Tag: Trump White House

Scoop: Trump selects Eric Ueland to lead legislative affairs

President Trump has picked Eric Ueland, currently deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy, to replace Shahira Knight as director of legislative affairs, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the decision. Ueland has deep experience in Congress and is widely respected on Capitol Hill.

Why it matters: As the president’s top liaison to Capitol Hill, this is perhaps the hardest job in Washington. The White House is at war with House Democrats, who have initiated a blizzard of subpoenas. Trump has made clear he wants his current and former staff to stonewall House Democrats and that he expects to get no big legislative items done (for example, infrastructure) while Democrats are investigating him.

Context: Joe Grogan, the head of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, brought Ueland onto his team earlier this year, and officials have who worked both with and against Ueland over his long career on the Hill described him as an especially important hire.

View the complete June 13 article by Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene on the Axios website here.

Harvard professor lays out why the conflicts surrounding Jared Kushner ‘have only grown more distressing with time’

A real estate firm owned in part by Jared Kushner reportedly received $90 million in foreign funding from “an opaque offshore vehicle” after the son-in-law of President Donald Trump began working as a senior adviser at the White House.The company in question, Cadre, has received overseas investments while Kushner “through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands,” according to the Guardian. Although Kushner sold other assets after beginning his employment at the White House, financial disclosures indicate that he maintained his stake in Cadre, which is now worth as much as $50 million.Because much is unknown about the nature of who has been investing in Cadre, experts have raised concerns that Kushner’s interest in the company could interfere with his ability to impartially represent America’s best interests in geopolitical situations. During his time in the White House, Kushner has taken a lead on foreign policy initiatives, including a well-publicized attempt to broker peace in the Middle East.

“The conflicts that have swirled around Jared Kushner have only grown more distressing with time,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email.

“Besides being the president’s son-in-law, he is a scion of a family, whose wealth is intertwined with Jared’s many roles in the Trump administration, roles that have put him virtually in bed with, among other bloody despots, Saudi Crown Prince MBS, with whom Jared hobnobbed right after MBS sent a team of thugs to brutally torture, murder and dismember a Washington Post critic of the Saudi regime. It would take a long time to enumerate the conflicts we know about. Those we don’t yet know about are neatly hidden away in the Cadre company, in which Kushner apparently has holdings valued at as much as $50 million.”

View the complete June 11 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

White House poised to relax mileage standards, rebuffing automakers and setting up probable fight with California

A last-minute push by automakers appears unlikely to sway the Trump administration from abandoning President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy to improve mileage standards for cars and light trucks, two government officials said Friday.

The administration’s plan to freeze federal fuel-efficiency requirements for six years and end California’s authority to set its own standards has injected uncertainty into the auto market and raised the prospect of a drawn-out legal fight between federal officials and the nation’s biggest state.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are poised to finalize a proposal this summer that would set federal car standards at roughly 37 miles per gallon, rather than raising them to nearly 51 miles per gallon for 2025 models. The rule would also revoke California’s existing waiver to set its own rules under the Clean Air Act, a practice the federal government has sanctioned for decades.

View the complete June 7 article by Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

Trump scolded and embarrassed Kellyanne Conway in front of a journalist: report

In an excerpt from his upcoming book, “The Best People: Trump’s Cabinet and the Siege on Washington,” author Alexander Nazaryan describes an interview with the president in the Oval Office where Donald Trump humiliated White House adviser Kellyanne Conway as she sat there and smiled and said nothing.

According to Nazaryan, he met with the president to get his take on how members of his cabinet — past and present — have performed, with the president forced to read from a tip sheet sitting on his desk that contained boilerplate compliments about his many appointees.

Trump stated that HUD Secretary Ben Carson, “has done a very good job,” and perfunctorily called Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue all “great.” But the author noted the president didn’t have anything to say about Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

View the complete June 6 article by Tom Boggioni of Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony calling climate change ‘possibly catastrophic’

Officials sought to excise the State Department’s comments on climate science because they did not mesh with the administration’s stance

White House officials barred a State Department intelligence agency from submitting written testimony this week to the House Intelligence Committee warning that human-caused climate change is “possibly catastrophic.” The move came after State officials refused to excise the document’s references to federal scientific findings on climate change.

The effort to edit, and ultimately suppress, the prepared testimony by the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research comes as the Trump administration is debating how best to challenge the fact that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet and could pose serious risks unless the world makes deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade. Senior military and intelligence officials have continued to warn that climate change could undermine the United States’ national security — a position President Trump rejects.

Officials from the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs, Office of Management and Budget and National Security Council all raised objections to parts of the testimony that Rod Schoonover, who works in the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues, prepared to present on the bureau’s behalf for a hearing Wednesday.

View the complete June 8 article by Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey and Brady Dennis on The Washington Post website here.

White House tells Hicks, Donaldson not to turn over certain documents to House Judiciary

The White House has instructed former officials Hope Hicks and Annie Donaldson not to turn over documents to the House Judiciary Committee that relate to their work in the administration.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) had subpoenaed the two on May 21, setting a deadline of 10 a.m. on June 4 for them to produce documents and demanding they provide testimony – Hicks in a public appearance on June 19 and Donaldson in a closed-door deposition June 24.

CNN first reported the White House had instructed them not to turn over documents stemming from their time in the Trump administration sought by the subpoena. A committee source confirmed the development to The Hill.

View the complete June 4 article by Morgan Chalfant and Olivia Beaver on The Hill website here.

‘Profound ignorance’: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace explains why Jared and Ivanka are ‘the rot’ inside the White House

Jared Kushner gave a disastrous interview to Axios’ Jonathan Swan as shown in the second season premiere of the outlet’s HBO series, which was released over the weekend. And the president’s son-in-law and top advisers is now getting appropriately raked over the coals.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace tore into Kushner on Monday during a panel discussion on her show “Deadline: White House.” She zeroed in on Kushner and Ivanka as two of the major deleterious forces within the administration.

She noted how Kushner “drove Rex Tillerson out of the administration. He repelled top-tier talent for the chief of staff job. It would seem to be that if there’s rot in this White House, the malignancy is Jared and Ivanka.”

View the complete June 3 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Disregard Trump’s ground noise. Focus on the signal.

My first year in Congress was spent absorbing attacks from a local newspaper unimpressed by the fact I was the first Republican elected in my area of Florida since Reconstruction. They appreciated my lectures on small government conservatism no more than does the current collection of Big Government Republicans in Washington.

During my freshman year on the Hill, I tried to respond to every charge from every article, political cartoon or editorial page. After one particularly stem-winding speech that I delivered at the downtown Rotary Club in Pensacola, Fla., three-star admiral Jack Fetterman took me aside and gently offered advice that I carry with me a quarter-century later. He put his arm around me and said, “Joe, you have to learn to separate the ground noise from the signal. And here’s the secret, son: It’s almost always ground noise.”

I thought of the admiral’s words this weekend as I glanced at the news feed coming in over my phone.

View the complete June 3 commentary by Joe Scarborough on The Washington Post website here.

House committee to vote on holding Barr and Ross in contempt for failing to provide documents related to 2020 Census citizenship question

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee said Monday that the panel would vote to hold Attorney General William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt for failing to comply with a bipartisan subpoena for documents on a Trump administration plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The panel’s chairman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), announced the move in letters to Barr and Ross on Monday. He gave them until Thursday to comply and raised the possibility of delaying the vote if they cooperate.

“Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern,” Cummings wrote to Barr and Ross in the letters. “The Trump administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented coverups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations.”

View the complete June 3 article by Felicia Sonmez Tara Bahrampour and Rachael Bade on The Washington Post website here.

Supreme Court rejects Trump request to fast track decision on DACA case

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s request to fast track a decision on whether it will hear a case over the president’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

The justices, in an unsigned order, denied the request, which was filed on behalf of the administration last month to expedite a decision on whether to review the case.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco, who represents the administration in cases before the Supreme Court, had urged the justices to announce their decision on whether they will hear the case by the end of their term later this month.

View the complete June 3 article by Jacqueline Thomsen on The Hill website here.