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Trump’s onetime campaign manager Manafort faces 12 charges; another ex-aide pleads guilty to lying to FBI

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Here’s our look at the Trump administration and the rest of Washington:

Virginia tests a likely 2018 election strategy: racially fraught appeals

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, right, debates Democratic rival Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, right, debates Democratic rival Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.
(Steve Helber / Associated Press)

Virginia has been swamped by fearful images as Tuesday’s state elections near: heavily tattooed and handcuffed Latinos staring balefully at the television camera, a mug shot of a convicted pedophile set loose on the state.

Versions of those ads may be headed to other states in the 2018 elections, as Republicans seek to maximize the turnout of the burgeoning Trump wing of the party with themes known to appeal to them.

The strategy in Virginia by Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie has played heavily on themes of race and crime — itself an issue that has historically conjured racial stereotypes — in the style employed by President Trump last year.

Both sides believe the outcome likely will turn on which candidate — Gillespie or Democrat Ralph Northam — can best deploy their base voters on Nov. 7. Democrats, who have won statewide in elections since 2009, are counting on Trump’s unpopularity to pull their voters to the polls. Republicans have sought to energize their voters with issues including gangs, sanctuary cities and Confederate monuments.

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Trump seizes on New York attack to sell immigration agenda, rile his political rival

President Trump quickly seized on Tuesday’s deadly attack in New York to promote immigration restrictions and to criticize his chief Democratic rival, New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer.

Trump’s immediate labeling of the attack as a terrorist act and his calls for policy actions contrasted with his responses to the violence and a killing by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., in August — Trump wouldn’t blame the neo-Nazis solely and said then he doesn’t rush to discuss incidents without the facts — and to the mass killings in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, after which he said it was too soon to discuss gun laws.

Trump’s Wednesday morning tweets followed a report from ABC News that the man apprehended in the New York attack, Sayfullo Saipov, came to the United States in 2010 through the diversity lottery program, which is designed to increase legal immigration from countries with lower numbers of migrants.

Trump is trying to end the program and many conservative outlets have seized on Tuesday’s attacks to criticize the program and Schumer.

Two of Trump’s Wednesday tweets referenced Fox News, an indication he was probably watching the cable news channel, his routine in the morning.

He first tweeted on Tuesday night, soon after the incident, saying he “ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program,” the subject of extensive litigation since Trump took office. Trump did not offer specifics and it is unclear how different vetting procedures would have affected Saipov’s case.

Schumer responded on Twitter hours later:

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House GOP tax plan will keep top 39.6% tax rate for rich, delay estate tax repeal for 2-3 years

The much-anticipated House GOP tax plan will keep the current top tax rate of 39.6% for the most affluent Americans but will make that bracket apply only to “substantially” higher incomes than the current $470,700 for couples, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan told a group of conservative interest groups Tuesday.

The plan will also delay any repeal of the estate tax for two to three years, the speaker told the group, according to participants in the private meeting.

Ryan said he wanted the House bill to immediately cut the corporate tax rate to 20% from the current 35%, but he acknowledged that the final version may be different. “I can’t speak to what the Senate’s going to do,” he told the group.

House leaders have been planning to introduce their bill on Wednesday, but GOP leaders indicated that may slip to Thursday amid continued negotiations over some parts of the measure.

Some Republicans are urging a gradual phase-down of the corporate rate as a way to reduce the costs of the sweeping GOP tax-cut package. In order to pass in the Senate, the tax plan may not add more than $1.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.

Many attendees were initially disappointed with the preservation of the top rate, but became more at ease as Ryan disclosed additional details, according to the person inside the room.

Other key elements remain under discussion, including how to limit state and local deductions and whether to impose caps on tax-deferred 401(k) retirement accounts.

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Trump won’t make a ‘cliche’ visit to DMZ during trip to South Korea, White House says

President Trump won’t be going to the demilitarized zone on the border between North and South Korea during his 12-day tour of Asia, the White House confirmed on Tuesday.

“The president is not going to visit the DMZ. There is not enough time in the schedule,” said a senior administration official, who insisted on anonymity to brief reporters on the Asia trip.

Trump leaves on Friday and will stop first in Hawaii before visiting five Asian countries — Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines — at a time when tensions with North Korea have spiked over its advancing nuclear missile program and its threats to conduct an above-ground nuclear test. Those tensions were said to be a factor in the decision for Trump to skip a visit.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Vice President Mike Pence have all visited the DMZ, a 2.5-mile wide strip of land that has separated the two countries since 1953.

“It’s becoming a little bit of a cliché” for U.S. leaders to visit the zone, the official said.

The official said that since the end of the Korean War, “a minority” of American presidents have gone to the still-contested border. That has not been true in recent decades: Since Ronald Reagan made the first visit by a sitting president, each successor except George H.W. Bush has made a much-photographed stop; Jimmy Carter visited as a former president.

Trump instead will visit a joint U.S.-South Korean military base 55 miles south of Seoul along with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

“No president has visited Camp Humphreys and we thought that that made more sense in terms of its messaging, in terms of the chance to address families and troops there, and to highlight — really, at President Moon’s invitation — South Korea’s role in sharing the burden of supporting this critical alliance,” the official said.

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Republicans’ deal to keep property tax deduction leaves California lagging some other states

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The decision by a key House Republican to maintain the deduction for property taxes but not for other state and local taxes is a victory for California but a bigger win for residents of other states.

While California has the highest state income tax rate in the nation, the state ranks in the bottom third by one measure for property taxes, which have been limited since voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978.

However, the deal to keep part of the state and local deduction in the Republican tax overhaul bill set to be unveiled Wednesday still would be a win for California.

It’s just not as big a victory as it is for New York, New Jersey and several other states, where property taxes make up a larger share of the overall tax burden, said Jared Walczak, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

“California receives a substantially high benefit from the property tax deduction,” he said. “It’s just that California receives such a disproportionate benefit of the overall state and local tax deduction that this looks more modest by comparison.”

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Trump boasts of superior relationship with Philippines President Duterte, who is accused of human rights violations

President Trump’s planned meeting with President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines during a regional summit in Manila on Nov. 12-13 was already controversial.

Human rights groups have accused Duterte of allowing death squads to kill thousands of supposed drug users, and he has called former President Obama a “son of a whore” who can “go to hell.”

Trump, as he often does, turned it up a notch Tuesday as he seemed to brag that he would have a superior relationship with Duterte than his predecessor.

“We’re going to the Philippines,” he told reporters as he described his upcoming 12-day trip to five countries in Asia, taking a break during a meeting on tax reform. “Which is a strategically important location where the previous administration was not exactly welcome, as you may remember.”

That came after a senior White House official briefed reporters on the trip earlier Tuesday and emphasized that Trump and Duterte have exchanged letters and spoken by phone as part of a thawing of relations between the two countries.

“There’s a warm rapport there,” the official said.

The Philippines is a former U.S. colony and relations between Washington and Manila have long been fraught.

In 1991, the government there forced the Pentagon to abandon two major bases in the Philippines, but the two countries have cooperated closely in counter-terrorism operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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President Trump tweets again, trying to turn spotlight on Democrats

President Trump continued broadcasting his frustration with Monday’s announcement of two indictments and one guilty plea of top figures in his campaign, sending a second series of tweets Tuesday morning intended to deflect attention to Democrats.

The presidential tweets, amid one of the most challenging weeks of his presidency, mark yet another precedent broken by Trump. Many legal analysts have advised him against making impromptu public statements on social media during the investigation.

It is unclear what he meant when he said that the Podesta brothers could “drain the swamp.” John Podesta served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. His brother Tony, who is also close to the Clintons, resigned from his Democratic lobbying firm amid the furor of the Russia probe on Monday.

Podesta’s firm is referenced, though not by name, in the indictment against Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager who was charged Monday. The firm worked on a contract with Manafort for a Ukrainian government political party.

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Trump aide who pleaded guilty went from an ‘excellent guy’ to a ‘low-level volunteer’

President Trump broke a nearly daylong Twitter silence Tuesday to characterize a former campaign aide who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as a “young low-level volunteer” who “few knew.”

That might come as a surprise to candidate Donald Trump, who in a March 2016 meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post highlighted George Papadopoulos’ role in his campaign.

Asked about a pending announcement of his foreign policy team, Trump listed Papadopoulos as one of five advisors.

“He’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy,” Trump said.

The advisor also was present at a meeting of Trump’s foreign policy team; a picture shows him four seats from Trump.

Papadopoulos pleaded guilty early this month to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia during the campaign. The plea was made public Monday.

Trump’s tweets also erred in their characterization of the timing of events listed in the indictment of his former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s chief aide, Richard Gates. While the 12-count indictment on money laundering, conspiracy and other charges involved events before the campaign, prosecutors specified that the acts continued until 2017.

Trump had tweeted similar sentiments after the Manafort and Gates indictments were announced, but he had not commented since the Papadopoulos plea was made public.

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Chief of Staff John Kelly brushes aside Trump aide charges, endorses new Clinton inquiry

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly on Monday brushed aside charges leveled at three Trump campaign aides as part of the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, but endorsed a new independent prosecutor to delve into a 2010 uranium company deal that has become a rallying cry for opponents of Hillary Clinton.

Kelly, speaking on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle,” claimed that all the activities involving former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, his chief aide Richard W. Gates III and a foreign policy advisor, George Papadopoulos, occurred “long before they ever met Donald Trump or had any association with the campaign.”

In fact, the investigation, being directed by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, covered the period in which all three served under Trump. Manafort and Gates were charged in a 12-count indictment that alleged money laundering, among other crimes. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the campaign.

Ingraham did not correct Kelly, who later went on to say that “the reaction of the administration is to let the legal system work. … Everyone is presumed innocent and we’ll see where it goes.”

Kelly also expressed confidence that the Mueller investigation was nearing its end.

“It should wrap up soon,” he said. “It would seem that they’re toward the end of the witness pile.”

“I don’t know how much longer it can possibly go on,” he said, adding that the president found the investigation “very distracting.”

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Manafort’s lawyer lashes out at special counsel

Paul Manafort’s attorney mocked the prosecution of his client Monday afternoon at the entrance of the federal courthouse in Washington, where Manafort and his longtime business associate had just been ordered by a judge to home confinement and to post millions of dollars in bail.

Kevin Downing, attorney for the former chairman of the Trump campaign, called the indictment “ridiculous.” He repeated President Trump’s assertion, posted on Twitter earlier in the day, that there was no evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia. And he accused the special counsel’s office of pursuing a “novel” prosecution strategy that has only been attempted a half dozen times in the last 50 years, resulting in just one conviction.

Manafort “was seeking to further democracy and to help the Ukraine come closer to the United States and to the E.U.,” Downing said of the payments to his client from Ukrainian officials which are a focus of the indictment. “Those activities ended in 2014. Over two years before Mr. Manafort served in the Trump campaign.”

Downing labeled as “ridiculous” the prosecution’s argument that Manafort was concealing income from the government through a network of offshore accounts.

His comments came shortly after Manafort and his associate Rick Gates solemnly waked into the courtroom in dark suits to enter their pleas of not guilty. The men were ordered by a judge to home confinement with daily check-ins and electronic monitoring. Both men had already turned their passports over to federal law enforcement prior to the arraignment.

Manafort was ordered to post a $10-million unsecured bond after prosecutors warned his vast wealth and extensive network of contacts overseas make him a flight risk. They acknowledged that pinpointing exactly how much money Manafort had in the bank had proven difficult. The cache of loan applications and other documents prosecutors have in their possession suggested that Manafort’s net worth could be anywhere from $20 million to $100 million, they said.

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Ukrainian lawmaker happy about Paul Manafort’s indictment

A Ukrainian lawmaker said Monday he was glad to learn that former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been indicted in the U.S. on charges largely stemming from his work as a consultant to a former Ukrainian president accused of bilking the country of billions of dollars.

Sergei Leshchenko, an Ukrainian lawmaker who spearheaded an investigation into allegations that Manafort received as much as $12.7 million in secret cash payments from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine, said the indictment showed that the “bad guys will be punished.”

“I’m very happy,” Leshchenko said by phone from Kiev on Monday evening. “A corrupt American spin doctor helped [former Ukrainian President Viktor] Yanukovych win elections and push Ukraine toward a pro-Russia agenda. He was paid by corrupt people who stole Ukrainian taxpayers’ money.”

Manafort was indicted on several charges of money laundering and tax evasion. He pleaded not guilty to the charges. The charges are linked to Manafort’s work during 10 years for a Russia-leaning political party in Ukraine called the Party of Regions.

That party supported Yanukovych, who was ousted in February 2014 during mass street protests known as the Maidan revolution. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to protest Yanukovych’s reversal on a promise to sign a trade and association agreement with the European Union. The street protests were followed by the Russian annexation of Crimea, and a military conflict in the east with Kremlin-backed separatist militias.

“I feel like I didn’t waste my time on this, even though there was a lot of skeptics when I first started,” Leshchenko said. “People said it wasn’t a good way to begin relations with the new administration. But it’s important to show that the bad guys will be punished.”

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White House: Charges against Manafort have ‘nothing to do with’ Trump

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

The White House downplayed indictments on Monday against President Trump’s former campaign manager and two other aides, including one who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, as having “nothing to do” with the president or his election effort.

“Today’s announcement has nothing to do with the president, has nothing to do with the president’s campaign or campaign activity,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, and Rick Gates, whom the indictment called “Manafort’s right-hand man,” pleaded not guilty to 12 charges of money laundering and conspiracy, the first charges filed in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of connections between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to influence last year’s presidential election.

The indictment alleges that for at least a decade, through 2016, Manafort and Gates failed to properly disclose more than $75 million in payments from Ukraine’s government, then pro-Moscow, for lobbying and public relations to influence U.S. policy in its favor.

“We’ve been saying from Day One there is no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion and nothing in the indictment today changes that at all,” Sanders said, echoing earlier tweets from Trump. Like him, she sought to deflect attention by saying that “the real collusion scandal” is related to the Clinton campaign efforts to collect opposition research on Trump.

Sanders’ dismissiveness was challenged, however, by the indictment and guilty plea of the third former aide, foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who confessed to making false statements about his contact with Russians during the campaign. He is cooperating with prosecutors.

Sanders sought to diminish Papadopoulos’ role in the campaign, describing him as a member of a “volunteer advisory council” that met perhaps once. If so, it put him near the right hand of Trump, as a photo Trump once tweeted shows.

Sanders said Papadopoulos’s outreach to senior campaign officials to have Trump meet with Russian officials “was repeatedly denied.” He “reached out and nothing happened beyond that,” Sanders said.

“It has nothing to do with the activities of the campaign, it has to do with this failure to tell the truth,” she added.

When asked why Trump appears in the March 2016 campaign photograph with Papadopoulos, Sanders said Trump appears in “thousands of photographs with millions of people.”

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$10 million bond for ex-Trump chairman Paul Manafort after not guilty plea in Russia probe

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates were ordered to surrender their passports and remain in home confinement after pleading not guilty Monday in the first indictments from the special counsel investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Manafort was released on $10 million bond and Gates on $5 million.

The two, who were arrested earlier in the day, appeared before a federal judge here Monday afternoon.

They are charged with a total of 12 counts that include conspiracy to launder money, failing to registered as a foreign agent, false statements, and failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.

Federal prosecutors in the office of Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, accused Manafort of hiding roughly $75 million he received in payment for lobbying he did for agents of the former President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions.

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Federal court bars Trump from reversing transgender troops policy

A federal court in Washington, D.C., is barring President Trump from changing the government’s policy on military service by transgender people.

Trump first announced in a July tweet and then in an August memo that he intended to reverse course on a 2016 policy that allowed troops to serve openly as transgender individuals. He said he would order a return to the policy prior to June 2016, under which service members could be discharged for being transgender.

U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote Monday that transgender members of the military who had sued over the change were likely to win their lawsuit and barred the Trump administration from reversing course.

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Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleads guilty to lying to the FBI agents in Mueller probe

A former foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians who claimed to have “thousands of emails” on Hillary Clinton, in the latest charges filed in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

George Papadopoulos, 30, of Chicago, has agreed to cooperate with the investigation led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, according to a plea agreement unsealed on Monday.

He pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 to making false statements to disguise his contacts with Russians whom he thought had “dirt” on Clinton, according to court papers. He was arrested in July as he got off a plane at Dulles International Airport.

After he was contacted by an unnamed Russian professor in March, Papadopoulos exchanged emails with an official in the Russian foreign ministry, court papers say. Among the topics he discussed was a possible visit by Trump to Russia.

“As mentioned we are all very excited by the possibility of a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” one Russian emailed him.

In April, after he had become an advisor to the campaign, Papadopoulos met with the Russian professor at a London hotel. The professor said he had just returned from a trip to Moscow, where he was told “the Russians had emails of Clinton.”

Papadopoulos told other leaders in the Trump campaign that he was in contact with Russians, and said there were some “interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip.”

An unnamed campaign official, described as a campaign “supervisor,” encouraged him to make the trip, a document reads.

Papadopoulos was one of several foreign policy advisors to Trump during his campaign.

Papadopoulos previously had served as a policy and economic advisor to Ben Carson, who notably struggled with domestic and foreign policy issues during his failed presidential run.

Before that, the 30-year-old was a consultant at a London-based oil and gas company. He’s a director at the London Centre of International Law Practice. He graduated from DePaul University in 2009.

UPDATES

7:55 a.m.: Adds additional details

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein on the Manafort charges: ‘The process is working’

(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the charges filed against President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort’s former business associate showed the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was “doing his job and the process is working.”

“I’ll continue to support Bob Mueller as he follows the facts — his independence must remain sacrosanct,” the California Democrat said in a statement.

On Friday, Feinstein sent letters requesting information from the White House, Michael Cohen, Facebook, Twitter and Cambridge Analytica on Russia’s use of technology to interfere with the election.

“Bob Mueller’s criminal investigation is important, but Congress has a responsibility to get to the bottom of this and work to make sure it never happens again. That’s why it’s so vital that the congressional investigations continue.”

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Trump responds to Paul Manafort charges: ‘There is NO COLLUSION!’

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Watch as Paul Manafort arrives at an FBI office to surrender

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort walks into an FBI field office in Washington on Monday after being indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian meddling probe.

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GOP says lower-tax states are subsidizing California. It’s the other way around, and tax overhaul could make it worse

The Capitol building in Sacramento.
The Capitol building in Sacramento.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The main Republican argument for killing the state and local tax deduction is that the break forces residents of low-tax states to subsidize those in California and other high-tax states.

But when it comes to federal taxes, the data show that it’s the other way around. And it could get worse for Californians if the deduction is eliminated as part of the GOP tax overhaul.

California is among 13 states that ship more tax money to Washington than they get back in federal spending, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government, a public policy think tank in Albany, N.Y.

They’re known as donor states, a title California has held for years, mostly because of the state’s relatively younger population and large number of high-income earners.

Killing the state and local tax deduction, as President Trump and congressional Republican leaders have proposed, probably would tilt the equation even more against California.

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Trump campaign manager Manafort, ex-aide charged in Russia probe

Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, has been indicted on 12 charges of money-laundering and conspiracy, the first charges filed in the investigation of possible connections between the Trump campaign and a Russian effort to influence last year’s presidential election.

Manafort, 68, turned himself in at FBI headquarters early Monday for his role in an alleged scheme to use offshore accounts to hide tens of millions of dollars in payments he received for representing a pro-Kremlin political faction in the Ukraine.

Manafort also was charged with filing false reports to conceal the fact that he was acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Also charged in the indictment was Richard W. Gates III, a top business aide to Manafort.

The charges state that Manafort and Gates were agents for former Ukraine President Victor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions.

Manafort and Gates used a variety of offshore accounts in Cyprus and other bank secrecy havens to hide $75 million in payments for the lobbying work, allowing them to avoid filing required registrations and to avoid paying taxes, according to the indictment.

“Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States, without paying taxes on that income,” the charges said.

The White House declined comment on the charges.

Former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III was named as special counsel in May to investigate the Russian attempts to influence the election, but the charges are not directly tied to that operation. Mueller also has authority to investigate any related crimes that his team uncovers.

Manafort worked for the Trump campaign from March until August, serving for several months as campaign chairman.

>> The charges against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates

UPDATES

6:19 a.m.: This post was updated with the addition of charges against Manafort and Gates

6:38 a.m.: This post was updated with additional details

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Puerto Rico says it’s scrapping $300-million Whitefish contract amid increased scrutiny

Whitefish Energy Holdings workers restore power lines damaged by Hurricane Maria in Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, on Oct. 15.
(Ramon Espinosa / Associated Press)

The head of Puerto Rico’s power company said Sunday the agency will cancel its $300-million contract with Whitefish Energy Holdings amid increased scrutiny of the tiny Montana company’s role in restoring the island’s power system following Hurricane Maria.

The announcement by Ricardo Ramos came hours after Gov. Ricardo Rossello urged the company to scrap the deal.

Ramos said that Whitefish will continue with current work, but the contract would then be scrapped — leading to delay of 10 to 12 weeks in completing the work.

It’s an enormous distraction,” he said on why he canceled the contract. “This was negatively impacting the work we’re already doing.”

Federal investigators have been trying to investigate the contract awarded to the small company from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s hometown. The deal, signed shortly before the hurricane hit, is being audited at the local and federal level.

Whitefish spokesman Chris Chiames told the Associated Press before the Ramos announcement that the company would soon issue a comment.

Rossello said earlier that nearly $8 million has been paid to Whitefish so far.

Rossello said he has requested that crews from New York and Florida come help restore power in Puerto Rico as he criticized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for not meeting its goals. The agency could not be immediately reached for comment.

The governor also announced the appointment of an outside coordinator to oversee the power company’s purchase and contracting division.

“If something illegal was done, once again, the officials involved in that process will feel the full weight of the law, and I will take administrative actions,” Rossello said.

Roughly 70% of the island remains without power more than a month after Hurricane Maria struck the U.S. territory on Sept. 20 as a Category 4 storm with winds of up to 154 mph.

Ramos has said that Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority reached a deal with Whitefish just days before the hurricane struck, saying that he spoke with at least five other companies that demanded similar rates, in addition to a down payment the agency did not have.

Ramos also has said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had approved of the deal, something the agency has denied.

FEMA said it has not approved any reimbursement requests from the power company for money to cover repairs to the island’s electrical system. The contract said the utility would not pay costs unallowable under FEMA grants, but it also said, “The federal government is not a party to this contract.”

FEMA has raised concerns about how Whitefish got the deal and whether the contracted prices were reasonable. The 2-year-old company had just two full-time employees when the storm hit, but it has since hired more than 300 workers.

A Whitefish contract obtained by the Associated Press found that the deal included $20,277 an hour for a heavy lift Chinook helicopter, $650 an hour for a large crane truck, $322 an hour for a foreman of a power line crew, $319 an hour for a journeyman lineman and $286 an hour for a mechanic. Each worker also gets a daily allowance of $80 for food, $332 for a hotel room and $1,000 for each flight to or from the mainland.

Whitefish Energy Holdings is based in Whitefish, Mont. Zinke, a former Montana congressman, knows Whitefish CEO Andy Techmanski, and Zinke’s son also had a summer job at a Whitefish construction site.

“I had absolutely nothing to do with Whitefish Energy receiving a contract in Puerto Rico,” Zinke recently said in a statement linked to a tweet. “Any attempts by the dishonest media or political operatives to tie me to awarding or influencing any contract involving Whitefish are completely baseless.”

Democrats also have questioned the role of HBC Investments, a key financial backer of Whitefish Energy. The Dallas-based company’s founder and general partner, Joe Colonnetta, has contributed thousands of dollars to Trump and other Republicans. Chiames has said Colonnetta’s political donations were “irrelevant” and that the company would cooperate with any federal authorities.

This week, Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah Republican who heads the House Natural Resources Committee, sent the power company director a letter demanding documents, including those related to the contract with Whitefish and others that show what authority the agency has to deviate from normal contracting processes.

“Transparent accountability at [the power company] is necessary for an effective and sustained recovery in Puerto Rico,” his office said in a statement.

A federal control board that oversees Puerto Rico’s finances announced this week that retired Air Force Col. Noel Zamot will be in charge of power reconstruction efforts. Rossello and other officials have rejected the appointment, saying the local government is in charge of a power company that is $9 billion in debt and that had struggled with ongoing outages before hurricanes Irma and Maria hit last month.

1:20 p.m.: This story has been updated with Puerto Rico saying it will cancel its contract with Whitefish.

This story originally published at 8:21 a.m.

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White House press secretary insists women accusing Trump of sexual assault are lying

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders appears at a briefing earlier this month.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump’s spokeswoman maintained Friday that all of the women who have accused him of unwanted touching or kissing were lying.

“Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president has spoken on it,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said when asked if Trump’s position on accusations against the president was that “all of these women are lying.”

Accusations against Trump arose during last year’s presidential campaign, when at least 11 women described physical actions by the president that they found offensive. Trump at the time called the women “horrible liars” and suggested in at least one case that he was not physically attracted to the woman making the accusation.

The president himself, however, was caught bragging in vulgar language, on a 2005 video made by the “Access Hollywood” show, about grabbing and kissing women without their permission.

Then the lead character on the “Apprentice” television show, Trump said on the video that he got away with the actions because he was “a star.”

Trump’s actions have received renewed interest since movie producer Harvey Weinstein has been accused by dozens of women of inappropriate sexual acts. Weinstein lost his post at his family company; the fallout also has tarnished journalist Mark Halperin, who was suspended from his MSNBC and NBC analyst roles after several women accused him of harrassment when he directed political coverage years ago at ABC News.

Trump has maintained his innocence during his presidency, as he did in the campaign.

Eleven days ago, during a press briefing with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Trump was asked about his campaign being subpoenaed by one of his accusers for documents related to the 2016 allegations.

“All I can say is it’s totally fake news. It’s just fake. It’s fake,” he said. “It’s made-up stuff, and it’s disgraceful what happens. But that’s [what] happens in the world of politics.”

Earlier, Trump told reporters that he was not taken aback by the alleged actions against Weinstein, a longtime Democratic donor.

“I’ve known Harvey Weinstein for a long time. I’m not all surprised to see it,” Trump said on Oct. 7.

Asked about the accusations leveled against him, Trump attempted to brush them aside.

“That’s locker room. That’s locker room,” he said, employing the same description he used when the “Access Hollywood” tape first surfaced a year ago.

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Watch live: Briefing with White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders

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Narrow House passage of GOP budget resolution suggests tax reform plan faces a tough road

House Republicans’ narrow passage Thursday of a 2018 budget resolution points to how much work still lies ahead to push through President Trump’s tax cut package.

The largely partisan tax plan, aimed chiefly at lowering corporate tax rates, is set to be unveiled in a matter of days.

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Pentagon chief at Korea’s demilitarized zone: ‘Our goal is not war’

Days after North Korea threatened to test a nuclear weapon above ground, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis visited the Demilitarized Zone that divides that country from South Korea and declared: “Our goal is not war.”

On Friday, he visited the heavily fortified border area, where U.S. and South Korean troops maintain a constant presence opposite North Korean forces. Mattis stressed the need for a “diplomatic solution” to the tensions with Pyongyang, which have been building under President Trump, who has repeatedly sent more provocative signals, especially on Twitter.

“North Korean provocations continue to threaten regional and world peace, and despite unanimous condemnation by the United Nations’ Security Council, they still proceed,” Mattis said. “As Secretary of State [Rex] Tillerson has made clear, our goal is not war but rather the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”

A senior North Korean official told CNN on Wednesday to take “literally” the isolated nation’s threats that it might conduct an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific.

That would be a major escalation. All six of North Korea’s previous nuclear tests have been underground. No nation has conducted an atmospheric nuclear test since China in 1980.

During his visit, Mattis was joined by South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo.

Song, acknowledging that North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons and missiles, added that the weapons “should never be used.”

“Should they ever use it, they will be faced with the strong might” of joint South Korean and American forces, Song said, “and they will be met with a proportional and firm response.”

Mattis also visited the Blue House, South Korea’s presidential residence, and met with President Moon Jae-in. His trip comes ahead of Trump’s visit to Asia next month, though the White House has said that the president will not visit the Demilitarized Zone, as past presidents have.

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Virginia governor’s race polls gyrate, an example of guesswork over who will show up to vote on Nov. 7

Vice President Mike Pence campaigned for Republican candidate Ed Gillespie earlier this month in southwest Virginia.
(Andre Teague / Associated Press)

Those looking at polls to find out who’s ahead in the hard-fought Virginia governor’s race have a case of whiplash.

The contest is the most-watched of the season, coming almost exactly a year after President Trump’s election in a place whose electorate resembles the United States writ small.

Democrats and Republicans consider the race a bellwether for views of Trump’s presidency, and the president’s antics in Washington have overshadowed the two candidates, Democrat Ralph Northam and Republican Ed Gillespie.

Those working on the campaigns consider the race to be close, making it all the weirder that recent polls have shown rather comfortable leads — for both candidates.

A Fox News poll released Oct. 17 gave Northam a seven-point advantage: 49%-42%. A survey by Hampton University, released Oct. 22, had Gillespie ahead by eight points, 41%-33%. A poll by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University, released Friday, had Northam ahead by seven, 50%-43%.

The differences stem from the alchemy of polling, which combines research and other factors to come up with a reasonable expectation of which voters actually will show up on election day. As the 2016 presidential contest showed, variation in turnout — say a higher rural vote benefitting Donald Trump or a lower African American turnout hurting Hillary Clinton — can produce unforeseen results.

In Virginia, the latest three polls seemed to differ on the make-up of the electorate.

In the Fox poll, 45% of voters identified themselves as Democrats, to 42% Republican and 13% independents. In the Hampton poll, the proportion of Republicans rose, with 49% saying they leaned Republican, to 37% leaning Democratic. In the Wason Center survey, Democrats represented 36% of the sample and Republicans 33%.

It’s a pithy cliche of politics, most often uttered by the candidate trailing as voting nears: The only poll that counts is the one on election day.

In Virginia this year, that happens to be true.

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Trump administration belatedly takes step toward new Russia sanctions

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press))

The Trump administration belatedly has taken the first steps toward imposing new sanctions on Russian officials to punish Moscow for interfering in the 2016 election.

In early August, after considerable delay, Trump signed into law a measure that required the new sanctions, which target individuals with ties to Russian defense and intelligence agencies. Under the law, companies that do business with those individuals could be subject to U.S. sanctions.

The law gave the administration until Oct. 1 to produce a list. After the administration missed that deadline, members of Congress and others have stepped up criticism of Trump on the issue. Late Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson authorized officials to release the list to key members of Congress.

The names haven’t been made public yet, but that’s expected to happen in coming days. The idea is to give companies time to unwind any connections they may have with the named individuals before the new sanctions take effect in late January.

In a joint statement, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), who have been among the leaders in Congress on the sanctions issue, praised the administration for taking a first step, but warned that recent cutbacks at the State Department could hamper the sanctions.

The State Department needs to “dedicate robust staffing and resources to the implementation effort,” they said, noting that Tillerson has downgraded the department’s sanctions office and “a number of its staff have resigned.”

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Trump’s push to revive coal mining puts Utah dinosaur discoveries in danger, scientists say

The creature looked like a three-ton rhino crossed with a tropical lizard. Ten little horns dangled over its giant forehead like frills on a jester’s cap and two more perched over the eyes. Spikes poked out of each cheek. A blade jutted from its nose.

Paleontologists suspect this freakish beast, named kosmoceratops, was brightly colored to attract mates. It prowled the coastal swamps of southern Utah 79 million years ago.

It is one of more than two dozen new species of dinosaurs discovered in Grand Staircase-Escalante in the 21 years since President Clinton preserved it as a national monument.

The bounty has stunned scientists. Most of this 1.9 million acres of desert wilderness, one of the world’s richest fossil sites for studying the age of dinosaurs, remains unexplored.

But scientists now fear President Trump will soon spoil it.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, ordered by Trump to reassess the biggest national monuments named since 1996, has proposed shrinking Grand Staircase-Escalante. Whatever area is removed would be open to coal mining, oil drilling and mineral extraction.

The fossil beds here are scattered across land that also holds an estimated 62 billion tons of coal.

“My fear is that opening up the monument to energy extraction will threaten our ability to uncover the secrets that we know must still be buried in the monument,” said Scott Sampson, a Canadian paleontologist who oversaw much of the early dinosaur research in the monument.

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Here’s why Republicans could help send Dianne Feinstein back to Washington — even if they can’t stand her

Larry Ward is no fan of Dianne Feinstein.

“Time to retire,” he says of the Democratic senator from California. “Too old.”

Coming from a Republican such as Ward, that’s hardly surprising. He’d have gladly been rid of Feinstein a long time ago.

But it’s voters like Ward — conservatives who feel voiceless and adrift, bobbing like red specks in a blue sea — who could help usher the 84-year-old Feinstein back to Washington with a new lease on her Senate seat.

Like most voters here in El Dorado County, Ward supported President Trump. He can’t understand why Democrats and the media pile on and keep him from cutting taxes and fulfilling a campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare.

He certainly doesn’t think Feinstein’s been too kind to Trump — the argument made by her newly announced challenger, Kevin de León. The state senator from Los Angeles and others on the left were spitting fire a few weeks back when Feinstein allowed as how she hoped, given time and a radical transformation, Trump might end up being a good president.

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Pentagon chief Jim Mattis stresses diplomacy in Korean crisis

(STR / AFP/Getty Images)

On his first visit to the tense but eerily quiet frontier between North and South Korea as U.S. secretary of defense, Jim Mattis conveyed the message he hopes will win the day: Diplomacy is the answer to ending the nuclear crisis with the North, not war.

He made the point over and over - at the Panmunjom “truce village” where North literally meets South; at a military observation post inside the Demilitarized Zone, and in off-the cuff comments to U.S. and South Korean troops.

“We’re doing everything we can to solve this diplomatically - everything we can,” he told the troops after alighting from a Black Hawk helicopter that had ferried him to and from the border some 25 miles north of central Seoul.

“Ultimately, our diplomats have to be backed up by strong soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines,” he added, “so they speak from a position of strength, of combined strength, of alliance strength, shoulder to shoulder.”

At Panmunjom, where the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in July 1953, Mattis quoted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as saying, “Our goal is not war.” The aim, he said, is to compel the North to completely and irreversibly eliminate a nuclear weapons program that has accelerated since President Trump took office.

Despite unanimous condemnation by the United Nations Security Council of the North’s missile launches and nuclear tests, “provocations continue,” Mattis said.

Mattis’ counterpart, South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo, gave the former four-star Marine general the lay of the land, noting that the North has 342 long-range artillery pieces aimed at Seoul, among other weapons. That’s a threat that cannot be defended against, Song said, so Washington and Seoul must come up with “new offensive concepts” to be able to eliminate the artillery before it can be used, should war break out.

On Saturday, Mattis will be joined by Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in annual consultations with South Korean defense officials. They are expected to admonish North Korea, vow to strengthen allied defenses, and discuss prospects for eventually giving South Korea wartime control of its own forces.

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Government watchdog to investigate Trump’s voter fraud commission

(David Goldman / Associated Press)

President Trump’s voter fraud commission, already facing several lawsuits, will now be investigated by a government watchdog.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an independent nonpartisan agency, announced Thursday that it has accepted a request by Democratic lawmakers to review the commission.

In an Oct. 18 letter requesting an investigation, Democratic Sens. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota wrote that the manner in which the commission is conducting its work “will prevent the public from a full and transparent understanding of the commission’s conclusions and unnecessarily diminish confidence in our democratic process.”

Officials from the GAO wrote back that the review will begin when it has staff available in about five months.

In May, Trump established the commission to study registration and voting processes. Trump has alleged — without evidence — that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in last year’s presidential election, in which he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million ballots.

Critics have assailed the commission as both a sham created by an insecure president and a tool to justify measures that would make it harder for minorities to vote. Several groups have filed lawsuits against the commission — which to date has held two public meetings — over privacy concerns and the collection of voter data.

Two Democrats on the bipartisan commission sent letters to leaders of the panel last week condemning a lack of transparency.

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What’s behind the opioid crisis that prompted a declaration from Trump?

The opioid epidemic has claimed more than 190,000 lives since 1999.

The Times investigated Oxycontin, a prescription drug widely blamed for setting off the epidemic. Over the last 20 years, more than 7 million Americans have abused OxyContin, according to the federal government’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The drugmaker Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin two decades ago with a bold marketing claim: One dose relieves pain for 12 hours, more than twice as long as generic medications.

Patients would no longer have to wake up in the middle of the night to take their pills, Purdue told doctors. One OxyContin tablet in the morning and one before bed would provide “smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night.”

On the strength of that promise, OxyContin became America’s bestselling painkiller, and Purdue reaped $31 billion in revenue.

But OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

The problem offers new insight into why so many people have become addicted to OxyContin, one of the most abused pharmaceuticals in U.S. history.

Our investigation:

“You want a description of hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-hour problem

More than 1 million OxyContin pills ended up in the hands of criminals and addicts. What the drugmaker knew

How black-market OxyContin spurred a town’s descent into crime, addiction and heartbreak

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Watch live: President Trump delivers remarks on battling the opioid crisis

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The Trump wing of the GOP is winning battles. But will it lose the war to keep the Senate in Republican hands?

Sen. Jeff Flake’s surprise decision to not seek reelection marked a major victory for Stephen K. Bannon and his pirate band of Republicans. But the larger question Wednesday was whether the insurgency will cost the GOP its thin majority on Capitol Hill.

The fratricide that Bannon, a former White House advisor, is waging against President Trump’s critics threatens to undermine the party’s Senate hopefuls and has already lifted Democratic prospects, boosting the possibility of shaving the GOP’s 52-48 majority or eliminating it altogether.

“It’s causing Republicans to spend money defending their own rather than focusing on the big target, which should be expanding the size of their governing majority,” said Scott Reed, chief political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the citadels targeted by Bannon and his anti-establishment forces.

The insurgency also runs the risk of putting forth candidates unable to broaden their support beyond a fervent but small wing of the GOP, repeating the failings of the tea party movement that cost Republicans winnable Senate seats in 2010 and 2012.

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Veteran journalist Mark Halperin reportedly out at NBC News, MSNBC after sexual harassment claims

Veteran journalist Mark Halperin reportedly will leave his roles at NBC News and MSNBC after five women claimed he sexually harassed them while he was a top ABC News executive.

The coauthor of the best-selling book “Game Change” told CNN on Wednesday night that he’s “deeply sorry” and is taking a “step back” from day-to-day work to deal with the situation.

His statement came after CNN reported allegations that Halperin propositioned, fondled and pushed himself against five women in the early 2000s while he was ABC News’ political director.

The women, who asked to remain anonymous, said they didn’t report Halperin’s conduct because they feared retribution or were embarrassed.

Halperin says he pursued relationships, sometimes with junior co-workers, but CNN says he denies the groping allegations.

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Democrats on Trump’s voter fraud commission urge leaders to be more transparent

President Trump’s voter fraud commission, launched by executive order in May with the stated goal of restoring confidence and integrity in the electoral process, is now confronted with pushback from an unlikely group: its own members.

Two Democrats on the bipartisan commission sent letters to leaders of the panel last week condemning a lack of transparency.

“I honestly do not know what’s going on with the commission,” Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, the author of one of the letters, said Wednesday. “This very much concerns me.”

The correspondence adds to mounting criticism that Trump created the commission with the aim of blaming his popular-vote loss on fraud and to look for new ways to suppress turnout among voters who tend to favor Democrats.

Trump has alleged — without evidence — that between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes were cast in last year’s presidential election in which he prevailed in the electoral college even as Democrat Hillary Clinton garnered nearly 3 million more votes. Studies have consistently shown that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

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Trump would ‘love’ to do a DACA deal, wants it to include border wall funds

(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

President Trump said Wednesday he would “love” to make an immigration deal to protect so-called Dreamers, but wants border security concessions in exchange, including money to build his long-promised wall along the border with Mexico.

“I’d love to do a DACA deal, but we have to get something very substantial for it, including the wall” and tougher border security, Trump told reporters as he left the White House to fly to Dallas for a GOP fundraiser and a briefing on Gulf Coast hurricane relief efforts.

Trump announced in September he was terminating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program established by President Obama that has protected from deportation more than 800,000 people brought to the country illegally as children.

At the time, Trump gave Congress six months to act before work permits and deportation deferrals issued under the program begin to expire on March 6.

But lawmakers have struggled to agree on how to move forward with a bill to protect the DACA recipients. They’re currently negotiating with an eye toward including a compromise on the issue as part of a must-pass spending bill due for a vote in early December.

The top Democrats in the House and Senate, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), said Trump made a deal with them during an Oval Office meeting in early September that he would sign a DACA bill that didn’t include funding for the wall.

Earlier this month, however, the White House issued a 17-page list of principles for any deal that included building the wall, increasing the number of deportation officers, and provisions that would limit the ability of new U.S. citizens to sponsor relatives for legal status.

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Trump adds fresh doubts to his promise to declare opioid emergency

President Trump surprised his advisors last week when he promised that he would declare an opioid emergency by this week. On Wednesday, he added to the confusion.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump hedged his language on when he would declare a state of emergency and fueled doubts about the amount of legal force he will put behind the declaration.

“We’re going to have a big meeting on opioids tomorrow,” he said during an ad hoc news conference on the White House lawn as he set out for a fundraising trip to Texas.

The session would be “a very, very important meeting,” Trump said, adding that an emergency would be declared “sometime in the very short, very near future.”

Trump promised last week that the emergency would be declared this week. He made a similar promise of rapid action in August, after his high-profile opioid commission made declaration of an emergency a top recommendation.

But the White House has been slow to act, leading to questions over how much power an actual declaration will carry in freeing up money or adding to the government’s authority to regulate.

Since the opioid commission released its report, Trump’s secretary for Health and Human Services, Tom Price, has stepped down and his pick for drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), withdrew his nomination.

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Trump: Flake was ‘against me from before he ever knew me’

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In stunning rebuke of Trump, two GOP senators accuse him of undermining American values

President Trump on Tuesday endured one of the most searing rebukes of a chief executive by members of his own party in modern history, with one Republican senator accusing him of “debasing” the nation and another declaring he would rather retire than be “complicit” in the “compromise of our moral authority.”

Senate Republicans had hoped a Tuesday lunch with Trump would showcase GOP unity as they push for tax cuts. But the meeting was largely lost amid Trump’s remarkable war of words with Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the announcement by Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake that he would not run for reelection because he refuses to accommodate the “new normal” of the president’s behavior.

The successive attacks, one before senators even sat down for lunch and the other afterward, showed once again how the president’s unpredictable outbursts and willingness to belittle his allies not only distracts from the administration’s policy agenda, but also threatens to undercut Trump’s image at home and abroad.

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Trump makes fundraising trip to Dallas, with hurricane briefing -- far from coast -- on the side

(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)

President Trump visited Dallas on Wednesday for a Republican fundraiser and political reception, and added a brief meeting about hurricane recovery efforts continuing on the Gulf Coast about 250 miles away.

The briefing at Dallas Love Field Airport, where several state and federal officials reviewed the effort since Hurricane Harvey struck the Houston region in August, lasted just 10 to 15 minutes, according to reporters with the president. Afterward Trump attended a private roundtable event and reception with Republican National Committee supporters and donors.

The reception was held at the Belo Mansion, now a catering and event space that once was the home of Alfred Horatio Belo, who led Confederate troops at the Battle of Gettysburg and later helped found the Dallas Morning News. It was expected to raise $4 million from about 200 people who paid from $2,700 a person up to $100,000 a couple, Republican officials said.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott attended the hurricane relief meeting and the reception, which comes during a week when Trump’s conduct in office was criticized by three Republican senators, as well as former President George W. Bush, who lives in Dallas.

The fundraising events were initially scheduled for September but were delayed after the hurricane. Dallas, however, was not affected by the storm given its distance from the coast. Trump last visited the coastal area seven weeks ago.

Scheduling an official event like the hurricane briefing on top of the fundraising events allows the White House to split the cost of Trump’s trip between taxpayers and the Republican Party, a practice that past presidents adopted as well.

This article was updated after Trump’s arrival.

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Legal battle ends: Detained immigrant obtains an abortion

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The first legal battle over abortion in the Trump administration ended Wednesday when a 17-year-old immigrant from Central America had an abortion in south Texas.

The U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled Tuesday that administration officials could not prevent her from obtaining the abortion with the help of a legal guardian.

The Trump administration did not attempt to fight the legal battle further.

But the action does not settle the larger legal question of whether officials at the Office of Refugee Resettlement can stand in the way of detained young women who wish to terminate their pregnancies. Administration lawyers said the only option for pregnant minors in detention was to accept deportation to their home countries.

Brigitte Amiri, an ACLU attorney, predicted further legal fights.

“Justice prevailed today for Jane Doe. But make no mistake about it, the administration’s efforts to interfere in women’s decisions won’t stop with Jane,” she said.

Attorneys issued a statement from the young woman.

“I made my decision and that is between me and God. Through all of this, I have never changed my mind,” she said.

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Sen. Jeff Flake: ‘You can’t continue to just remain silent’

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, invoking the 1950s demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, said Wednesday “you can’t continue to just remain silent” about President Trump’s politics and behavior.

“There is a tipping point. ... I hope we’re reaching that tipping point,” Flake told NBC’s “Today.”

The Arizona senator made the rounds of morning television news shows to talk about his decision not to run for reelection in 2018 and his impassioned speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, in which he said he could no longer be “complicit” with the Republican president.

“We are excusing undignified and outrageous and reckless speech and behavior as ‘telling it like it is.’ ... That’s not right,” Flake said Wednesday on MSNBC.

Trump immediately fired back on Twitter, saying that Flake and another retiring Senate Republican, Bob Corker of Tennessee — who had criticized Trump on Tuesday as “untruthful” and debasing the nation — aren’t running for reelection because “they had zero chance of being elected.”

He also contended that Flake and Corker stand alone, boasting in several tweets that he had gotten standing ovations at a Senate Republicans’ luncheon Tuesday at the Capitol.

Flake cited the era of McCarthy, the Republican senator from Wisconsin whose smear tactics alleging communist infiltration ultimately led to his censure. In an op-ed column in the Washington Post, Flake quoted Joseph Welch, an Army lawyer, who stood up to McCarthy in a June 1954 hearing and demanded: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

“The moral power of Welch’s words ended McCarthy’s rampage on American values, and effectively his career as well,” Flake wrote. “We face just such a time now. We have again forgotten who we are supposed to be.”

Flake also said he thinks more of his Republican colleagues will speak out.

“It’s up to us to stand us and say, ‘This is not acceptable,’” he told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

Asked why others in his party haven’t yet done so, Flake said, “There is some fatigue about it.”

Flake stopped short of saying Trump should be declared unfit for office or impeached.

“The voters made their choice,” Flake said. “He was elected fair and square.”

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Clinton’s campaign helped fund research that led to Trump dossier on ties to Russia, source says

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund political research into President Trump that ultimately produced a dossier of allegations about his ties to Russia, a person familiar with the matter said Tuesday night.

The revelation is likely to fuel complaints by Trump that the dossier, which the president has derided as “phony stuff,” is a politically motivated collection of salacious claims. Yet the FBI has worked to corroborate the document, and in a sign of its ongoing relevance to investigators, special counsel Robert Mueller’s team — which is probing potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign — weeks ago questioned the former British spy, Christopher Steele, who helped compile the claims in the dossier.

The dossier, which circulated in Washington last year and was turned over to the FBI for its review, contends that Russia was engaged in a long-standing effort to aid Trump and had amassed compromising information about him. Trump has repeatedly dismissed the document as false and in recent days has questioned on Twitter whether Democrats or the FBI had helped fund it.

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Senate votes to kill new rule allowing class-action lawsuits against banks after Pence casts deciding vote

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), center, and other Democrats discuss the federal arbitration rule.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The Senate voted Tuesday night to kill a controversial rule that would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration.

The move by the Senate followed a similar action by the House in July to rescind the rule. President Trump is expected to sign the repeal legislation, providing a major victory for the financial industry.

Vice President Mike Pence cast the deciding vote after the Senate tied 50-50. All but two Republicans — John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted to repeal the rule. No Democrats or independents supported the move.

The White House said Trump “applauds” Congress for voting to repeal the rule, which would have given consumers “fewer options for quickly and efficiently resolving financial disputes.”

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Read Sen. Jeff Flake’s speech announcing he will not seek reelection: ‘I rise today to say: Enough’

Mr. President, I rise today to address a matter that has been much on my mind, at a moment when it seems that our democracy is more defined by our discord and our dysfunction than it is by our values and our principles. Let me begin by noting a somewhat obvious point that these offices that we hold are not ours to hold indefinitely. We are not here simply to mark time. Sustained incumbency is certainly not the point of seeking office. And there are times when we must risk our careers in favor of our principles.

Now is such a time.

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Congress approves $36.5-billion disaster aid for Puerto Rico, wildfires and hurricane relief

Congress gave final passage Tuesday to $36.5 billion in disaster aid for Puerto Rico and several states impacted by a particularly destructive hurricane season.

The package includes $576.5 million to address the devastating wildfires in California and the West.

It is the second – but not likely final – allotment of emergency funds after a succession of deadly hurricanes battered Texas, Florida and other Southern states. It is the first allotment for Puerto Rico.

Approval arrives amid criticism of President Trump’s uneven response to the island, which remains largely without electricity, and where food and potable water remain scarce more than a month after Hurricane Maria. Congress had approved $15 billion in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

The vote, 82-17, follows earlier passage in the House. Trump is expected to swiftly sign it into law.

Passage was not always guaranteed amid opposition from conservatives. The package includes $18.7 billion to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s main Disaster Relief Fund, $16 billion to shore up the National Flood Insurance Program and $1.2 billion for nutrition assistance and the wildfire funds. Conservatives balked at what they called a “bailout” for the flood insurance program, which faces a continual shortfall and has been targeted for reforms.

An wildfire approaches a Sonoma winery Oct. 9.
An wildfire approaches a Sonoma winery Oct. 9.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
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Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake denounces Trump, announces he will not seek reelection in 2018

Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake said Tuesday that he will not seek reelection in 2018, declaring he needs political independence to criticize President Trump.

“I have children and grandchildren to answer to, and so Mr. President, I will not be complicit or silent,” Flake declared in a dramatic Senate speech.

“Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior” that “emanates from the top of our government.. is dangerous to a democracy,” he said.

“I rise today to say enough,” Flake added. “We did not become great by calling true things fake.”

Flake was already involved in a sharp battle with Trump that had prompted a Republican challenger to enter the race against him

Earlier, Flake told the Arizona Republic about his plan to serve out the remainder of his term but avoid a reelection campaign.

“There may not be a place for a Republican like me in the current Republican climate or the current Republican Party,” Flake told the newspaper.

Flake had been beset from both sides as he sought reelection: from Republicans loyal to President Trump who resented his criticism of the commander in chief, and from Democrats angered by his votes for Trump’s policy desires.

“This spell will pass, but not by next year,” Flake told the Republic.

12:39 p.m.: This post was updated with quotes from Flake’s Senate speech.

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House Republicans to investigate Obama-era uranium deal

House Republicans are opening investigations of the Obama administration’s 2010 decision to approve the sale of American uranium mines to a Russian-backed company, lawmakers said Tuesday.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said at a news conference that his panel and the House Oversight Committee would jointly probe the deal, which President Trump has called “the real Russia story.”

Nunes and other Trump supporters have raised the 7-year-old uranium deal while four congressional committees and Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III are looking into Russia interference the 2016 election and whether Moscow had any direct links to the Trump campaign.

Nunes said the House probe would focus initially on whether the the FBI or Justice Department had investigated attempts by Russian officials to gain influence over the American energy industry.

“This is just the beginning of the probe,” Nunes told reporters. “We’re not going to jump to any conclusions at this time.”

The House probe of the uranium deal parallels a Senate Judiciary Committee probe into whether the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear officials were involved in fraudulent dealings in 2009 before the uranium deal was approved.

In April, Nunes stepped away from leading the House Intelligence Committee probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election after the House Ethics Committee said it was investigating whether he had improperly disclosed classified information.

But he and his staff have used his chairmanship to push parallel investigations aimed at Trump’s opponents and critics, including Fusion GPS, the political research firm behind a unverified dossier of allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia.

Trump and his supporters frequently cite the 2010 purchase of Uranium One by Rosatom, a Russian-run company, as a counter to questions about Russian support for Trump’s presidential bid.

The sale was approved while Hillary Clinton led the State Department and some investors in the U.S. company had relationships with former President Clinton and had donated to the Clinton Foundation.

The State Department was one of nine U.S. departments or agencies that approved the sale.

Clinton’s presidential campaign and former State Department officials said she was not involved in the approval process by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a government panel charged with examining foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies.

Republicans have tried to link Clinton to the deal, citing Canadian financier Frank Giustra, a top Clinton Foundation donor.

He sold his company, UrAsia, to Uranium One, which was chaired by Ian Telfer, also a Clinton Foundation donor. Giustra has said he sold his stake in the deal in 2007, while Clinton was competing with Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination.

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For the record

12:48 p.m.: An earlier version of this post identified Rep. Devin Nunes as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

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The feud between Trump and Sen. Bob Corker explodes ahead of president’s visit

(President Trump in the Rose Garden of the White House. (Saul Loeb / Getty Images))

President Trump will visit Senate Republicans for lunch Tuesday, arriving on the Capitol Hill turf of some of his most powerful GOP critics as he pushes Congress to swiftly act on his tax cut proposal.

Trump has a mixed record from his forays to Capitol Hill. His visit to House Republicans during the healthcare debate failed to inspire passage on their initial attempts at an Obamacare overhaul. When he invited senators to lunch at the White House, he not-so-lightly threatened those who dared oppose him on healthcare with their jobs.

On Tuesday, Trump will need to appeal to some of his most vocal critics to find common ground on their shared priority of passing what he calls the biggest tax cuts in history. This will be his first trip as president to a Senate Republican lunch.

Among Trump’s top critics is Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, who, in an interview on “Today,” downplayed Trump’s visit.

“I think it’s fine for him to come over. I do look at these things as more of a photo op,” Corker said. “They’re not really about substance, but more power to him.”

Trump responded on Twitter, mocking Corker as someone who could not get elected “dog catcher.”

The two went back and forth on Twitter, with Corker using a hashtag citing previous comments he made about the White House becoming an “adult day-care center.”

Corker had more to say in an interview with press ahead of the meeting.

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Nation’s top general says U.S. troops in Niger were ambushed on way back to base

French armored vehicles head toward the Niger border in 2013.
(Jerome Delay / Associated Press)

The nation’s top general outlined the investigation Monday into the ambush that killed four U.S. servicemen in the African country of Niger on Oct. 4, and provided new details on the attack.

Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that aspects of the attack were still unclear as well as the perception that the Pentagon had not been forthcoming on the deadliest combat incident since President Trump took office.

His comments came the same day that the widow of an Army sergeant killed in the attack publicly said Trump had “made me cry even worse” in a condolence phone call when, she said, he didn’t know her husband’s name.

“We owe the families as much information as we can find out about what happened, and we owe the American people an explanation of what their men and women were doing at this particular time,” Dunford told reporters at the Pentagon.

Sketching out the timeline of the attack, Dunford said a dozen U.S. soldiers and 30 Nigerien troops embarked Oct. 3 on a “reconnaissance mission” to the village of Tongo Tongo, near the border with Mali.

“The assessment by our leaders on the ground at that time was that contact with the enemy was unlikely,” he said.

The next morning, the soldiers were returning to their base when they were hit with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. One hour after taking fire, the Americans radioed a request for air support.

A reconnaissance drone appeared “within minutes,” Dunford said. An hour later, French Mirage fighter jets and helicopter gunships arrived on the scene because the Pentagon does not have attack warplanes in the region.

During the firefight, two U.S. soldiers were wounded and evacuated by the French. Three U.S. soldiers were killed and were evacuated by a military contractor aircraft that night.

One other soldier, Sgt. La David Johnson, was still missing. His body wasn’t found until two days later.

“Now many of you have asked a number of questions, and many of them are fair questions, and we owe you more information,” Dunford said. “More importantly, we owe the families of the fallen more information, and that’s what the investigation is designed to identify.”

Dunford said the questions included: Did the mission of U.S. forces change during the operation? Did U.S. forces have adequate intelligence, equipment and training?

Was a pre-mission assessment of the threat accurate? How did U.S. forces become separated during the engagement and how did they lose contact with Sgt. Johnson? And why did they take time to find and recover his body?

Dunford’s briefing came after Myesha Johnson, the sergeant’s widow, made her first public comments during an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“I don’t know how he got killed, where he got killed or anything,” she said. “I don’t know that part. They never told me, and that’s what I’ve been trying to find out since Day One.”

The pregnant mother of two children said Trump’s subsequent call had upset her further: “I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he couldn’t remember my husband’s name.”

Trump tweeted after the interview had aired: “I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!”

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Tillerson makes unannounced stops in Kabul, Baghdad

Under cloak of secrecy, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited two war-zone capitals Monday to reaffirm Washington’s desire for stability in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tillerson traveled first to Kabul, Afghanistan, and later to Baghdad, Iraq. The State Department had not announced either trip in advance, and his visit was bracketed in heavy security out of fear of possible attack.

In the Iraqi capital, where people still celebrated having driven Islamic State militants out of large parts of the country, Tillerson urged the central government and Kurdish-dominated areas to reconcile their differences.

Kurdish militias played a key role in the war against Islamic State in northern Iraq and now seek an independent state, which Baghdad vehemently opposes.

“We are concerned and a bit sad,” Tillerson said after meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi at a heavily fortified government facility late Monday.

“We have friends in Baghdad and friends in [the Kurdish capital] Irbil and we encourage all parties to enter into discussion,” he said.

The Trump administration has sided with Abadi in opposing the Kurdish bid for independence and rejecting the Kurds’ recent referendum in favor of the issue. The administration says it wants to see a “unified, democratic” Iraq.

Abadi may have dealt a setback to Tillerson, saying that the so-called Popular Mobilization fighters, which the U.S. considers undesirable proxies of Iran, are “part of our Iraqi institutions” who should be “encouraged.”

“They will be the hope of country and the region,” Abadi said.

Tillerson did not respond but had earlier called for Iranian-backed fighters to be expelled from Iraq.

Earlier in Kabul, Tillerson said the Trump administration was willing to engage “moderate” Taliban officials to reach a political solution to end America’s longest war.

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John McCain vs. President Trump: Draft dodgers, bone spurs and Vietnam War

Sen. John McCain never mentioned President Trump in criticizing the Vietnam War-era draft system that allowed the wealthy and connected to avoid military service.

But the Arizona senator didn’t have to as he blasted “bone spur” medical deferments, which Trump used to avoid service during the war.

“We drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur,” McCain said in an interview Sunday on C-SPAN’s “American History” program. “That is wrong. That is wrong. If we’re going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve.”

Trump and McCain have never much bonded, ever since then-candidate Trump mocked the former fighter pilot, who was held in captivity for nearly five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, scoffing that he preferred “people who weren’t captured.”

McCain, who tried and failed twice to become president, and is now battling brain cancer, has emerged as one of the president’s most outspoken Republican critics.

Asked on Monday if he meant Trump was a draft-dodger, McCain explained he was criticizing the draft as “one of the great inequities of the Vietnam conflict.”

“I don’t consider him so much a draft dodger as much as I feel that the system was so wrong that certain Americans could evade their responsibilities to serve the country, “ he said during an appearance, alongside his daughter, Meghan, on “The View.”

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Analysis: Kelly might not be like Trump, but he seems like many Trump voters

In the roughly three months since President Trump chose John F. Kelly as his second chief of staff, observers have puzzled over the retired Marine general’s occasional scowls and downcast gazes, wondering whether he and Trump, with such different styles and backgrounds, perhaps weren’t working well together.

Kelly, the military man trained to respect sharp lines of authority and tradition, uses terms like “information flow” to describe the discipline he tries to bring to a chaotic White House. Trump, the impulsive businessman and reality-show veteran, delights in flouting authority and upending norms of the presidency.

But Kelly’s extraordinary remarks on Thursday from the White House briefing room, in which he segued from defending Trump to speak of loss — both his own, of a son, and the country’s, of old civilities, all while attacking a Florida congresswoman — offered a glimpse of what the two men seem to share. Both hark back to an undefined time in America when some things were “sacred,” as Kelly put it, to a better moment that’s been lost.

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Watch live: President Trump’s joint statement with Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong

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Trump vows ‘no change’ to 401(k) rules in Republican tax bill

(Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press)

President Trump on Monday vowed there would be “no change” to rules for 401(k) plans, seeking to douse speculation that the Republican tax overhaul bill being drafted by Congress would include new limits on retirement savings.

“This has always been a great and popular middle class tax break that works, and it stays!” Trump said on Twitter.

The outlines of the tax overhaul released by the White House and Republican leaders last month said that “[t]ax reform will aim to maintain or raise retirement plan participation of workers and the resources available for retirement.”

Lawmakers are drafting legislation based on the framework, which is centered around a large cut to the corporate tax rate, other breaks that would benefit the wealthy and mostly unspecified promises of helping reduce taxes for the middle class.

But there have been reports that Republicans in Congress are weighing new limits on the upfront tax break for 401(k) savings as a way of generating additional federal revenue to offset money lost by the rate cuts and other proposed changes.

The New York Times reported Friday that House Republicans were considering placing a cap of as low as $2,400 on the annual amount that workers can put into their 401(k) accounts to defer tax payments until they tap the savings in retirement.

The current limit is $18,000, and it rises to $24,000 a year for people over 50 years old to encourage them to save more for retirement.

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Immigrant abortion case heads back to court

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The ACLU asked a federal appeals court Sunday night to reenter the case of a 17-year-old pregnant immigrant in detention whose request for an abortion has been blocked by federal officials.

The woman, identified in court as Jane Doe to protect her privacy, has been held in a federal detention center in south Texas since crossing the border illegally in September.

She is 15 weeks pregnant and has been seeking an abortion for several weeks. She got approval from a Texas state judge, which the state’s law requires for minors who don’t have a parent’s permission for the procedure.

But under policies adopted by the Trump administration, federal officials have tried to block any pregnant minors held in immigrant detention from getting abortions. E. Scott Lloyd, the head of the federal refugee agency that oversees detention centers for minors, is a long-time antiabortion activist, and he has refused to allow Doe to leave the detention center to go to an abortion clinic.

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Tillerson makes unexpected trip to Afghanistan

Mosque bombings in Afghanistan last week
(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made a surprise trip to Kabul, Afghanistan, on Monday and pledged to engage “moderate” Taliban officials to build peace in the country.

Tillerson said the site of America’s longest war was key to denying terrorists refuge and that the Trump administration was committed to forging a democratic, unified Afghanistan through a regional approach.

The U.S. will continue to fight the Taliban, he said, but will also reach out to “moderate voices among the Taliban, voices that do not want to continue to fight forever.”

Tillerson met at the Bagram Air Field with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah and other officials.

On Tuesday, Tillerson is scheduled to continue his tour of the region, arriving in Islamabad, Pakistan, where the government is being told it must destroy safe havens for militants or risk losing U.S. aid.

“Pakistan needs to, I think, take a clear-eyed view of the situation that they are confronted with in terms of the number of terrorist organizations that find safe haven inside of Pakistan,” Tillerson said.

The stop in Kabul had not been announced. Reporters traveling with Tillerson were not told where they were going until the last minute.

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Bowe Bergdahl faces life in prison during sentencing hearing on desertion charges

(Andrew Craft / Associated Press)

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is set to appear Monday before a military judge who will determine his punishment for endangering comrades by walking off his post in Afghanistan. Before delivering his sentence, the judge will have to resolve a last-minute defense argument that new comments by President Trump have tainted the case.

Bergdahl faces up to life in prison after pleading guilty last week to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. Prosecutors made no deal to cap his punishment, so the judge has wide leeway to decide his sentence after a hearing expected to take several days.

The judge, Army Col. Jeffery R. Nance, is expected to weigh factors including Bergdahl’s willingness to admit guilt, his five years of captivity in the hands of the Taliban and its allies, and the serious wounds that several service members suffered while searching for him.

Prosecutors are expected to put on evidence or testimony about soldiers and a Navy SEAL who were seriously wounded by gunfire during these search missions, including an Army National Guard sergeant who was shot in the head, suffering a traumatic brain injury that put him in a wheelchair, unable to speak.

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Widow of Sgt. La David Johnson: Trump ‘couldn’t remember my husband’s name’

In a phone call with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, President Trump stumbled to remember her husband’s name, according to Myeshia Johnson, who spoke to ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Monday.

“It made me cry because I was very angry at the tone of his voice and how he said it,” Johnson said.

Sgt. Johnson was killed earlier this month along with three other soldiers during an ambush on a special forces patrol in Niger, an attack apparently carried out by militants affiliated with Islamic State.

Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, a Florida Democrat and family friend who was listening in on the call, has been fighting with Trump over what was said and whether it was insensitive. Johnson’s account backs that of Wilson, whom Trump accused of fabricating the story.

Rather than leave the matter alone, Trump responded to the interview on Twitter, saying he had a “very respectful” conversation with Johnson. Contradicting her, he added, “and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!”

The controversy threatens to overshadow an afternoon White House ceremony in which Trump will award the Medal of Honor to Retired Army Captain Gary Michael “Mike” Rose, a Vietnam War medic.

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McCain issues veiled criticism of Trump’s Vietnam War deferment

Sen. John McCain has issued a veiled criticism of President Trump’s medical deferments that kept him from serving in the Vietnam War.

In an interview with C-SPAN last week, McCain lamented that the military “drafted the lowest income level of America and the highest income level found a doctor that would say they had a bone spur.”

One of Trump’s five draft deferments came as a result of a physician’s letter stating he suffered from bone spurs in his feet. Trump’s presidential campaign described the issue as a temporary problem.

McCain spent six years as a prisoner of war after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967.

Trump derided McCain’s service in 2015, stating his fellow Republican wasn’t a “war hero” and adding “I like people who weren’t captured.”

McCain’s spokeswoman didn’t immediately return a request for comment Monday.

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Trump’s promise on tax cuts: ‘NO change to your 401(k)’

President Trump pledged Monday morning via Twitter that there would be no changes to the 401(k) retirement savings plans as Republicans in Congress pursue an overhaul of the tax code.

Actual text of a tax overhaul bill hasn’t been written, much less become public. Members of Congress haven’t reached consensus on what cuts to make or where to make them. Trump signaled that tweaks are still being made.

On Sunday, Trump raised expectations about the timetable for completing tax reform, indicating that he expects the as-yet unwritten overhaul of the tax code on his desk by Thanksgiving.

“I want to get it by the end of the year, but I’d be very disappointed if it took that long,” he said on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.” He said lawmakers should forgo their Thanksgiving break if they can’t send him a measure by then.

The tax plan Republican leaders and the White House have laid out calls for reducing tax rates on corporations from 35% to 20%, and consolidating individual tax rates to 12%, 25%, 35% and possibly one higher bracket for the wealthy. Income brackets for those rates have yet to be set.

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EPA cancels appearance of scientists at Rhode Island event

The Environmental Protection Agency has canceled the appearance of three scientists at an event on Monday in Rhode Island where they had been scheduled to discuss a report that deals in part with climate change.

EPA spokesman John Konkus confirmed Sunday that agency scientists would not be speaking at the event in Providence, according to the New York Times. Konkus did not provide an explanation.

The event is designed to draw attention to the health of Narragansett Bay, which forms New England’s largest estuary.

A spokesman for Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said the event will go on as planned and the report that EPA scientists helped work on will be released.

In a statement to the Associated Press on Sunday, Reed said that “muzzling EPA scientists won’t do anything to address climate change.”

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Four female senators tell their #MeToo stories

Four female U.S. senators shared stories of sexual harassment Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) told stories of crude comments by colleagues or co-workers trying to touch them.

The interviews came on the heels of a social media outcry that sprung up following allegations of sexual harassment by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. Actress Alyssa Milano requested on Twitter that women tell their stories of sexual harassment or assault with the hashtag #MeToo, and variations have taken hold in countries around the world.

“The first women who started the “me, too” campaign were incredibly brave,” Warren said. “And they inspired the next wave. And in turn, they inspired the next wave and the next wave and the next wave. That’s how we make real change.”

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McConnell says he’ll bring the bipartisan Affordable Care Act fix up for a vote if Trump backs it

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he’s waiting to hear if President Trump will support a proposed bipartisan healthcare fix before bringing the measure up for a vote.

The plan to fix parts of the Affordable Care Act and stabilize health insurance markets is backed by 12 Republican and 48 Democratic senators. It would reinstate federal payments to insurers that Trump cut off this month, offering millions of Americans some relief from rising premiums and shaky insurance markets. It would also give states some new flexibility to offer cheaper, less generous health plans.

“If there is a need for some kind of interim step here to stabilize the market, we need a bill the president will actually sign,” McConnell (R-Ky.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And I’m not certain yet what the president is looking for here, but I’ll be happy to bring a bill to the floor if I know President Trump would sign it.”

Trump has given conflicting signals on whether he will support the compromise worked out by Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, and the committee’s senior Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said the plan, with the support of 60 senators, should be brought up immediately. “We should pass it and pass it now,” Schumer said.

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Trump tweets he’ll authorize release of JFK assassination files

President Trump tweeted Saturday morning that pending more information, he plans to allow the release of classified files related to the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Several media outlets had reported in recent days that White House officials expected the president to block the release of thousands of classified files as security agencies voiced concerns that sensitive documents could be included if the full trove of more than 3,000 files is released.

The tweet didn’t specify whether the president intends to allow all, or just some, of the information to become public, and he stipulates that the decision is “subject to the receipt of further information.”

The White House clarified later in the day with an unattributed statement that “the President believes that these documents should be made available in the interests of full transparency unless agencies provide a compelling and clear national security or law enforcement justification otherwise.”

In an effort to stamp down conspiracy theories, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992 to hold the files from public release for 25 years. Trump has until Oct. 26 to block the files’ release, otherwise they are scheduled to be made public by the National Archives.

12:22 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from the White House. It was originally published at 6:14 a.m.

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State Department says ambassador did not deny U.S. military request for personnel involved in Niger attack

The U.S. ambassador in Niger did not deny support for a U.S. Special Forces unit that lost four soldiers in a deadly ambush on the border between Mali and Niger on Oct. 4, the State Department said Friday.

The Times reported Thursday that the ambassador had resisisted U.S. military requests for more drones or other surveillance aircraft and additional military medical support in Niger during the weeks and months leading up to the attack.

“Did the ambassador in Niger deny support or protection for military personnel involved in the attack? No,” a State Department spokesman said in a statement.

The U.S. Special Forces unit was part of a broader mission run by U.S. Africa Command to train Nigerien units to counter Islamic State and Al Qaeda-linked groups trying to gain a foothold in the region. The attack is currently being investigated by the U.S. military and the FBI.

“As required by the president, the embassy and U.S. AFRICOM continuously engage to address security threats to all U.S. government personnel and operations,” the spokesman said. “This close cooperation ensures activities are coordinated, effective and sustainable. The president directs that disagreements, which are rare, are quickly referred to the secretary of Defense and secretary of State for immediate resolution,” the official said.

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Paul Ryan says tax overhaul will include a bracket aimed at the wealthy

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said Friday that the Republican tax overhaul will include a fourth bracket for the wealthiest Americans to ensure that high earners don’t benefit more than the middle class.

The bracket would be “designed to make sure we don’t have a big drop in income tax rates for high-income people,” Ryan (R-Wis.), told “CBS This Morning.” Ryan didn’t say what the tax rate or income level would be for the fourth bracket in the Republican plan.

The outline of the tax plan released last month by the White House and top congressional Republicans called for reducing the current seven individual tax brackets to three, with the top rate declining to 35% from 39.6%.

In 2017, the top bracket applied to income of more than $418,400 for individuals and $470,700 for couples filing jointly.

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As Trump looms, Virginia governor’s race tests whether an establishment Republican can succeed

Vice President Mike Pence campaigns in Abingdon, Va., with Republican gubernatorial nominee Ed Gillespie.
(Andre Teague / Associated Press)

A decade before Donald Trump upended national politics, Ed Gillespie was among the establishment Republicans counseling his party’s candidates to tread gently on the issue of immigration or risk ruination by alienating Latinos.

Now he is Virginia’s Republican nominee for governor, sounding remarkably like Trump as he speaks from a hay bale-laden stage at the Washington County Fairgrounds in southwest Virginia. The president won 75% of the vote in this part of the state, and Gillespie is trying to prove that an establishment Republican still can succeed under the shadow of Trump.

“Do we need to have sanctuary cities here in Virginia?” Gillespie asked the crowd, raising an issue he has highlighted in ads that feature heavily tattooed Latinos and threats of menacing gangs.

“No, we don’t!” the crowd shouted back, and he added firmly: “No, we don’t.”

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Video of Frederica Wilson’s 2015 FBI speech shows John Kelly got it wrong

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, in criticizing Florida Rep. Frederica Wilson, misrepresented a 2015 speech she made at the opening of a new FBI building, an exclusive South Florida Sun Sentinel video of her speech shows.

Kelly made the comments at the White House on Thursday while discussing President Trump’s conversations with the families of four U.S. soldiers killed in an ambush in Niger earlier this month.

Kelly chastized Wilson for listening in on the conversation between Trump and the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson. Wilson was in a car with the widow and Johnson’s mother going to the airport for the arrival of Johnson’s body, and the call was placed on speakerphone.

Kelly then continued his criticism of Wilson, mentioning the 2015 dedication of an FBI building in Miramar, Fla., where he said she focused her speech on asserting that she “got the money” for the building, a sum, he said, of $20 million.

Wilson said Kelly’s comment was a fabrication, that she wasn’t even a member of Congress when the funding for the building was approved. A Sun Sentinel video of the event supports Wilson’s version of events.

Wilson did take credit for securing approval just days before the dedication of naming the building in honor of two slain FBI agents.

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Trump praises Senate Republicans for passage of budget with $1.5-trillion deficit to pay for his upcoming tax cuts

President Trump praised Senate Republicans — giving an unusually upbeat shout-out to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — for passage of a GOP budget that sets the stage for tax reform.

Along with Trump’s tweets, the White House issued a statement in which the president “applauds the Senate for passing its FY 2018 Budget Resolution” and “taking an important step in advancing the administration’s pro-growth and pro-jobs legislative agenda.”

The proposed budget adds $1.5 trillion to the deficit over the decade to pay for Trump’s tax cuts. It was approved on an essentially party-line vote, 51-49, late Thursday with one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, joining all Democrats in opposition.

Paul rejected the party’s argument that a tax-cuts package, which is still a work in progress, will more than pay for itself by spurring economic growth that will produce more revenue.

“I will fight for the biggest, boldest tax cut we can pass, but I could not in good conscience vote for a budget that ignores spending caps,” the libertarian-leaning senator said.

The measure now must be reconciled with a House version.

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Speaker Ryan roasts Trump: ‘Enough with the applause, all right. You sound like the Cabinet when Donald Trump enters’

House Speaker Paul Ryan took the mike at the annual Alfred E. Smith charity dinner -- and had more than a few zingers. Here are some of the shots he took:

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Bernie Sanders bows out of Women’s Convention in Detroit to survey Puerto Rico

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

In seven days, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ role for the Women’s Convention in Detroit went from a primary speaker to a panelist to not attending at all.

Sanders said he can’t attend the event because he’ll be in Puerto Rico to survey the devastating damage from Hurricane Maria, which hit the island about a month ago.

“I want to apologize to the organizers of the Women’s Convention for not being able to attend your conference next Friday,” Sanders said in a statement. “Given the emergency situation in Puerto Rico, I will be traveling there to visit with San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz and other officials to determine the best way forward to deal with the devastation the island is experiencing.”

Instead, U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) will give an opening speech at the convention, which is the first national Women’s Convention in 40 years. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (-L.A.) also will speak at the event.

The gathering, scheduled for Oct. 27-29 at Cobo Center, is expected to attract more than 3,000 people and aims to take on social injustice and uphold the feminist nonviolent resistance principles of the Women’s March, which is organizing the event.

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Listen live: Young, pregnant migrant’s case tests Trump’s policies on abortion and immigration

(Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)

When the Trump administration chose E. Scott Lloyd, a prominent antiabortion activist and attorney, to head the federal agency that oversees refugee affairs, he quickly set about enforcing strict policies.

For months, even as he personally intervened in cases and tried to talk young women out of getting abortions, his efforts drew little attention.

The case of a 17-year-old pregnant girl in an immigration detention center in Texas has suddenly changed that.

On Friday, a federal appellate panel in Washington is scheduled to hear arguments in a case brought by the girl, called Jane Doe to shield her identity, to force Lloyd’s office to allow her to have an abortion. The dispute could be an important early test of both abortion rights and the treatment of immigrants in custody in the Trump era.

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Doe was pregnant when she crossed the border in September as an unaccompanied minor. Since then, she has been detained in a shelter in Texas. Lloyd, who has campaigned against abortion since his days as a law student at Catholic University, has denied her requests to leave the shelter to obtain an abortion, according to court papers.

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Former President Obama steps back onto the campaign stage to spur voters and tangle with Trump

Barack Obama returned to the campaign stage on Thursday to denounce the politics practiced by his successor as president, Donald Trump, as unbefitting a nation yearning for unity rather than division.

Speaking in New Jersey and Virginia on behalf of Democratic candidates for governor in next month’s off-year elections, Obama never mentioned Trump’s name in his first political activities since leaving office.

But his indictment of his replacement — and his defense of his own eight years as president — was by turns angry and somber, and clearly targeted at the White House.

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In stunning attack, George W. Bush accuses President Trump of promoting falsehoods and prejudice

In an extraordinary — albeit veiled — attack, former President George W. Bush delivered a scathing assessment Thursday of President Trump and his policies, suggesting he has promoted bigotry and falsehoods to the detriment of the country and its values.

Speaking at a policy seminar in New York, the nation’s 43rd president never mentioned Trump by name. But his target was unmistakable.

“We have seen our discourse degraded by casual cruelty,” Bush said. “We’ve seen nationalism distorted into nativism.”

“Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children,” he said at another point. “The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.”

The remarks were an exceptional breach of the protocol governing post-presidential behavior — be seen and rarely heard — and were especially striking coming from Bush. He has gone to great lengths to ignore repeated provocations from Trump, who savaged the former president’s younger brother Jeb in the 2016 campaign and often assailed the Bush administration.

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Watch live: President Obama speaks at Ralph Northam rally in Virginia

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Trump meets with Janet Yellen as decision on next Fed chair nears

Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin.
(Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP/Getty Images))

President Trump met with Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet L. Yellen at the White House on Thursday as he neared a decision on who will lead the central bank after her first four-year term ends in February.

Yellen, 71, a Democrat nominated to the job by former President Obama, is one of five candidates and was the last to meet with Trump, a White House official said.

Trump told reporters this week he was nearing a decision on a job that could have a major influence on his efforts to boost economic growth by reshaping the world’s most powerful central bank.

“I would say within those five you’ll probably get the answer,” Trump said Tuesday. “And I’ll be making the decision over the next fairly short period of time.”

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Trump will head to Capitol Hill next week for lunch with GOP senators

President Trump is heading to Capitol Hill next week for lunch with Senate Republicans as Congress struggles to push ahead on its next priority -- tax reform.

Trump was invited by the No. 4 Republican leader, Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), who organizes the weekly lunches.

Barrasso is also among those senators being targeted for a possible primary challenge by Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House advisor who has pledged a “war” on the Republican establishment he views as insufficiently supportive of Trump’s policies.

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Trump’s chief of staff, who lost a son in combat, gives emotional defense of Trump’s calls to military families

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly on Thursday gave an emotional defense of Trump’s calls to the families of soldiers killed earlier this month in Niger, and assailed a Democratic congresswoman who was among the president’s chief critics.

Kelly said he was “stunned” and “broken hearted” to see a member of Congress, Rep. Frederica S. Wilson of Florida, describing Trump’s conversation with the widow of Stg. La David T. Johnson, one of four U.S. soldiers who died in an Oct. 4 ambush in the West Africa country.

Wilson, a friend and mentor to the Johnson family, was with Myeshia Johnson in a car when the widow took Trump’s call, and heard him on a speakerphone. Wilson later described Trump’s message as insensitive for suggesting the sergeant knew what he was getting into when he joined the Army.

In the call to Johnson’s widow, Trump was echoing words that Kelly had suggested, the chief of staff told reporters at the White House. Kelly lost a son in a landmine explosion in Afghanistan in 2010.

Before Trump placed the calls, the president had asked what to say, and Kelly recounted for him what Kelly’s best friend had said when Kelly’s son, Lt. Robert Kelly, had died. The friend said the young man at the moment of his death was doing exactly what he wanted to do, that he knew what he was getting into and that he was surrounded by the “best men on earth” when he died.

“That’s what the president tried to say to four families the other day,” Kelly said. “In his way, he tried to express that.”

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Senators push forward with bipartisan Obamacare fix — and Trump’s encouragement

Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the two top lawmakers on the Senate Health Committee, announced a breakthrough Tuesday in their negotiations to stabilize Obamacare markets.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

Despite President Trump’s mixed messages, key senators unveiled their bipartisan plan Thursday to stabilize health insurance markets, drawing widespread support.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Health committee, and the top Democrat on the panel, and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington jointly announced 22 bipartisan co-sponsors to their effort, more than typical for a bill.

Alexander noted that Trump, too, continued to encourage him to push forward. The president called the senator twice Wednesday, even after speaking critically of the plan.

“I want to thank him for his encouragement,” Alexander said.

Eleven Republican and 11 Democratic senators joined in backing their bill, which would extend for two years federal payments to insurers that offset subsidies they must offer to help low-income Americans. In exchange, Republicans want to make it easier for insurers to offer cheaper plans and those that deviate from certain regulations.

Trump has cut off the payments but told Alexander he would be willing to reinstate them, the senator said.

The compromise also has drawn support from more than two dozen groups representing healthcare advocates, patients and providers.

Among those backing the bill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), said she not only supports the policy, but the opportunity it provides for Congress to show, “at a time when things are a little tense ... that we can come together. We can demonstrate the ability to govern.”

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George W. Bush’s scathing rebuke of the Trump presidency

( (Seth Wenig / Associated Press))

Former President George W. Bush on Thursday delivered a scathing warning about Donald Trump, saying his “America first” philosophy portends a dangerous inward turn that is eroding democracy at home and threatening stability around the world.

“The health of the democratic spirit is at issue,” the 43rd president said during a speech in New York. “And the renewal of that spirit is the urgent task at hand.”

“Since World War II, America has encouraged and benefited from the global advance of the free markets, from the strength of democratic alliance and from the advance of free societies,” Bush said.

“Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry and compromises the moral education of children.”

READ THE FULL SPEECH HERE

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Senate Democrats fail in first attempt to save state and local tax deduction

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.)
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Senate Democrats on Thursday failed in their first attempt to save the state and local tax deduction, which helps many residents of California and other high-cost states reduce their federal income tax bills.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 52-47 to reject an amendment that would have prevented the Senate from considering any bill that repeals or limits the deduction as part of a planned tax overhaul.

But the fight over the break, which the Republican tax plan would scrap, is far from over as legislative efforts in Congress are just beginning.

And supporters of the deduction seized on a new argument Thursday, noting that the Republican tax overhaul framework does not propose to eliminate the ability of corporations to deduct state and local taxes as a business expense.

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Trump meets with Puerto Rican governor: ‘I give ourselves a 10’

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump, still facing criticism for his administration’s response to the pair of hurricanes that ravaged Puerto Rico, gave himself high marks Thursday as he met with the island’s governor, Ricardo Rossello.

“I give ourselves a 10,” Trump said.

At one point, Trump looked directly at Rossello, seated beside him in the Oval Office, and asked: “Did we do a great job?”

Rossello, on a delicate mission to secure aid for the U.S. territory, did not answer directly. “You responded immediately, sir,” Rossello said.

“The response is there,” he added. “Do we need to do a lot more? Of course we do.”

Trump has continually expressed frustration with the blame he has received for the federal government’s response in Puerto Rico, where the majority of residents lack electricity. He blamed the island for many of its problems while warning of the limits of the federal government’s commitment.

Rossello asked for equal treatment with other Americans as he talked about the long task ahead.

Trump praised the government’s “well-oiled machine” in responding to disasters affecting Texas and Florida, while pointing to corruption in Puerto Rico as hampering efforts there. “Not by the federal; this is local we’re talking about,” he added.

He also emphasized Puerto Rico’s large debt, saying that the federal government would expect to have any loans it provides for rebuilding the island paid off before other debt-holders.

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Trump punts his top priorities to Congress, setting the stage for a year-end showdown

In kicking his top priorities to Congress, President Trump is setting the stage — intentionally or not — for weeks of messy horse-trading that may culminate in a year-end standoff to avoid another government shutdown.

Trump is betting he can pressure Congress into breaking its gridlock and squeeze some concessions from Democrats.

But his own flip-flops on key issues have left lawmakers unable to trust the White House’s leadership and uncertain how to resolve the most thorny policy disputes.

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Trump administration tries to block abortion for pregnant undocumented immigrant

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

Lawyers for the Trump administration have asked a court for an emergency order allowing officials to block a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant in federal custody from having an abortion.

Thursday morning, the federal appeals court in Washington announced it would hold a hearing in the case on Friday.

The woman, known in court as Jane Doe, has been held in an immigrant detention facility in Texas since being detained after crossing the border in September. Soon after her detention, a medical exam found she was pregnant, and she began seeking an abortion. Although she got approval from a state judge to have the procedure -- a requirement in Texas for minors who do not have a parent’s permission -- federal officials have refused to allow her to leave the detention center to go to a clinic.

Doe won a round in court earlier Wednesday when a federal district judge here ordered the government to allow her to obtain an abortion by Saturday.

But within hours, lawyers for Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions asked the court of appeals to put that ruling on hold, saying that she could still wait “a number of weeks” to end her pregnancy.

The appeals court, in its order Thursday, stayed part of the lower court order, saying that federal officials must allow Doe to go to the pre-abortion counseling session that Texas requires for minors. But the court put off the Saturday deadline for the abortion, itself, until the judges can consider the case.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which has custody of unaccompanied minors who are apprehended crossing the border, has a policy of not taking any action that would “facilitate” an abortion, government lawyers told the judges in their motion.

The young woman could get an abortion by returning to her home country, Justice Department lawyers said.

“Even if she must choose between leaving the United States and the ability to seek an abortion,” forcing that choice would not violate her rights “because Ms. Doe, as an illegal alien, has no legitimate right to remain in the United States,” they wrote.

Requiring the government to allow her to go to a clinic for an abortion could “incentivize illegal immigration by pregnant minors,” they argued.

Attorneys for the ACLU, which have represented Doe in court, called the government’s move “shocking.”

“We should all be horrified that the federal government is doing everything imaginable to stop a young woman from getting an abortion,” said Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “No one should be delayed for weeks in getting the care they need.”

8:48 a.m.: This post was updated with information on the appeals court’s order.

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How Trump’s response to four soldiers’ deaths went so wrong

President Trump kept silent on the deaths of four American soldiers for nearly two weeks, while finding time to tweet about “fake news” and Republicans’ fundraising, attack Puerto Ricans and a Republican senator, among others, and keep up his complaints against protesting professional football players.

When he finally spoke up on Monday about the deadliest combat incident of his presidency — and then only in answer to a reporter’s question — Trump started a furor that engulfed his chief of staff, predecessors from both parties, a Florida congresswoman and now one of the grieving families of the soldiers he was being asked to honor.

Trump’s slow and sloppy response to the death of the soldiers ambushed Oct. 4 in Niger, in northern Africa, illustrated the hazards of his extemporaneous governing style, the disorganization within his White House and his refusal to back down in the face of criticism.

“It’s exactly the wrong way to handle this kind of situation,” said Leon E. Panetta, who served as Defense secretary under President Obama and White House chief of staff for President Clinton.

Aside from his public battle with a Democratic congresswoman from Florida and the mother of the fallen soldier, Army Sgt. La David T. Johnson, over the alleged insensitivity of his condolence call the day before, the Washington Post reported that Trump promised Chris Baldridge of Zebulon, N.C., $25,000 of his own money when they spoke in the summer about the loss of his son, Army Sgt. Dillon Baldridge, killed in Afghanistan. The check never came. The White House said Wednesday, after the report, that “the check has been sent.”

The Associated Press reached out to the families of all 43 people who have died in military service since Trump became president and made contact with about half the families. Of those who would address the question, relatives of nine said they had heard from Trump by phone or mail. Relatives of nine others said they haven’t. Others waited for calls that did not come.

Read MoreTimeline: A deadly ambush in Niger, and quiet in Washington — until now

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Judge rules detained teenage immigrant must be allowed to have an abortion

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

The Trump administration must stop blocking a pregnant teenage immigrant currently being held in custody in Texas from getting an abortion, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

Administration officials have been refusing to allow the 17-year-old, known in court as Jane Doe, to travel to an abortion clinic from the shelter for unaccompanied immigrant minors where she is being held.

Lawyers for the ACLU, which went to court on Jane Doe’s behalf, said that officials of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the department of Health and Human Services, had taken the woman to a Christian group that counsels pregnant women not to have abortions, but had refused to give her permission to travel to the clinic.

At a hearing Wednesday, a lawyer for Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions had suggested that because the woman was not legally a U.S. resident, she was not covered by the constitutional right to end her pregnancy.

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan rebuked the government lawyers at the hearing. Her order directs officials to transport Jane Doe to the clinic of her choice and allow her to obtain an abortion by Saturday.

“At last, our client will be able to get the care she needs without federal officials standing in the way,” Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said in a statement.

“Her courage and perseverance are incredible, but no one should have to go to court to get a safe, legal abortion. And no one should be held hostage to the extreme anti-abortion views of a handful of government officials.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services said lawyers were reviewing the ruling and considering how to respond.

The judge’s “troubling ruling” sets a “dangerous precedent” that could lead to the U.S. becoming an “open sanctuary for taxpayer-supported abortions by minors crossing the border illegally,” the department said in a statement.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the ruling.

3:01 p.m.: This post was updated with the Justice Department declining to comment.

4:06 p.m.: This post was updated with a statement from the Department of Health and Human Services.

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Mnuchin warns of ‘significant’ stock market drop if tax reform fails

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said Tuesday that failure to pass the Republican tax overhaul would trigger a “significant” drop in the stock market, which has rallied to record highs in recent months.

His warning, which some market analysts disputed, came as a new poll showed 52% of Americans oppose the tax plan, which is centered on huge cuts for corporations.

Only a third of respondents in the CNN poll said they supported the proposal from the Trump administration and congressional Republican leaders, which lawmakers are scrambling to turn into legislation.

With Congress facing a difficult task in passing a tax bill by the end of the year, Mnuchin increased the stakes by saying the recent stock market rally would end if the effort fails.

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Tillerson uses speech on ‘partner’ India to take jab at China

Ahead of his first trip to India, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday used a speech about the world’s largest democracy to take a jab at the Pacific region’s other powerhouse, China.

Tillerson heaped praise on India’s vibrant growth and declared the United States its partner.

He also commended India for respecting international norms of trade and commerce as it challenges China’s economic power.

Although the United States wants continued dialogue with Beijing, Tillerson said, “we won’t shrink from China’s challenges to the rules-based order, or where China subverts the sovereignty of neighboring countries, and disadvantages the U.S. and our friends.”

“In this period of uncertainty and angst, India needs a reliable partner on the world stage,” he said. “The United States is that partner.”

Tillerson travels in the coming days to India and other countries in the region, pushing what the State Department describes as the administration’s new policy for a “free and open Indo-Pacific” region, including Afghanistan.

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Trump continues spat with congresswoman over his call to soldier’s widow: ‘I did not say what she said’

(Mandel Ngan / AFP)

President Trump pushed back harder on Wednesday against a congresswoman’s account of his phone call to the widow of a slain soldier, saying Rep. Frederica S. Wilson knows she falsely reported his comments.

“I didn’t say what that congresswoman said, didn’t say it at all. She knows it,” Trump told reporters gathered for the start of his meeting with members of the Senate Finance Committee about his proposed tax cuts.

Trump angrily added a challenge, “I’d like her to make that statement again,” and moments later repeated it.

Wilson, a Florida Democrat, has said she was with the widow of Staff Sgt. La David T. Johnson, one of four soldiers killed in Niger after an ambush on Oct. 4, and listening by speakerphone when Trump called to offer condolences on Tuesday. Wilson, who knew Johnson, said the president told Myeshia Johnson that her husband “must have known what he signed up for.”

Johnson’s mother, Cowanda Jones-Johnson, confirmed Wilson’s account to the Washington Post.

Trump had not commented on the four soldiers’ killings until Monday, when he was asked by reporters why he hadn’t done so in nearly two weeks. The president defensively claimed to have done a better job of contacting families of slain service members than Presidents Obama and George W. Bush. Former staff members from both administrations have disputed Trump, some of them angrily.

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Senators announce bipartisan deal to stabilize Obamacare markets

Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the two top lawmakers on the Senate Health Committee, announced a breakthrough Tuesday in their negotiations to stabilize Obamacare markets.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

The Senate moved closer Tuesday to a rare bipartisan deal to fix parts of the Affordable Care Act as a pair of leading senators announced an agreement designed to stabilize health insurance markets.

The deal — which was blessed by President Trump — still faces significant hurdles in Congress, particularly opposition from some conservative Republicans who want nothing less than a complete repeal of the 2010 healthcare law, commonly called Obamacare.

But the announcement of the compromise worked out by Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, and the committee’s senior Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, nonetheless marks an important breakthrough in the nation’s more than seven-year battle over the healthcare law.

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Trump reverses course and appears to reject senators’ bipartisan Obamacare fix

A day after President Trump gave his blessing to a short-term fix to stabilize the insurance market under the Affordable Care Act, he appeared to backtrack with pointed criticism Wednesday of the deal.

Trump singled out the chief negotiator of the accord, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the affable chairman of the Senate Health Committee, who negotiated the two-year agreement with the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington.

For the past two days Trump has spoken publicly about the need for a temporary measure to curb rising premiums. Prices are expected to spike after Trump announced his decision to eliminate some federal subsidies to insurers under Obamacare.

The senators’ deal would allow those payments to continue, in exchange for loosening restrictions to allow for cheaper, less generous policies in certain case.

Many conservative Republicans oppose the compromise and would prefer to repeal the 2010 law.

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Trump again attacks Comey and Justice Dept. as Sessions goes to testify on Capitol Hill

President Trump sent a series of new tweets renewing his war with the Justice Department and former FBI Director James B. Comey, as Justice’s chief, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, prepared to testify to Congress on Wednesday.

Once again accusing Comey of prematurely exonerating Hillary Clinton, his former rival, before the FBI had completed last year’s probe of her email practices, Trump wrote, “Obviously a fix. Where is the Justice Department?”

Sessions, a campaign confidant of Trump who, in office, has been repeatedly and publicly criticized by the president, is scheduled to testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where one topic could be the investigations into whether the Trump campaign assisted Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election campaign.

Trump advisors initially said he fired Comey in May because the FBI director was unfairly harsh to Clinton in the email probe; Trump soon contradicted them, saying he took action because of the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia.

Contrary to Trump’s latest tweets, Hillary Clinton was interviewed by the FBI for more than three hours.

Trump’s tweets seize on newly released FBI documents that show Comey began circulating early drafts of his July 2016 statement recommending no charges against Clinton two months before he delivered it in public. The documents are mostly redacted so it is unclear what is written in the early drafts of the statement.

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Former press secretary Sean Spicer is questioned in Mueller Russia probe

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump’s former press secretary, Sean Spicer, was interviewed Monday by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mueller is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether there was any collusion between Trump’s campaign and Vladimir Putin’s government. Among the events Mueller is examining is Trump’s firing of former FBI director James B. Comey in May and former national security advisor Michael Flynn, both of which occurred while Spicer was press secretary.

Spicer left the White House at the end of August after his main ally in the White House, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was forced out in an internal power struggle. Priebus was interviewed by Mueller’s team on Friday.

Spicer’s interview with the special prosecutor’s team was reported earlier by Politico.

Mueller team’s meeting with Spicer suggests the special prosecutor is ramping up interviews with the Trump White House inner circle.

Mueller’s team also has interviewed Keith Kellogg, the chief of staff of the National Security Council under both Flynn and his successor, said two people familiar with the matter. Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general, didn’t bring an attorney to the interview, said one of the people.

In addition to Priebus and Spicer, Mueller is expected to interview White House counsel Don McGahn; James Burnham, an associate in the White House counsel’s office; communications director Hope Hicks and possibly Josh Raffel, a spokesman for Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner, a person familiar with the investigation said last month.

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Trump blasts congresswoman’s claim that he told soldier’s widow ‘he knew what he signed up for’; lawmaker pushes back

After facing criticism for not calling the families of four soldiers who died in combat, President Trump reached out to one of the widows Tuesday and said her husband “knew what he signed up for ... but when it happens it hurts anyway,” according to Rep. Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.).

The call between Trump and Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Army Sgt. La David Johnson, lasted about five minutes, according to accounts that Wilson provided to local media.

Wilson, a friend of the family, was in the car for the call, which happened before the fallen soldier’s remains arrived at Miami International Airport.

“Yes, he said it,” Wilson told the media. “It’s so insensitive.”

Trump’s silence on the deaths of the soldiers, who were killed in combat in Niger on Oct. 6, generated controversy on Monday. When he was asked why he had not commented on their deaths, Trump responded by saying that President Obama and other presidents also had failed to reach out to families of servicemen killed in action.

That comment drew rebukes from former Obama staffers, who noted the many times that Obama had called family members of soldiers killed in action. Alyssa Mastromonaco, a deputy chief of staff for Obama, tweeted that it was a lie.

“He’s a deranged animal,” she said of Trump.

On Tuesday, Trump brought Gen. John F. Kelly, his chief of staff, into the controversy, saying Kelly hadn’t received a call from Obama when his son, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly, 29, died in combat in 2010.

“As far as other presidents, I don’t know, you could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama? I don’t know what Obama’s policy was,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Radio.

A White House official who demanded anonymity said that Obama did not call Kelly after the death. The official did not immediately say whether Kelly received a letter.

On Wednesday morning, Trump responded to the claims on Twitter, saying Wilson “totally fabricated” the story.

In an interview Wednesday morning with CNN, Wilson said several other people who were in the car also heard Trump’s remark. “I have proof too,” she said. “This man is a sick man.”

Staff writer Noah Bierman contributed to this report.

--

UPDATES

Oct. 18, 5:33 a.m.: This post was updated to add later comments from Wilson.

Oct. 18, 4:51 a.m.: This post was updated to add Trump’s response

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Senators announce bipartisan healthcare deal; Trump appears to endorse plan

Key senators announced a bipartisan deal Tuesday to fix parts of the nation’s healthcare law and head off large premium increases faced by consumers in some states.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Health Committee, announced the tentative agreement with the top Democrat on the panel, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

The agreement would continue cost-sharing payments to health insurers that President Trump eliminated last week.

“President Trump has encouraged this,” Alexander told reporters.

Trump, at a news conference with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, appeared to endorse the deal: “We have been involved, and this is a short-term deal,” he said, adding that it would last for “the next year or two” so that “we don’t have this dangerous little period.”

Alexander said he spoke to the president twice recently, including Saturday, when Trump encouraged him to find a bipartisan solution.

“He said he doesn’t want people to be hurt during these next two years by the possibility of rising premiums or by not being able to buy insurance,” Alexander said.

Alexander and Murray have been working for months on a proposal that would allow the Obamacare payments to insurers, which help offset costs for low-income Americans, to continue. In return, Congress would make changes to allow states greater ability to waive certain insurer policy requirements to allow for cheaper plans. Specific legislation is expected to be introduced later this week.

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Ivanka Trump hosts senators for bipartisan dinner to talk tax cuts as White House pushes reform

Ivanka Trump with her father, the president, in June.
(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

It’s not just President Trump who’s pushing tax cuts. His daughter Ivanka hosted senators for dinner Monday as the White House tries to build support for Trump’s proposed tax reform.

Half a dozen Republicans and Democrats, including Sen Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), dined on soup, a main course and chocolate ice cream with Ivanka Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin to talk tax cuts.

Congress is working on draft legislation based on the Republican proposal to reduce corporate and individual tax rates in what the president calls the largest tax cuts in history.

The White House has been specifically targeting red-state Democrats to back the GOP plan, though their support is not at all certain.

Ivanka Trump has advocated for increasing the tax credit that parents can take for each child, but the details remain a work in progress.

The Republican tax overhaul outline calls for “significantly” increasing the existing $1,000 per child tax credit, but no specific figure has yet been released. The plan also calls for making the credit more widely available by increasing the income levels at which the credit begins to phase out.

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Justice Department to review opioid laws after Trump’s pick for drug czar steps aside amid controversy

(Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)

The Trump administration plans to review the powers that law enforcement officials have under existing opioid laws and request additional authority from Congress if needed, a top official at the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

“We’re going to review it,” Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein said when asked by a reporter if current regulatory laws are sufficient to control the opioid epidemic.

The review comes as President Trump’s pick to be the nation’s drug czar, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), withdrew from consideration Tuesday after news reports focused attention on Marino’s role in weakening the Drug Enforcement Administration’s power to combat opioid abuse, trafficking and addiction.

Rosenstein stopped short of saying current law isn’t strong enough to control the problem.

“I’m not prepared to answer that question right now. If we conclude they don’t have the appropriate tools, we will seek more tools,” Rosenstein said.

At a congressional hearing in 2014, Marino encouraged the head of the DEA to collaborate more with large phamaceutical companies, saying, “big fines make headlines, but that is all they do: Press releases do not save lives.”

During a wide-ranging press conference Monday, Trump said he plans to declare a national emergency next week to help combat opioid addiction.

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Senate Republicans advance GOP budget on party-line vote, setting stage for Trump’s tax cuts

Senate Republicans overcame internal objections to advance a GOP budget plan Tuesday, an important step that lays the groundwork for President Trump’s tax cuts.

Some conservatives had griped that the fiscal 2018 budget proposal would allow $1.5 trillion in deficit-financed tax cuts.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was able to secure the majority needed to advance the package, 50-47, without any Republicans opposed. Several senators were absent.

A final Senate vote on the budget is expected later this week. Some GOP deficit hawks have signaled they may yet vote against the final plan. Democrats are all expected to oppose it.

Once Senate Republicans pass the budget and resolve differences with their colleagues in the House, they will be able to use special rules to pass Trump’s tax proposal with a simple-majority vote, avoiding the threat of a filibuster.

The tax cuts proposal remains a work in progress. Trump is pushing Congress for swift passage, and Republicans, worried they have accomplished little this year, are intensifying efforts to draft a bill.

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Trump brings his chief of staff, whose son died in combat, into controversy over condolence calls

President Trump, facing blowback for his failure to call the families of four soldiers who died in combat, on Tuesday invoked the fallen son of his chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly.

“As far as other presidents, I don’t know, you could ask Gen. Kelly, did he get a call from Obama? I don’t know what Obama’s policy was,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Radio on Tuesday.

Kelly seldom talks about his son, 2nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly, 29, who died from a Taliban land mine in Afghanistan in 2010.

A White House official who demanded anonymity said that Obama did not call the elder Kelly after the death. The official did not immediately say whether Kelly received a letter. Obama’s office declined to comment. Kelly, who was a general when his son died, has not spoken about his interaction with Obama on the subject.

Kelly attended a breakfast the Obamas hosted in May 2011, six months after his son’s death, and was seated at First Lady Michelle Obama’s table, according to a person familiar with the breakfast who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

Trump has faced criticism for failing to call the families of four soldiers killed in Niger on Oct. 6. It intensified Monday after Trump falsely claimed that Obama and other predecessors failed to call families.

Obama officials angrily denied the assertion. Alyssa Mastromonaco, a deputy chief of staff for Obama, used profanity in an angry tweet, calling the claim a lie. “He’s a deranged animal,” she said of Trump.

“I really speak for myself. I am not speaking for other people. I don’t know what [George W.] Bush did. I don’t know what Obama did,” Trump said in the Fox radio interview. “I believe his policy was somewhat different than my policy. I can tell you, my policy is. I have called every one of them.”

This item was updated with context at 1 p.m.

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Trump calls for short-term Obamacare fix and reaches out to Republican leaders

President Trump threw his weight Monday behind a measure to fix parts of Obamacare, the first time he has voiced approval of a specific legislative approach to do so and an abrupt turnaround on a bipartisan effort to preserve key elements of the healthcare system that he has sought to repeal.

Trump’s backing of what he repeatedly referred to as a “short-term fix” to ensure “good healthcare” came during freewheeling remarks in which he sought to mend relations with GOP leaders, even as he kicks a growing list of complicated issues to Congress, including immigration and the Iran nuclear deal.

Appearing with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after a White House lunch, Trump pledged to try to at least partially rein in his former strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who has vowed to challenge incumbent Republicans in 2018, especially those who back McConnell as leader.

He said “no, not at all” when asked whether he was considering firing Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in last year’s election.

And he lauded Republican successes in confirming judicial nominees and promised swift approval of tax reform.

“We are probably now, I think — at least as far as I’m concerned — closer than ever before,” Trump said, using the pomp of the Rose Garden for a news conference to signal a truce with the majority leader. “The relationship is very good.”

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Embattled congressman Tom Marino withdraws from consideration as drug czar, Trump says

President Trump’s pick to be the nation’s drug czar withdrew from consideration Tuesday after news reports focused attention on his role in weakening the government’s power to combat the nation’s opioid epidemic.

Trump posted a tweet Tuesday morning announcing that Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) had withdrawn his name from consideration.

Trump said Monday that “we’re going to be looking into” the actions of Marino, who was one of Trump’s early boosters in Pennsylvania, a key state.

As a member of Congress, Marino sponsored legislation that passed with virtually no debate last year which has significantly hindered the ability of the Drug Enforcement Administration to block bulk shipments of opioid drugs from pharmacy wholesalers. Outsized shipments of the drugs to specific pharmacies are often sign of drug mills that are fueling addiction, drug enforcement officials say.

The legislation, and Marino’s role in pushing it, were the subject of a Los Angeles Times article last year. The topic got renewed attention this week after a report in the Washington Post and CBS’ “60 Minutes,” which detailed how major drug distribution companies had hired former DEA officials to help craft the legislation and then had pushed it through Congress.

Some members of Congress have now said they will push to reverse Marino’s bill.

6:20 a.m.: This post was updated to add details. This post was originally published at 5:50 a.m.

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Republican lawmakers’ troubles deepen as Koch donors and Bannon take aim

Former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon takes part in an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News.
(Craig Ruttle / Associated Press)

Less than a year after Republicans gained control of Washington with President Trump amid heady promises of action, political pressures from multiple directions are bearing down on House and Senate lawmakers whose stalled agenda threatens to exact a toll heavy enough to endanger their majorities.

The messy dilemma congressional Republicans face was starkly visible at two venues in recent days, where powerful factions within the party vented their anger.

At one — a gathering at an expensive New York hotel of wealthy donors aligned with the conservative Koch brothers — frustrations ran so high over the GOP’s inability to deliver on campaign promises that some warned of a wipeout in the 2018 midterm elections. Donors suggested that their financial backing for Republican campaigns could dry up if lawmakers fail to make progress, particularly on tax cuts.

At a conservative religious summit in Washington, meantime, a similar displeasure was spilling from Stephen K. Bannon as the former White House advisor declared “war” on GOP incumbents who fail to adequately back the president.

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McCain denounces ‘spurious nationalism’ in thinly veiled shot at Bannon

(Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press)

Sen. John McCain, who has sparred repeatedly with President Trump and his former strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, issued a thinly veiled attack Monday, denouncing as “unpatriotic” what he described as “spurious nationalism.”

The Arizona senator, the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, did not mention either Bannon or Trump by name, but his brief speech accepting the 2017 Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia left little doubt that he was targeting the “America first” nationalism that Bannon helped instill in Trump’s campaign and White House.

“To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history,” McCain said.

“We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil,” he added. “We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.”

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Senate confirms Callista Gingrich, third wife of former House speaker, as Trump’s pick for Vatican ambassador

Callista Gingrich is shown with her husband, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Callista Gingrich is shown with her husband, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
(Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press)

The Senate easily confirmed Callista Gingrich as President Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

A businesswoman and a Catholic, Gingrich is the third wife of Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, Republican presidential candidate and Trump supporter.

The vote was 70 to 23.

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After being criticized for not calling families of slain soldiers, Trump falsely claims Obama did the same thing

President Trump falsely said that President Obama and other previous presidents failed to call the families of soldiers killed in action, drawing angry rebukes from Obama aides.

Trump made the accusation during an impromptu news conference on Monday, while defending himself for failing to call the families of four soldiers killed 12 days ago in an ambush in Niger.

Trump said he had written letters “and they’re going to be going out either today or tomorrow” and that he would call parents and families “at some point.” He said how difficult the calls are and claimed “President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls.”

That’s not true. Alyssa Mastromonaco, a deputy chief of staff for Obama, used profanity in an angry tweet, calling it a lie. “He’s a deranged animal,” she said of Trump.

Former White House photographer Pete Souza posted on his Instagram account a photo of Obama meeting with parents of a fallen sergeant, while recounting meetings with “hundreds of wounded soldiers and those killed in action.”

Later in his news conference, Trump was asked about the false claim and backed off slightly, saying of Obama, “I don’t know if he did.”

“I was told that he didn’t often, and a lot of presidents don’t. They write letters,” Trump said. “I do a combination of both. Sometimes, it’s a very difficult thing to do, but I do a combination of both. President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.”

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Mayors say many American families would be hurt by GOP plan to kill state and local tax deduction

Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Tom Tait, the Republican mayor of Anaheim, isn’t happy about his party’s tax-overhaul efforts in Washington because the plan would eliminate a deduction for state and local taxes that helps many of his city’s residents.

In Anaheim’s 92806 ZIP Code, for example, the loss of the deduction would lead a family of four with about $52,000 in adjusted gross annual income to pay $2,950 more in taxes, Tait said Monday.

“When people are talking in Washington about tax relief, people [in Anaheim] are not expecting an increase and certainly not an increase of that amount,” he said. “That would have a terrible impact on our local economy.”

Tait was among a bipartisan group from the U.S. Conference of Mayors that released a study Monday from the Government Finance Officers Assn. showing that almost 30% of taxpayers would face higher taxes if the deduction is eliminated.

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Trump says he will try to talk Steve Bannon out of challenging some Republican senators

President Trump appears with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump said Monday that he would try to talk his former top strategist, Steve Bannon, out of backing primary challenges against at least some incumbent Republican senators.

After meeting in the Oval Office with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Trump said he would talk with Bannon about relenting on at least part of the “war” his former strategist has declared on the GOP establishment.

“Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing,” Trump said. “Some of the people that he may be looking at, I’m gonna see if we can talk him out of that,” he added.

Since being pushed out of his job as White House chief strategist in August, Bannon has taken aim at McConnell and is working to find candidates who Bannon believes are more closely aligned with Trump’s agenda than the Senate leadership.

McConnell has been pressing Trump to support incumbent senators and candidates who have the best chance of winning a statewide election.

“You have to nominate people who can actually win. Winners make policy, and losers go home,” McConnell said, listing names of right-wing Republican candidates who won heated primaries in 2010, but went on to lose in statewide elections.

Trump has been frustrated that McConnell and Senate Republicans have failed to secure votes to overhaul healthcare and cut taxes, as well as take action on other parts of his agenda.

Just two hours earlier, Trump told reporters some Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” and said he understood how Bannon feels.

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Trump blames Cuba for attacks on U.S. diplomats

President Trump on Monday blamed the Cuban government for a mysterious series of possible sonic attacks on U.S. diplomatic personnel assigned to Havana.

Until now, U.S. officials have said they believed Cuba neglected its duty to protect foreign diplomats. But the administration had not blamed the Cuban government for the attacks. Administration officials had said they did not know who was responsible and that Havana was cooperating in an investigation.

“I believe Cuba’s responsible,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference in the Rose Garden Monday. “It’s a very unusual attack, you know.”

At least 22 U.S. diplomatic personnel stationed in Havana have suffered injury or illness, including hearing loss and dizziness, from attacks that may be be sonic or auditory in nature.

The U.S. ordered more than half of its staff in Cuba to return home and expelled 17 Cuban diplomats from Washington.

It is possible that a third country or rogue agents are behind the attacks, U.S. officials have said.

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Trump says he ‘can understand’ why Steve Bannon is at war with the GOP establishment

(Saul Loeb / AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump said Monday he can understand why his former top advisor Steve Bannon called for “a season of war” on the GOP establishment.

“I’m not going to blame myself. I’ll be honest, they are not getting the job done,” Trump told reporters in the White House before a scheduled lunch with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Vice President Mike Pence.

“I can understand where Steve Bannon is coming from,” Trump said.

Trump is frustrated that Republican senators have been unable to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act or get traction on a tax cut bill, among other priorities in Trump’s agenda.

“There are some Republicans, frankly, that should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump said. “They really, really disappointed us.”

Since Bannon was pushed out of his job as chief strategist at the White House in August, he has taken aim at McConnell and other Republican senators who haven’t given a full-throated defense of Trump’s agenda.

“Yeah, Mitch, the donors are not happy. They’ve all left you. We’ve cut your oxygen off,” Bannon said Saturday during a speech to religious conservatives at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

“There’s a time and season for everything, and right now it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment,” Bannon said.

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Coal country is finding little relief in Trump’s climate actions

The coal plant in Homer City, Pa., is teetering on insolvency.
The coal plant in Homer City, Pa., is teetering on insolvency.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Every morning is filled with anxiety in this hardscrabble town so intertwined with the fortunes of its hulking coal power plant that a drawing of the facility is emblazoned on the community’s police force emblem.

Locals look out their windows to see if there are clouds drifting from its massive smokestacks, indicating the plant is still running. If they don’t see any, they wonder if plant owners have thrown in the towel for good.

“Everyone gets concerned when they wake up and don’t see smoke coming out,” said Rob Nymick, manager of the 1,700-resident borough that he says will be economically “crushed” if the plant goes dark.

As the Trump administration dismantles one of the world’s most aggressive programs to confront climate change, it is invoking the suffering of communities like this one, where the brawny coal power plant that anchors the local economy teeters on insolvency.

Yet as the Trump administration declares an end to what it calls the “war on coal,” Homer City isn’t any less under siege.

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Trump to meet with the Philippines’ Duterte, who is accused of human rights abuses

President Trump will meet with the controversial president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, during an upcoming tour of Asia, the White House announced Monday.

Duterte has been accused of egregious human rights abuse in his declared war on drug traffickers, which activists and others have blamed for the slaying of thousands of people, many of them innocent.

Trump has never condemned Duterte. In April, in what White House officials described as a “warm” and “very friendly” telephone call, Trump told Duterte he was doing a “great job,” according to the Philippine government’s readout of the conversation.

In the call, the White House said, Trump invited Duterte to visit the White House and said U.S.-Philippines relations “were heading in a very positive direction.”

Last year, when the Obama administration criticized the killings in the Philippines, Duterte called the then-president a “son of a whore” and threatened to end decades of military and security cooperation with the U.S.

Human Rights Watch estimated that more than 7,000 people were killed in Duterte’s first year in office, starting June 30, 2016, in an apparently deliberate campaign of extrajudicial executions.

The White House said Monday that Trump and Duterte will hold bilateral meetings on the margins of the Nov. 13 summit of the Assn. of Southeast Asian Nations in Manila. Trump is also visiting Vietnam, China, South Korea and Japan on the same Nov. 3-14 trip.

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McConnell heads to lunch with Trump as president piles on Congress’ to-do list

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell heads to lunch Monday with President Trump at the White House after the president kicked some of the most substantive issues before the administration over to Congress for it to decide on.

Congress has already been struggling, after its failure to repeal Obamacare, to make gains on the next GOP priority -- tax cuts.

But Trump just loaded up the legislative agenda with key issues needing decisions -- on immigration law changes to protect young immigrant “Dreamers” from deportation, the future of the nuclear nonproliferation deal with Iran, and what to do with the Affordable Care Act after Trump cut insurance subsidies that help low-income Americans. Congress is now puzzling over how to meet a year-end deadline to act on issues that have been difficult to resolve for decades.

McConnell and Trump have never been close friends. The button-down Senate leader reels from Trump’s freewheeling style, and his tweets. The president blames McConnell for the failures of his agenda priorities, namely the repeal of Obamacare.

At lunch, where they will be joined by Vice President Mike Pence, there may be an opening to provide a start fresh.

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Tillerson, on whether Trump is trying to ‘castrate’ him: ‘Still intact’

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered up a notable response Sunday to a leading GOP senator’s assertion that President Trump was trying to “publicly castrate” the secretary by undercutting his diplomacy.

“I checked – I’m fully intact,” Tillerson deadpanned, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The notion of Trump running roughshod over the nation’s top diplomat is apparently a sensitive one inside the White House, with Tillerson and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley making the news-talk show rounds Sunday to push back against reports of a deteriorating relationship between the two.

Haley, appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” was asked about reports she might be tapped to replace the former Exxon Mobil CEO as secretary of State. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Haley contended, as she has previously, that Trump and Tillerson “work very well together.”

The secretary, however, passed up repeated chances to directly deny that he had called Trump a “moron” – a remark reportedly made months ago, but that emerged earlier this month in news reports.

“I’m not going to deal with that kind of petty stuff,” Tillerson said in the CNN interview. “I don’t work that way.” He had also sidestepped a flat denial after the report first appeared on NBC, although his spokeswoman said he didn’t use such language.

Two weeks ago, Trump went on Twitter to admonish Tillerson, then in the midst of delicate diplomatic outreach toward North Korea, not to “waste his time” pursuing any indirect channel to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Many foreign policy observers described that as a remarkable breach of the united front that presidents and the State Department seek to present.

Some Trump supporters painted Trump’s comment as a kind of “good cop-bad cop” play, but Sen. Bob Corker -- the Tennessee Republican who a week ago referred to the White House as an “adult day care” center and then used the castration metaphor in subsequent interviews -- said no such strategic imperative was at work.

Tillerson insisted that he and Trump routinely have “a very open exchange of views” -- again without specifically denying the “moron” characterization, which was reportedly made to others, not to the president’s face.

“I call the president ‘Mr. President,” Tillerson told CNN.

Corker and Tillerson are close, and the senator, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, is a respected voice in the chamber on foreign policy matters.

Corker’s caustic observation about day care followed a Twitter attack by Trump in which the president accused the Tennessee Republican, who is retiring, of not having the “guts” to seek reelection. After Corker’s online retort, the president replied by belittling Corker’s height.

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Iran foreign minister: Trump’s action on nuclear accord damages U.S. credibility

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, warned Sunday that President Trump’s efforts to weaken the 2015 nuclear agreement will broadly harm U.S. international credibility.

In an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Zarif suggested that Washington might ending up suffering more adverse consequences than Iran as a result of Trump’s steps last week against the accord between Tehran and six world powers, including the United States.

“Nobody else will trust any U.S. administration to engage in any long-term negotiation because the length of any commitment, the duration of any commitment from now on with any U.S. administration would be the reminder of the term of that president,” Zarif, a key architect of the deal, said. The interview was conducted Saturday in Tehran and aired Sunday.

On Friday, Trump declared his administration would not certify Iran’s compliance with the landmark pact. That declaration does not end the deal, but does trigger a review by Congress. The deal’s other signatories have signaled continuing support for the accord.

Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, sought to dispel any notion that Trump’s decision would lead to any immediate break with the accord.

U.S. law requires the president’s certification every 90 days. Trump had twice declared Iran in compliance, but balked ahead of Sunday’s deadline.

“Right now, you’re going to see us stay in the deal,” Haley said in an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Calling the president’s move an important preventive measure, she said: “What we’re saying now with Iran is: Don’t let it become the next North Korea.”

Trump has urged lawmakers to weigh the reimposition of sanctions if Iran engages in activities like firing ballistic missiles. Via executive action, he also set in motion new sanctions against Iran’s most elite elite military unit, the Revolutionary Guard, which has sweeping powers as a regional enforcer for the Tehran government.

Amid reports of tensions between Trump and his secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, Zarif was asked in the CBS interview whether Tillerson had tipped him that the president’s announcement was coming, the foreign minister said no — but that the absence of advance notice did not surprise him.

“There’s not much courtesy left in the way the United States treats the rest of the world,” he said.

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In Virginia’s coal country, Vice President Pence praises Trump and asks voters to make history

Vice President Mike Pence campaigned Saturday for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, right.
(Sara D. Davis / Getty Images)

In Virginia’s oddly timed elections for governor, held a year after presidential contests, history has repeated itself: The winning candidate lately has represented the opposite party as the newly elected president.

In 2009, Republican Bob McDonnell’s election followed President Obama’s seizure of the White House for Democrats. Eight years earlier, Democrat Mark R. Warner was elected governor after Republican George W. Bush’s presidential election.

That has added a sense of historical imperative to Republican efforts here, particularly since this year’s Republican candidate, Ed Gillespie, has trailed Democrat Ralph Northam in early polls.

So it fell to Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday to try to rev up Republican enthusiasm in this coal country section of Virginia. It is a place similar to those that helped Trump win states like Pennsylvania and Ohio last year, although he fell short in Virginia.

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Trump golfs Saturday with Sen. Lindsey Graham, again

For the second time this week, President Trump spent the afternoon golfing with his sometimes critic, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The president and the South Carolina senator appeared to have moved beyond a frenemies stage of their relationship to develop a working rapport, particularly on health care, immigration and foreign policy issues -- all front and center this week on the White House agenda.

Other senators have said Trump and Graham now talk so frequently it’s as if they are on speed-dial with one another. (Ironic, after Graham came to regret giving Trump his cell phone number way back when, which Trump then used to taunt the senator.)

No word what the two discussed as they hit the links. The White House only confirmed Saturday that Graham, who had golfed with the president Monday, was again joining him.

Graham, who tweeted about his earlier outing, had yet to comment.

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Bannon, touting his ‘war’ on the GOP, credits Alabama election with pulling Trump rightward

Former White House advisor Stephen K. Bannon said Saturday that President Trump’s recent rightward lurch is the result of the outsider victory in Alabama’s Republican Senate primary.

Trump’s hardened line — on immigrant DACA recipients, Obamacare health insurance payments and the Iran nuclear deal — suggest the president got the message from his voters after conservative former judge Roy Moore bested the establishment-backed candidate Trump supported in last month’s GOP special primary election, Bannon said.

“Right now, it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment,” Bannon told conservative religious activists at the annual Values Voter Summit in Washington.

“Those are not random events, folks,” said Bannon, who returned to his perch heading Breitbart News after leaving the White House in August.

“Victory begets victory,” said Bannon, who broke with the White House in supporting Moore. “We owe that to Judge Moore and the good men and women of Alabama because all that came from them.”

Trump made a series of moves this week that pleased the right. He unveiled a list of hard-line demands for Congress in exchange for protecting from deportation young immigrants who are part of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He eliminated subsidies for low-income Americans under the Affordable Care Act. And he declined to certify Iran’s compliance with a nuclear deal, urging Congress to consider new sanctions.

Bannon predicted more such actions from Trump in the week ahead, including one fulfilling his campaign promise — which has been on hold — to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

“Every day is like Christmas Day now,” Bannon added. “This is the Trump program. This is what we always wanted.”

Bannon pointedly criticized Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — at one point looking into the camera to ask whether the Kentucky Republican was watching the live-streamed event — as well as outspoken retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) as insufficiently backing Trump’s agenda.

The former Trump advisor supported Moore over Sen. Luther Strange in Alabama, and he plans to support other challengers to incumbent Republican senators in the 2018 midterm elections. On Saturday, he specifically warned three of them — Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, who is a member of party leadership, Sen. Dean Heller, who faces a primary challenger in Nevada, and Sen. Deb Fischer in Nebraska.

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Trump boasts of ending healthcare subsidies and sending insurance stocks plunging; others not so pleased

President Trump defended his move to halt federal health insurance payments for millions of low-income Americans, even as he acknowledged rising costs faced under the Affordable Care Act.

Trump, in a series of tweets late Friday and into Saturday morning, appeared intent on deflecting the outpouring of concern that Americans will suffer under his executive order this week to scrap the payments.

The president had wavered for months over so-called cost-sharing reduction payments, which Republicans in Congress had long targeted in their effort to dismantle Obamacare.

Under the act, the federal government pays insurers to reduce costs of policies for lower-income Americans not covered by their employers. The payments cost about $7 billion a year.

Trump is aiming to draw Democrats eager to save Obamacare to the negotiating table. And that could happen. But healthcare providers and outside analysts warn that, in the meantime, his move likely would result in insurers pulling out of healthcare markets and leaving millions of Americans with no access to plans.

As Trump boasted on Twitter that he had sent health insurance stocks plunging, his critics questioned if he comprehended the impacts of his actions. “Are you daft?” Democratic operative Brad Woodhouse tweeted at Trump. “Tanking their stocks will raise premiums. And that sir, is all on you.”

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At Koch donor summit, Mike Pence promises tax reform, and Ted Cruz warns of midterm ‘bloodbath’ if Congress fails

Vice President Mike Pence pleaded with wealthy donors at a Koch-aligned summit to use their influence – on workers, businesses and lawmakers – to encourage Congress to pass President Trump’s tax reform plan this year.

“Our entire agenda depends on this Congress stepping forward,” Pence said at the Seminar Network’s fall gathering in New York City, his first address as vice president to the organization backed by the billionaire Koch brothers.

“Talk to your employees, talk to your suppliers to your fellow business leaders to get them on board.”

In fact, speaker after speaker – from elected officials to wealthy business executives – warned that failure by Congress to pass tax reform, after the collapse of the Obamacare repeal, could wipe out the Republican majority in Congress, which so far has few accomplishments to run on in the 2018 midterm election.

“We could face a bloodbath,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told more than 100 donors gathered at the tony St. Regis Hotel in midtown Manhattan, forewarning of the “potential for a Watergate-level blowout.”

The network, whose members donate at least $100,000 annually, expects to spend up to $400 million this election cycle through its affiliated groups on issue advocacy and voter persuasion in the run-up to the midterms, and has already spent more than $10 million on tax reform, including ads and events in lawmakers’ home states.

As Congress struggles to draft tax legislation from Trump’s framework, donor Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry chief executive from Denver, said voters and donors will be dispirited if Congress fails.

“I think Republicans will pay a heavy price in the midterm elections,” he said. “Absolutely, they’ll give less money. People double down on success. They don’t double down on failure.”

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Trump says U.S. ‘totally prepared’ for North Korea threats

Even as he took action against a nuclear nonproliferation deal with Iran, President Trump on Friday stoked concern over military threats from North Korea, a rival nation that actually has an advanced nuclear arms program.

“We’re totally prepared for numerous things,” Trump told reporters who asked about North Korea’s latest threats as he left the White House for an event. “We’re going to see what happens.”

North Korea has repeatedly threatened U.S. territory, including Guam, and Trump has responded in kind, with talk of “fire and fury” and of “totally” destroying the country. But other senior administration officials have advocated for diplomacy and negotiations.

Trump, who has recently complained that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is “wasting his time” in trying to talk to the regime in Pyongyang, told reporters he would be “open” to negotiations if plausible.

“But if it’s going to be something other than negotiation, believe me, we are ready -- moreso than we have ever been,” he added.

Tensions with North Korea have soared even as Trump has said the 2015 international agreement that put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program is seriously flawed. On Friday, he refused to certify Iran’s compliance with that deal, though senior advisors acknowledge Tehran is complying, and he asked Congress to consider new sanctions.

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Trump slaps Iran with more sanctions but keeps nuclear deal in place

President Trump on Friday announced new restrictions on Iran -- “a terrorist nation like few others” -- but stopped short of scrapping the landmark nuclear deal that was the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievement.

Instead, he called on Congress to consider reimposing sanctions if Iran crosses certain lines, such as firing ballistic missiles or financing terrorism.

For now, Trump said he would not certify that Iran was in compliance with the 2015 deal that curbed its nuclear program, as he has twice before under a law requiring the president’s certification every 90 days. But in addition to asking Congress to enact potential new sanctions, Trump moved to impose unrelated sanctions by executive action, including blacklisting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s elite military unit that is heavily involved in much of the country’s business and trade.

“We cannot and will not make this certification,” Trump said in a speech from the White House ahead of the next deadline for certification on Sunday.

“The longer we ignore a threat, the more dangerous it becomes,” Trump said. He called the government in Tehran a “rogue” and “fanatical regime” that has “spread chaos” around the world, and added, “The regime remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.”

Iran also violently represses its own citizens and fuels “vicious” civil wars in countries like Yemen and Syria, Trump said. The nuclear deal, however, was limited by allies’ agreement to addressing that threat, not other Iranian activities.

If the Obama administration and other major world powers had not entered into the deal that required Iran to shutter its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, Tehran’s economy would have collapsed, Trump said.

Now, he added, “We will deny the regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.”

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Trump backs off threat to limit aid to Puerto Rico after backlash

(Evan Vucci / AP)

President Trump on Friday backtracked from his threat a day earlier to limit federal assistance to Puerto Rico, saying that the United States would help all states and territories beset by recent natural disasters.

“We’ll be there,” Trump told Christian conservatives at an annual gathering known as the Values Voter Summit.

Trump grouped Puerto Rico with Texas, Louisiana, Florida and the Virgin Islands, all of them blasted by hurricanes, as well as California, beset by devastating wildfires. On Thursday he’d singled out Puerto Rico, perhaps the most damaged of all but where federal efforts have been most criticized, to warn on Twitter that the government’s efforts there can’t go on “forever.”

On Friday, however, he said in reference to all the hard-hit places, “It’s not even a question of a choice. ... We’re going to be there as Americans, and we love those people and what they’ve gone through.”

Trump’s comments followed similar remarks Thursday from senior administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, seeking to clean up amid a bipartisan backlash to the president’s morning tweet suggesting Puerto Rico was partly to blame for its crisis and warning of an end to aid.

The president also began Friday with a new tweet that, while alluding to his same arguments that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was bad before, closed with a more magnanimous point: “The wonderful people of Puerto Rico, with their unmatched spirit, know how bad things were before the” hurricanes, he wrote. “I will always be with them!”

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Killing state and local tax deduction hits many Californians hard. Limiting it affects only the top 1%

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas)
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)

Limiting instead of scrapping the federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes would preserve the benefit for all but the top 1% of earners, but would raise only about a quarter of the revenue for lawmakers looking to offset broader proposed tax cuts, according to a new analysis.

The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimated that a full repeal of the deduction — a key and controversial component of the sweeping Republican tax cut plan — would increase federal revenue by $1.8 trillion over the next decade.

Limiting the state and local tax deduction to individuals with adjusted gross incomes of no more than $400,000 (or $800,000 for married couples) would slash those revenue gains to $481 billion over the same period.

The trade-off would be that all but the highest income households would continue to have access to the break, which is coveted in high-tax states like California and New York.

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Trump launches early salvo in the purported war on Christmas

(Michael Reynolds / EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

The Halloween decorations are just going up and Thanksgiving is more than a month away. But President Trump is getting an early jump on Christmas -- the Christmas culture war, that is.

“We’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore,” he told an enthusiastic crowd of Christian conservatives on Friday. “They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct.”

“Well, guess what?” he continued. “We’re saying Merry Christmas again!”

The line predictably got a standing ovation from the hundreds of people at the annual Values Voter Summit -- as did red-meat remarks for the flag, God and Israel. The “war on Christmas” theme has proven politically potent for years on the right, stocked by conservative media including Trump’s favorite, Fox News. With polls suggesting some core supporters have cooled on him, Trump lately has seemed eager to stoke the culture wars.

His October wish for a Merry Christmas wasn’t even his first such utterance this year. In July he also raised the specter of a war on Christmas, at a controversial speech to a national Boy Scouts jamboree in West Virginia.

Trump segued on Friday to talk of his emerging tax plan, saying his “massive tax cuts” would be a welcome “gift” for the holidays -- er, Christmas.

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Democratic states say they’ll take Trump to court over insurance subsidies

(Rich Pedroncelli / AP)

Within hours of the Trump administration’s announcement that it would stop payments to insurers that are designed to help make healthcare affordable to low-income people, Democratic state attorneys general threatened to go to court.

In August, Democratic state attorneys general won the right to intervene in a long-running case about the insurance subsidies, which are known as cost-sharing reductions. They did so in order to give them a quick route to court if the administration cut off the payments, as it has now said it will do.

At stake is roughly $7 billion in annual payments that the government has been making to insurers under the Affordable Care Act. The payments go to reimburse insurers for reducing deductibles and co-payments for lower-income consumers. Congress has never passed an appropriation for the money, and the administration said Thursday night that it had concluded it did not have the legal authority to make the payments without such legislation.

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Watch live: Trump speaks at the 2017 Value Voters Summit

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Susan Collins announces she will stay in the Senate rather than seek Maine’s governorship

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) speaks at a news conference at Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, in September.
(Robert F. Bukaty / Associated Press)

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, one of the key Republican votes that blocked the party’s effort to repeal Obamacare, announced Friday that she will forgo a race for the state’s governorship, remaining in the Senate at least until her term expires in 2020.

“I am a congenital optimist and I continue to believe that Congress can and will be more productive,” Collins told an audience in Rockport, Maine, at the end of a speech on healthcare reform.

“I want to continue to play a key role in advancing policies that strengthen our nation, help our hardworking families, improve our healthcare system and bring peace and stability to a troubled and violent world, and I have concluded that the best way I can contribute to these priorities is to remain as a member of the United States Senate.”

Collins, who was reelected in 2014, indicated for months that she was conflicted about the decision. She won her Senate seat for the first time in 1996, two years after she lost an earlier race for governor. The winner was independent Angus King, who since 2013 has served with Collins in the Senate.

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Iran rallies behind the Revolutionary Guards as Trump threatens new sanctions

Iran’s military establishment defended itself Friday in response to reports that President Trump would seek new economic sanctions against the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Hours before Trump was due to announce his decision to alter the 2015 Iranian nuclear agreement, the Revolutionary Guards issued a statement through the Sepah news agency, boasting that it was “the most effective corps in the region.”

Iran’s military public relations — representing ground, air and naval forces — also rallied behind the elite force, saying that any insult to the Revolutionary Guards “is an insult to the entire ruling establishment,” Sepah reported.

“If the IRGC had not taken effective measures, terrorism would have overwhelmed many countries in the region,” the military statement said.

White House officials said Trump would stay in the nuclear deal but would not certify Iran’s compliance, arguing that Tehran was pushing the envelope by testing ballistic missiles and threatening the U.S. and Israel.

Officials said Trump would direct the Treasury Department to blacklist the Revolutionary Guards, the powerful force that leads Iran’s military operations overseas. The White House accuses it of arming Syrian President Bashar Assad, undermining the fight against Islamic State through proxy Shiite Muslim forces in Iraq, supporting Houthi rebels battling a U.S.-backed government in Yemen and launching cyberattacks.

Iran says it has agreed to the toughest international inspections ever put in place and will not abandon the agreement, which granted it relief from international economic sanctions.

Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, in the religious establishment’s weekly sermon at Tehran University, said Friday that Iranian officials should “stand firmly against this bullying.”

Rahim Zohaby, a 66-year-old importer of consumer goods in Tehran, said Trump was trying to appease his anti-Iranian base.

“President Trump needs controversial moves to redirect American public opinion” from his political struggles, Zohaby said.

Other Iranians said Trump’s actions fall short of his pledge to “tear up” the nuclear deal.

“The madman has backed down in a cowardly way from his hollering and harsh words,” said Ali Jafari, a 42-year-old shopkeeper. “I think we must keep up our commitment to the nuclear deal, and at the same time continue our missile projects and strengthening our military power, just in case.”

Rahim Haghverdi, a grocery shop owner, said Iran should stick with the nuclear deal no matter what the U.S. does.

“We need stability in the economy and domestic and foreign investment,” said Haghverdi, 27. “I don’t care about blacklisting the IRGC. We want stability and economic growth.”

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Chief of Staff John Kelly contradicts Trump on North Korea: ‘Let’s hope diplomacy works’

Days after President Trump said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with North Korea, the president’s chief of staff, John F. Kelly, said Thursday that diplomacy was crucial to dealing with the nuclear-armed nation.

“Right now there’s great concern about a lot of Americans that live in Guam. Right now we think the threat is manageable,” Kelly told White House reporters on Thursday. “But over time, if it grows beyond where it is today -- well, let’s hope diplomacy works.”

North Korea was just one topic that Kelly touched on in a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room that seemed timed mainly to allow him to debunk numerous recent media reports that he is unhappy in his job and might quit. It was his first such public exchange with reporters in the nine tumultuous weeks since he replaced Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Kelly, a highly decorated former Marine general, cited tensions with North Korea as the issue that could most keep him up nights. Since Trump took office, the government of Kim Jong Un has made progress on developing an intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear warhead.

“The American people should be concerned about a state that has developed a pretty good ICBM capability and is developing a pretty good nuclear reentry vehicle,” he said. “That state simply cannot have the ability to reach the homeland.”

Trump has taken a far more provocative tone, threatening “fire and fury” and to “totally destroy” North Korea. More than once he has tweeted his frustration with diplomacy and with Tillerson, though other senior advisers -- including Kelly and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis -- were also known to favor diplomacy.

“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...” Trump wrote this month, using his insulting nickname for Kim.

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Trump says the release of an American family held by Taliban shows Pakistan is ‘starting to respect’ U.S. again

(Michael Reynolds / EPA-EFE)

President Trump on Thursday hailed Pakistan’s cooperation in making possible the release of an American family held captive in Pakistan by the Taliban, calling it “a positive moment” in the country’s relationship with the United States.

Trump praised the Pakistani government for “working hard” to help find and win the release of American citizen Caitlin Coleman and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, along with their three children, who were born during their five years in captivity since 2012.

“They worked hard on this and I believe they’re starting to respect the United States again,” Trump said in remarks at a White House event on healthcare.

The administration counts the family’s release as a victory in its broader push to pressure foreign governments to do more to secure the release of citizens held captive abroad. Yet, even as some are released, others are detained, and Americans continue to be held in countries including North Korea, Iran and Turkey.

In his intelligence briefings, President Trump has regularly zeroed in on the status of citizens being held overseas, even as his administration has retreated from criticizing the human rights records of other countries.

White House officials said Trump’s overtures on behalf of jailed citizens are often made in private. It is unclear what, if anything, Trump has done for a dozen U.S. citizens held in Turkey by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after a failed coup last year. Erdogan is believed to see them as bargaining chips he might use to force the United States to extradite Islamist cleric Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish exile in Pennsylvania blamed by Erdogan for the coup conspiracy.

In speaking to reporters before he met with Erdogan at the United Nations General Assembly last month, Trump didn’t mention the jailed Americans. Erdogan, he said, “has become a friend of mine.”

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House approves disaster funds for Puerto Rico, other hurricane-hit areas and Western wildfires

Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Congress was on track to pass disaster funds for Puerto Rico after the House on Thursday approved a $36.5-billion package that also includes additional money for other hurricane-stricken areas, flood insurance and wildfires in the West.

The vote, 353-69, was not without some difficulty after conservative groups balked at the spending and President Trump lashed out at Puerto Rico, criticizing its pre-hurricane fiscal crisis in a series of morning tweets. The package now moves to the Senate. It is the first round of aid for Puerto Rico, which was devastated by Hurricane Maria and is still largely without electricity.

Last month, Congress approved an initial $15-billion aid package for Texas, Florida and other areas hit in rapid succession by unusually destructive hurricanes.

In Thursday’s package, about half the money, $18.7 billion, will go to replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, which is being rapidly depleted by recovery operations. Another $16 billion will shore up the National Flood Insurance Program that is also running out of money to cover losses. The package also provides $576.5 million for wildfires that have left dozens dead and hundreds of homes and structures burned in the West. Congress provided $4 billion more money for FEMA than the White House requested.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) sought to downplay Trump’s criticisms of Puerto Rico, though he shared some of the president’s complaints about the island territory’s fiscal crisis. “Yes, we need to make sure Puerto Rico can stand on its own two feet,” said Ryan, who will be visiting the island on Friday. “But at the moment, there’s a humanitarian crisis.”

Others in Congress, however, criticized Trump’s slow response to the crisis in Puerto Rico, mocking his visit when he threw paper towels to a crowd as insufficient. “We don’t need the president tossing paper towels to storm victims like he was tossing a ball to a dog,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who has been calling for federal evacuation aid for the elderly, sick and other particularly vulnerable people in Puerto Rico. “We need airplanes, ships and helicopters to get people the hell out.”

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White House Chief of Staff Kelly: ‘I’m not quitting today’

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, in a rare and wide-ranging press conference Thursday, told reporters he felt secure and satisfied in his job and expressed frustration with press reports to the contrary.

“I’m not quitting today,” Kelly said. “I don’t believe--and I just talked to the president--I don’t think I’m being fired.”

The chief of staff also said he was not aware beforehand of Trump’s frequent and often provocative posts on Twitter, but that they don’t make his life managing the White House more difficult.

A number of news reports have described Kelly as having difficulty managing President Trump’s unpredictable nature and habit of undermining his own policy messages with distracting outbursts.

“I was not brought to this job to control anything,” Kelly said, but rather to manage the flow of information to the president “so he can make the best decisions.”

White House chief of staff is the “hardest” and “most important” job he’s ever had, Kelly said, but it’s “not the best job” he’s ever held. That, he said, was being an enlisted Marine sergeant infantryman.

Trump, however, told reporters at the White House on Saturday that Kelly “loves it more than anything he’s ever done.” And, Trump said, Kelly is doing “an incredible job.”

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How big an effect Trump’s healthcare order will have may not be known for months

In announcing his new executive order on healthcare, President Trump said that it would “increase choice and increase access to lower-priced, high-quality healthcare options” for “millions of Americans.”

Critics of the order warned that it could endanger care for millions of other Americans with existing health problems such as cancer, heart disease or diabetes.

But healthcare experts said Thursday that the effect of the order -- for good or bad -- won’t be fully known for months, at the earliest. That’s because the order set out broad policies and directed three federal agencies -- the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Treasury -- to come up with the detailed plans.

“It’s remarkable how truly vague the executive order is, with words like ‘consider’ and ‘potentially,’” tweeted Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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San Juan mayor responds to Trump’s tweets blaming Puerto Rico

The mayor of San Juan responded to President Trump’s tweets Thursday morning in which he blamed Puerto Rico for its problems and insisted that he had little patience for the years-long effort that will be required to repair the U.S. territory.

“We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” he said in one tweet.

He blamed the island for “a total lack of accountability” in a pair of tweets and quoted a conservative journalist who invoked the island’s financial crisis as a problem “of their own making.”

In response, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz penned a letter to Trump, criticizing his approach.

“While you are amusing yourself throwing paper towels at us, your compatriots and the world are sending love and help our way,” she wrote. “Condemn us to a slow death of non drinkable water, lack of food, lack of medicine while you keep others eager to help from reaching us since they face the impediment of the Jones Act.”

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Watch: President Trump to sign executive order to deregulate health insurance

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Trump warns Puerto Rico that hurricane assistance may end soon, blames territory for its infrastructure problems

President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive in Puerto Rico last week.
President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump arrive in Puerto Rico last week.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

During a White House event last week, President Trump said his administration is “marshaling every federal resource at our disposal” and “will not rest until that job is done” to help Puerto Rico recover and rebuild following the devastation wrought from Hurricane Maria.

That didn’t last long.

By Thursday, even as the death toll has risen above 40 and the majority of the island remained without power, Trump seemed to have had enough of all that. He blamed Puerto Rico for its problems and insisted that he had little patience for the years-long effort that will be required to repair the U.S. territory.

“We cannot keep FEMA, the Military & the First Responders, who have been amazing (under the most difficult circumstances) in P.R. forever!” he said in one tweet.

He blamed the island for “a total lack of accountability” in a pair of tweets and quoted a conservative journalist who invoked the island’s financial crisis as a problem “of their own making.”

The federal government traditionally takes a major role in storm rebuilding efforts, spending years and more than $100 billion in Louisiana and other states affected by Katrina.

Trump made a similar pledge to Texas and Louisiana following Hurricane Harvey.

“We will get through this. We will come out stronger, and believe me we will be bigger, better, stronger than ever before,” he said.

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No one has ever gone straight from City Hall to the White House. Could L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti end that streak?

There are many paths to the presidency, most of them a standard climb from one elected office to the next.

A whole passel of lawmakers have cycled their way through a governorship or the U.S. Senate en route to the White House. Others arrived with less buttoned-down backgrounds. There have been war heroes, a former haberdasher, a onetime movie actor.

And then, of course, there is the current occupant whose resume — real estate developer, beauty pageant promoter, conspiracy monger, reality TV celebrity — comprises a category all its own.

In the whole history of the United States, however, there has never been a candidate who made the leap straight from City Hall to the White House, or who even managed to win his party’s presidential nomination.

Now Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is mentioned as a presidential prospect, fresh off his inauguration to a second term. He insists that more than 250 years of unbroken mayoral futility are no deterrent.

“I think all the rules are off,” he told a Wisconsin TV interviewer during a June visit to the Midwestern swing state. “No African American could be president until one was. No reality star could be president until one is.”

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Trump draws a hard line on protection for young immigrants and touts misleading statistics to boost tax plan

President Trump, speaking at a Wednesday rally in Pennsylvania.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

President Trump hardened his conditions for approving legal status for young immigrants brought to this country illegally, insisting Wednesday that before he would back new protections for them, Democrats would have to back funding for a border wall and other security measures.

After a mid-September meeting with Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Charles E. Schumer, Trump had said he favored a targeted, bipartisan solution for the so-called Dreamers, until recently protected by an Obama administration directive called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that Trump began phasing out this month. “The wall will come later,” he said then.

Earlier this week, his administration put forth a series of hard-line conditions Democrats strongly oppose, prompting Pelosi and Schumer to issue a joint statement suggesting he’d reneged on his tentative deal with them. Trump reiterated Wednesday that the wall — detested by Democrats, and some border Republicans — remained a priority before any DACA deal could be reached.

“If we’re going to do something, we need to get something in return,” he said during an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity that was conducted before a rally at the Harrisburg, Pa., airport, and broadcast on Fox later in the evening. Trump expressed some sympathy for the young immigrants, noting that many “don’t speak the language of their country” since they came to the United States so young.

Still, he added, “if we’re going to solve that, we want a wall and we want greater border security.”

During the lengthy and fawning interview, Hannity repeatedly praised the president and Trump returned the favor, twice telling an audience gathered behind him about Hannity’s ratings. “I’m so proud of you,” the president said.

Hannity did not correct multiple falsehoods Trump uttered during the interview.

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Hillary Clinton says she was ‘appalled’ at Weinstein news, will give away his donations

(Larry Busacca / Getty Images for Time)

Saying she was “sick,” “shocked” and “appalled” by news of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual predation, Hillary Clinton said in an interview Wednesday that she would donate to charity the money he had contributed to her campaign.

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Clinton said she had no idea about Weinstein’s behavior until the revelations in recent days that led to his ouster from the company that bears his name.

“I certainly didn’t, and I don’t know who did,” she said. “Like so many people who’ve come forward and spoken out, this was a different side of a person who I and many others had known in the past.”

Asked about the campaign donations, Clinton said she would follow the pattern adopted by several other Democrats who received money from Weinstein.

“What other people are saying, what my former colleagues are saying, is that they’re going to donate it to charity, and of course I will do that,” she said.

Clinton added that until now, she would have considered Weinstein a friend, and she praised the women who have spoken publicly about his conduct.

“The courage of these women coming forward now is really important because it can’t just end with one person’s disgraceful behavior and the consequences that he is now facing,” she said. “This has to be a wake-up call and shine a bright spotlight on anything like this behavior anywhere, at any time.”

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Top Kelly aide expected to be choice for Homeland Security secretary

Kirstjen Nielsen, shown here with her boss, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, is expected to be nominated as secretary of Homeland Security.
(Andrew Harnik/AP)

The White House will nominate Kirstjen Nielsen, a top aide to Chief of Staff John Kelly, to take over the Department of Homeland Security, according to a Homeland Security official.

The appointment of Nielsen likely would represent a continuation of the policies of Kelly. The retired Marine general won Trump’s praise for his tough approach to immigration enforcement during his six months running the department.

The sprawling department includes the agencies responsible for policing borders and immigration, a central focus for the Trump administration, including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Acting Secretary Elaine Duke told her staff about the expected appointment Wednesday, the official said. The choice was first reported by Politico.

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Trump follows up NBC threat: ‘It is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write’

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump intensified his threat against the press Wednesday afternoon, hours after threatening to use government power to penalize NBC, telling reporters that “it is frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.”

The comments came as Trump was meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the Oval Office.

Trump was still angry over an NBC report detailing his request to increase the nation’s nuclear arsenal by nearly tenfold.

He called the report “fake news.”

Ten times would be “totally unnecessary,” Trump said, adding that he wants the U.S. nuclear arsenal to be in “tiptop shape.”

Trump’s Twitter threat earlier in the day against NBC’s ability to hold local television licenses already had alarmed 1st Amendment advocates for its chilling tone.

The 1st Amendment has long been interpreted to protect speech that government officials object to as a bulwark against authoritarianism.

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Ryan sides with NRA for regulatory fix on ‘bump stocks,’ not legislation, after Las Vegas shooting

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) speaks in the Capitol.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) speaks in the Capitol.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), siding with the National Rifle Assn., said Wednesday he prefers limiting “bump stocks” used in the Las Vegas massacre through administrative action, rather than legislation.

“We think the regulatory fix is the smartest, quickest fix,” Ryan told reporters.

The GOP leader’s approach largely reflects that of the NRA, which announced a surprise willingness after the Las Vegas shooting to consider limits on the devices that can essentially turn assault rifles into automatic weaponry.

Relying on administrative review, though, would likely squash efforts underway for a potentially more lasting legislative solution through law, and shield lawmakers from taking potential tough votes at odds with the NRA on a gun safety issue.

Several bills, including one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and a bipartisan House proposal that has drawn 20 Republican and Democratic sponsors, are making their way through Congress after the shooting that left dozens dead and hundreds injured at an outdoor concert on the Las Vegas Strip.

Authorities believe the Las Vegas gunman used the device in his rampage, which they said was the most deadly mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Under the Obama administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed access to bump stocks, a decision Republicans now want to review.

“It makes sense that this is regulation that probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Ryan said. “And I’d, frankly, like to know how it happened.”

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Trump appoints acting secretary of Health and Human Services

Tom Price
(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

President Trump on Tuesday announced that Eric Hargan, an attorney from Illinois, would serve as acting secretary of Health and Human Services, following the resignation of Tom Price late last month.

Price resigned in the midst of an expanding controversy over hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer money spent for private air flights.

Hargan was sworn in as deputy secretary days before his appointment as acting secretary of the Health and Human Services department.

Former Acting Secretary Don Wright said Hargan brought “a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and leadership experience to HHS.”

“His commitment to public service and vast experience in the healthcare field will help guide the department as we advance President Trump’s agenda on behalf of the American people,” Wright said in a statement on Hargan’s appointment.

Hargan served at the Health and Human Services Department during former President George W. Bush’s administration and was on Trump’s transition team.

The Chicago Tribune contributed to this report.

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Trump unleashes himself from would-be handlers, lashing out mornings, nights and weekends

President Trump with his chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
(Andrew Harrer / Getty Images)

When President Trump agreed last month with Democrats to strike a deal granting legal status to so-called Dreamers brought to this country illegally as children, his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, was all for it. Another Trump confidant disagreed: Fox host Sean Hannity made clear in a phone call and on his show that Trump must draw a harder line on broader immigration enforcement as his price.

Trump sided with Hannity, according to a person close to the White House. The result was a list of demands unveiled Sunday night — conditions seemingly guaranteed to thwart a bipartisan deal.

Kelly, the retired Marine general who is Trump’s second chief of staff, has sought to tighten the flow of information and visitors to the president, to bring order to an unruly White House and to the way that Trump makes his decisions. But he is often thwarted by one man: Trump.

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President Trump threatens NBC’s broadcast licenses following critical stories

President Trump, who has threatened press freedoms before, suggested Wednesday that NBC might lose its broadcast licenses following critical stories detailing his behavior.

Substantively, Trump’s threat is fairly empty: NBC and other networks do not hold a license for the network as a whole. Licenses are issued to local stations, of which NBC owns 28. Under deregulatory measures that Republicans successfully pushed over the past generation, challenging a license on the grounds that coverage is unfair or biased would be extremely difficult.

Gordon Smith, president of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, denounced Trump’s threat on Wednesday.

“The founders of our nation set as a cornerstone of our democracy the 1st Amendment, forever enshrining and protecting freedom of the press,” said Smith, a former Republican senator.

“It is contrary to this fundamental right for any government official to threaten the revocation of an FCC license simply because of a disagreement with the reporting of a journalist,” he said.

The tweet fits a pattern for Trump. His threat of government retaliation against NBC followed a tweet Tuesday that threatened the tax status of the National Football League. The league gave up its tax-exempt status in 2015.

Trump had previously spoken of making libel laws stricter and other crackdowns on the press, raising concern from 1st Amendment advocates.

NBC reported last week that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron” and nearly quit the administration out of concern for Trump’s behavior and policy. The network followed up Wednesday with a report on what had prompted the “moron comment.”

Tillerson made the comment following a July 20 meeting of top national security leaders at which Trump advocated a near-tenfold increase in the nation’s nuclear arsenal, questioning why he lacked the stockpile that U.S. presidents had during the height of the Cold War, the network reported. The U.S. has since entered into numerous treaties and other legally binding agreements to slow the nuclear arms race.

Trump has been furious at the coverage. He challenged Tillerson to an IQ test in a Forbes interview published Tuesday and tweeted separately on Wednesday that the NBC account is “pure fiction, made up to demean.”

9:00 a.m.: This story was updated with comment from Gordon Smith of the National Assn. of Broadcasters.

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House panel approves $36.5 billion for hurricane and wildfire relief and recovery

(Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)

The House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to provide $36.5 billion in emergency funding for hurricane and wildfire relief and recovery.

The legislation includes $18.7 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, $576.5 million for wildfire efforts, and $16 billion for debt relief for the National Flood Insurance Program, which now needs additional funds to make insurance claims payments to individuals, according to a release from the committee.

The bill includes a provision for the Disaster Nutrition Assistance Program to enable low-income residents in Puerto Rico to receive the same emergency nutrition assistance that other hurricane-affected states already receive.

“These funds are urgently needed to get resources to families and communities that are still suffering,” Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) said in the statement. “This legislation will continue immediate relief efforts, and help jump-start the rebuilding process.”

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Navy fires top officers of wrecked U.S. warship John S. McCain

The commander and executive officer of the U.S. destroyer John S. McCain were relieved of their duties Wednesday due to lost confidence after the warship and an oil tanker collided near Singapore in August.

The cause of the Aug. 21 collision is still under investigation but the Navy described it as preventable. The Navy statement said Cmdr. Alfredo J. Sanchez and the ship’s executive officer, Cmdr. Jessie L. Sanchez, were reassigned.

Alfredo Sanchez, was reassigned to the headquarters of Naval Forces Japan, and Jessie Sanchez was reassigned to the ship repair facility at Yokosuka, Japan, home port of the 7th Fleet, the Navy said.

It said Cmdr. Ed Angelinas, former commanding officer of the destroyer McCampbell, was named acting commanding officer of the McCain. Lt. Cmdr. Ray Ball, chief engineer of the guided-missile cruiser Antietam, is acting executive officer.

The Navy fired the then-commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, shortly after the McCain’s crash.

The crash killed 10 U.S. sailors and injured five others. It was one of several accidents in the region that raised concern over the safety and operational effectiveness of U.S. naval vessels.

Some Navy officials have cited strains from frequent extended deployments, delayed maintenance and nearly a decade of budget constraints and reductions in resources devoted to training as factors.

But the Navy statement said it also was “evident the collision was preventable, the commanding officer exercised poor judgment and the executive officer exercised poor leadership of the ship’s training program.”

The McCain crash followed the collision of the U.S. destroyer Fitzgerald and a container ship in waters off Japan in June, which killed seven sailors. In January, the Antietam ran aground near Yokosuka base in Japan, and in May the cruiser Lake Champlain had a minor collision with a South Korean fishing boat.

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Supreme Court says it has dismissed travel ban case — for now

The U.S. Supreme Court.
The U.S. Supreme Court.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

The U.S. Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it had dismissed as moot a case from Maryland involving the fight over President Trump’s travel ban.

The court’s action was widely expected.

The pending appeal by the government challenged a U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that held that Trump’s earlier temporary travel ban order was unconstitutional. Since the ban’s 90-day time limit had expired, the court decided the case should expire too.

In keeping with usual practice, the justices said they were vacating or setting aside the 4th Circuit’s opinion.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented and said the court should not set aside the lower court’s ruling.

The underlying dispute is far from finished. The American Civil Liberties Union, the state of Hawaii and other immigrants rights groups have filed new suits to challenge Trump’s latest travel ban, which has no time limit.

A judge in Maryland will hold a hearing on the new case next week.

The justices took no action on a second pending case arising from the 9th Circuit, perhaps because it focuses on refugees, and the time limit on that part of the order does not expire until late October.

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Trump uses visit by Kissinger to tout healthcare change

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

President Trump used a photo op with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to tout a proposal Trump plans to unveil on healthcare later this week, offering an unusual justification.

“We’re going to have to do something with Obamacare because it’s failing. Henry Kissinger does not want to pay a 116% increase in his premiums, but that’s what’s happening,” Trump said.

Kissinger, at 94, is well over Medicare age and wouldn’t be affected by Obamacare or the changes Trump plans to propose.

It was one of several moments in the photo session in which Trump made statements that didn’t comport with reality. He also repeated his claim that “we’re the highest-taxed nation in the world” -- an assertion he loves to make even though the U.S. tax burden actually is one of the lowest of the industrialized nations.

He also denied that he had undercut the current secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, by publicly rebuking him on Twitter.

“No, I didn’t undercut anybody. I don’t believe in undercutting people,” he said.

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Trump’s increased unpopularity has hit states with key Senate races

President Trump with Republican Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, who is up for reelection next year.
(Michael Reynolds / EPA)

It’s no secret that President Trump’s popularity varies widely from one part of the country to another -- deeply unpopular in the Northeast and the West, more favorably viewed in the South and the country’s interior.

That’s still true, but as Trump’s overall popularity has declined this year, his state-by-state standing has shifted in places that could play major roles in next fall’s midterm elections.

The polling and media firm Morning Consult surveyed 472,032 registered voters from Inauguration day until Sept. 26 to develop a state-by-state picture of how Trump’s popularity has shifted.

The firm found that Trump remains strongly popular in much of the South and some of the Great Plains and northern Rocky Mountain states. He started out deeply unpopular in the Northeast and on the West Coast and has only gotten more so.

The more interesting shifts, however, were in places like Arizona and Nevada, which started out pro-Trump, but had both flipped by August. That reinforces other signs of trouble for Republican Senate incumbents Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada. On the flip side, Trump continues to have a positive image in Missouri and Indiana, both states with endangered Democratic incumbents.

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White House defends Trump’s ‘Liddle’ attack on Sen. Bob Corker, saying Congress is the problem

President Trump continued attacking Republican Sen. Bob Corker, belittling the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman over his stark criticisms of the president as Trump’s allies called for the senator to step down.

Trump resorted to name-calling on Twitter, as is his preference, labeling the 5-foot-7-inch Tennessee senator “Liddle’ Bob Corker.”

Critics say Trump’s tirades against a growing list of top Republicans, including Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), are alienating the key members of his party needed to advance tax reform and the rest of the president’s legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.

But White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended the president on Tuesday, pointing the finger at Congress.

“I don’t think he’s alienating anyone,” Sanders told reporters. “I think Congress has alienated themselves by not actually getting the job done that the people of this country elected them to do.”

The failure of Republicans to advance their agenda amid infighting and Trump’s own unorthodox leadership style has left each side blaming the other.

Some of the president’s top allies, including former chief strategist and current Breitbart News editor Stephen K. Bannon, have said Corker should resign for failing to deliver for the president.

Corker announced last month that he would not seek reelection next year. Bannon had already been cultivating primary challengers to Corker and other Republicans viewed as insufficiently supportive of Trump.

Asked if Corker should leave office sooner, Sanders declined to weigh in, saying that is “not for us to decide.”

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Indiana vague about reasons for withholding Pence’s emails

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

Indiana officials are refusing to release an indeterminate number of emails from private AOL.com accounts Mike Pence used as governor, and they’re not saying whether the vice president’s lawyers influenced which messages should be withheld.

Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb’s office has released more than 1,300 pages of his predecessor’s emails, although most of the documents — released in multiple batches over recent months — contain little substance. They largely consist of correspondence from staffers sharing press releases or news articles, laudatory notes from Pence’s fans and documents so heavily redacted they’re barely readable.

“It’s hard to justify withholding information after a governor leaves office,” said Nate Jones, of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which advocates for government transparency. “It makes it look like they aren’t subscribing to good open-government practices.”

A Pence spokeswoman declined to comment on Monday.

The Associated Press has sought emails from Pence’s private AOL accounts, which he regularly used for state business, since shortly after he was tapped to be Donald Trump’s running mate in July 2016.

The emails released to date reveal little about some of the divisive topics that defined Pence’s term as governor, including a religious-objections law he signed in 2015 that critics decried as discriminatory against gays. Amid the national backlash, Pence held a news conference to push back, hired a crisis management firm and ultimately signed a “fix” into law.

But 293 pages of recently released emails about the controversy predominantly consist of news story summaries and links. A few show Pence staffers providing an opinion article to the Wall Street Journal. And one exchange alerts him that the publication of a critical story was postponed. Left out, however, was any meaningful discussion about one of the most difficult situations he faced as governor.

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Q&A: If Trump refuses to recertify the Iran nuclear deal, what happens?

Any day now, President Trump is expected to take steps that have the potential to unravel one of the most important nuclear antiproliferation deals of the century.

Trump has indicated he will declare that the agreement the Obama administration and five other world powers reached with Iran in 2015 to suspend its nuclear program is not sufficiently strong to benefit “U.S. national security interests.” Iran should no longer be seen as in compliance with the accord, Trump is expected to say.

His judgment is shared by a number of conservative organizations and members of Congress. Many others, including several of his top Cabinet officials, most European diplomats and the United Nations, disagree with him and say the deal is working.

What effect would refusal to certify have?

Refusing to certify is not the same as withdrawing completely from the deal.

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Sen. Bob Corker is saying what other Republicans will only whisper about President Trump

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
(Erik Schelzig / Associated Press)

At the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Sen. Bob Corker reacted like most other Republicans to the daily White House outbursts and tweets. He largely withheld criticism and called for patience as the new administration settled in.

Corker, though, stood out by sometimes letting slip what he was privately thinking — through an eye roll or head shake, though usually softened by his easy Tennessee banter.

But since announcing that he would not stand for reelection, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has unleashed some of his most unvarnished, inner thoughts about Trump, borrowing from the president’s own preference for direct, public confrontation over diplomacy.

Their war of words spilled into full view over the weekend when Trump tweeted that Corker “didn’t have the guts” to run for reelection and claimed Corker had “begged” for his endorsement, only to be rejected.

The senator, who has been friendly with Trump and was once considered to be Trump’s secretary of State, refuted those claims and deadpanned that “it’s a shame the White House had become an adult day-care center. Someone obviously missed their shift.”

In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Corker warned more ominously that Trump’s foreign policy impulses may be setting the country “on the path to World War III” and that “every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.”

The remarks provided a stunning glimpse of what other Republicans dare only privately whisper about Trump, despite growing discomfort over the actions at the White House.

“The biggest casualty of Donald Trump’s presidency is political courage,” said Rick Wilson, a Florida Republican consultant who has spoken out repeatedly against Trump.

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Prospects of a deal for ‘Dreamers’ may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

Lawmakers who favor a deal to protect approximately 700,000 young immigrants facing possible deportation because of the end of the Obama administration’s DACA program are seeking to drive a wedge between President Trump and hard-liners on his staff, launching appeals directly to a president who they see as potentially sympathetic to people brought illegally to the U.S. as children.

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Trump touts economic development bill ‘which nobody knows about’

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

President Trump said he has an economic development bill, “which nobody knows about,” that would provide incentives to keep companies in the U.S. and “severely” penalize them if they move offshore.

“It’s both a carrot and a stick,” Trump said in an interview with Forbes that appeared online Tuesday.

“It is an incentive to stay. But it is perhaps even more so — if you leave, it’s going to be very tough for you to think that you’re going to be able to sell your product back into our country,” he said.

Trump told Forbes that “you are hearing about it for the first time.”

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Analysis: Dianne Feinstein confronts a race for a sixth U.S. Senate term — and her party’s shift to the left

Sen. Dianne Feinstein speaks recently in San Francisco.
(Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decision to seek a sixth term in theory leaves her open to a fierce challenge from someone closer to the ascendant and most vocal voters in a party that has moved sharply to the left and begun a generational shift.

Feinstein has long straddled two camps in California, demonstrating enough liberal tendencies to attract a majority of Democrats and enough moderate ones to be acceptable to those in the middle of the political spectrum. Early in her career, for example, she gained credit among moderate voters by drawing boos from a crowd of liberal party activists when she said she favored the death penalty in some cases.

In recent years, that sort of straddle has become an increasingly difficult posture to maintain.

The leftward move by Democrats has been matched by a Republican shift to the right, leaving fewer voters to occupy the moderate middle on which Feinstein has depended. This year, she has come under loud public criticism from liberal activists for refusing to endorse a single-payer healthcare plan and other goals.

Most recently, she was blistered by her party’s left for uttering what appeared to them to be a heresy, telling a San Francisco audience that she still had hope President Trump could be a “good president” and counseling patience rather than agitating for impeachment.

For all that, she remains at this point the favorite to win, for reasons central to her record and to the state’s complicated politics.

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After alleged ‘moron’ comment, Trump suggests he’s smarter than Rex Tillerson

(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)

President Trump suggested he’s smarter than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, saying in an interview published Tuesday that if Tillerson did call him a moron, as reported, the two should “compare IQ tests.”

“And I can tell you who is going to win,” Trump said to Forbes magazine.

Trump’s tense relationship with Tillerson burst into public view last week. An NBC News story claimed Vice President Mike Pence had to talk Tillerson out of resigning this past summer, and that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron.”

Tillerson said he never considered resigning, though he didn’t directly address the reported insult. His spokeswoman later said he never used such language.

Trump and Tillerson are scheduled to have lunch Tuesday at the White House with Defense Secretary James N. Mattis.

Trump has at times appeared to undercut Tillerson’s message on some of the United States’ most sensitive national security challenges, including Iran and North Korea. Tillerson also has publicly complained about the White House blocking him from making key appointments.

Still, Trump told reporters last week that he has “total confidence” in his secretary of state.

In the Forbes interview, done Friday, Trump responded to criticism that he’s undermined his secretary of State through his often provocative tweets that have interfered directly with ongoing diplomatic efforts.

“I’m not undermining,” Trump told Forbes. “I think I’m actually strengthening authority.”

As for Tillerson’s reported “moron” ’comment, the president said, “I think it’s fake news. But if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

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Trump says U.S. should change tax law to punish NFL

President Trump is suggesting the U.S. change its tax laws to punish organizations such as the NFL if members are “disrespecting” the national anthem or flag.

The NFL gave up its federal tax-exempt status a few years ago and now files tax returns as a taxable entity. So it’s unlikely that Trump’s proposal, tweeted in the early hours Tuesday, would change anything.

Trump tweeted : “Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!”

Trump also tweeted Tuesday that ESPN ratings have “tanked” because of Jemele Hill, the anchor suspended for making political statements on social media.

While NFL viewership is down slightly, ESPN remains among the most popular cable networks, averaging 3 million viewers in prime time. The network has suffered subscriber losses over the last few years as some viewers have moved to streaming services from cable television.

Hill, an African American co-host of the 6 p.m. broadcast of “SportsCenter,” received backlash last month after calling Trump a “white supremacist” in a series of tweets that referenced the president’s comments about a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

That comment prompted Trump to demand an apology from ESPN and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to call for Hill’s firing.

While ESPN took no formal action against Hill over the Trump comment, she did apologize to the network for the trouble her remarks had caused while standing by the tweets. ESPN cited that apology in announcing Hill’s suspension Monday , saying in a statement that ESPN employees had been “reminded of how individual tweets may reflect negatively on ESPN and that such actions would have consequences.”

Hill targeted Jerry Jones on Twitter on Sunday after the Dallas Cowboys owner stated that players who disrespect the flag would not play for his team. She suggested fans who disagree with Jones should boycott the team’s advertisers and not buy the team’s merchandise.

She clarified Monday that she wasn’t calling for an NFL boycott.

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Michigan helped make Donald Trump president. Is it ready to elect the nation’s first Muslim governor?

The Democratic candidate for Michigan governor stood before liberal activists, alone on stage, delivering a message of hope and inspiration.

His beloved state, he said, the state where he was born, where he summered on Crystal Lake, where he spoke for his graduating class at the University of Michigan and helped rebuild Detroit’s ravaged healthcare system, is suffering.

He may seem an unlikely savior, he said, at a mere age 32.

“A lot of my friends tell me ... you’re relatively young,” he told the 50 or so filling the pews at a church in downtown Kalamazoo. “What they sometimes don’t say is you’re also relatively brown and relatively Muslim.”

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During stop in suburban Sacramento, Pence says Trump’s tax plan will pass this year

Vice President Mike Pence, center, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), right, talk with small-business owners about President Trump's tax plan.
Vice President Mike Pence, center, and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), right, talk with small-business owners about President Trump’s tax plan.
(Liam Dillon / Los Angeles Times)

Vice President Mike Pence toured an industrial machine shop in a Sacramento suburb Monday evening to pitch President Trump’s tax reform plan.

“President Donald Trump is committed to work with the Congress and pass the largest cut in American history,” Pence told a gathering at Stroppini Enterprises in Rancho Cordova. “And we’re going to do it this year.”

The vice president toured the machine shop with House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) and held a roundtable discussion with small-business owners to talk about the president’s tax plans.

The president’s proposal could dramatically affect California taxpayers. Proposed elimination of the federal deduction of state and local taxes could cost Californians more than $100 billion, according to nonpartisan estimates. Potential changes to the mortgage interest deduction also could hit state homeowners disproportionately.

At the same time, lower tax rates on corporations and the wealthiest residents would benefit the state’s major companies and highest earners. Top Democratic elected officials in California, including U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, state Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) and State Controller Betty T. Yee, have criticized Trump’s plan, saying it will hurt the state.

Pence also noted during the event that he had spoken with Gov. Jerry Brown about the wildfires that tore through eight Northern California counties on Monday, and pledged the federal government’s full support.

“I can assure you, as I did the governor, the federal government stands ready to provide any and all assistance to the state of California as your courageous firefighters and first responders confront this widening challenge,” Pence said.

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Nobel Prize winner in economics may have ‘nudged’ you to make better choices

A University of Chicago professor whose research integrating psychology into economics has had broad influence on public policy has been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Monday.

Richard H. Thaler, 72, is one of the leading scholars in the field of behavioral economics, which draws on psychological insights to understand the often irrational financial and economic choices made by individuals and institutions.

“He’s made economics more human,” the Nobel committee said in announcing the prize, the last of the Nobel awards this year.

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As the immigration debate ramps up, here are the leading bills already pending in Congress

Gloria Mendoza, 26, gathered with protesters at Trump Tower in New York on Sept. 5.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

When President Trump withdrew deportation protection for people who illegally came to the United States as children, he tasked Congress with crafting an immigration plan to overhaul the system.

A blueprint deal he reached with Democrats emphasized protecting the so-called Dreamers while beefing up border security to prevent others from entering the country illegally. Over the weekend, the White House unveiled much tougher terms, including funding for a border wall and new limits on legal immigration.

Because of the deep divides over immigration, passage of reform will be difficult.

But because the issue has been kicking around Congress for years, there are already several bills that could provide a foundation or pieces for an immigration package.

Here’s a look at some.

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Trump on Puerto Rico’s response to hurricane aid: ‘So little appreciation’

(Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)

In strikingly personal terms, President Trump complained in a tweet on Sunday evening that he had done so much to help Puerto Rico recover from Hurricane Maria yet received “so little appreciation.”

Rarely has the president taken such personal credit for the federal relief effort -- typically he has boasted of his administration, or referred specifically to the agencies at work in Puerto Rico, such as the Federal Emergency Managment Agency.

The administration has been widely criticized for a slow and then inadequate response since the U.S. territory was devastated on Sept. 20 by a Category 4 storm that left 95% of the island’s residents without electricity and nearly half without running water.

Many of Puerto Rico’s 3.4 million people, who are American citizens, have scrambled for necessities like food, medicine and gasoline, prompting some local officials and residents to regularly lament their plight to reporters covering the devastation.

Trump visited Puerto Rico last week and called the recovery efforts led by his administration an “amazing job.” Critics, however, have said that the effort, particularly in the earliest days after the hurricane struck, compared unfavorably to the government’s response to hurricanes in Texas and Florida.

Earlier Sunday, FEMA director William “Brock” Long, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he had “filtered out” assertions by the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, who said again Sunday that not enough help was arriving. Long said such complaints amounted to “political noise.”

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White House offers hard-line immigration policies as trade for legalizing ‘Dreamers’

(Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images)

The Trump administration revealed a set of sweeping immigration demands Sunday night — including the building of a wall on the southern border and major changes to the legal immigration system — as tradeoffs for legislation to protect the so-called Dreamers.

The White House proposals would curb the ability of family members to join their relatives from abroad, upending decades of immigration policy, and put strict new limits on asylum claims.

Democrats quickly denounced the proposals, saying they did not come close to what President Trump and congressional Democratic leaders had discussed last month when they struck a tentative deal for legislation to protect the Dreamers, young people who arrived in the U.S. illegally when they were children.

“This list goes so far beyond what is reasonable. This proposal fails to represent any attempt at compromise,” Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York said in a statement.

In addition to the restrictions on legal immigration and asylum claims, the White House list also included increased money for border security and mandatory use of the government’s E-Verify system for employers to ensure that workers they hire are legal residents.

If Trump insists on each of the proposals, the move would probably kill the deal to pass legislation that would grant legal status to Dreamers. Trump announced last month that he would end the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provided a temporary legal status for them.

“These requirements are truly essential to ensuring border security and national security,” said Ronald D. Vitiello, acting deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

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Vice President Mike Pence leaves NFL game after anthem protests

Vice President Mike Pence, front center, stands during the playing of the national anthem at the Indianapolis Colts and the San Francisco 49ers football game on Sunday.
(Michael Conroy / Associated Press)

Vice President Mike Pence has left the 49ers-Colts game after about a dozen San Francisco players took a knee.

The former Indiana governor flew in so he could watch Peyton Manning’s jersey retirement ceremony on Sunday. Manning will become the first Indianapolis-era player in Colts history to have his number retired and will also be inducted into the team’s Ring of Honor.

But Pence didn’t stick around long.

Pence said on Twitter :

The White House also issued a statement from Pence, in which he says Americans should rally around the flag. Pence said: “I don’t think it’s too much to ask NFL players to respect the Flag and our National Anthem.”

President Trump tweeted that he had asked Pence to leave if any players kneeled.

Pence is a noted sports fan. The game was the second major event he attended in his home state since taking office in January. He also attended May’s Indianapolis 500, a family tradition.

But Pence couldn’t come to Manning’s statue unveiling Saturday afternoon, which was attended by a number of luminaries including NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.

Pence spent most of Saturday honoring victims of the Las Vegas shooting before returning to his home state.

UPDATES

11:42 a.m.: This post has been updated with Trump’s tweet.

This post originally published at 10:52 a.m.

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Top GOP senator calls the White House an ‘adult day care center’ after Trump lashes out in tweets

President Trump launched a Twitter broadside on Sunday morning against a respected senior Republican senator, who fired back by saying that the White House had become an “adult day care center.”

The stunning exchange-by-tweet captured the disruption that Trump has brought to the Republican Party he now heads, and put his agenda further at risk in a Senate where Republicans have just a two-vote margin of control.

Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee last week had praised several of Trump’s senior advisers for their sober-minded style and declared that they were helping to stave off “chaos,” making clear in follow-up comments that the chaos was the work of the president.

Sunday’s tweets suggested the president was still smarting over that implied criticism of him days earlier.

Corker, who is not seeking re-election, responded with a stunning observation about the White House given its resident’s penchant for Twitter outbursts outside of normal business hours. In so doing, Corker said publicly what many Republicans in Congress have largely limited to their private conversations.

Even for a president who rarely allows any slight to go unanswered, Trump’s outburst was an extraordinary show of hostility aimed at a well-respected senator. Corker is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The president has previously tangled with other Republican senators, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

This war of words began when Corker, without mentioning Trump by name, offered a thinly veiled critique last week of Trump’s leadership style.

“I think Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Mattis and chief of staff Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos,” Corker said Wednesday, referring to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis and White House chief of staff John F. Kelly. He was responding to reports of high tensions between Trump and Tillerson.

Those comments were not the first time Corker has expressed distinct reservations about Trump. In August, after the president’s initial refusal to specifically condemn white-supremacist and neo-Nazi groups who rallied in Charlottesville, Va., the Tennessee senator said Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful.”

White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders had previously said Corker’s “chaos” comment was off the mark.

“I think that the president is the one that’s keeping the world from chaos,” she said Friday from the White House’s press room podium.

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Mayor of Puerto Rico’s capital who was previously singled out by Trump comes under new criticism from FEMA head

(AFP/Getty Images)

The Trump administration is brushing off fresh criticism from the mayor of San Juan over the federal government’s recovery effort in hurricane-battered Puerto Rico.

William “Brock” Long, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, on Sunday dismissed the latest pleas for urgent assistance from the mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, as “political noise.”

“We filtered out the mayor a long time ago,” Long said on ABC’s “This Week” when asked about a pair of early morning tweets from Cruz, in which she said she had unsuccessfully sought help from FEMA after the power failed at a major hospital.

Referring to FEMA, the mayor added sarcastically, “Oh sorry they are collecting data.”

Last week President Trump in a tweet suggested Cruz is a “politically motivated ingrate.” She had made a number of pointed public criticisms of the pace and scope of the federal relief effort after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, wrecking the electricity grid and leaving many of its 3.4 million people desperate for food, water and gasoline.

Trump visited the U.S. territory on Tuesday and hailed the “amazing job” being done by federal officials in rushing in supplies and working to restore electricity and power. The president raised eyebrows when he alluded again to the cost of the recovery effort -- an observation he has not made about the ongoing expense of helping Texas and Louisiana after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma -- and told officials that they should be proud that the death toll had been low compared to that in the “real catastrophe” of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005.

The president repeated his self-congratulatory assessments about his administration’s work in Puerto Rico again on Saturday night, in a television interview with the conservative former governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, on the Christian cable network TBN.

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On anniversary of ‘Access Hollywood’ tape’s release, Trump criticizes Harvey Weinstein

(Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

President Trump took a swipe at Harvey Weinstein on Saturday evening, saying he was “not at all surprised” by revelations that the Hollywood movie mogul has repeatedly paid to settle charges of sexual harassment.

The timing of Trump’s remarks to White House reporters, in an exchange as he left for a Republican fundraiser in North Carolina, was notable: They came on the anniversary of the preelection release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape from 2005, in which he bragged in vulgar terms about assaulting women by grabbing them by the genitals.

Trump shrugged off a question about the timing of his Weinstein remarks: “That’s locker room talk,” he said, according to a press pool report, echoing the defense he made at the time to multiple women’s allegations that he had harassed them sexually.

On Friday, a group that says it was formed to fight sexism played the “Access Hollywood” tape repeatedly for 12 hours on the National Mall in Washington.

Trump has a political motive to hit Weinstein, who has been a major Democratic fundraiser and was a supporter of his opponent last year, Hillary Clinton.

Trump told reporters he had known Weinstein a long time and “I’m not at all surprised to see it.” The Weinstein Co. announced Friday that Weinstein, one of Hollywood’s most visible and powerful producers, will take an indefinite leave of absence.

The New York Times reported that he had sexually harassed many employees and actresses over many years. On Friday, the Huffington Post reported that Weinstein had made unwanted sexual advances to a TV reporter, cornering her in a restaurant and masturbating in front of her.

Three board members resigned on Friday along with his legal advisor, Lisa Bloom. Democrats have come under pressure to refund donations, and a number have said they will donate the sums to charity.

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Trump again tweets cryptic threats about North Korea

President Trump on Saturday sent new tweets hinting at military action against North Korea, keeping alive tensions with the isolated nation and distancing himself further from his top aides who favor diplomacy.

“Only one thing will work” in dealing with nuclear-armed North Korea, the president wrote -- without further clarification.

“Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid,” he said. It was not clear what money he was talking about.

That approach, he wrote in a follow-up tweet, “hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!”

Later Saturday, in remarks to White House reporters as he left for a Republican fundraiser in North Carolina, Trump declined to clarify his mysterious comment earlier in the week, at a White House dinner with top military officials, that their gathering was “maybe the calm before the storm.” That was widely interpreted as perhaps a reference to North Korea. Trump told reporters there was “nothing to clarify.”

Saturday’s tweets, posted soon after Trump had spent an afternoon at his Virginia golf club near Washington, made for a second consecutive weekend in which he has taken to Twitter with belligerent messages that contradict his top military and diplomatic advisors, who have advocated a more cautious approach.

Last weekend, Trump directed a message to his secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, saying that he was “wasting his time” by trying to talk to the government of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to find a peaceful solution to what has become something of a potential nuclear standoff.

The president’s postings a week ago, just a day after Tillerson, in China, had said the United States had established direct contacts with North Korea to “probe” its willingness to negotiate, were widely seen as a humiliation of Tillerson, and not the first. Tillerson subsequently appeared before television cameras at the State Department to deny that he has threatened to resign.

The dispute between Trump and Tillerson over North Korea, among other issues, has severely strained relations within the Cabinet.

In the remarks to reporters as he left for North Carolina, Trump said he and Tillerson have “a very good relationship.” He acknowledged that they have some disagreements and that “sometimes I’d like him to be a little bit tougher.”

The president also addressed the status of his chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, who has also been the subject of speculation that he is unhappy in his job.

To the contrary, Trump said, Kelly “will be here, in my opinion, for the entire remaining seven years” -- a comment that also assumed Trump is reelected to a second term.

“John Kelly is one of the best people I’ve ever worked with,” Trump said, adding, “He’s doing an incredible job.”

This post was updated to add Trump’s comments to reporters on Saturday evening.

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Trump once again says he’s open to a healthcare deal with Democrats. Schumer: Not so fast

President Trump and Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., after reaching a fiscal deal in the Oval Office in September.
(Alex Wong/Getty Images)

With Republican having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, at least for now, President Trump on Saturday confirmed he’d once again opened the door to a deal with Democrats. They remain wary, at best.

“I called Chuck Schumer yesterday to see if the Dems want to do a great HealthCare Bill,” Trump tweeted on Saturday morning, speaking of the Senate Democratic leader and fellow New Yorker. “ObamaCare is badly broken, big premiums. Who knows!”

The president’s message, just before he headed for his Virginia golf club, reflected his continued frustration with his own party’s failures to keep its seven-year-old vow to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic achievement. He has flirted with the idea of a deal with Democrats before, only to return to Republicans’ position that the law has to be scrapped.

Just before leaving for a Republican fundraiser in Greensboro, N.C., on Saturday evening, Trump said he would be willing to cut a short-term deal with Democrats to save Obamacare from total collapse.

“It’s really up to them,” he added. “It’s exploding, like I said it would.”

Repealing the law is a non-starter with Democrats, who say the law needs improvements but is working, even as the administration is taking actions that amount to “sabotage.”

Schumer underscored that point in his response, making it clear that he and Trump weren’t about to embrace on a healthcare plan.

“The president wanted to make another run at repeal and replace and I told the president that’s off the table,” Schumer wrote via Twitter. “If he wants to work together to improve the existing health care system, we Democrats are open to his suggestions.”

Schumer said “a good place to start” was the bipartisan effort led by two senators, Republican Lamar Alexander from Tennessee and Democrat Patty Murray of Washington, who are the chairman and senior Democrat, respectively, of the Senate’s health committee. Schumer said a deal “would stabilize the system and lower costs.”

The Alexander-Murray talks were shelved last month while Senate Republican leaders pursued their latest effort to end the Affordable Care Act. But they couldn’t attract a majority behind a bill, and legislation was never brought to a vote. Republican leaders say they will keep trying, though many Republicans say the effort is doomed and they want to focus on tax cuts.

This post was updated at 4:20 p.m. PT to add Trump’s comments to reporters as he left for North Carolina.

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Three men arrested in suspected plot to bomb New York City subway and Times Square

A Canadian citizen inspired by Islamic State to create “the next 9/11” and two other men plotted to attack Times Square and the New York City subway system with bombs and a shooting rampage during the Muslim holiday of Ramadan last year, according to federal charges unsealed Friday.

Abdulrahman El-Bahnasawy, 19, of Mississauga, Canada, bought bomb-making materials and studied maps of the subway system, but the planned attacks were thwarted by an undercover FBI agent who was posing online as an Islamic State sympathizer, the charges said.

El-Bahnasawy was arrested in May 2016 and has already pleaded guilty.

Also charged were Talha Haroon, 19, a U.S. citizen living in Pakistan, and Russell Salic, 37, of the Philippines, who allegedly wired $423 to help finance the plot. Both have been arrested and are awaiting extradition to the U.S., authorities said.

According to the charges, El-Bahnasawy and Haroon declared their support for Islamic State and were inspired by deadly terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels.

“We seriously need a car bomb at times square …. look at those crowds of people!” El-Bahnasawy said in one message to the undercover agent, according to court papers. He also expressed a desire to “shoot up concerts cause they kill a lot of people.”

“We just walk in with guns in our hands. That’s how the Paris guys did it,” he wrote, according to the charges.

He bought bomb-making materials in Canada, including about 40 pounds of hydrogen peroxide, which can be used to make a powerful explosive, along with batteries, Christmas lights and thermometers.

Haroon said that Times Square was “a perfect place to hit them.” He added, “I wanna kill … them in thousands,” the charges state.

But Haroon never made it to the United States, and El-Bahnasawy was arrested as soon as he arrived in New Jersey from Canada.

Salic, who told the undercover agent that he longed to go to Syria and join Islamic State there, actually wired the money into a government account.

There is no sign that the terrorist group participated in the planning. But the charges said Haroon and El-Bahnasawy claimed approval from an Islamic State cell in Pakistan.

The three are charged with multiple terrorism offenses, including conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and support of a terrorist organization.

El-Bahnasawy has pleaded guilty to seven charges and will be sentenced on Dec. 12.

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Citing improvements, U.S. will lift some sanctions on Sudan

The Trump administration said Friday it was lifting several key economic sanctions on Sudan because the African nation had shown improvement in fighting terrorism and rejecting ties with North Korea.

Some of the sanctions being removed were two decades old.

The decision also reflected better human rights conditions in the war-torn Darfur region of western Sudan and more access for humanitarian aid, a senior administration official said.

Other sanctions, including some also related to the Darfur conflict, will remain in place. But the decision effectively ends a 20-year U.S. economic embargo against Sudan.

It will improve that country’s diplomatic ties with Washington and allow the unfreezing of Sudanese assets.

The Trump administration also recently removed Sudan from its controversial travel ban.

“We see this as an important milestone,” said the U.S. official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in keeping with State Department procedures.

But the official said Sudan still needs to make up ground to completely rejoin the world community. U.S. officials will closely monitor whether Sudan continues to prevent terrorists from transiting its territory, eases deliveries of humanitarian aid and cooperates in regional security efforts.

As a separate part of the deal, the Sudanese government pledged not to pursue the importation of any weapons from North Korea, the official said.

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Trump hosts Hispanic Heritage event as his administration begins phasing out DACA protections for young immigrants

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

On the same day his administration stopped accepting applications from so-called Dreamers for protection from deportation, President Trump on Friday welcomed Latino American leaders to the White House to honor their cultural heritage in observance of Hispanic Heritage Month.

In rambling remarks, Trump said the United States remains “a beacon” to people of other nations and lauded young attendees for the contributions they would make to the nation -- notes at odds with his restrictive immigration talk and policies, including the phase-out of the Deferred Action for Childhoood Arrivals program.

Trump did not mention his decision, which took effect at midnight, to shut down DACA. Since 2012, the Obama-era program has given temporary legal status, for two years at a time, to some 800,000 people brought to the country illegally as children.

Nearly 90% of DACA beneficiaries are Latino.

Nor did Trump take the opportunity to renew his call for Congress to act to make those protections permanent by writing them into law. As of Friday, the government stopped taking applications for new or renewed two-year work permits and deportation deferrals under DACA. Existing permits begin expiring on March 6, 2018.

At one point, Trump pointed to members of a youth orchestra from Miami and said, “There is no task too large and no dream beyond your reach.”

Trump also congratulated his administration, as he has many times, for “doing a great job” responding to Hurricane Maria’s devastation in Puerto Rico. “We love Puerto Rico,” he said, three times mimicking a Spanish accent to repeat the name of the U.S. territory.

Trump said the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, called him on Thursday to thank the United States for sending rescue teams to help after a deadly earthquake that rocked Mexico City last month.

Their relationship has been tense since the 2016 campaign, given Trump’s adversarial rhetoric against immigration from Mexico and his demands that Mexico pay for a border wall. But Trump had kind words for Peña Nieto on Friday, telling the White House gathering, “You have a wonderful president in Mexico, I can tell you that.”

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President Trump hosts a Hispanic Heritage Month event

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Republicans and NRA, in a shift of position, say they’ll consider limiting firearm ‘bump stocks’

The Las Vegas massacre has breached Republicans’ solid opposition to additional gun restrictions, prompting party leaders as well as the National Rifle Assn. to say they will consider placing limits on so-called bump stocks, devices that can turn assault rifles into virtual machine guns.

The White House signaled a willingness Thursday to consider a ban, and the NRA, which has powerful sway among Republicans, said it could back a limit on bump stocks — but as a federal regulation, not a law.

“The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations,” the group said.

The NRA’s blessing probably will increase the number of Republicans willing to back restrictions.

The statement marked a rare concession by the powerful gun-rights organization. At the same time, however, the call for regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives could provide a way to deflect pressure for congressional action — and tough votes — that might lead to broader gun restrictions.

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Justice Department issues policy memo declaring religious freedom is ‘paramount’ in U.S.

President Trump signs an order on religious freedom in May.
(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

A sweeping new statement by the Justice Department calls religious freedom a “fundamental right of paramount importance,” placing the Trump administration squarely on the side of religious conservatives in America’s culture wars.

The statement by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, with a long legal analysis by the department’s lawyers, is intended to be guidance to the rest of the federal government on how to decide conflicts involving declarations of religious belief – for example, the recent case involving a baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. The Justice Department already has intervened in that case on the side of the baker.

The statement released Friday makes clear that, in Sessions’ view, the benefit of the doubt should go to the person declaring a religious belief over those claiming illegal discrimination.

“Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with federal law,” the statement reads.

Justice Department officials say the analysis was produced to follow up on President Trump’s executive order on religious freedom in May, and they say it sets no new policies and isn’t directly related to any pending legal dispute.

But the impact of the new stance became clear Friday when the administration said it would allow more employers to cite religious objections to opt out of providing no-cost birth control to women ucovered by company healthcare plans.

It expanded a religious exemption that previously applied to houses of worship, religiously affiliated nonprofit groups and closely held private companies.

“Our freedom as citizens has always been inextricably linked with our religious freedom as a people,” Sessions said. “It has protected both the freedom to worship and the freedom not to believe.”

In his May order, Trump instructed the IRS to avoid prosecuting churches for engaging in politics -- a law that was rarely enforced.

The new order was drafted after consultation with a broad spectrum of religious and civil rights groups, the Justice Department said.

Many of the current conflicts in the religious sphere concern civil rights for lesbians, gays and transgender people -- for instance, whether religious organizations can refuse to employ people because of their sexual identification. Federal law says that is permitted, the memo says.

Sessions, a deeply conservative former senator from Alabama, has already rolled back other gay-friendly policies.

Earlier this week he issued a memo that reverses an Obama-era policy that found that transgender people are entitled to protection against discrimination in the workplace. Sessions said the civil rights law does not mention questions of gender identity, so the legal protections don’t apply.

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Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl expected to plead guilty to desertion and misbehavior

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by the Taliban for half a decade after abandoning his Afghanistan post, is expected to plead guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, two individuals with knowledge of the case said.

Bergdahl’s decision to plead guilty rather than face trial marks another twist in an eight-year drama that caused the nation to wrestle with difficult questions of loyalty, negotiating with hostage takers and America’s commitment not to leave its troops behind. President Trump has called Bergdahl a “no-good traitor” who “should have been executed.”

The decision by the 31-year-old Idaho native leaves open whether he will return to captivity for years — this time in a U.S. prison — or receive a lesser sentence that reflects the time the Taliban held him under brutal conditions. He says he had been caged, kept in darkness, beaten and chained to a bed.

Bergdahl could face up to five years on the desertion charge and a life sentence for misbehavior.

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The Trump administration has started dismantling DACA

(Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / Getty Images)

The Trump administration began unraveling the Obama-era program shielding people brought to the United States illegally as children from deportation, though a split Congress has made no progress on writing similar protections into law as President Trump asked.

The phaseout of the five-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program began at midnight Thursday. The administration no longer is accepting or processing new or renewal applications for so-called DACA protections, even if they were mailed before the deadline.

Now, with five months to go before hundreds of people daily begin losing their legal status, Congress is struggling to respond to Trump’s request for a legislative solution over an issue that traditionally has divided lawmakers along partisan lines.

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U.S. loses 33,000 jobs in September after hurricanes slam Texas, Florida

Homes are submerged by the flooded Brazos River in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey near Freeport, Texas.
Homes are submerged by the flooded Brazos River in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey near Freeport, Texas.
(Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma walloped the labor market last month, causing the nation to lose jobs for the first time in seven years, the Labor Department said Friday.

Total nonfarm employment declined by 33,000 net jobs in September compared with an upwardly revised gain of 169,000 the previous month. The Labor Department said 1.5 million workers — the most in 20 years — were not at their jobs during the survey week last month because of bad weather.

Restaurants and bars took the biggest hit. Total employment in September declined by 105,000 “as many workers were off payrolls due to the recent hurricanes,” the Labor Department said.

The sector had averaged job growth of 24,000 over the previous 12 months.

Analysts had expected the major hurricanes that devastated large parts of Texas and Florida would significantly reduce job growth in September, but the decline was much bigger than expected.

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Trump, surrounded by military at White House dinner: ‘Maybe it’s the calm before the storm’

President Trump, surrounded by military leaders and their spouses at a White House dinner Thursday night, made some cryptic but seemingly ominous remarks suggesting some “storm” ahead.

“Maybe it’s the calm before the storm,” Trump told a few reporters who were ushered into the room to photograph the assemblage. Trump grinned mischievously and waved his hand in a semicircle as the military leaders flanked him.

The comments could mean anything -- or nothing, given Trump’s penchant for off-the-cuff comments and teases to the press. Rarely if ever do presidents joke about potential military action. And given tensions in so many global theaters -- for example, with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions, with Iran over its support for terrorist activities, and now the prospect of retaliation for the killing of three Green Berets this week in Niger -- Trump’s comments immediately provoked serious questions.

“What’s the storm?” a reporter asked. “On Iran? On ISIS? On what?”

“We have the world’s great military people,” Trump said, again offering what amounted to a tease. “Thank you all for coming.”

“What storm, Mr. President?” another reporter shouted.

“You’ll find out,” Trump shot back.

On Friday, Trump was asked again what he meant by the comment.

“Thank you,” he said with a wink. “You’ll find out.”

UPDATE:

10/6, 11:35 A.M.: Updated with Trump’s comment on Friday.

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Court battles resume over Trump travel order: Is it still about a ‘Muslim ban’?

The Supreme Court opened its term Monday.
The Supreme Court opened its term Monday.
(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

Looking ahead to new rounds of litigation over President Trump’s latest travel ban, his lawyers urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to wipe away appeals court rulings that struck down earlier versions this spring.

Federal appeals court judges on the West Coast and in Virginia cited Trump’s tweets and his campaign pledge to enact a “Muslim ban” in rulings that blocked the earlier versions of the travel order from taking effect.

Those opinions “remain legally consequential,” Justice Department lawyers said in a letter to the justices, but should not stand because they could shape future court battles.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and the state of Hawaii gave the opposite advice. They said a “live dispute” still remained over the constitutionality of Trump’s travel ban orders, and the lower court opinions remained relevant.

The latest travel ban “is an outgrowth of the president’s promised Muslim ban and imposes a set of restrictions designed to fulfill that promise,” said Washington attorney Neal K. Katyal, who represents Hawaii.

The skirmishing follows the Supreme Court’s decision to postpone arguments on Trump’s immigration power, which had been set for Oct. 10. The justices asked the lawyers for advice on what should happen next.

On Thursday, Trump’s lawyers said the current cases should be dismissed as moot. The ACLU and Hawaii insisted they were not moot because the essential dispute is still alive.

But a new round of litigation is already underway. A federal judge in Maryland has scheduled a hearing on the new travel order for Oct. 17.

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Treasury secretary used military planes without adequate justification, inspector general finds

In this Jan. 20, 2017, Stephen T. Mnuchin and then-fiancee Louise Linton arrive on Capitol Hill in Washington for the presidential inauguration.
(Saul Loeb / Pool Photo via AP, File)

Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin took military aircraft on at least seven occasions without adequate justification, the Treasury Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday.

The inspector general said that Mnuchin’s use of the planes was not illegal but that the White House failed to abide by a “rigorous” preapproval process intended to justify the need to use expensive military aircraft.

Mnuchin has been criticized for requesting a military aircraft for a trip to Kentucky during which he viewed the solar eclipse and a trip to Europe for his honeymoon in August. He withdrew the request for the honeymoon trip, according to the report from the counsel to the Treasury Inspector General, Rich Delmar.

In total, Mnuchin requested government aircraft for nine trips, one of which was withdrawn and one that is scheduled for later this month. The report found that each trip was classified as a White House support mission.

In order to get that classification, the president must have directed the official to take the trip and the department must show that either commercial airlines were not available or cost effective or that there was an emergency need or national security concern requiring military planes. Those guidelines are based on a 2011 memo from then-White House Chief of Staff William Daley.

Delmar found that for the majority of the trips Mnuchin requested, it was “not explicit” that President Trump had ordered the travel, and the department did not provide a detailed analysis of the trip. Most of the requests included a similar line saying the planes were needed “due to scheduling, logistics and secure communications needs.”

This “single boilerplate statement constituted the whole analysis and justification for designation and use of military aircraft,” Delmar wrote.

The inspector general’s review found “no violation of law in these requests and uses.”

“What is of concern is a disconnect between the standard of proof called for in the Daley memo and the actual amount of proof provided by Treasury and accepted by the White House in justifying these trip requests,” Delmar wrote.

The Office of Management and Budget said in a memo last Friday it was reviewing guidance for the use of government aircraft and suggested that officials should be using government air travel only in exceptional situations.

The report comes amid reports that three other administration officials have used private or military aircraft for trips, including Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who reportedly spent more than $400,000 on private domestic travel. Price resigned last Friday after Trump expressed anger at his use of private charter flights.

For the Record

9:30 a.m. Oct. 9: An earlier version of this story said Mnuchin did not meet rules regarding travel on military aircraft, according to an inspector general’s report. The report concluded that the White House had not met the “rigorous” preapproval process to justify the need to use expensive military flights.

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GOP Rep. Murphy resigning after reports of affair

Rep. Tim Murphy speaks on Capitol Hill on March 26, 2015.
(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

GOP Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania, caught up in tawdry revelations of an extramarital affair, is resigning from Congress.

That’s the word from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Murphy, an anti-abortion lawmaker, allegedly urged his mistress to get an abortion when he thought she was pregnant.

Ryan says Murphy has sent him a letter announcing his resignation, effective Oct. 21.

Ryan says the decision was Murphy’s, but he supports “Murphy’s decision to move on to the next chapter of his life.”

Murphy is serving his eighth term representing a district in southwestern Pennsylvania, including parts of suburban Pittsburgh. The district is a safe Republican seat, with Republican Donald Trump beating Democrat Hillary Clinton by a margin of 3 to 2 in last November’s presidential election.

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Trump moves closer to decertifying Iran nuclear deal

President Trump appears on track to decertify the Iran nuclear deal next week, a decision that will open an unpredictable debate in Congress and could lead to an unraveling of the landmark agreement.

Trump is planning to announce next week that the Iran deal is not in the U.S. national security interest, and that additional sanctions should be imposed on Tehran to prevent it from restarting its nuclear program at some point in the future, according to a person briefed by the White House who was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Aides are drafting a harsh speech that Trump is tentatively planning to deliver on Wednesday or Thursday in which he will explain his decision, according to people briefed on the president’s thinking.

Officials said Trump, who has certified the deal twice to Congress so far this year, still may change his mind.

Under a U.S. law, the White House must notify Congress every 90 days - the next deadline is Oct. 15 - whether Iran is in compliance with the accord, and whether the agreement remains in the U.S. national security interest.

The law was passed in 2015 when the Obama administration and five other major powers were completing a deal with Iran that required it to destroy or disable its nuclear infrastructure in exchange for easing of international sanctions. The United Nations Security Council has backed the accord.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency, has repeatedly determined that Tehran is meeting its obligations under the deal, and U.S. intelligence agencies have reached the same conclusion.

That leaves national security, a much vaguer standard, as the apparent basis for Trump’s decision on decertification.

National security advisors close to Trump joke that he should give the speech in front of the shuttered Iranian Embassy in Washington. Diplomatic relations were severed after Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy and seized scores of hostages in Tehran during the country’s revolution in 1979.

Trump has repeatedly criticized the Iran deal as one-sided and has threatened to scrap it. He ordered an inter-agency review of U.S. policy toward Iran soon after he took office.

He and other critics insist that Tehran’s support for militant groups in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, its ballistic missile program and other destabilizing actions should be restricted.

The 2015 pact focused only on blocking Iran’s ability to someday build a nuclear bomb, not its other activities.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday that the president “has ... made a decision” on whether to recertify the deal to Congress.

His main focus “has been a comprehensive strategy on how to deal with Iran.” she said.

“That is what he wanted his team to put in place, and I think you will see that announced in short order, and that will be a comprehensive strategy with a unified team behind him supporting that effort,” she said.

National security advisor H.R. McMaster convened a group of Democratic lawmakers at the White House on Wednesday in an effort to persuade them to support Trump’s decision.

But many Democrats, even some who originally opposed the Iran deal, are not convinced. They fear that throwing the accord to Congress is likely to lead to new nuclear-related sanctions that would effectively put the United States in violation of the accord, alienating allies and giving Iran a reason to withdraw and restart its nuclear program.

“People are getting nervous,” said a person briefed on the discussions. “It could open up a real Pandora’s box.”

European allies who helped broker the agreement have made it clear they would not support efforts to reimpose sanctions or renegotiate a disarmament deal that U.N. nuclear monitors say is working.

The debate has divided some of Trump’s top aides.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Wednesday that he and other top national security aides were planning to present multiple options to Trump and make a recommendation to him.

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis told Congress on Tuesday that the accord remains in the U.S. national security interest. Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also voiced support for the deal, saying it had made the nation safer.

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In defending Trump’s call for investigation of news outlets, White House cites lack of positive news coverage of Trump

(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders insisted Thursday that President Trump is an “incredible advocate” for the 1st Amendment.

Then she defended his threat to investigate news organizations with a complaint that Trump had not received enough positive news coverage.

“With the 1st Amendment, with those freedoms, also come responsibilities, and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate,” Sanders said during her regular briefing with White House reporters.

She cited a Pew Research Center study that she said asserted that the vast majority of early Trump coverage had been negative, before listing issues on which she believed the administration had achieved great success.

“You’ve only found 5% of your time to focus on some of those big issues,” Sanders said. “And, frankly, those are the issues most Americans care about, not a lot of the things that you cover, not a lot of the petty palace intrigue that you spend your time on.”

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Trump administration ‘open’ to debate on banning bump stocks

The Trump administration, which has positioned itself as a staunch defender of gun rights, signaled potential support for at least a partial gun control measure Thursday.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Trump welcomed a conversation on banning bump stocks, devices used in the mass shooting in Las Vegas and elsewhere to make semi-automatic weapons operate more like machine guns.

“We know that members of both parties and multiple organizations are planning to take a look at bump stocks and related devices,” Sanders said during Thursday’s regular press briefing. “We certainly welcome that. We’d like to be part of that conversation, and we would like to see a clear understanding of the facts.”

She added later, in a response to the National Rifle Assn.’s support for a possible ban on bump stocks, that “it’s something we’re very open to.”

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Republicans, in a shift after Las Vegas massacre, are open to considering a gun limit -- on ‘bump stocks’

The Las Vegas massacre has forced a breach in congressional Republicans’ solid opposition to gun restrictions, prompting many, from party leaders on down, to say they will consider banning “bump stocks” that turn assault rifles into virtual machine guns.

The National Rifle Assn., to which most Republicans are loyal and which had been silent since the gunman’s attack Sunday night, on Thursday in a statement said it could back such limits -- as a federal regulation, not law.

“The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.” its statement on Thursday said.

The NRA’s blessing will probably increase the number of Republicans willing to back restrictions, but if those limits come in the form of regulations from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), rather than in a law, Democrats are certain to object.

Just Wednesday, when California Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to ban bump stocks by law, only fellow Democrats joined with her.

By Thursday, however, top GOP leaders in the House and Senate, including Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, signaled their interest in working on legislation that that could limit access to the devices.

“Clearly that’s something we need to look into,” Ryan told MSNBC host Hugh Hewitt in an interview scheduled to air this weekend.

Senators on Thursday morning privately discussed ways they could tackle the issue as they met for routine business.

“I will tell you that the unique aspect of the bump stock and how you would literally transform a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic weapon is something that I think bears looking into,” Cornyn told Texas reporters on a conference call.

He has asked Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley of Iowa to convene a hearing “and look into it.”

Even Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus of conservative hard-liners, told reporters earlier in the week he’d be willing to consider banning bump stocks, if the Senate passes a bill and sends it to the House.

The shift is notable for Republicans who, under great pressure from the NRA and other gun rights groups, have resisted past efforts at gun control, even after some of the most devastating mass shootings in the United States.

Coming after the Las Vegas shooting, which left 58 dead and hundreds wounded in what authorities said is the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, the movement may indicate the potential limits of the gun lobby’s reach into politics and policy.

Polls show Americans overwhelmingly want measures that could curb gun violence and pressure has mounted as cultural figures, including late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel, have delivered heart-wrenching criticisms of congressional inaction.

Democrats, who have at times splintered on firearms issues as conservative-state lawmakers joined Republicans to defeat gun-safety bills, welcomed the changed outlook.

They have called on President Trump to cut across partisan lines and push Congress toward legislation to reduce gun violence that polls show most Americans would support.

“Will the president stand up?” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer of New York. “The president has a choice.”

Many Democrats, however, will not want to limit action to bump stocks.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said bump stock legislation was one approach, but no substitute for a background check bill that she said would have bipartisan support in the House if Ryan would allow a vote.

“It really is all up to the speaker,” she said. “Is he going to bring the bill to the floor?”

At the same time, lawmakers were skeptical that initial interest in limited bipartisan legislation would translate into enough actual votes to write the restriction into law.

“We need to move Republicans from being open to the idea to being willing to actually work on it,” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, a Democrat who has become a leader on firearms safety measures since the 2012 killings of 20 first-graders and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

One key Republican, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, who co-sponsored a bipartisan background check bill that was defeated a few years ago, was noncommittal Thursday. He said he was just learning about bump stocks and needed more information.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told reporters it was too soon, as the investigation in Las Vegas was just underway, to consider legislation.

Lawmakers, though, appeared concerned that the device offers a way to get around the existing ban on automatic weapons, which have been outlawed for years except for military use.

In the House, several military veterans, led by Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois, sent a letter to federal officials asking them to reconsider how they regulate the devices. During the Obama administration, the ATF authorized use of the stocks.

“This is definitely an area we’re going to look [at],” Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said on Fox News.

A number of lawmakers, including Ryan, an avid hunter, said they were unfamiliar with bump stocks before the Las Vegas shooting. The alleged gunman appears to have used the device for rapid shooting.

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Sessions vows to press for stronger prosecution of street crime

Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions says he will push federal prosecutors to put a more intense focus on prosecuting street criminals, saying the Justice Department needs to focus on rolling back a recent increase in the violent crime rate.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it would add 40 prosecutors to 20 U.S. attorney districts across the country, with instructions to team with local law enforcement to target guns, illegal drugs and the most violent offenders.

FBI statistics released last month show that violent crime rose for the second straight year, in a 4% increase from 2015. Murders increased nearly 9%, largely due to a surge in violence in Chicago; Memphis, Tenn.; San Antonio; Louisville, Ky.; and several other cities.

“We cannot be complacent or hope that this is just an anomaly,” Sessions said in a statement. “We have to take action.”

Justice said it would emphasize an existing program called Project Safe Neighborhoods, which Sessions called “the centerpiece of our crime reduction strategy,” that will use technology and stiffer federal enforcement to target the worst crime in the worst-hit cities.

The department will also try measures like prioritizing “urgent” requests for tracing guns by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. The system still uses paper records and typically takes up to a week to answer requests.

Justice has requested funding for 300 additional assistant U.S. attorneys in next year’s budget to help prosecute violent crime and immigration offenses.

In his first eight months as the nation’s top lawman, Sessions has made a number of changes in department regulations and guidelines in a push to crack down on violent crime, illegal narcotics and immigration violations.

He has spoken repeatedly about the dangers of the MS-13 gang, which has ties to Central America, and pressured cities to give up “sanctuary” policies that protect immigrants in the U.S. illegally, threatening to cancel federal law enforcement grants unless they start to cooperate with immigration authorities.

As part of the crackdown, Justice will distribute $70 million in grants to the most crime-plagued cities. One of those is Chicago, which has sued the department over its sanctuary city stance.

A Justice Department official said Thursday the department hasn’t decided if those grants will also be tied to immigration policies.

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It’s time for Pelosi and other long-timers to leave House Democrats’ leadership, California’s Sanchez says

(J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

It’s time for Rep. Nancy Pelosi and other longtime party leaders in Congress to make way for a new generation to lead House Democrats, Rep. Linda Sanchez, the vice chairwoman of their caucus, said Thursday.

“Our leadership does a tremendous job, but we do have this real breadth and depth of talent within our caucus and I do think it’s time to pass the torch to a new generation of leaders,” said Sanchez, of Whittier.

It was a bold declaration for a member of Democrats’ House leadership, especially for a member from Pelosi’s home state, and could signal that Sanchez is reflecting the views of other House Democrats.

There has been quiet grumbling for years about how long Pelosi, the minority leader from San Francisco, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland and assistant Democratic leader James E. Clyburn of South Carolina -- all in their late 70s -- have led the party in the House. But few members have been willing to publicly call for a change.

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Partisan gaps widen even further in Trump’s first year as Democrats move left

The partisan gap that already divided Americans into increasingly estranged camps has widened even further in President Trump’s first year in office, largely because Democrats have moved to the left on a wide range of issues, a new large-scale, nonpartisan poll has found.

On issues as varied as government aid to the poor, immigration and the role of diplomacy versus military force, Americans who identify themselves as Democrats or independents who generally side with the Democrats have shifted to more liberal positions in the last several years. That shift has become even more pronounced in the last year, according to the new survey by the Pew Research Center.

Across the board, “the divisions have never been this large” between partisans, Pew found. The gap between Democrats and Republicans now looms larger than the divide in opinions between blacks and whites, young and old, pious and secular or college educated and non-college educated Americans.

Attitudes toward immigrants provide an example: More than eight in 10 Democrats now say that immigrants strengthen the country “because of their hard work and talents.” A generation ago, only about a third of Democrats took that view.

Republicans have also shifted toward a more benign view of immigrants, but not as dramatically. Republicans are almost equally divided on whether immigrants strengthen the country or weaken it “because they take our jobs, housing and healthcare.”

As with Democrats, a generation ago, only about one third of Republicans said that immigrants strengthened. Overall, on an issue where the two partisan groups once were largely similar, they now show a huge gap.

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House GOP approves 2018 budget on party-line vote, setting stage for Trump’s tax cuts

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Republicans once railed against deficits. Now President Trump’s tax plan piles on more than $2 trillion in red ink

Not long ago, Paul D. Ryan stood before charts and graphs as the House Budget Committee chairman like a new Ross Perot, promoting an austerity plan that slashed taxes and spending, and warning of the dangers of deficits.

“The facts are very, very clear: The United States is heading toward a debt crisis,” he said then. “We face a crushing burden of debt which will take down our economy, which will lower our living standards.”

Now as House speaker, the Wisconsin Republican is undergoing a role reversal, championing President Trump’s tax cuts, which promise massive tax cuts for corporations and, to some extent, individuals — and which experts say will add some $2 trillion to the nation’s red ink over the next decade.

It’s a sizable shift for Ryan, and he’s hardly the only one. The Republican majority, which swept to power just a few years ago, in part by warning of then-President Obama’s run-up of debt, now plays down concern over deficits. Economic growth must take priority, many Republicans say, and will ultimately take care of worries about red ink.

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Democrats want Ivanka Trump’s security clearance revoked

(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

A pair of Democratic lawmakers are seizing on reports of Ivanka Trump’s use of private email for government business to demand that her security clearance be revoked by the White House.

“Recent press investigations highlight severe credibility issues with Ivanka Trump, a White House official, close advisor, and daughter to the President,” Rep. Ted Lieu, (D-Torrance) and Rep. Don Beyer, (D-Va.), wrote in a letter to White House counsel Don McGahn released Thursday.

They also cite reports that Ivanka Trump and her husband, fellow White House advisor Jared Kushner, were fined for missing deadlines to file financial disclosure forms.

Lieu and Beyer joined with other Democratic lawmakers in June to request that Kushner’s security clearance be revoked; they renewed that request in Thursday’s letter.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the administration does not discuss security clearances in public.

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Campaign contributions from Trump lawyer followed DA’s decision to drop investigation of Trump children

New York Dist. Atty. Cyrus Vance Jr. received $50,000 in campaign contributions from President Trump’s lawyer and the attorney’s associates and friends shortly after Vance’s office dropped a fraud investigation against Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump.

Trump’s two eldest children were under investigation by the district attorney’s office in 2012 for allegedly misleading investors in a hotel and condominium project in New York’s Soho neighborhood, according to an investigation published Wednesday by ProPublica, WNYC and the New Yorker.

After a two-year investigation, the DA instructed his underlings to drop the case. Months later, Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s personal lawyer, donated $32,000, while another $18,000 was raised from lawyers at his firm and through a fundraising breakfast he hosted, according to the report.

Vance, who is again up for reelection, last week returned the $32,000 to Kasowitz, according to a statement from campaign spokesman Steve Sigmund.

“Contributions have never influenced Cy Vance’s work and [they] never will. Every contribution is vetted through a rigorous process, accepted when appropriate, and returned when flagged,” said the spokesman. Separately, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said that the criminal inquiry was dropped after the investors of the property in question settled their civil litigation against the Trumps.

“This was a two-year investigation that never produced sufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution,’’ said the spokeswoman, Joan Vollero.

Kasowitz could not immediately be reached for comment. The $1,500-an-hour New York lawyer has represented Donald Trump for at least 15 years, handling cases involving bankruptcy, divorce and sexual harassment.

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Trump administration ordered to enforce methane restrictions

A flare is seen at a well site in Wyoming's Upper Green River Basin.
( (Mead Gruver / Associated Press))

The Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge Wednesday to immediately enforce new restrictions on the release of potent methane emissions at oil and gas drilling operations on public land.

The ruling came at the behest of California and other states, which charged the administration is required by law to enforce the new rules intended to cut the release of 175,000 tons of the potent greenhouse gas annually, as well as reduce the emission of associated toxic pollutants.

The Interior Department had been delaying enforcement as it mapped out a strategy to rescind the new rules, which industry has complained are onerous. An earlier push by opponents of new methane restrictions to kill them in Congress fell short of the needed votes amid a backlash from landowners affected by pollution from drilling and environmentalists.

The ruling was the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the Trump administration, as the courts find flaws in its plans for dismantling executive branch actions taken to confront climate change before President Trump took office.

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Congressman who reportedly urged mistress to have abortion won’t seek reelection

Rep. Tim Murphy in 2015.
(Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)

Rep. Tim Murphy has announced he will not seek reelection after reports surfaced indicating the publicly pro-life politician had urged his mistress to have an abortion during what turned out to be a pregnancy scare.

In a statement, the Pennsylvania Republican said he would retire from Congress and “take personal time to seek help as my family and I continue to work through our personal difficulties,” the Associated Press reported. Murphy is serving his eighth term.

On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Shannon Edwards, with whom Murphy was having an affair, told him, “you have zero issue posting you pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options.”

On the same day the text messages were reported, Murphy voted yes on a bill that would ban abortion after 20 weeks. The messages came to light after Edwards’ husband filed for divorce.

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House leaders mum after pro-life GOP congressman reportedly urged mistress to have abortion

Republican leaders on Wednesday continued to maintain silent on the case of a Republican congressman who reportedly told his mistress to have an abortion during a pregnancy scare.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported Tuesday that a series of documents and text messages related to Rep. Tim Murphy’s (R-Penn.) extramarital affair with a woman named Shannon Edwards disclosed the abortion request.

In one message, Edwards chided him for hypocrisy related to his anti-abortion voting record.

“And you have zero issue posting your pro-life stance all over the place when you had no issue asking me to abort our unborn child just last week when we thought that was one of the options,” she wrote.

“I get what you say about my March for life messages. I’ve never written them. Staff does them. I read them and winced. I told staff don’t write any more. I will,” was the response from Murphy’s cellphone number, the Post-Gazette reported.

The relationship between Murphy and Edwards first came to light as a result of a divorce case filed by Edwards’ husband.

Murphy voted Tuesday for a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks. He’s a member of the House Pro-Life Caucus and has been endorsed by LifePAC, which opposes abortion.

House leaders have not commented on Murphy’s situation, although the Post-Gazette reported that local Republican officials have talked about finding an alternative candidate for the 2018 election.

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Trump’s pick as EPA air pollution chief won’t pledge to maintain California’s authority

When California defied Washington a decade ago by launching aggressive action on climate change, one official at the Environmental Protection Agency emerged as a nemesis for state leaders time and again.

William Wehrum’s efforts to keep California from going its own way so enraged power brokers in the state that they ultimately used their clout in the Senate to block his confirmation for the job as director of the EPA’s air and radiation division, one of the most influential environmental posts in government.

Now, Wehrum is back. He has been chosen by President Trump to run the same office the Senate refused to give him during the Bush administration. And in the current GOP-controlled Congress, California lacks the power to block him.

State leaders are anxious about Wehrum’s appointment at a time the EPA has threatened to revoke California’s authority to impose vehicle mileage standards that are tougher than those imposed by the federal government. Those standards, which California is empowered to enforce through a waiver granted by Congress, are a key pillar of the state’s climate action. The law enables other states to adopt the California standards, and more than a dozen have.

Wehrum in 2006 worked aggressively to block California from using the waiver — against the advice of career staff at the EPA, who found the agency had no basis for doing so. Wehrum also led broader efforts at the EPA to deny greenhouse gas emissions are a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled they are.

At Wehrum’s confirmation hearing Wednesday, California Sen. Kamala Harris sought an assurance from him that he will not revive his efforts to block California from using its waiver. She did not get it.

“Will you commit, if confirmed, to follow the science and law ... and recognize California’s authority to issue its own new vehicle standards?” Harris said, after rebuking Wehrum for disregarding the findings of career staff the last time he was faced with that decision.

“My commitment to you,” Wehrum responded, “would be to understand that provision as much as possible and to implement it as faithfully as possible.”

The exchange made climate advocates bristle. Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, described Wehrum as a nominee who “overrode the unanimous recommendation of his staff and ordered them to reverse their judgment and substitute his own political judgment that California’s right to set standards and protect California citizens should be run off the road.”

Becker is skeptical Wehrum’s thinking has changed since that time, during which he has been representing industry in environmental litigation.

“Sen. Harris asked him to commit to protecting California’s right to protect its citizens,” Becker said. “He dodged completely.”

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As Trump administration begins phasing out ‘Dreamers’ program, Congress split over replacement legislation

(Peter Foley / EPA-EFE)

At midnight Thursday night, the Trump administration officially begins to unravel the Obama-era program shielding from deportation people brought to the United States illegally as children, accepting no new applications after that time.

The phase-out of the 5-year-old Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program designed by the Obama administration comes as Congress struggles to write legislation that would put alternative protections into law, as President Trump requested.

When Trump announced last month that he was ending the program, he said it was up to Congress to act to shield the roughly 800,000 immigrants who have qualified for two-year permits to remain in the U.S. without threat of deportation and work legally, get an education or serve in the military.

Work permits issued under the program begin to expire on March 5, and starting on Friday cannot be renewed. All protections under the program will be stripped away on a rolling basis over the next 2 1/2 years, as two-year deferrals expire.

Democratic lawmakers including Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois have urged the Department of Homeland Security to extend Thursday’s deadline, especially for people living in disaster zones in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico.

Up to now, people who qualify have been able to apply if they pay a $495 fee and submit to a federal background check. For two-year renewals, they must take the same steps again. The program has paid for itself using the fees revenue.

In a statement on Monday, Durbin urged people to act before the deadline, after which no new renewals or applications will be accepted.

“The deportation clock is ticking on hundreds of thousands of young people who know no other country,” he said. “We will continue to press DHS to extend this deadline. But in the meantime, I strongly urge any Dreamers who are eligible to renew to do so by this Thursday.”

In July, Durbin and a Republican ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, introduced the Dream Act. It would allow some people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as minors to apply for lawful permanent residence and eventually U.S. citizenship.

But Trump has signaled in recent weeks that he will only sign a more narrow bill that would allow people who qualified for DACA to receive protections, and not expand to a broader pool of immigrants.

That would exclude, for example, close relatives of those who have benefited from the existing program. DACA beneficiaries would not be allowed to sponsor relatives for migration to the United States.

White House officials have also said that any law to replace DACA should also come with more money for immigration enforcement. That could sap Democrats’ support for a bill.

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Rex Tillerson: ‘I’ve never considered leaving this post.’

In a statement this morning, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reaffirmed his commitment to President Trump’s agenda, addressing what he called “erroneous rumors” in news reports this morning.

An NBC report said Vice President Mike Pence had to convince Tillerson to stay on in his role in the administration.

Tillerson said Pence never had to convince him because “I’ve never considered leaving this post.”

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Watch live: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson speaks to the media

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Republicans consider keeping the state and local tax deduction as they search for votes for overhaul

Gary Cohn, director of the White House National Economic Council
(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

Congressional Republicans are considering keeping the state and local tax deduction in some form as part of the party’s tax overhaul to avoid losing votes of lawmakers from California and other states that have large numbers of residents who use the break.

The tax plan unveiled by President Trump and key Republicans last week proposed to scrap the deduction. That would help offset the plan’s business and individual tax cuts by generating about $1.3 trillion in additional federal revenue over the next decade.

Rep. John Faso (R-N.Y.) said Tuesday that lawmakers from states like his own that would be hit hard by the loss off the deduction are raising concerns with House Republican leaders.

“They’re cognizant of our concern, and there’s a lot more discussion that needs to take place,” Faso said. “There are a lot of ways to address this. We want the leadership and the tax writers to consider alternatives that will treat everyone fairly.”

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House passes bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks

Antiabortion advocates rally outside the Supreme Court during the March for Life on Jan. 27, 2017.
(Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

The House on Tuesday passed a bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of gestation, a top priority of the antiabortion movement, but the measure is widely expected to die in the Senate.

What Republicans call the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act would prohibit anyone from performing an abortion if the fetus is 20 weeks or more past fertilization, based on controversial claims that it can feel pain at that age. The validity of this claim has been disputed by medical authorities and abortion providers.

The bill passed by a vote of 237 to 189, with all but two Republicans supporting the bill and just three Democrats voting for it.

Among the bill’s Republican supporters was Rep. Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania. On Tuesday the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that he had urged a mistress to have an abortion when she told him that she thought she was pregnant; she was not, it turned out.

The measure will now go to the Senate, where it would need at least eight Democrats’ votes to pass -- an unlikely scenario. The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), has introduced similar legislation several times; one such bill passed the House in 2015 but failed in the Senate.

This time, however, the bill has presidential support. President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget said in a statement on Monday that the administration supports the House for “continuing its efforts to secure critical pro-life protections,” and that advisors would encourage the president to sign the bill into law.

“In spite of all of the political noise, protecting these little, helpless, pain-capable unborn children and their mothers is not a Republican issue and it is not a Democrat issue,” Franks said at a hearing before the House vote. “It is a basic test of our basic humanity and who we are as a human family.”

Critics of the bill say that it could pose serious risks to women’s rights and health. Amy Friedrich-Karnik, senior federal policy advisor at the Center for Reproductive Rights, called the bill a “direct attack on women’s autonomy.”

“Every woman faces her own unique circumstances in a pregnancy, her own unique challenges and potential complications,” she said. The bill, she added, “inserts politicians into those decisions and into the doctor’s room.”

Although only a few abortions occur after a fetus has reached 20 weeks, abortion rights advocates say those cases usually arise from a woman’s health risks, financial concerns or a lack of resources for the pregnancy.

The bill would prevent abortions 20 weeks after fertilization unless the pregnancy has put the woman’s life in danger or it was a result of rape or incest. In a pregnancy resulting from a rape, a woman would be allowed to have an abortion if she has received counseling or medical treatment and has waited 48 hours.

Under the bill, women who receive an abortion would not be sanctioned, but the person who performed the procedure would be subject to a fine and up to five years in prison.

Currently, abortions are legal nationwide until a fetus is viable outside the womb, but states can enact laws to limit the procedure.

The combination of support from some conservative states and the Trump administration, along with some relaxation in the Democratic Party of the criticism of the party’s few antiabortion lawmakers, could give the bill momentum in the Senate, said Mallory Quigley, communications director for the antiabortion organization Susan B. Anthony List.

Quigley and other supports of the act often refer to it as “Micah’s law,” for a young boy said to have been born 20 weeks after fertilization who is now starting kindergarten. This bill could “bring about a life-affirming culture because we protect these lives under the law,” Quigley said.

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Kremlin looking to new U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman to reshape relations

New U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman, left, meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin in Moscow on Tuesday.
(Pavel Golovkin / Associated Press)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that he hopes the new U.S. ambassador, Jon Huntsman, will cooperate with the Kremlin to improve relations between Washington and Moscow, but emphasized that cooperation should be based on “principles of equality, respect for national interests, and non-interference in internal affairs.”

Putin told the new ambassador that bilateral relations with the United States “at their current level cannot be viewed as satisfactory.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov blamed the deteriorating relationship on “the damage caused by Washington’s actions.”

Putin “has stressed more than once that, unfortunately, it is impossible to put such intentions into practice acting on one’s own, without a partner,” Peskov said in a conference call with reporters. “There have been certain problems with reciprocity so far.”

Huntsman presented his credentials to Putin in a formal ceremony at the Kremlin.

The former Utah governor arrived in Russia at a time when U.S.-Russia relations are at their lowest point since the Cold War.

U.S. investigations into accusations that the Kremlin tried to influence the 2016 presidential elections in favor of President Trump have increased tensions between the two countries. The Kremlin denies the accusations, calling the investigation part of a growing “Russophobia” initiated by the Obama administration.

But the deterioration in relations has clouded efforts by Russia and the U.S. to find compromises and solutions to global issues such as North Korea, Ukraine and Syria.

In the past several months, Washington and Moscow have engaged in a diplomatic row that has resulted in a tit-for-tat series of demands that each side reduce in-country diplomatic staff and facilities. In January, before leaving office, President Obama expelled 35 Russian intelligence officers and seized two Russian diplomatic compounds. The Kremlin retaliated in July by demanding that the U.S. reduce its diplomatic mission in Russia by more than 750 and seized an embassy warehouse and weekend cottage compound. The following month, the U.S. ordered the closure of the Russian consulate in San Francisco.

Huntsman’s appointment as ambassador to Russia was confirmed by Congress last week. He previously was an ambassador in Singapore and China. He replaces John Tefft, a career diplomat who served in Moscow for three years.

During Tuesday’s ceremony, Huntsman pledged to help mend relations.

“I look forward to working to rebuild trust between our two countries and to strengthening the bilateral relationship based on cooperation on common interests,” he said in a statement released by the U.S. Embassy.

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Pentagon chief says keeping Iran nuclear deal is in U.S. security interest

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis said today that maintaining the Iran nuclear deal is in the U.S. national security interest, staking out a position before President Trump decides whether to continue to certify Iran’s compliance.

The White House faces a Oct. 15 deadline to recertifiy to Congress whether Iran is complying with the landmark 2015 accord, which blocked Iran’s nuclear development program in exchange for easing international sanctions.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, has repeatedly determined that Iran has met its obligations under the accord.

Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that he supports upholding the agreement as long as the U.S. government can ensure that Iran is abiding by its obligations.

“The point I would make is that if we can confirm that Iran is living by the agreement, if we can determine that this is in our best interest, then clearly we should stay with it,” he said. “I believe at this point in time, absent indications to the contrary, it is something that the president should consider staying with.”

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) asked Mattis specifically whether he believed it was in the U.S. national security interest to remain with the deal.

“Yes, senator, I do,” Mattis replied.

Trump has recertified the deal twice since taking office in January, but has indicated that he might not this time. If the White House does not certify the deal, it opens the door for Congress to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions that were lifted once the deal was signed by the six world powers who negotiated it.

Trump has repeatedly criticized the Iran deal, making it a major part of his 2016 presidential campaign. Last month, he called the agreement “an embarrassment to the United States” during his debut speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

His main criticism is that the nuclear deal does not address Tehran’s continued development of ballistic missiles, or its support for Hezbollah and other groups deemed “terrorist organizations” by the U.S. government and foreign allies.

The 2015 accord sought only to block Iran from building a nuclear weapon. The U.S. maintains separate economic sanctions on Iran for its ballistic missile program and its support for terrorist groups.

By most accounts, Iran has lived up to its end of the bargain.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at the U.N. last month that Iran remains in “technical compliance” with the deal. A week later, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said Tehran is in compliance.

“The briefings I have received indicate that Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations,” Dunford told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 26, using an acronym for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Dunford also warned that pulling out of the agreement, without hard evidence of Iran violating its commitments, would undercut the U.S. ability to negotiate other diplomatic deals – namely with nuclear-armed North Korea.

“It makes sense to me that our holding up agreements that we have signed, unless there’s a material breach, would have an impact on others’ willingness to sign agreements,” Dunford said.

Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, made the same argument at his Senate confirmation hearings in January.

“When America gives her word, we have to live up to it and work with our allies,” he said then.

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Trump says Puerto Rico should be proud for avoiding a ‘real catastrophe like Katrina’

Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico — and that’s fine; we’ve saved a lot of lives. Every death is a horror, but if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died and you look at what happened here with really a storm that was just totally overbearing ... you can be very proud of all of your people, all of our people working together. 

— President Trump

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State Department to expel 15 Cuban diplomats over health attacks on U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana

The Trump administration has ordered the expulsion of 15 Cuban diplomats from Washington over the next week in response to unexplained “attacks” that have sickened 22 American officials posted in Havana.

The expulsions are the latest development in a mysterious series of incidents that have affected U.S. diplomats in Cuba, including hearing loss and minor brain damage.

Neither U.S. nor Cuban officials have been able to explain the cause of the illnesses, and the FBI and Cuban law enforcement agencies are cooperating in an investigation.

“The decision was made due to Cuba’s failure to take appropriate steps to protect our diplomats in accordance with its obligations under the Vienna Convention,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement. “This order will ensure equity in our respective diplomatic operations.”

Tillerson and other State Department officials insisted the action did not reduce diplomatic relations between the two countries, which were only restored in 2015.

Expelling Cuban diplomats does not reflect an assignment of blame, a senior State Department official told reporters ahead of the announcement.

But, the official said, Cuba must be held accountable for protecting American diplomats.

The U.S. “needs full assurances from the Cuban government that these attacks will not continue,” the official said.

The expulsions bring the level of Cuban diplomatic staff in Washington closer to the number of personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, the official said.

Last week, the Trump administration ordered more than half of the U.S. Embassy staff and family members to depart Cuba because of the mysterious ailments. The staff already was reduced because of hurricane warnings, and officials did not say how many people subsequently left the country.

Tillerson said last week that 21 Americans were suffering symptoms, but the official who briefed reporters Tuesday said another American who fell ill in January was reexamined and added to the group.

Washington and Havana reestablished full diplomatic ties just two years ago after half a century of hostilities. Speculation on the cause of the attacks has focused on a rogue operation by Cuban operatives or the work of a third nation.

President Raul Castro has reportedly expressed alarm at the series of incidents, and Cuba’s foreign minister told Tillerson in a meeting last last week that his country was not involved in the attacks and was trying to find the culprits.

The State Department official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity, said the 15 Cuban diplomats had seven days to leave. The State Department presented Cuban authorities with a list of names Tuesday.

Cuba “must take more action” in response to the attacks, the official said, without specifying what actions he had in mind.

“Until the government of Cuba can ensure the safety of our diplomats in Cuba, our embassy will be reduced to emergency personnel to minimize the number of diplomats at risk of exposure to harm,” Tillerson said.

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Why does Puerto Rico seem like an island nation, even when it’s not?

(Hector Retamal / AFP/Getty Images)

In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic sweep across Puerto Rico, some on the U.S. mainland were trying to sort out just how American this territory really is.

This past weekend, President Trump insulted many Puerto Ricans by bashing “ingrates” who don’t fully appreciate U.S. rescue and recovery operations, saying on Twitter that they just “want everything to be done for them.”

The logistics, he said, were far more daunting than in Texas and Florida, where, his critics say, the federal response was faster after storms devastated those states in recent weeks.

Trump plans to visit Puerto Rico on Tuesday — nearly two weeks after Maria hammered the island — to survey the damage.

How did Puerto Rico become part of the United States?

The United States acquired Puerto Rico under the treaty that settled the Spanish-American War in 1898. Its main island, which is about 3,500 square miles, is situated between the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands. Two of Puerto Rico’s more than 140 much smaller islands, Vieques and Culebra, are also populated.

When did Puerto Ricans become citizens of the United States?

Under a 1917 federal law, Puerto Ricans are American citizens by birth. They are free to travel within the United States at will. More than 95,000 Puerto Ricans are veterans of the U.S. military, and more than 1,225 have died in combat for the United States, according to the Defense Department.

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President Trump will visit Puerto Rico today amid criticism over handling of hurricane crisis

(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

Nearly two weeks after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico — and amid bitter controversy over the pace of the federal relief effort — President Trump is paying a politically fraught visit Tuesday to the hard-hit U.S. territory.

The one-day trip coincides with a national outpouring of mourning and grief over a gunman’s rampage in Las Vegas that killed at least 59 people and wounded hundreds more — and with sharp debate over whether the White House was slow to respond to the widespread destruction in Puerto Rico, whose 3.4 million residents are U.S. citizens.

Trump and First Lady Melania Trump departed the White House early Tuesday morning for a short helicopter trip to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and the subsequent Air Force One flight to Puerto Rico. They are scheduled to meet with officials involved in the relief effort, first responders and hurricane-affected islanders.

Puerto Rico is struggling to recover from the devastating Category 4 hurricane that raked the island on Sept. 20, knocking out the power grid, snatching away cellphone service, isolating dozens of rural communities and leaving hundreds of thousands scrambling for food, water, medicine, cash and gasoline.

On the eve of his visit, Trump defended federal efforts as robust.

“It’s been amazing what’s been done in a very short period of time on Puerto Rico,” the president declared Monday in the Oval Office. As he left Tuesday morning, he said Puerto Rico was in a “much tougher situation” than hurricane-hit Texas and Florida, but said the administration’s performance was being widely lauded.

Over the weekend, Trump had stirred debate by railing against San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz’s “poor leadership” and implying that Puerto Ricans were not doing enough to help themselves. He indirectly slammed the mayor in a tweet decrying “politically motivated ingrates” who criticized the scope and scale of the initial relief effort.

It was not immediately clear whether the presidential visit to the island would include an encounter with Cruz, who has made no direct response to Trump’s attacks. White House Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the mayor had been invited to Tuesday’s events, and Cruz said Monday she would willingly meet with the president or anyone who could help.

Federally directed aid to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands has dramatically picked up in recent days. But critics point to initial slowness in waiving the Jones Act, which restricts foreign-flagged shipping in U.S. waters, coupled with a delay in appointing an on-the-ground military commander to coordinate relief and a lag in dispatching a Navy hospital vessel, the Comfort.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency says more than 12,000 federal workers and officials are now in Puerto Rico, including military troops. The administration has cited signs of recovery including the reopening of businesses, notably more than half the gas stations, and restoration of running water for about half the island’s residents.

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Analysis: Trump offers the expected rhetoric of gun massacres, but little is expected to change

President Trump speaks from the White House on Monday.
(Mandel Ngan / AFP/Getty Images)

In the immediate aftermath of a crushing national disaster, Americans want a consoler in chief, a president who tries to bind obvious wounds and unify a shattered public.

Then they want results, and usually get them: the strengthening of building regulations after a destructive hurricane; the engineering of safer airplanes after a calamitous crash.

America got its consoler in chief Monday morning when President Trump spoke somberly to the nation from the White House. They are not likely to get results beyond that.

Mass shootings like Sunday night’s tragedy in Las Vegas have become outliers: horrific events that lead to almost no change.

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Facebook turns over more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads to Congress

Facebook has handed over to congressional committees more than 3,000 ads purchased during the 2016 election campaign by a firm with ties to Russian intelligence, a lawmaker said Monday.

The ads have emerged as key evidence that the Kremlin sought to secretly influence the presidential election since Facebook disclosed they had appeared on its site in 2015 and 2016.

The social media ads “help demonstrate how Russia employed sophisticated measures to push disinformation and propaganda to millions of Americans online during the election, in order to sow discord and chaos, and divide us from one another,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) said in a statement.

Schiff said he hopes to make at least some of the ads public, perhaps later this month, when Facebook, Twitter and Google are expected to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, one of four panels examining Russian interference in the U.S. election.

Facebook has refused to make the ads public, citing privacy concerns.

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is separately investigating if the Trump campaign aided the Russian government. Trump has vehemently denied any such collusion.

But the use of social media was part of a broad effort by the Kremlin to help then-Republican nominee Donald Trump and harm Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, U.S. intelligence agencies said in a January report.

In most cases, the social media ads did not refer to particular candidates. They focused instead on divisive themes such as race, gay rights, gun control and immigration, according to a person familiar with them.

Facebook disclosed the existence of the ads last month. It said they were purchased through 470 fake accounts traced back to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian entity known for posting pro-Kremlin propaganda online.

U.S. intelligence agencies said in January that the Internet Research Agency was likely financed by “a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.”

Schiff said congressional investigators would examine whether the ads were aimed at particular communities or voters, using Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

“We will be particularly interested in understanding their full reach, in particular to determine what groups and individuals were most heavily targeted and why,” he said.

“The American people deserve to see the ways that the Russian intelligence services manipulated and took advantage of online platforms to stoke and amplify social and political tensions,” he added.

Twitter said last week that it had found around 200 accounts linked to Russian interference in the 2016 election.

(Matt Rourke / Associated Press)
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Ryan Zinke under investigation for taxpayer-funded flights

(Richard Drew / Associated Press)

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s taxpayer-funded flights on private planes have attracted the attention of federal investigators, who are now investigating whether they were a legitimate government expense.

The department’s Office of Inspector General launched an investigation following news reports late last week that revealed a $12,375 flight Zinke chartered from Las Vegas to an airport near his home in Montana, where he spent the night.

The inspector general’s investigation began Friday, the same day Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign amid a public outcry over his use of private planes at taxpayer expense.

“We are looking into the secretary’s travel,” the spokeswoman for the inspector general, Nancy DiPaolo, said of the Zinke investigation. “It will likely include modes of transportation, costs and schedules.”

Investigators were driven to launch their probe by news reports detailing Zinke’s travel and complaints they have received. The probe was first reported by Politico.

The four-hour flight to Montana earlier in the summer enabled Zinke to attend a dinner where he spoke to the Vegas Golden Knights, a new National Hockey League team that is owned by one of Zinke’s most generous political donors. Had he flown on earlier coach flights, airline schedules suggest he would have been able to make it to a routine department event he attended in Nevada and the Montana meeting of the Western Governors Assn. the next day -- but would have missed the dinner with his donor’s team.

Zinke was unapologetic about his travel when he confronted the reports head-on during a speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation on Friday. He called the suggestion that he misused taxpayer resources “a little B.S.”

At the speech, he also revealed two more instances of private plane travel billed to taxpayers. He said in all cases, the charters were needed to make it to his public events. One trip was a bipartisan expedition to the Arctic Circle, and another involved travel between islands of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Zinke said he has also flown on military aircraft to meet wildfire crews, as well as on trips with the president and vice president.

Democrats who demanded the investigation say Zinke has left a lot of questions unanswered. In a letter to the inspector general Monday, the senior Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Donald McEachin (D-Va.), who sits on the committee’s oversight panel, wrote that billing the plane flights to taxpayers may have been a violation of department rules.

“Each of the trips…involved events that may not be taxpayer reimbursable,” they wrote, pointing to various political events Zinke attended during his trips. “Claims that the Secretary’s full schedule required the use of chartered aircraft deserve scrutiny.”

The Democrats urged investigators to look not just at the chartered planes, but all of Zinke’s taxpayer-funded travel, which, according to the letter, includes multiple trips near his homes in Montana and Santa Barbara. They also asked investigators to look at any taxpayer-funded travel by Zinke’s wife to or from Montana, where she is chairing a GOP Senate campaign.

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Former Equifax CEO apologizes for massive data breach, details missteps in company’s response

The former chief executive of Equifax plans to apologize for the credit reporting company’s massive data breach when he testifies Tuesday before a congressional committee, as well as detail the missteps in response to the hack that exposed the Social Security numbers and birthdates of as many as 143 million people.

“Equifax was entrusted with Americans’ private data and we let them down,” Richard Smith said in written testimony for the hearing that the House Energy and Commerce Committee released Monday. “To each and every person affected by this breach, I am deeply sorry that this occurred.”

Smith stepped down last week in the wake of the breach, which has sparked numerous federal and state investigations as well as outrage from lawmakers. His appearance Tuesday before the House panel will be the first of three before congressional committees this week.

In his written testimony, Smith blamed the breach on “human error and technology failures” and said the company was a victim of “a massive theft.”

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Trump tax plan not meant as boon to wealthy, administration officials insist

Senior aides and political allies of President Trump fanned out Sunday on news talk shows to defend Republicans’ tax-overhaul plan against critics and analyses, forcefully denying that the richest Americans would be its principal beneficiaries.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said the primary objective of the proposed tax framework that Trump and Republican congressional leaders outlined last week is to “lower taxes for middle-class taxpayers.”

Appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Ryan was asked whether tax cuts would apply to everyone in the middle class.

“Well, I don’t know every single person’s little, small problem or issue,” Ryan said, adding that factors such as whether a person is married or has children have an impact on tax status and liability.

Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin also denied that the plan’s provisions would disproportionately benefit the most affluent, whose top income tax rate would drop to 35% under the proposal, and perhaps 25% in some cases, from nearly 40%.

“Our objective is not to create tax cuts for the wealthy,” Mnuchin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

His claim is contradicted by a number of nonpartisan studies, based on the scant details Republicans have released, concluding that the wealthy inevitably would benefit from lower rates and that some middle-class households would pay more.

The Treasury secretary also repeated the administration’s contention that sharply cutting the corporate tax from 35% to 20% would represent a boon for the overall economy.

“This is really a jobs act — this is about creating jobs,” he said. Many economists have questioned the link between such cuts and job creation.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said opponents’ assertions that the plan was meant to benefit wealthy families like Trump’s own were unfair.

“When you hear the president say he really doesn’t care what happens to the top 1%, that’s real for him,” Mulvaney said. “This is really about the middle class and the corporate tax rate for the president.”

The administration’s bid to move ahead with a tax plan has also served to highlight longstanding criticism of Trump for refusing to release his own taxes, defying a decades-old presidential norm.

Mnuchin, on ABC, was asked how the public could judge whether to accept Trump’s assertion that he would not personally benefit from his own proposals without the returns being released.

“That’s just not fair,” he replied.

Some in the president’s party are already saying they won’t accept a tax plan that adds to the deficit. One of those is Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who said last month he would not seek reelection next year.

Interviewed on “Meet the Press,” Corker called the deficit the “greatest threat to the nation.”

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Trump says Tillerson is ‘wasting his time’ trying to negotiate with North Korea

President Trump said on Sunday he told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson not to waste his time trying to negotiate with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un — an extraordinary public undercutting of the top American diplomat.

The president’s stunning contradiction of Tillerson, amid high tensions with North Korea over its nuclear and ballistics programs, came in the form of tweets sent from his New Jersey golf resort just a day after Tillerson, in China, said the United States has direct contacts in North Korea and is “probing” for negotiations.

Trump’s derisive nickname for the North Korean leader — “Little Rocket Man” — has previously drawn an angry response from the government in Pyongyang. And the president’s implied threat — “We’ll do what has to be done!” — is the latest in a series of saber-rattling remarks that have raised anxieties among not only U.S. allies in Asia, but the American public as well.

Veteran diplomats and foreign policy experts have been shocked by Trump’s seeming glee at baiting Kim, a thin-skinned, isolated leader. The president’s latest tweet brought new expressions of alarm.

Former State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said on Twitter that “undercutting your Secretary of State publicly is a cardinal sin of diplomacy.”

“Unpresidential,” he added.

Tillerson had told reporters in Beijing on Saturday, without giving details, that the Trump administration was in “direct contact” with North Korea over the heightened tempo of nuclear and ballistics tests.

“We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout,” Tillerson said. “We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang. We can talk to them, we do talk to them.”

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Trump assails ‘politically motivated ingrates’ as San Juan mayor renews pleas for more help

President Trump on Sunday morning assailed “politically motivated ingrates” for criticizing the speed and scope of the federal recovery effort in the wake of Hurricane Maria, while praising first responders, the military, Puerto Rico’s governor and federal workers.

His remarks were in a series of posts on Twitter, just as on Saturday morning when Trump first unleashed attacks on his critics in Puerto Rico from his New Jersey golf resort. While less acidic than those a day earlier that drew a strong backlash, the tweets signaled that Trump is comfortable keeping the furor alive -- two days before he is to visit the island on Tuesday.

Maria, a Category 4 storm, devastated Puerto Rico, whose 3.4 million residents are U.S. citizens. It struck on Sept. 20, hard on the heels of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, which raked Texas and Florida respectively. Puerto Rico, too, was picking up after Irma’s damage even as Maria slammed it.

In the first of two dozen tweets on Saturday, Trump attacked the “poor leadership” of the mayor of ravaged San Juan, who had criticized him in pleading for more aid, suggested that Puerto Ricans officials were “not able to get their workers to help” and said islanders “want everything to be done for them.”

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, appearing Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” for a second day declined to respond directly to Trump’s personal criticism of her, saying: “There’s only one goal, and that’s saving lives.”

Cruz also said she appreciated the efforts of responders, including those from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but felt they had not been given sufficient means to help those in the most dire need. For example, she said, people were being told to register online for aid, but very few have access to the internet.

“I recognize the good heart that the FEMA people have, and they want to help,” she said. “They just don’t have the resources.”

On Sunday news-talk shows, Trump’s aides sought to portray the president as the aggrieved party in his Twitter onslaught against Cruz. “When the president gets attacked, he attacks back, and I think the mayor’s comments were unfair given what the federal government has done,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The president’s weekend tweets have galvanized critics, including prominent artists like “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and an array of lawmakers, mainly Democrats. Some of the most fiery commentary came from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who contested the Democratic presidential nomination last year.

“You know, speaking from his fancy golf club, playing golf with his billionaire friends, attacking the mayor of San Juan, who is struggling to bring electricity to the island, food to the island, water to the island, gas to the island, that is just -- it is unspeakable,” Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding: “I don’t know what world Trump is living in.”

Trump’s defenders have cited enormous logistical obstacles and the heavy strain placed on responders by the two previous hurricanes. William “Brock” Long, the FEMA administrator, pointed Sunday to round-the-clock efforts to repair the electrical grid and get basic supplies like food and water to cut-off areas.

“We’ve pushed everything into that island that we can,” said Long, interviewed on “This Week.” Asked about Trump’s suggestion that Puerto Ricans were not doing enough to help themselves, Long said, “I believe in the Puerto Ricans. They’re pulling their weight.”

Long pointed to the “Herculean effort” being made to help the island and its people recover, but conceded: “We got a long way to go.”

Mnuchin, Long and another senior administration official, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, renewed criticism Sunday of Cruz, saying she has not cooperated sufficiently with federal officials.

“It is unfortunate that the San Juan mayor wants to sort of go against the grain,” Mulvaney said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” adding, “We’d love to have her on the team as we all pull in the same direction.”

Cruz said in the ABC interview that while she wanted to see federal efforts become more effective, she would willingly speak with Trump when he visits Puerto Rico on Tuesday.

“If he asks to meet with me, of course I will meet with him,” she said. “Anything that can be done, and anyone that can listen.”

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