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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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Gabrielle Canon in Oakland (now) and Vivian Ho in Oakland and Ben Jacobs in Washington (before)

Trump uses clash over State of the Union to fundraise – as it happened

Donald Trump speaks at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia on 17 January.
Donald Trump speaks at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia on 17 January. Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

That’s it from us for tonight. We hope you will be back tomorrow.

Until then, here’s Thursday in US politics:

  • After grounding military aircraft scheduled to take Speaker Pelosi and other representatives to meetings with Nato officials and troops in Afghanistan and Brussles, Trump doubled down and canceled his delegation’s trip to Davos for the World Economic Forum.
  • Congressional leaders were quick to criticize the President’s move, and even Trump’s ally Lindsey Graham commented on the back-and-forth. “One sophomoric response does not deserve another”, he tweeted.
  • In a speech at the Pentagon, Trump announced a new plan that would expand the US missile stockpiles and use new technology, including space-based sensors, to “shield every city in the United States”. Experts and House and Senate leaders see the plan a bit differently, and worry that the policy will only incentivize Russia and China to bolster their arsenals.
  • Congressman Tom Marino, a Republican for Pennsylvania and earlier supporter of Donald Trump, resigned today, leaving his post for a job in the private sector. Marino was once Trump’s pick to head the National Office of Drug Control Policy and tackle the opioid epidemic but withdrew under controversy after reporters revealed he’d taken $100,000 from pharmaceutical lobbyists and supported for a bill that hampered efforts to crack down on opioid-distributing drug companies. He also quit a previous job as a US attorney after a DOJ investigation found he may have helped secure a casino license for someone with mob connections.

Goodnight everybody!

More furloughs for the FDA

With no solutions to the shutdown in sight, the Food and Drug Administration announced today that it would roll out new cost-saving measures to buy a few more weeks of life for the agency’s drug reviews.

The Washington Post reports that more workers will be furloughed and “discretionary activities” will cease until the shutdown ends.

“What we are trying to do is to keep the review process continuing because of important drugs in the pipeline”, Commissioner Scott Gottlieb told The Post, explaining that new treatments for cancer, depression, and diabetes are on the line.

“A core part of the FDA is advancing innovations that will benefit patient care,” Gottlieb added. “We are trying to make prudent decisions to keep that process going.”

According to NBC news, far-right troll Chuck Johnson — who was spotted with Congressmen Andy Harris and Phil Roe yesterday, reportedly to “DNA” and “genetics” — posted on Facebook that he believes Muslims are “genetically different in their propensity for violence or rape” and that African Americans possess a violence gene.

The meeting happened not long after the House resoundingly voted to condemn white supremacy, but the congressmen responded saying they didn’t know about Johnson’s reputation for racism before the meeting.

Per NBC:

Spokespersons for Harris and Roe both confirmed to NBC News that they had met with Johnson Thursday, and a spokesperson for Roe said they had discussed “DNA” and “genetics.” Johnson and Harris would not identify the company when asked. Roe’s office said it did not know the identity of the company.

Johnson is best known for his conspiracy-filled right-wing news websites, connections to white supremacists, and downplaying the severity of the Holocaust in an online forum. He declined to comment on his new endeavor or the meeting, telling NBC News in a series of text messages, ‘I don’t discuss my work with people who don’t understand it’”.

According to CNN, President Trump wasn’t pleased to learn that his AG pick was so close with special counsel Robert Mueller. AG nominee William Barr referred to Mueller as “Bob” during the first day of his Senate confirmation hearing, and said that “the Barrs and Muellers were good friends and would be good friends when this was all over”. He also described Mueller as a “straight-shooter”.

While Barr said during his hearing that Trump ‘was interested’ in hearing about the friendship, the details that emerged this week caught the President off guard, the three sources said. He bristled at Barr’s description of the close relationship, complaining to aides he didn’t realize how much their work overlapped or that they were so close”.

Reuters is reporting that four Volkswagen managers from the car company’s luxury Audi unit have been indicted for their role in the 2015 scandal over the automaker’s attempt to evade US exhaust emissions tests.

The four are charged in a 12-count indictment with conspiring to evade U.S. emissions standards in diesel vehicles sold in the United States with 3.0-liter engines. The vehicles include the 2009-2015 Audi Q7 vehicles as well as other Q5, A6, A7, and A8 diesel models. They are accused of wire fraud, violating the Clean Air Act and conspiracy.

Volkswagen spokesman Pietro Zollino said the company continues ‘to cooperate with investigations by the Department of Justice into the conduct of individuals. It would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases’”.

White House cancels delegation's trip to World Economic Forum

Amid criticism over Trump’s move today to ground Pelosi’s plane for a scheduled trip to visit Nato officials and troops in Afghanistan and Brussels, the President has also canceled his delegation’s travel plans to the World Economic Forum in Davos citing concerns about the shutdown.

The delegation included Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell and was lead by Treasure Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The annual conference that convenes in Switzerland is an important meeting that brings together business and governmental leaders from across the world. This year’s theme is “Globalization 4.0: Shaping a Global Architecture in the Age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

It appears that a certain someone is enjoying life post-politics. Instead of being stressed over shutdown battles, these days Former House Speaker John Boehner is busy peddling pot to investors as America’s next cash crop.

Others are beginning to weigh in on Trump’s decision to cancel Pelosi’s trip.

“The President’s comment that lawmakers visiting Afghanistan is a ‘public relations event’ is an insult to the brave men and women serving in harm’s way,” Virginia Congresswoman Elaine Luria said in a statement. “As a 20-year Navy veteran, new member of the House Armed Services Committee, and new member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, it is my duty to support our troops and learn everything I can about their mission. Oversight is the responsibility of Congress, and it is inappropriate for the President to interfere with our constitutional duties.”

California Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s decision to cancel Pelosi’s trip “completely inappropriate” and “obviously an action directed at the Speaker” for her letter requesting to move the State of the Union.

“We’re not going to allow the President of the United States to tell the Congress it can’t fulfill its oversight responsibilities, it can’t ensure that our troops have what they need whether our government is open or closed,” Schiff told reporters Thursday. “That work must go on and I think it’s vitally important now, in particular that the President has announced withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan, that we understand the situation on the ground.”

Schiff continued: “We had anticipated important defense and intelligence briefings in Afghanistan. We were looking forward to the opportunity to reassure NATO allies and those shaken by reports that the president has questioned his staff about leaving NATO. We’re determined to make sure that our NATO allies understand that on a very bipartisan basis our commitment to NATO is strong.”

House and Senate leaders push back against Trump missile plan

Democratic leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees expressed concerns over a newly announced Trump Administration plan to expand US missile stockpiles that would include space-based sensors.

Representative Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington expressed concerns that the move will “fuel a nuclear arms race.”

“Strategic stability is an essential component of U.S. national security, and it does not serve our long-term interest to take steps that incentivize Russia and China to increase the number and capability of their nuclear weapons,” Smith said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Senator Edward Markey likened the move to a “bad Star Wars sequel”.

“While it is true that the missile threat environment America now faces is different, the answer is not to build a wall in space,” Markey told the AP.

He added that Trump’s “misguided rush to weaponize space would be as ineffective, costly, and dangerous as it was more than three decades ago when it was soundly rejected.”

Updated

Summary

This is Gabrielle Canon and Vivian Ho on the west coast taking over for Ben Jacobs.

If you are just tuning in, here’s what has happened so far today:

  • The shutdown stalemate continues, now in its 27th day, with political finger-pointing and partisan bickering. President Trump has yet to officially respond to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s request that he postpone his state of the union address until after the shutdown ends, but he did push back by refusing to provide military aircraft for Pelosi and other representatives for a previously scheduled trip to meet with Nato commanders and troops in Afghanistan and Brussels. She was set to leave today, along with chairs of the House Foreign Affairs and the House Intelligence Committees.
  • Trump has begun fundraising off of Nancy Pelosi’s proposal that he delay the State of the Union speech, and a new poll found 57% of voters would definitely vote against the president in 2020.
  • Vice-President Mike Pence pushed back against criticism over his wife’s new teaching job at a school that bans gay children and parents, reframing the comments as “criticism of Christian education”.

Updated

The wife of acting attorney general Matt Whitaker has sent a very long, very defensive email to a reporter at Slate and it’s worth a read.

Legislators in New Jersey have agreed to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.

The House of Representatives is holding re-vote next week after Republicans were caught napping on a voice vote to revote the government. As Jim Newell of Slate reports, things got peculiar:

The House was voting on another stopgap bill to reopen the government, this one until Feb. 28. Nearly all House Republicans routinely have voted against House Democratic spending bills over the last two weeks in an effort to stay in lockstep with President Trump’s demand for border wall funding. And it’s important to their messaging that they show unity against the Democratic bills.

When the bill came up, the Democrat presiding over the House, North Carolina Rep. G.K. Butterfield, called for a voice vote and declared the resolution passed. This is a standard majority move. What’s supposed to happen afterward, though, is for a member who wants a recorded vote to call for a recorded vote. The Republican at the lectern responsible for this task was Kentucky Rep. Brett Guthrie. Either he didn’t call for the recorded vote, or Butterfield didn’t hear him. (If Guthrie did say something, it’s certainly not audible on the C-SPAN replay.) Butterfield waited about 30 seconds and then moved on to the next item of business.

As Beto O’Rourke’s road trip continues, the former Texas congressman chronicles that he stopped in Liberal, Kansas for pancakes this morning.

This was the most intense fog I’d seen. A thick all encompassing blanket. I figured that by the time I’d finished breakfast at the Pancake House in Liberal (top three pancakes I’ve ever had) the sun would burn through, but it didn’t.

I left Liberal with a full stomach, and with gratitude for my hosts at Southwind. But since I came in at night and left in a fog, I had no idea what the town really looked like.

Pelosi’s spokesman responds to the cancellation. He says the trip was not scheduled to visit Egypt and notes that Trump visited Iraq during the shutdown.

The powerhouse law firm Skadden Arps has just agreed to a $4.6 million settlement with the Department of Justice over its representation of Paul Manafort and retroactively register as a foreign agent.

Trump is now fundraising off the State of the Union showdown.

Lindsey Graham has condemned Trump’s decision in a series of tweets.

Among those scheduled to go with Pelosi it seems are the chairs of the House Foreign Affairs and the House Intelligence Committees.

Apparently there are a bunch of members of Congress sitting on an Air Force bus right now trying to figure out what is going on.

Pelosi had reportedly been scheduled to leave at 3PM EST on the trip, less than an hour before Trump canceled it.

Apparently Trump is cancelling all trips abroad by members of Congress not just Pelosi. It had been unclear if the trip, which was previously not public, would have gone forward even before this letter. The House had been scheduled to be in recess next week but it is staying in session due to the shutdown.

Trump cancels Pelosi trip

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders has posted a letter saying that Trump will refuse to provide military aircraft for Pelosi to travel abroad to Brussels, Egypt and Afghanistan because of the shutdown. The military is not affected by the shutdown.

He has said Pelosi can still travel commercial if the highest ranking woman in American history still wishes to visit Afghanistan.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says that a Republican congressman shouted “go back to Puerto Rico” today at Tony Cardenas, an Hispanic congressman from California.

Mike Pence has described criticism of his wife for teaching art at a school that bans gay children and parents as “criticism of Christian education” in an interview with a conservative Catholic television network.

Updated

In the aftermath of the report that Michael Cohen tried to rig an online poll on Drudge Report on Trump’s behalf, it doesn’t appear that Matt Drudge is very happy with the president.

Tulsi Gabbard has issued an apology video for past homophobic comments. The Hawaii Democrat announced that she would mount a presidential bid over the weekend.

Updated

The House overwhelmingly approved a resolution to keep the Trump Administration from rolling back sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The vote was entirely symbolic as the effort failed in the Senate yesterday and it requires the approval of both chambers of Congress.

Congressman Eric Swalwell of California, a potential presidential candidate, is heading to Atlanta this weekend for Martin Luther King Jr. Day events.

Pennsylvania congressman Tom Marino, an early Trump endorser, is resigning from Congress for a private sector job.

Trump won the district in 2016 by a margin of 66% to 30%.

Talking Points Memo reports that Donald Trump’s companies have reached a ten year high in the number of foreign workers that they have recruited for low wage, unskilled jobs at Trump companies.

Trump has long campaigned on restricting immigration to the United States.

The Trump Organization requested and received at least 192 visas for foreign workers in 2018, according to Department of Labor data. That number appears to be the highest for the company going back to at least 2008 and likely much earlier, based on public records.

The nearly two decades’ worth of data were pulled together by the Democratic research group American Bridge and shared with TPM, which then reviewed the raw Labor Department information files.Those visas were almost entirely for the type of low-skilled foreign workers that Trump has claimed drive down American wages. Cooks, servers, housekeepers and farmworkers make up a large chunk of the Trump Organization’s requests, most of them making between $10 and $15 hourly.

Trump claims that before he ran he was one of the most popular people in the world and now notes that polls say he is not popular in Europe. He adds “I shouldn’t be.”

Speaking at the Pentagon, Trump tries to blame Pelosi for the shutdown.

“While Dems would like to make a deal, Speaker Pelosi will not let them negotiate. The party has been hijacked by open border fringe within the party”

The Hill reports that Chuck Schumer is recruiting Congressman Ruben Gallego to run in the 2020 Arizona special election for the Senate seat vacated by John McCain’s death.

Gallego is a third term congressman who graduated from Harvard and served in combat in Iraq. The Democratic nominee for the seat would likely face Martha McSally, the former congresswoman who was appointed to fill the seat in January.

A new poll of Democratic primary voters shows that the two candidates with the highest unfavorables are Bernie Sanders who is viewed unfavorably by 28% and Michael Bloomberg who is viewed unfavorably by 27% of primary voters.

An infamous Holocaust denier and far right wing troll met with two members of Congress yesterday.

Republicans Phil Roe of Tennessee and Andy Harris of Maryland met with Chuck Johnson yesterday about “DNA sequencing.”

One colleague has come to Steve King’s defense.

Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas complained that King “was not given due process” in an interview with the Tyler Morning Telegraph. “And, in fact, if our minority leader (Kevin) McCarthy had gotten the same lack of due process against him previously, I can assure you he would not have been majority leader and he would not now be minority leader.”

Senator Kamala Harris has come out in opposition to Bill Barr’s nomination to be attorney general.

The California Democrat, who is expected to run for president, was expected to oppose Barr.

Nancy Pelosi says she has yet to receive a response to her letter about the State of the Union from Trump.

CBS reports that the White House is mulling the option of having President Donald Trump deliver the State of the Union in the Senate chamber after Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to delay the address until after the shutdown.

The Wall Street Journal reports that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen billed Donald Trump $50,000 for work for an IT firm that unsuccessfully rigged online polls on Trump’s behalf as well as creating the Twitter account @womenforcohen. However, Cohen paid the company between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash.

The Women for Cohen Twitter account still exists and describes itself as by “Women who love and support Michael Cohen. Strong, pit bull, sex symbol, no nonsense, business oriented, and ready to make a difference!”

Updated

Poll: 57% of voters would vote against Trump in 2020

Good morning.

The partial government shutdown is on its 27th day with no sign of any progress, a new poll has 57% of voters saying they would definitely vote against President Donald Trump in 2020 and Trump will go to the Pentagon today for an announcement on the missile defense review.

It’s Thursday in American politics.

Updated

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