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The Guardian - US
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Vivian Ho in San Francisco (now) and Tom McCarthy in New York (earlier)

Mueller reportedly criticized attorney general's depiction of Russia investigation – as it happened

Robert Mueller.
Robert Mueller wrote to William Barr expressing concern over his depiction of Mueller’s report, the Washington Post reported. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Evening summary

An eventful end to an eventful day.

  • Special counsel Robert Mueller allegedly penned a letter to attorney general William Barr expressing concerns that his summary did not “fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusion.” Barr is scheduled to appear before Senate for a hearing tomorrow morning. House judiciary committee chair Jerry Nadler is demanding the letter, and there are already calls to impeach Barr.
  • A federal judge ruled that Congress Democrats can move forward with their lawsuit alleging that President Trump’s private business of violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments.

My colleague Sabrina Siddiqui reports that a spokesman for Mueller has declined to comment on the mysterious matter, but that Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said Barr called Mueller upon receiving his letter and that the two had a “cordial and professional conversation”.

More from Sabrina:

Kupec said Mueller and Barr then discussed “whether additional context from the report would be helpful and could be quickly released”, but that the attorney general decided it would be counterproductive to release the report in “piecemeal fashion”.

It was after their conversation, she noted, that Barr released a second letter to Congress saying his first assessment was not intended to be a summary of Mueller’s report.

Barr, who is set to begin two days of testimony before Congress on Wednesday, has vigorously defended his framing of Mueller’s conclusions amid intense scrutiny over his conduct.

Earlier on Tuesday, Senate Democrats called on the Justice Department’s watchdog to independently investigate Barr’s handling of the Mueller report and “whether he has demonstrated sufficient impartiality” to continue overseeing 14 ongoing criminal matters related to the special counsel’s investigation.

Mueller concluded the two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election last month and subsequently delivered a final report to Barr spanning more than 400 pages.

Barr initially released a letter on 24 March citing Mueller’s conclusion that there was no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Barr also declared in the same letter that he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of justice.

But a redacted version of Mueller’s report, which was made public on 18 April, revealed nearly a dozen instances in which the president sought to obstruct the investigation. The report also stated that the Trump campaign was “receptive” to assistance from Moscow during the 2016 election and expected to benefit from Russian interference.

Barr nonetheless delivered a press conference, prior to his public release of the redacted report, that essentially sought to absolve the president of wrongdoing. In his statement, Barr repeatedly echoed Trump’s claims of “no collusion” with the Russians and downplayed the president’s attempts to impede the special counsel investigation.

House Democrats have issued a subpoena for the full Mueller report and underlying evidence, setting the stage for what is expected to be a protracted legal battle with the Justice Department and the White House.

Here is Nadler’s full statement on the Mueller letter:

House judiciary committee chair Jerry Nadler notes that now with the knowledge of the Mueller letter, it appears attorney general William Barr gave some contradictory testimony before Senate a few weeks back:

In case you were looking for some extra William Barr reading ahead of tomorrow’s Senate hearing:

Just a reminder:

Mueller: "There is now public confusion"

The Washington Post has provided some text to the mysterious Mueller letter, sent to the Justice Department a few days after Barr released his four-page summary of the report’s findings last month:

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

So it begins.

Judiciary Committee Chair demands Mueller letter

Two weeks ago, we were all about the Mueller report. Now we’re all about the Mueller letter. House judiciary committee chair Jerry Nadler is now weighing in on the Mueller letter:

Mueller pushed Barr to release report's executive summaries

The Washington Post is reporting that special counsel Robert Mueller wrote a letter to attorney general William Barr saying that Barr’s depiction of the Mueller report’s findings failed to capture the “context, nature, and substance” of the investigation.

If you’ll rewind the tapes back to last month, you’ll recall that Barr’s summary of the Mueller report was somewhat lacking and left many feeling unsatisfied.

A few weeks ago, a redacted version of the long-awaited report was released, leading many to further question Barr’s characterization of the findings.

The New York Times is now reporting that Mueller wrote his letter in late March, with a Justice Department spokeswoman telling the Times that a conversation took place between Mueller and Barr soon after Barr publicized his summary.

“The special counsel emphasized that nothing in the attorney general’s March 24 letter was inaccurate or misleading,” a Justice Department spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, told the Times. “But he expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage regarding the special counsel’s obstruction analysis.”

Updated

While President Trump and Meghan McCain continue to target Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in thinly veiled Islamaphobic attacks, activists and members of congress held a rally to show their support of her today.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Democrats in Congress can move forward with their lawsuit alleging that President Trump’s private business of violates the Constitution’s ban on gifts or payments from foreign governments.

According to the Washington Post, the decision comes from US District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan adopting “a broad definition of the anti-corruption ban and could set the stage for Democratic lawmakers to begin seeking information from the Trump Organization”:

Sullivan had already ruled in September that the legislators had legal standing to sue. After hearing arguments, he wrote that the case ought to be allowed to continue in part because the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause “requires the President to ask Congress before accepting a prohibited emolument.”

But Sullivan still needed to rule on questions that include whether the Founding Fathers’ definition of “emolument” was broad enough to include a foreign embassy paying the president to rent a hotel ballroom.

In his ruling, Sullivan acknowledged concerns from Trump’s lawyers, who said that allowing the case to move ahead would impose “significant burdens” on a sitting president.

But clarifying the definition of the clause, the judge wrote, should ensure that the president can abide by his oath of office.

The president’s argument “regarding the ‘judgment’ and ‘planning’ needed to ensure compliance with the clause is beside the point,” the judge wrote. “It may take judgment and planning to comply with the clause, but he has no discretion as to whether or not to comply with it in the first instance.”

Today is one of those days where is a lot is happening, just not over here. Make sure you take a peek over at the Venezuela live blog, where our colleagues are doing an amazing job.

The Washington Post is reporting that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general is accusing the agency of “‘unreasonably’ delaying production of email and other records related to the agency’s handling of hurricane relief funding for Puerto Rico.”

The Post obtained a memo in which HUD Inspector General Rae Oliver Davis complained to HUD Secretary Ben Carson: “Delayed access to departmental records causes OIG [Office of Inspector General] oversight efforts to be diluted, become stale, or worse, halt entirely.”

“The OIG has put the department on ample notice that responses to our requests are untimely, that such delays negatively affect our work, and that the delays in OIG access fail to comply with the law,” Oliver Davis wrote in the April 29 memo to Carson.

The average wait time for HUD electronic records has increased from approximately 95 calendar days in 2017 to 151 calendar days in 2018, or more than 60 percent, Oliver Davis noted in the letter.

In addition, 20 requests in 2018 took longer than six months, and in one instance, HUD took eight months to produce the emails of four employees, Oliver Davis wrote.

The letter noted that her office had previously flagged “unacceptable delays” in the agency’s production of electronic records, in response to requests from the IG, congressional oversight committees and litigation under the Freedom of Information Act.

Hey all, Vivian Ho taking over for Tom McCarthy. Let’s see where the day takes us, shall we?

Summary

Here’s a summary of the day in politics so far:

  • Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer said they had roughed out a $2tn infrastructure deal with Trump but such a plan had a long way to go to realization.
  • Schumer warned that Trump was failing to protect the 2020 election against foreign threats. Members of congress introduced legislation requiring federal campaign officials to notify law enforcement if they are approached by foreign operatives.
  • A House committee convened a hearing on Medicare-for-all, in a sign of how mainstream the proposal has become.
  • Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said she would not run for US senate but that left open the question of a White House run.
  • The nomination of Stephen Moore to join the Federal Reserve board appeared in doubt after multiple senate Republicans withdrew support.
  • Democratic leaders recoiled at the idea that they might have discussed impeachment at a meeting following a 2-week recess, saying they had not.
  • A few new surveys showed Joe Biden polling strongly in the wake of his presidential announcement.

Sounds like Pelosi had to elbow in on a Schumer-Trump colloquy.

Trump has been giving money to Schumer since the 1990s and Schumer’s grandfather from Brooklyn knew Fred Trump from Queens because both developed “little rowhouses” after the war, Schumer has told Time magazine, and “I think they had the same lawyer. And they would share supplies occasionally, and things like that.”

Trump is hosting 2018 NASCAR Cup Series champion Joey Logano at the White House:

Joey Logano, driver of the #22 MoneyLion Ford, and Daniel Suarez, driver of the #41 Coca-Cola Orange Vanilla Ford, lead the field during the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on April 28, 2019 in Talladega, Alabama.
Joey Logano, driver of the #22 MoneyLion Ford, and Daniel Suarez, driver of the #41 Coca-Cola Orange Vanilla Ford, lead the field during the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway on April 28, 2019 in Talladega, Alabama. Photograph: Sean Gardner/Getty Images

Here’s mayor Pete Buttigieg hanging out with Daily Show host Trevor Noah between the scenes:

Ernst opposes Moore

Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican running for reelection in Iowa, has just gone down as opposing Stephen Moore, Donald Trump’s pick for the Federal Reserve board.

Ernst went on to say that she did not think Moore had the votes in the senate to be confirmed. Earlier Trump floated and then withdrew the nomination of former restaurant executive Herman Cain for the board, after Republican opposition to the pick materialized.

The Guardian’s Jon Swaine revealed last month that a court official accompanied by four police officers had to break into the home of Moore after he repeatedly failed to pay debts to his ex-wife.

Read further:

The president is on it.

Picking up on senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s open letter warning that Donald Trump is not doing enough to defend the 2020 election against foreign interference, a senator and a US representative have teamed up to introduce legislation to protect elections by requiring federal campaign officials to notify law enforcement if offered assistance by agents of another government.

That would mean that if, say, you were contacted by foreign operatives with an offer of “dirt” on your opponent, you would have to notify law enforcement instead of, for example, responding with unbridled enthusiasm and taking a meeting with the operatives at your dad’s office.

The bill was introduced in the House by Representative Eric Swalwell, who himself is running for president on a guns control platform, and in the Senate by Richard Blumenthal.

“When foreign adversaries seek to meddle in our elections, silence is not an option,” said Swalwell. “This is part of a series of reforms to demonstrate we are a government that will respond to foreign interference.”

“A duty to report foreign sabotage of our democracy is a matter of simple patriotism and common sense — but now needs to be an explicit legal duty too,” said Blumenthal. “If a foreign adversary offers a candidate for U.S. office illegal assistance, the first call should be to federal law enforcers not to criminal co-conspirators.”

Biden’s the headline in this new poll but look at senator Warren:

In the aforementioned CNN poll, Warren showed consistency:

Warren won rave reviews for an appearance in front of a crowd of union members at the National Forum on Wages and Working people at the weekend. And she went viral on Twitter – again – on Monday for a reply taunting a failed attempt by Chase bank to preach the gospel of penny-pinching (the bank has since deleted the tweet captured here):

Biden is campaigning in Iowa. He has just said of law enforcement and emergency personnel: “They’re an incredible breed of cat, man, let me tell you”. Here’s a live stream:

Updated

You’ve all turned into shouters!

Here’s a scene from today’s meeting between Trump and the Democrats:

No reports yet on which flavor. Stay tuned for further.

#TBT:

Dozens of advocacy and activist organizations have called on the 2020 candidates to support prisoner and felon voting rights. Bernie Sanders focused attention on the issue last week when he called for the franchise to be expanded to all incarcerated people as well as former felons.

“Candidates cannot earn my vote without being in favor of restoring prisoners’ right to vote,” said Amani Sawari, national coordinator at the Right2Vote Campaign. “We need a candidate that is going to use these next four years to address America’s largest problem and that is mass incarceration.”

The groups have published an open letter to the 2020 candidates. The letter reads in part:

The right to vote is a fundamental component of American citizenship. Yet millions of Americans have been stripped of this right and made to feel like second-class citizens because of laws that exclude people from voting due to a criminal conviction. An estimated 6.1 million American citizens with felony convictions were barred from voting in the 2016 presidential election alone, a race that was decided by just79,316 votes. In short, felony disenfranchisement is not just anti-democratic and bad for public safety, it is an unpopular practice that sprang from the most shameful era of American history, a vestige of our past wildly out of step with international norms. And now is the moment for its abandonment.

Schumer warns Trump leaves 2020 election vulnerable to attack, again

In a letter to colleagues Tuesday, senate minority leader Chuck Schumer accused Donald Trump of not doing enough to protect the 2020 election from foreign tampering. The Trump administration is “not forcefully and adequately responding to the attack on our democracy” detailed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Schumer’s letter said.

A full volume of Mueller’s report described a long-running and multi-faceted Russian campaign to tamper in US elections and confuse debate in the virtual public square. US intelligence services have warned that the Russians are still at it.

The Trump campaign manager, Brad Parscale, meanwhile, has been busy taking money from foreign entities for paid speeches in places like Romania, the Washington Post reported today.

So it’s possible that the need for care when dealing with foreign actors in the elections space has not sunk in for Trump-world actors when the dollar signs are illuminated.

Schumer is concerned, AP reports:

In a letter to colleagues Tuesday, Schumer said Congress needs to “fill the vacuum” on election security.

He says the Senate should provide additional resources to beef up state and federal election systems and impose sanctions on Russia or others engaged in “malign activities” to interfere.

Schumer notes that the FBI has called the 2018 election a “dress rehearsal” for the next election. He says senators need a classified briefing to hear directly from the FBI, Homeland Security and others “on what, if any, actions are underway” to protect the vote.

Senators will meet privately Tuesday for the first time since Mueller’s report was released.

Activist groups call Trump asylum policy 'heartless'

Donald Trump has directed officials to toughen rules for asylum seekers, including by introducing a fee for their applications and barring those who entered the country illegally from working until their claims are approved. Reuters has this:

The moves are the latest effort by the Trump administration to stem a growing number of migrants crossing the US southern border, many of whom then seek asylum in the United States. Many of the changes would be dramatic shifts in how asylum seekers are treated, but would also require time-intensive regulatory procedures before they go into effect, which will probably take months.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly blamed US laws protecting asylum seekers for encouraging fraudulent or non-deserving claims.

But immigrant advocates say the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict asylum protections harm people legitimately seeking refuge from violence and persecution.

The Tahirih Justice Center, a national organization immigrant women in girls, released a statement expressing “deep concern” about the likelihood of new regulations based on Trump’s proclamation.

“The current proposal is another example of downright poor policy, and is also heartless,” said Archi Pyati, chief of policy at Tahirih. “This scheme will fail to bring protection to those who need help, and will cripple the already broken system even further.”

Trump and Democrats agree to big number for infrastructure, Schumer says

Pelosi and Schumer are outside the White House talking about their infrastructure meeting with Trump. It appears to have ended as all the best meetings do: with an agreement to meet again, in this case three weeks from now.

Schumer says the two sides batted around a $2tn number. Sounds great. As long as each side is as good as its word and there are no speedbumps in Congress.

Updated

One 2020 candidate who did not excel in that aforementioned CNN poll was Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Analyst Harry Enten advises:

To that point, Buttigieg’s momentum seems like it may have stalled a little bit. His 7% in this poll is a point lower than the 8% he hit in Monmouth University poll found two weeks ago.

Now, it’s not as if Buttigieg is falling or anything like that. But Buttigieg had generally been gaining from March to April.

Buttigieg has some powerful people interested, though. As in Oprah-powerful:

“Buttabeep, buttaboop, look him up.” Does that fit on a bumper sticker???!?

Speaking of Joe Biden, don’t miss today’s opinion piece by Hamilton Nolan, “Clinton-era politics refuses to die. Joe Biden is its zombie that staggers on.”

Biiiiideeeen. Brraaaiiinnnns. Biiiiideeeenn:

His constituency is real. It is not illuminating to think of them just as centrists, arguing for the gentlest sprinkling of sugar over the top of America’s poison. It’s better to think of them as zombies: the product of three decades of self-serving, triangulating brainwashing. They are the Democrats who had their eyelids propped open and were forced to watch the Clinton era, year after year after year. It is not so much that they do not, deep down, harbor a vague wish for a better world; it is that, like stray dogs dining exclusively on garbage, life has taught them that this is the best that they will ever get.

Read more here:

Biden appears to ride high in polls after announcement

A CNN poll out this morning has Joe Biden benefiting from an 11-point bounce in the polls after his presidential announcement.

Analyst Harry Enten says the demographic breakdown does not look bad for Biden:

Is CNN an outlier? Here’s Morning Consult:

Separately, an Emerson College poll released Monday of Democratic primary voters in the state of Texas found Biden and Beto neck and neck, with Biden at 23% and congressman O’Rourke at 22%. Bernie Sanders landed 17% in the poll.

Sarah Sanders who lied to the American public about being contacted by members of the FBI supposedly happy about the firing of director James Comey (actually that never happened, she told the special counsel in private) calls the bipartisan infrastructure meeting a “good first step”:

Medicare-for-all gets a hearing

Medicare-for-all is getting a hearing – the first serious consideration of this single-payer healthcare proposal in decades.

The House Rules Committee is taking testimony from advocates on all sides of the debate in a tiny meeting room on the third floor of the Capitol. Medicare-for-all is at the heart of the progressive agenda and is an idea whose time has come, according to Democrats. But Republicans have attacked the plan, arguing that it will lead to higher taxes, longer wait times and lower quality of care.

The hearing alone is a hard-won achievement for proponents of the single-payer plan and a sign of the shift in public support behind the plan. The committee considered the latest version of a Medicare-for-all bill, which was introduced by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal earlier this year.

The bill would establish a national health insurance program by expanding Medicare – the federal health insurance program for people who are 65 or older – until it covered all Americans.

The hearing comes as several 2020 Democratic candidates embrace the plan, following the lead of Senator Bernie Sanders who helped to popularize the idea when he ran for president in 2016.

A ‘Medicare For All’ Rally Outside PhRMA Headquarters Monday.
A ‘Medicare For All’ Rally Outside PhRMA Headquarters Monday. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Among the speakers is Ady Barkan, a progressive activist who is dying from ALS.

Speaking through a computer system that tracks his eye movements and subsequently converts text into speech, Barkan offered his own experience as an example of why universal coverage is needed.

“Like so many others, Rachael and I have had to fight with our insurer, which has issued outrageous denials instead of covering the benefits we’ve paid for. We have so little time left together, and yet our system forces us to waste it dealing with bills and bureaucracy,” Barkan told the committee. “That is why I am here today, urging you to build a more rational, fair, efficient, and effective system. I am here today to urge you to enact Medicare For All.”

Are we going to see footage from the latest Pelosi-Schumer-Trump meeting? We hope so. But none so far. Put it this way: people are excited about infrastructure.

Lots to be said about this contribution to art history. We’ll limit ourselves to the observation that that bike appears to be a Harley-Davidson, the company whose profits have been wiped out by Trump’s tariffs, and a boycott of which Trump has actively cheerleaded. Should’ve painted him on a Ural?

As Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer meet with Donald Trump, 2020 hopeful Bernie Sanders is speaking at the People’s Action Convention this morning:

Democrats adamantly NOT talking impeachment

In a reply to a question from reporters about impeachment, Representative Hakeem Jeffries from Brooklyn emphasizes that in a meeting this morning Democrats did not, N-O-T, not discuss impeaching Donald Trump:

“We discussed infrastructure,” Jeffries said. “We discussed prescription drugs. We discussed our response to the climate crisis. Not a moment of an hour meeting, the largest gathering of House Democrats in Washington DC after a two-week recess, was spent on impeachment.”:

Jeffries is a member of the Democratic House leadership. Sounds like the party leaders have come up with a pretty robust conclusion about the politics of mounting impeachment hearings with election season under way.

Updated

Workers barely benefited from Trump’s sweeping tax cut, investigation shows

Peter Cary and Allan Holmes of the Center for Public Integrity report:

Big companies drove Donald Trump’s tax cut law but refused to commit to any specific wage hikes for workers, despite repeated White House promises it would help employees, an investigation shows.

The 2017 Tax and Jobs Act – the Trump administration’s one major piece of enacted legislation – did deliver the biggest corporate tax cut in US history, but ultimately workers benefited almost not at all.

This is one of the conclusions of a six-month investigation into the process that led to the tax cut by the Center for Public Integrity, a not-for-profit news agency based in Washington DC.

The full findings, based on interviews with three dozen key players and independent tax experts, and analysis of hundreds of pages of government documents, are published today in an in-depth piece.

[...]

The bulk of the $150bn the tax cut put into the hands of corporations in 2018 went into shareholder dividends and stock buy-backs, both of which line the pockets of the 10% of Americans who own 84% of the stocks.

Just 6% of the tax savings was spent on workers, according to Just Capital, a not-for-profit that tracks the Russell 1000 index.

Read further.

We want to take a moment to cross-refer you to our live blog of developments in Venezuela, where opposition leader Juan Guaidó urged supporters to take to the streets to force his rival Nicolás Maduro from power.

The Venezuela blog is here.

The US secretary of state has announced that the United States “fully supports the Venezuelan people”:

Prince could face criminal charges for false testimony

Erik Prince, the controversial founder of the private war company formerly known as Blackwater and brother to education secretary Betsy DeVos, might have just become the latest Donald Trump associate to find himself on the wrong side of the law.

House intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff has announced that his committee would make a criminal referral to the justice department regarding alleged false testimony to the committee by Prince.

“The evidence is so weighty that the Justice Department needs to consider this,” Schiff told the Washington Post.

The New York Times reported a year ago that Prince arranged an August 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr and foreign nationals eager to help the Trump campaign. Meeting attendees included an Israeli social media specialist and George Nader, a convicted pedophile working on behalf of princes in both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

In earlier testimony, from 2007.
In earlier testimony, from 2007. Photograph: Larry Downing/Reuters

Prince elided the meeting from his description of his work for the Trump campaign that he gave the committee November 2017. Prince told the committee “I played no official or, really, unofficial role” in the Trump campaign and described his work on behalf of Trump like this:

I supported him momentarily. I attended some fundraisers. I wrote some papers on some different foreign policy position and, you know, kicked them up into the adviser-sphere on what should be done on Middle Eastern or African counter-terrorism issues.

“Also I arranged and attended meetings between the campaign and foreign nationals offering to help Trump win” – Prince left that part out.

Separately, the Mueller report suggests that Prince might have misled the committee about the nature of a meeting he had during the campaign in the Seychelles with a Russian investor.

Abrams senate decision leaves White House question open

Stacey Abrams’ decision not to run in Georgia for a US senate seat has intensified months of speculation about what’s next for the Democratic rising star after she narrowly lost the state’s governor’s race last year.

Abrams’ decision not to challenge US senator David Perdue in 2020 keeps the door open on a possible presidential run this year, a prospect the former Georgia state lawmaker has teased in interviews and appearances.

In 2018, the Abrams campaign mobilized a record number of nonwhite voters in the state, while winning larger shares of white voters than Barack Obama. Abrams fell just short of becoming the first black woman elected to be governor of a state, in a race marred by accusations of voter suppression.

Her loss to Brian Kemp, the former Republican secretary of state, devastated Democrats in Georgia and around the country, even as a record number of women and people of color led the party to a majority in the House. Almost immediately Abrams received calls to run for Senate, governor (again) and president.

What’s next?
What’s next? Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

She has met with several 2020 presidential candidates, including Joe Biden, who reportedly wanted to name her as a running mate before he had even announced his own candidacy. The suggestion was premature: “I think you don’t run for second place,” Abrams replied, when asked about his offer on ABC’s The View.

Earlier this year she was selected to deliver the Democratic rebuttal to Donald Trump’s state of the union speech, a job typically reserved for rising party leaders.

Her resume includes a degree from Spelman College, a renowned historically black college for women, a master’s in public policy from the University of Texas and a law degree from Yale. She served as former minority leader in the Georgia statehouse from 2011 to 2017, has published several romance novels under the pseudonym Selena Montgomery and is an unabashed Trekkie.

After her loss, she published a book, Lead from the outside, and launched the Fair Fight Action voting rights group.

Updated

Hello and welcome to our live blog politics coverage. Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost her run for the Georgia governorship in 2018, has ruled out a run for the US Senate in 2020, she announced.

“I am announcing today that I will not be a candidate for the United States Senate,” Abrams said in part. “I am so grateful for all the support and encouragement I’ve received from fellow Georgians to leaders of Congress and beyond. However, the fights to be waged require a deep commitment to the job, and I do not see the US Senate as the best role for me in this battle for our nation’s future.”

Our Washington reporter Lauren Gambino will have more on Abrams’ decision shortly.

Meanwhile it’s kumbaya Tuesday, with the Democratic leaders of Congress heading to meet Donald Trump at the White House this morning to discuss a potential deal on infrastructure.

Such a deal has been the subject of serial campaign promises, including by Trump. But what would it look like? In a letter sent yesterday by House speaker Nancy Pelosi and senate majority minority leader Chuck Schumer, the Democrats asked for “substantial, new and real revenue” for a “comprehensive” infrastructure package to include clean energy and organized labor. On his side, Trump has promised $1.5tn in infrastructure spending, so maybe among all those zeroes there is room for agreement somewhere.

But those who remember Nancy and Chuck’s last visit to the Oval Office are not totally optimistic. In that meeting, Trump vowed to shutter the government over his beloved border wall, which he proceeded to do, until political fallout from the debacle forced him to sign a spending bill that did not fund the wall.

Second time’s a charm?

Thanks for joining us today.

Updated

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