reports quoting anonymous sources said to have knowledge of Mr. Trump’s actions. An occasional quote from an associate — including his stockbroker, Alan C. Greenberg — helped burnish the myth.
“He has an appetite like a Rocky Mountain vulture,” Mr. Greenberg, the legendary chairman of Bear Stearns, told The Wall Street Journal in 1987. “He’d like to own the world.”
In his actions, Mr. Trump was more like a peacock.
An early and profitable gambit came in February 1987, when Mr. Trump started buying stock in the company that owned United Airlines. That April, The Times reported that Mr. Trump was “believed to own 4.9 percent” of United and was “believed to have paid” about $50 a share.
Trump takeover speculation set off a rally in the stock. At the end of the month, Mr. Trump quietly sold nearly all his shares. The next day, The Journal reported that Mr. Trump’s gamble appeared to have netted him $55 million.
It was a gross exaggeration. New Jersey gaming regulators later determined that he had purchased only 2.3 percent of the company and gained $11 million, before interest and commissions.
The same tactic continued to work through 1988. Mr. Trump made a total of $57 million by briefly presenting himself as a takeover threat to, among others, Hilton Hotels, the Gillette razor company and Federated Department Stores, casino regulators found.
In all, from 1986 through 1989, Mr. Trump declared $67.3 million in gains from stocks and other assets bought and sold within one year.
By 1989, investors were less fooled by his moves. That September, he bought a large stake in American Airlines and announced a takeover bid.
“I’m very skeptical of everything this man does,” Andrew Geller, then an airline analyst at Provident National Bank in Philadelphia, told The Associated Press.
Mr. Trump was rebuffed, and the stock price fell sharply. Though at the time his losses were reported to be modest, the new tax return figures show that in 1990, the year he sold his American Airlines stake, Mr. Trump lost $34.9 million on short-term trades, wiping out half his gains from the previous four years.
He appears to have held only one other significant chunk of stock by decade’s close: a 27 percent stake in the Alexander’s department store company.
Mr. Trump had bought those shares for $67.9 million and held on, hoping to gain control of the company’s real estate with a partner. After climbing on the possibility of a takeover, the stock price slid.
Mr. Trump ultimately agreed to turn over that stock and most of his other assets — including the yacht, the Trump Shuttle and his stake in the Grand Hyatt — to his lenders. On the day in 1992 when he gave up the stock, it was trading at about $9 a share — which would represent a loss of $55.5 million.
And with that, Mr. Trump’s days as a market mover were over.
One Huge Payday
As would be expected for a business owner, the line on Mr. Trump’s tax returns showing regular wages and salary does not represent the bulk of his income. But one year stands out: 1988, when he recorded $67.1 million in salary — 90 percent of his total regular wages for the 10 years.
The figure appears to include a payment he received as part of a deal to buy the unfinished Taj Mahal casino from Merv Griffin, the talk show host turned businessman. Mr. Griffin’s company had agreed to pay Mr. Trump to manage construction of the casino, among other services, and the resolution of a bitter dispute between the two included Mr. Griffin’s company paying Mr. Trump $63 million to buy out that contract.
That windfall contributed to Mr. Trump’s making his biggest income tax payment of the 10 years reviewed by The Times. Even so, his overwhelming business losses meant that he paid only $1.4 million in alternative minimum tax that year.
The only other income tax he was required to pay in those years was $124,344 in 1987, also under the alternative minimum tax, which was created to make sure wealthy people could not avoid all income tax through loopholes and deductions.
An Interest Mystery
One number from Mr. Trump’s tax returns is particularly striking — and particularly hard to explain: the $52.9 million in interest income he reported in 1989.
Mr. Trump reported $460,566 in interest income in 1986. That number grew to $5.5 million the next year, and $11.8 million the next. Then came the outlier 1989.
Taxpayers can receive interest income from a variety of sources, including bonds, bank accounts and mortgages. High-yield bonds, though less common today, were popular with institutional investors in the 1980s. And to make $52.9 million in interest, for example, Mr. Trump would have had to own roughly $378 million in bonds generating 14 percent a year.
Hard data on most of Mr. Trump’s business life is hard to come by, but public findings from New Jersey casino regulators show no evidence that he owned anything capable of generating close to $52.9 million annually in interest income.
Similarly, there is no such evidence in a 1990 report on Mr. Trump’s financial condition, prepared by an accounting firm he hired at his bankers’ request and based on his most current tax returns and audited financial statements.
Mr. Trump’s interest income fell almost as quickly as it rose: He reported $18.7 million in 1990, and only $3.6 million in 1992.
—
At his nadir, in the post-recession autumn of 1991, Mr. Trump testified before a congressional task force, calling for changes in the tax code to benefit his industry.
“The real estate business — we’re in an absolute depression,” Mr. Trump told the lawmakers, adding: “I see no sign of any kind of upturn at all. There is no incentive to invest. Everyone is doing badly, everyone.”
Everyone, perhaps, except his father, Fred Trump.
While Donald Trump reported hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for 1990 and 1991, Fred Trump’s returns showed a positive income of $53.9 million, with only one major loss: $15 million invested in his son’s latest apartment project.
President Trump’s aggressive trade policies are running headlong into his campaign for reelection.
As Trump prepares to run on the economy, his threat to increase tariffs on imports from China has sent the stock market diving and undercut a stretch of positive economic news. U.S. farmers and exporters, already bearing the brunt of China’s retaliatory tariffs, now face the prospect of an escalated trade war in which states that Trump needs to win reelection will be in the crosshairs.
The trade war has also exposed a rift inside the White House and among the president’s allies — with some officials pushing for a quick resolution to calm the markets ahead of 2020, and others warning the president that a weak deal with China could leave him politically vulnerable.
“My warning has been: We don’t want the 2020 election year to become greatly intensified friction with China over trade issues. We want a deal that works,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China expert at the Hudson Institute who has advised the Trump administration on trade. “One way to unite all 21 Democratic primary candidates is if the president gets a quick but flawed deal that inevitably leads to friction when China is caught cheating next year.”
However, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow are among a group of Trump aides who have encouraged the president to reach a deal with China quickly and avoid political blowback from a full-scale trade war in 2020, according to people familiar with the internal debate.
White House officials said Trump is prepared to take a hard line with China going into 2020 in part because he intends to keep his 2016 campaign promise to fix what he views as bad trade deals. Trump believes strongly in the power of tariffs to force China and other countries to negotiate and won’t sign a deal for political expediency, said two officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.
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