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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Vivian Ho in Oakland (now) and Lauren Gambino and Ben Jacobs (earlier) in Washington

Trump nominates former oil lobbyist to oversee interior department – as it happened

David Bernhardt listens as Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House on 2 January.
David Bernhardt listens as Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House on 2 January. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

Evening summary

That’s all for today, folks. Thanks for reading!

  • With just one more sleep until the State of the Union, Monday was full of State of the Union news. Bernie Sanders announced that for the third year in a row, he will be speaking on social media after the address, and First Lady Melania Trump revealed that she will be bringing a boy named Joshua Trump to the State of the Union because he “has been bullied in school due to his last name”.
  • President Trump’s inaugural committee was subpoenaed by federal prosecutors and ordered to hand over documents about its donors, finances and activities, the New York Times is reporting.
  • Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military officer turned Washington lobbyist who was present at the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting, “received a series of suspicious payments totaling half a million dollars before and after the encounter”, BuzzFeed is reporting.

In more State of the Union news, the Trumps released their list of special guests. And First Lady Melania Trump has invited a very special guest, indeed.

Trump's inaugural committee subpoenaed by federal prosecutors

President Trump’s inaugural committee was ordered on Monday to hand over documents about its donors, finances and activities, the New York Times is reporting.

A lawyer working with the inaugural committee received a subpoena on Monday evening seeking documents related to all of the committee’s donors and event attendees; any benefits handed out, including tickets and photo opportunities with the president; federal disclosure filings; vendors; contracts; and more, one of the people said.

Prosecutors also showed interest in whether any foreigners illegally donated to the committee, as well as whether committee staff knew that such donations were illegal, asking for documents laying out legal requirements for donations. Federal law prohibits foreign contributions to federal campaigns, political action committees and inaugural funds.

A spokesman for the inaugural committee said it was still reviewing the subpoena and intended to cooperate with the investigation. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. ABC first reported that a subpoena was in the works.

A federal judge has rescheduled Paul Manafort’s sentencing for attempted witness tampering and conspiring against the United States, Reuters is reporting.

President Trump’s former campaign chairman will be sentenced on March 13 instead of March 5, according to a court document filed on Monday.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge presiding over Manafort’s criminal case in Washington, did not provide a reason for the delay.

A Russian-born lobbyist who was present at the now-infamous Trump Tower meeting “received a series of suspicious payments totaling half a million dollars before and after the encounter,” BuzzFeed is reporting.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that Rinat Akhmetshin, a Soviet military officer turned Washington lobbyist, deposited large, round-number amounts of cash in the months preceding and following the meeting, where a Russian lawyer offered senior Trump campaign officials dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The lobbyist also received a large payment that bank investigators deemed suspicious from Denis Katsyv, whose company Prevezon Holdings was accused by the US Justice Department of laundering the proceeds of a $230 million Russian tax fraud.

The Trump Tower meeting and those who attended it have become a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into whether the president’s campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. As part of that inquiry, banks were asked to pull financial information on the meeting attendees, and investigators at Wells Fargo handed over documents on Akhmetshin to the US Treasury in 2017. Those records were passed to Mueller’s team, but Peter Carr, a spokesperson for the special counsel, declined to say whether the transactions are under investigation. Congressional investigators also requested the financial information from the Treasury Department.

Just last month, Natalya Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer with whom Akhmetshin attended the meeting, was accused by US authorities of secretly coordinating with the Russian government while defending Katsyv in a money laundering case in New York.

Updated

Bernie Sanders to speak after State of the Union

Stacey Abrams may be delivering the Democratic response to Tuesday’s State of the Union, but Bernie Sanders is taking to social media to deliver his own response as well.

The Vermont senator is an independent, but ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Updated

Hello again, Vivian Ho on the west coast, taking over for Lauren Gambino. Let’s see what else Monday has in store for us, shall we?

The afternoon in Washington

  • Virginia’s lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax implies embattled governor Ralph Northam may be behind fresh accusations of sexual misconduct.
  • Speculation is building around what is – and isn’t – in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plan. Universal healthcare? A federal jobs guarantee? The freshman congresswoman says we’ll find out soon, possibly before the end of the week.
  • New polling shows that an independent, third-party presidential bid would hurt Democrats and possibly help re-elect Trump.
  • Donald trump announced that David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas and water lobbyist, will be nominated to run the interior department.

Updated

Interesting bit of trivia: Rosa Parks, the civil rights activist who famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger in protest of the racial segregation of the public transit system, was born on this day in 1913.

Virginia lieutenant governor slams sexual misconduct allegation as a ‘smear’

Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia who would succeed Ralph Northam and is now facing his own allegation of sexual misconduct, has suggested that Northam is behind what he has called “a smear”.

“Does anybody think it’s any coincidence that on the eve of potentially my being elevated that that’s when this uncorroborated smear comes out?” Fairfax told reporters at the Virginia state capitol when asked whether he believes Northam, a fellow Democrat, was behind the accusation coming to light, according to the New York Times.

He offered no evidence tying the Northam camp to the allegation.

Fairfax has said the encounter was consensual.

Updated

If you’re Northam weighing your options, this is not good news:

Politico reports that the pro-impeachment group run by Tom Steyer to pressure the Democratic chairman of the House ways and means committee to subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns.

“Tom Steyer’s Need to Impeach campaign is spending $109,000 on a two-week ad buy in the relatively small media market of Springfield, Mass., to pressure [congressman Richard] Neal into action, and plans to hire paid staff and launch a door-to-door canvassing effort in the congressman’s district.”

Updated

Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Maryland, who is working with freshman congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to unveil Green New Deal legislation, announced that his guest for the State of the Union will be Varshini Prakash, the executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.

The group rose to prominence after staging a protest in the soon-to-be elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional office. Ocasio-Cortez joined the demonstration and called on Congress to back the Green New Deal concept and revive a special committee on climate change.

The choice is AOC-approved.

Read more about the deal from our environmental reporter, Emily Holden.

Updated

David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas and water lobbyist, will be nominated to run the interior department, Donald Trump tweeted.

Bernhardt was deputy secretary and has been running the department since Ryan Zinke stepped down at the end of the year Bernhardt has led plans to weaken endangered species protections.

He is expected to continue the Trump administration’s priorities to advance oil and gas drilling and mining on or near public land.

Updated

Time magazine reports that Donald Trump didn’t know that Nepal and Bhutan were independent countries. The reporting comes in a story about how Trump has repeatedly ignored or tried to contradict intelligence briefings.

In another briefing on South Asia, Trump’s advisors brought a map of the region from Afghanistan to Bangladesh, according to intelligence officers with knowledge of the meeting and congressional officials who were briefed on it. Trump, they said, pointed at the map and said he knew that Nepal was part of India, only to be told that it is an independent nation. When said he was familiar with Bhutan and knew it, too, was part of India, his briefers told him that Bhutan was an independent kingdom. Last August, Politico reported on president’s mispronunciation of the names of the two countries during the same briefing.

Updated

Unsurprisingly, Ralph Northam’s approval rating has collapsed since he admitted to wearing blackface at a Michael Jackson dance party while still denying he was in the picture on his yearbook page featuring a man in blackface and another in a KKK hood.

In a new poll by Morning Consult, the Virginia governor’s approval rating has cratered. He’s gone from 48% approval to 29% approval while his disapproval rating has soared and gone from 26% to 48%.

Updated

New polling shows that a majority of Americans still oppose new wall construction on the southern border with Mexico.

New data from Gallup says that 60% of Americans oppose expanding wall construction while 40% support it. This is only a minor change from from polling done last year, which showed 57% of Americans opposed this and 41% supported it. Since then, a month-long government shutdown has been held over wall funding.

Updated

A new poll of Iowa caucusgoers from Emerson College shows Joe Biden with a healthy lead if he chooses to run.

The former vice president would take 29% of caucusgoers, followed by California Senator Kamala Harris at 18%, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at 15% and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at 11%.

The poll comes just less than a year before the Iowa Caucuses are held on 3 February 2020.

Updated

Schultz 2020 run would hurt Democrats

New polling from Politico and Morning Consult shows that a potential third party presidential bid by billionaire Howard Schultz would hurt Democrats far more than Republicans.

The Starbucks mogul has come under heavy criticism from Democrats as he as explored a potential bid in the past week as a centrist advocating fiscally conservative and socially liberal policies. Schultz though has emphasized his opposition to progressives inside the Democratic party.

While only 26% of voters who approve of Trump’s job performance as president said they were very or somewhat likely to consider a third-party candidate, a larger percentage of Trump disapprovers, 41%, said they would consider voting for an independent. By party, nearly a third of Democrats, 31%, say they would consider a third-party candidate, compared with 25% of Republicans who indicated they would consider voting for someone other than the two major-party nominees.

But the data don’t suggest Schultz, the billionaire ex-CEO of Starbucks, could do more than play spoiler in the 2020 presidential race. While 35% of all voters in the poll said they would consider a third-party candidate, only 12% said they’d be very likely to look outside the two major parties. And survey data and experts alike dispute Schultz’s rationale for his possible campaign: that a critical mass of unrepresented voters in the political center could be marshaled into an electoral majority by a moderate voice.

Updated

New Jersey just officially approved an increase in the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024.

Democratic governor Phil Murphy signed the bill just now in a major progressive goal for the deep blue state. Past efforts to raise the minimum wage were blocked under former Republican governor Chris Christie.

Updated

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is taking steps to clamp down on a potential primary challenge.

Although Trump is a likely shoo-in to win re-nomination, a bruising primary battle could leave him vulnerable in a general election. The last two incumbent presidents to lose re-election, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush both faced strong primary challenges.

As the Associated Press reports:

Bill Stepien, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, calls it all a “process of ensuring that the national convention is a television commercial for the president for an audience of 300 million and not an internal fight.”

One early success for Trump’s campaign was in Massachusetts, where Trump backer and former state Rep. Jim Lyons last month defeated the candidate backed by Massachusetts Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, a Trump critic, to serve as the state party chairman.

“We have a constant focus on tracking everything regarding this process,” Stepien said. “Who’s running, what their level of support for the president is and what their vote counts are.”

The campaign’s work extends beyond state party leadership races, which are taking place in many key states in the coming weeks. Trump’s team plans to organize at county and state caucuses and conventions over the next 18 months to elevate pro-Trump leaders and potential delegates. Ahead of the convention, it aims to have complete control of the convention agenda, rules and platform – and to identify any potential trouble-makers well in advance.

Updated

Politico reports that one key feature of Donald Trump’s State of the Union address tomorrow will be a pledge to end the Aids epidemic in the United States.

Under Trump’s 10-year strategy, health officials would target the US communities with the most HIV infections and work to reduce transmissions by 2030. The strategy has been championed by top health officials, including HHS secretary Alex Azar and CDC director Robert Redfield.

While Trump’s plans for the address remain fluid – and one official cautioned that the speech is not finalized – HHS has pressed the White House to ensure the HIV strategy is highlighted on Tuesday night, said two individuals. The agency is also planning a broader rollout this week.

An HHS spokesperson referred questions to the White House. A White House spokesperson declined to comment.

The goal would be ultimately end all new transmissions of HIV by 2030.

Updated

Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, will make her first appearance testifying before Congress since Democrats took over in March.

Nielsen is likely to face tough questioning about a number of controversial Trump administration policies including family separation and the efficacy of a wall on the United States’s southern border.

Updated

Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia who would succeed Ralph Northam, is now facing his own allegation of sexual misconduct.

Fairfax was forced to respond to the allegation, surfaced on a right-wing blog, overnight.

As the New York Times reports, the allegation has added even more uncertainty to a state government in crisis after Northam admitted to appearing in blackface at a party 35 years ago.

As Mr. Northam met Monday morning with advisers in the state capitol complex here to discuss his future, stunned legislators arrived to word that of the middle-of-the-night statement by the Fairfax aides after the publication of the story by the right-wing website, Big League Politics.

The allegation threw Virginia’s government into a deeper state of chaos, just two days after Mr. Northam admitted that in 1984 he had used shoe polish to darken his face for a Michael Jackson-themed dance party but denied in the same year that he had appeared in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan robe.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski is hitting the fundraising circuit for the Ohio Republican party.

Lewandowski has long been a lightning rod both within Trump’s inner circle and in the general public. He was fired after alienating Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and drawing unwanted attention when he allegedly assaulted reporter Michelle Fields.

Lewandowski has continued as an informal advisor to Trump as well as using his connections to start a lobbying firm where the ex-Trump aide insisted he did not lobby.

Updated

Trump's private schedules leaked

Axios obtained Donald Trump’s private schedules on Sunday, which show that a majority of his day is left in unstructured “executive time”.

The unprecedented leak shows Trump’s unique governing style. In contrast to past presidents who had tightly regimented schedules, Trump has much of the day open for freewheeling phone conversations, private meetings and, of course, time watching cable news.

Close White House aides to Trump expressed their disappointment in the leak:

Updated

Dr Ronny Jackson, the former White House physician whose failed nomination to be secretary of Veterans Affairs sparked controversy in 2018, will be promoted.

The White House announced Jackson had been elevated to his chief medical advisor with the rank assistant to the president. Jackson, an admiral in the United States Navy, was also nominated to be elevated a run to be a two star admiral.

Jackson’s nomination foundered over questions about his conduct as White House physician, which included allegations of drinking on the job, as well as administrative experience to manage the VA’s bureaucracy.

Updated

Cory Booker’s 2020 presidential campaign has unveiled a long list of hires in the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

The hires include a number of top operatives in each state who all have number of cycles of experience. It includes veterans of all three major Democratic presidential campaigns of 2016: Clinton, Sanders and O’Malley

The Republican speaker of the Virginia House, Kirk Cox, has no plans to force Ralph Northam from office.

Cox told reporters this morning “I think there’s a rightful hesitation about removal from office, because obviously you have to consider that to some degree you’re overturning an election.

As the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Cox noted that General Assembly Republicans were among the “last” people to call for Northam to resign. The speaker said he continues to believe Northam has lost the ability to govern “regardless of the veracity of the photograph.” Cox said he’s not convinced the yearbook scandal meets the constitutional threshold for impeachment proceedings.

Northam has faced near-universal calls to resign after it emerged that a racist picture had been on his medical school yearbook page.

Updated

A second top Democratic candidate has thrown his hat into the ring to challenge incumbent Colorado Republican senator Cory Gardner in 2020.

Andrew Romanoff, a former speaker of the State House, who mounted an unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. Senate in 2010 and for Congress in 2014, is poised to announce a campaign.

Gardner is one of the most vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in 2020. The first-term senator is one of two incumbent senators on the ballot in a state that Hillary Clinton won. The other is Susan Collins of Maine.

Updated

Former vice-president Joe Biden is still on the fence about a presidential bid, telling people “I’m 70 percent there, but I’m not all the way there.”

The Atlantic reports Biden is taking many of the steps necessary to mount a campaign but is still hesitating about a run.

Top positions for a campaign have been sketched out. Donor outreach has accelerated, with Biden himself telling staff at some events to write down the names of people who say they’re eager to help. A list of potential “day-one endorsers” among elected officials has been prepared. Basic staff outreach is happening. Biden has even joked to people that he’s upped his daily workout to get in shape.

“I have been told that if it happens, I need to be ready to go with a moment’s notice,” said one person who’s been in conversations with Biden’s top aides.

Skepticism persists, fed by donors who are wondering why they haven’t heard anything, and operatives who others in the field assumed Biden would have locked down by now are still shopping around for other candidates.

Biden, who mounted failed presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008, almost ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016 but decided not to at the last minute.

Updated

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton will publish his first book in May, another step forward for a rising star in the Republican Party.

An veteran with undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard, Cotton’s book will chronicle the Old Guard, the oldest active duty regiment in the Army which serves ceremonial functions. Cotton served in the unit for over a year.

As Politico reports:

The apolitical “Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery” will showcase Cotton’s service in the military, rather than the hard-edged conservatism that many Republicans believe the first-term Arkansan will eventually try to use to run for president. One of the youngest senators and someone who is close to President Donald Trump, the hawkish 41-year-old Republican is still subject to regular buzz about serving in the Cabinet or eventually running for the president. He’s also up for reelection next year, though his seat is presumably safe in red Arkansas.

Cotton received more than $500,000 in advance for the book, according to a source close to him.

Opening summary

Good morning,

We are one day away from the State of the Union, eleven days away from another potential government shutdown and three days into the political crisis in Virginia sparked the discovery of a racist picture on the yearbook page of the state’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam.

It’s Monday in American politics.

Updated

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