Evening summary
Thanks for staying with us through another eventful day. We’ll see you tomorrow.
- Acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker announced that Robert Mueller’s investigation is close to finished.
- Trump accepts speaker Pelosi’s State of the Union invitation.
- At a White House press briefing on Venezuela, national security adviser John Bolton accidentally flashed his handwritten notes that included something about “5,000 troops to Colombia”.
- Former Starbucks CEO and possible “centrist independent” 2020 presidential candidate Howard Schultz makes his first stop on his book tour and it turns into a town hall meeting of sorts. And no town hall meeting is complete without at least one heckler.
Updated
The Guardian’s Erin Durkin is at former Starbucks CEO and possible independent 2020 presidential candidate Howard Schultz’s first stop of his book tour, which has turned into a town hall of sorts.
Speaking at a New York Barnes and Noble, he ruled out any possibility that he would run as a Democrat, despite his life-long affiliation with the party.
“If I run for president, I’m running as a centrist independent,” Schultz said. “If I ran as a Democrat, I would have to say things that I know in my heart I do not believe, and I would have to be disingenuous.”
Much of the criticism that has been lobbed at Schultz is that running for president seems more like a vanity project for an “egotistical billionaire asshole,” as one protester put it, that will do nothing but divide the liberal vote and hand the election to President Trump.
Earlier today, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s tweeted that he refused to run in 2016 for this reason.
In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the President. That's a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can't afford to run it now. https://t.co/SmHM6cYUg7 pic.twitter.com/iQ2CK5o2k6
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) January 28, 2019
“Mike Bloomberg has built a great business, was a great mayor,” Schultz said. “I have tremendous respect for him, but I don’t agree with his conclusion.”
Americans who don’t affiliate with either party, Schultz said, “have never had a legitimate choice to vote for what they believe in.”
Trump also took to Twitter today to take a jab at Schultz.
Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019
Schultz called the president’s attacks “childish.”
“Nobody wants to see Donald Trump removed from office more than me,” he said. “If I decide to run for president as an independent, I will believe and have the courage and the conviction to believe that I can win,” he said, though he added he could not yet answer whether he would bow out if polls show he is helping Trump. “I’m certainly not going to do anything to put Donald Trump back into the Oval Office.”
Updated
Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is having his first public event since he said he was exploring an independent bid for president as a “centrist independent”. He was immediately heckled.
Protester stands up almost immediately at Schultz event:
— Alexis Levinson (@alexis_levinson) January 29, 2019
"You'll help elect Trump, you billionaire, egotistical asshole. Go back to getting ratio'd on twitter. go back to Davos with the other billionaire elite."
Roger Stone, the longtime ally of President Trump who was indicted last week in the Russia probe, is set to be arraigned in federal court in Washington DC on Tuesday at 11am EST.
And Jerome Corsi, a right-wing author and conspiracy theorist, is already volunteering to testify, Reuters is reporting, and to “let the chips fall where they may.” Corsi had been one of two people Stone sought to use as intermediaries to communicate with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange about hacked Democratic Party emails in the 2016 election campaign, according to the indictment.
“I’m happy to be a witness,” Corsi told Reuters in an interview. “If it’s for Roger’s benefit or not for Roger’s benefit so be it but I’m going to tell the truth to the best of my ability.”
While Corsi is ready to go, Stone’s legal team appears to be having some trouble.
Roger Stone is due in federal court in DC tomorrow morning for an arraignment. His lawyers, who don't belong to the court's bar, have been having some issues today following the process for getting permission to appear in court pic.twitter.com/MijTkbAegW
— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) January 28, 2019
Stone has maintained that he will not testify against Trump, but he said on ABC’s This Week that he’d consult with his attorneys about potentially cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is close to finishing his investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.
Updated
The tens of thousands of immigration court hearings canceled during the five-week federal government shutdown could cause delays in the country’s already severely backlogged immigration court that will take years to sort through, the Associated Press is reporting.
Over 86,000 immigration court hearings were canceled during the standoff, the biggest number in California, followed by Texas and New York, according to an estimate from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. It estimates the courts have more than 800,000 pending cases overall.
The shutdown over President Donald Trump’s demand for funding for a border wall to keep out migrants has only added to the delays in the system, where cases can already take years to be resolved, said Jennifer Williams, deputy attorney in charge of the immigration law unit at Legal Aid in New York City.
“They’re going to be playing catch-up for years,” she said.
The shutdown did not affect hearings for immigrants being held in immigration detention. It also had no bearing on applications for green cards and U.S. citizenship, which are handled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and are funded by filing fees.
The cancellations were bad news for the many asylum applicants who have been waiting years to win approval so that they can bring loved ones to this country. It could be years before they are given new court dates, immigration attorneys said.
But for those with weak asylum cases, the canceled hearings could be a good thing, enabling them to keep on living in the U.S. and fend off deportation for now.
Trump accepts Pelosi's State of the Union invitation
And he accepts! (And no “madame” speaker this time) pic.twitter.com/euE3o2ep0S
— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) January 28, 2019
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, has agreed to testify behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee next month, the Associated Press is reporting.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff of California announced that Cohen would testify before the intelligence panel on February 8. Cohen was initially scheduled to appear in an open hearing before the House Oversight Committee one day earlier, but he abruptly announced last week he was postponing his scheduled congressional testimony, citing “ongoing threats against his family” from Trump and the President’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani.
Cohen has also been subpoenaed to appear in mid-February before the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the committee is in touch with Cohen’s legal team about that appearance, too.
“We will continue to work with Mr. Cohen and law enforcement in order to protect Mr. Cohen and his family,” Schiff said in a statement, in which he thanked Cohen for agreeing to talk to the intelligence panel voluntarily.
More from the Associated Press on the Mueller investigation:
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker says the special counsel’s Russia investigation is “close to being completed.”
Whitaker made the comment Monday during an unrelated news conference at the Justice Department in Washington.
He says he’s been “fully briefed” on the special counsel’s investigation. He took over control overseeing the probe after Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned at the president’s request in November.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election. Whitaker says he hopes to receive Mueller’s report as soon as possible.
Donald Trump has nominated William Barr to serve as the next attorney general. His confirmation hearing was held earlier this month and he’s awaiting a confirmation vote in the Senate.
Paul Manafort’s Feb. 8 sentencing was postponed Monday, Reuters is reporting, after prosecutors for the special counsel’s office accused President Trump’s former campaign chairman of breaching his plea agreement in a parallel case in Washington.
Judge T.S. Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia said in a court order he wanted to delay the sentencing until the other judge ruled on whether Manafort had knowingly lied to investigators in breach of his plea deal, noting that such a decision “may have some effect on the sentencing decision in this case.”
In Venezuela briefing, Bolton reveals note of "5,000 troops to Colombia"
The Trump administration announced sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil giant. The sanctions are meant to help punish “those responsible for Venezuela’s tragic decline”, the US treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, told reporters at a White House briefing today.
The hope is that the sanctions would boost Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who last week declared himself interim president and was recognized by the United States.
Referring to the situation in Venezuela, National Security Adviser John Bolton said at the same briefing that “the president has made it clear that all options are on the table.” The notes scrawled on his notepad illustrated just what those options could be.
So this notepad that National Security Advisor John Bolton was holding today at the White House briefing on Venezuela says:
— Rao Komar (@RaoKomar747) January 28, 2019
"Afghanistan -> Welcome the Talks. 5,000 troops to Colombia."
If confirmed this would be a pretty terrible OPSEC breach.https://t.co/KS0Issfvps pic.twitter.com/IOrSprG567
Mueller investigation close to finished
JUST IN: Acting AG Whitaker on the Russia investigation:
— NBC News (@NBCNews) January 28, 2019
“The investigation is, I think, close to being completed, and I hope that we can get the report from [Special Counsel] Mueller as soon as we -- as possible.” pic.twitter.com/4fTXIixhy2
Hey all, Vivian Ho on the West Coast taking over for Ben Jacobs. Stay tuned for more.
Updated
Summary
- Nancy Pelosi has invited Donald Trump to the Capitol to give the State of the Union yet again
- Sarah Sanders held the first White House press briefing of the year
- A new estimate from the Congressional Budget Office posits that the government shutdown cost the U.S. economy $11 billion.
A longtime top Obama aide has signed on with Howard Schultz’s potential third party bid for the White House.
NEWS: Former Obama WH adviser Bill Burton is joining Howard Schultz’s team as a top aide and communications strategist, per two people familiar with the hire. Burton was unavail for comment, Schultz spokes declined to comment.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) January 28, 2019
Pelosi invites Trump to give State of the Union again
Nancy Pelosi has just invited Trump to deliver the speech on February 5.
NEWS: Speaker Pelosi has invited President Trump to give #SOTU address on February 5, 2019 in the House Chamber. pic.twitter.com/5C4m0b4gAc
— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) January 28, 2019
Sarah Sanders says “the charges in the indictment against [Roger] Stone have nothing to do with the president.”
Sanders doesn’t have any information about whether Trump might pardon Roger Stone and won’t raise it with him.
"I'm not going to get into that at this point," Sarah Sanders says about a possible Roger Stone pardon. Says she's not aware of conversations about that happening.
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 28, 2019
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders accuses Speaker Nancy Pelosi of not acting in good faith over the State of the Union.
Sanders on Nancy Pelosi and state of the union address: "I certainly don't think she acted in good faith at the front end since she cited security concerns that didn't exist."
— David Smith (@SmithInAmerica) January 28, 2019
As Sarah Sanders speaks from the podium, worth noting that two of the three cable news networks are not broadcasting her briefing.
Sarah Sanders is at the White House podium and the only network taking her live is Fox News. CNN & MSNBC both sticking with regular programming.
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) January 28, 2019
Larry Kudlow declines to acknowledge any economic damage from the shutdown at the White House.
"I won't acknowledge any of that right now," WH economic adviser Larry Kudlow says of Congressional Budget Office report that shutdown cost the economy $11 billion dollars.
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) January 28, 2019
The first White House briefing of 2019 has begun with an announcement of new sanctions against the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
Focus on Venezuela at outset of first @WhiteHouse briefing of 2019 pic.twitter.com/Lb0N6jqTkG
— Todd J. Gillman (@toddgillman) January 28, 2019
The White House has just announced that it will welcome a trade delegation from China at the end of the month.
WH: Today, President Donald J. Trump announced that the United States will welcome an official delegation from China for a series of meetings from January 30 to 31, 2019, to discuss the trade relationship between the two countries.
— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) January 28, 2019
Two senators have introduced legislation to require the special counsel to directly submit a report to Congress rather than simply to the attorney general.
Dem Sen. Blumenthal and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley have introduced The Special Counsel Transparency Act, which "requires that a Special Counsel submit a report directly to Congress and the public at the conclusion of an investigation," or if he/she is fired or resigns. pic.twitter.com/2x1WbC72DL
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 28, 2019
Another Democratic presidential candidate will enter the fray tonight.
New Age author Marianne Williamson will announce her bid.
Join me tonight as I formally announce my candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president. Live in Los Angeles, the Saban Theatre 8440 Wilshire Blvd. 7:30PM, or livestream at https://t.co/zVBvuNdwg8
— Marianne Williamson (@marwilliamson) January 28, 2019
Williamson travelled to Iowa last summer exploring a bid.
Gwyneth Paltrow has a podcast?
Schultz told Gwyneth Paltrow on her podcast there's "a lack of civility" and "a lack of respect" in the U.S.
— Allan Smith (@akarl_smith) January 28, 2019
"We are imprinting a young generation with a lack of civility and hate and fear – and I don’t think we’re going to know the consequences of that for quite some time."
Trump 'very pissed off', 'really hopping mad'
According to Politico he is, anyway – over claims made by former aide Cliff Sims in the new book Team of Vipers.
Sims’ book is due out tomorrow but was scooped up by the Guardian last week. It tells the now familiar tale of White House chaos, bickering and skullduggery. And apparently it has really upset the president.
From Politico:
President Donald Trump is “very pissed off” and “really hopping mad” at former aide Cliff Sims’ new book that reveals firsthand the chaos and infighting that is ever present in his White House, according to several current and former White House officials.
Trump is asking aides: “Who is this guy? Why is he writing this book? He wasn’t even in meetings,” the sources said. He also dismissively refers to Sims – who served until last May as director of White House message strategy and a special assistant to the president —as “the videographer” because he also helped Trump with the weekly video and radio addresses, according to three current and former White House officials.
Updated
Potential billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg has thrown some shade at potential billionaire presidential candidate Howard Schultz, claiming an independent run for president would “end up re-electing” Trump.
Schultz announced this weekend that he is considering running for the White House as a “centrist independent, outside of the two-party system”.
On Monday Bloomberg, who is considering running as a Democrat, said he has crunched the numbers – and all an independent run would do is split the anti-Trump vote.
It’s no secret that I looked at an independent bid in the past. In fact I faced exactly the same decision now facing others who are considering it.
The data was very clear and very consistent. Given the strong pull of partisanship and the realities of the electoral college system, there is no way an independent can win. That is truer today than ever before.
In 2020, the great likelihood is that an independent would just split the anti-Trump vote and end up re-electing the president. That’s a risk I refused to run in 2016 and we can’t afford to run it now.
Updated
Time change:
lmao spoke too soon, it's at 3:30 now
— Brittany Shepherd (@blrshepherd) January 28, 2019
Poll! Poll! Poll!
This one is from Marquette Law School, who have surveyed Wisconsin voters. It seems 42% of Wisconsinites approve of the job Trump is doing, while 52% disapprove.
That approval rating is better than the national average, but it’s down from October, when 47% approved of Trump’s performance.
Worse news for Trump – who narrowly won in Wisconsin in 2016 – is that not many people say they will vote for him in 2020:
Among all registered voters, 27% say they would definitely vote to reelect Trump if the 2020 elections were held today, 12% say they would probably vote to reelect him. Eight per cent would probably vote for someone else and 49% would definitely vote for someone else.
Updated
Sanders to give White House briefing
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders is due to give an on-camera press briefing at 3pm ET.
Ordinarily that would not be news but these are not, as many eminently qualified people have observed, normal times. Sanders last briefed the White House press corps on camera on 18 December, Trump recently tweeted that he had told his press secretary “not to bother”, and the general dwindling of this once-glorious illustration of the power of the first amendment/blast of sound and fury signifying nothing has become a story in itself.
Amid the usual economies with the actualité and tetchy exchanges with grandstanding reporters with on-camera presences to think about, Sanders will doubtless be asked whether Trump is going to shut down the government again if he doesn’t get his money for a wall. On Sunday, the president spoke to the Wall Street Journal and said he thought the chances of bipartisan negotiators producing a deal on border security funding he could accept were “less than 50/50”.
The president also said he doubted he would accept less than the demand for $5.7bn for his border wall that caused the last shutdown, and doubted whether he would accept any deal involving a path to citizenship for young undocumented migrants, a Democratic priority.
Earlier the same day, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney went on the talk shows and was duly asked if Trump was prepared to shut down the government again in three weeks’ time, if his prediction proves accurate and no deal is produced.
“Yeah, I think he actually is,” Mulvaney said. “He doesn’t want to shut the government down, let’s make that very clear. He doesn’t want to declare a national emergency.”
Most observers assume Trump will in fact do the latter, in an attempt to bypass Congressional budget control altogether.
“The president’s commitment is to defend the nation, and he will do it either with or without Congress,” Mulvaney told Fox News Sunday.
Acting without Congress would likely trigger both legal challenges and intense political and philosophical debate about the extent and/or abuse of executive power.
So that will be fun.
Updated
An early endorsement for Kamala Harris, from Congressman Ted Lieu:
I endorse @KamalaHarris for President.
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 28, 2019
Known Kamala for many years & worked together on various issues. She embraces the future, not the past, and is the person we need to move America forward.
Watch the #HarrisTownHall tonight at 7 pm PT / 10 pm ET to learn more about Kamala. https://t.co/P4ywl9U3Op
The Iowa caucuses are just 12 months away! Could this be a game-changer?
Updated
Will Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, mount a presidential primary challenge against Donald Trump?
Probably not, but it hasn’t stopped news organizations from speculating. CNN is particularly keen on the idea, noting that Hogan “enjoys high approval ratings” in Maryland.
But CNN adds, a little underwhelmingly: “There’s been no indication of any concrete steps toward a primary bid and a spokesperson for Hogan did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.”
There’s nothing like a bit of Brexit news to make one feel better about US politics.
The latest development in the ongoing shambles is that a top EU official believes the risk of a “no-deal Brexit” – which essentially amounts to the UK crashing out of the EU with no clear plan forward – is now “very high”.
The Guardian’s man in Westminster Andrew Sparrow has the latest developments.
And if you’re still confused – like me – about terms like “backstop”, “Norway plus” and “SuperCanada”, then here’s a handy guide.
Updated
Shutdown cost the economy $11bn, says Congressional Budget Office
The border wall-inspired government shutdown cost the economy $3bn in the fourth quarter of 2018 and is expected to cost $8bn in the first quarter of 2019, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
Some of $11bn that will be recovered once federal workers start getting paid again, the CBO says. But not all:
Although most of the real GDP lost during the fourth quarter of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 will eventually be recovered, CBO estimates that about $3bn will not be. That amount equals 0.02% of projected annual GDP in 2019. In other words, the level of GDP for the full calendar year is expected to be 0.02% smaller than it would have been otherwise.
The CBO says the cost to the economy is due mainly to “the loss of furloughed federal workers’ contribution to GDP, the delay in federal spending on goods and services, and the reduction in aggregate demand (which thereby dampened private-sector activity)”.
Trump wanted $5.7bn for the border wall, in exchange for ending the shutdown.
Updated
Lindsey “Donald Trump is a race-baiting, xenophic bigot” Graham is up and about, continuing his single-minded propping up of the president.
If White House and Congress fail to reach a deal then President @realDonaldTrump must act through emergency powers to build wall/barrier.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) January 28, 2019
Pelosi: no State of Union on Tuesday
Donald Trump will not give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, according to an aide to Nancy Pelosi.
CNN reports that the address – Trump’s second – is not going to happen as had been scheduled before the shutdown.
The back-and-forth over Trump giving his State of the Union speech in the House chamber was a running sidenote to the government shutdown.
Pelosi asked Trump to postpone the address until after the shutdown ended, citing security concerns. Trump rejected that, saying he was going to do it anyway. Pelosi again said he would not be allowed to. The master dealmaker then caved, agreeing to postpone the speech.
It’s now unclear when Trump will address the nation.
Updated
There’s more bad news for Trump today – in the form of a Washington Post-ABC poll that finds the president “has largely underperformed the even modest expectations that Americans had for him as he took office”.
Nearly six out of ten Americans have an unfavorable view of Trump as a person, according to the survey. A majority of people also “doubt his empathy, honesty and ability to make political deals”, according to the Post.
The poll compares the expectations people had for Trump in January 2017 to current views of the president.
Midway through first term, Trump is failing to meet the public’s expectations for his job performance, Post-ABC poll finds https://t.co/ukVYXSIcWc
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 28, 2019
When Trump took office 50% of people thought he would do a good job on reducing the federal deficit, according to the poll. Now only 33% think he is doing well.
The federal deficit was a longtime rallying cry for Republicans under Obama, but McConnell and co were strangely silent as Trump’s tax cuts caused the deficit to balloon to $779bn in 2018 – an increase of 17%.
Updated
Howard Schultz’s announcement that he is considering a run for the White House as an independent has caused consternation among Democrats, who fear a third-party run from a candidate with many of their policies – Schultz himself told CBS he’s a “lifelong Democrat” and listed some progressive-ish policy positions – could split the vote and hand a second term to Trump.
Trump himself duly tweeted about the former Starbucks chief executive on Monday morning, saying that Schultz is not “the smartest person” … because he is. No presidential nickname has yet been coined.
Schultz himself acknowledged that his ambitions are not for everyone, telling the news site Axios he knows he is:
going to create hate, anger, disenfranchisement from friends, from Democrats.
Axios reports that the billionaire businessman is, however, convinced he is doing the right thing. He’s certainly doing the write thing, releasing a campaign-oriented biography today with a launch in his native New York.
It’s called From the Ground Up: A Journey to Reimagine the Promise of America. Before you rush to the store to order it, consider this from the Guardian’s Lloyd Green, on the often (if not always) dubious pedigree of the presidential campaign book:
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of the day’s political news.
In Washington and around the country, hundreds of thousands of federal employees will return to work for the first time in 2019 as museums and national parks prepare to open. A surprising climb down by Donald Trump ended the longest shutdown in US history on Friday, but it could be a several more days before employees receive their pay.
Congress has less than three weeks to present Trump with a border security plan he likes. A bipartisan group of members were selected to lead the negotiations but Trump has already dismissed the prospect that they will come up with a proposal he would sign. In that case, Trump has vowed to declare a national emergency to build his wall along the south-western border. And on the talk shows on Sunday, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the president could shut down the government again.
Trump has no public events scheduled today but that doesn’t mean we haven’t heard from him and won’t be hearing more.
Already this morning he has tweeted about tarrifs and bible study classes. He also taunted former Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, saying he doesn’t have the “guts”’to run for president.
Howard Schultz doesn’t have the “guts” to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the “smartest person.” Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2019
