Trump Says U.S. ‘Losing’ Afghan War in Tense Meeting With Generals
President Donald Trump is introduced by Defense Secretary James Mattis during the commissioning ceremony of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford at Naval Station Norfolk. Jonathan Ernst / Reuters
General John Nicholson, the Commander of US Forces Afghanistan and NATO's Resolute Support Mission, speaks during an opening ceremony of "Invictus Games" at the Resolute Support Headquarter, in Kabul, Afghanistan on May 13 , 2017. Massoud Hossaini / AP file
by Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube Aug 2 2017, 6:02 pm ET
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has become increasingly frustrated with his advisers tasked with crafting a new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and recently suggested firing the war's top military commander during a tense meeting at the White House, according to senior administration officials.
During the July 19 meeting, Trump repeatedly suggested that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford replace Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/2-u-s-soldiers-killed-eastern-afghanistan-after-afghan-soldier-n770616 ], because he is not winning the war, the officials said. Trump has not met Nicholson, and the Pentagon has been considering extending his time in Afghanistan.
Over nearly two hours in the situation room, according to the officials, Trump complained about NATO allies, inquired about the United States getting a piece of Afghan’s mineral wealth and repeatedly said the top U.S. general there should be fired. He also startled the room with a story that seemed to compare their advice to that of a paid consultant who cost a tony New York restaurateur profits by offering bad advice.
Trump's national security team has been trying for months to come up with a new strategy [ http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pentagon-weighs-more-aggressive-role-afghanistan-n778766 ] he can approve. Those advisers are set to meet again to discuss the issue on Thursday at the White House. The president is not currently scheduled to attend the meeting, though one official said that could change.
Former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush went through multiple strategies over the course of their presidencies to try to stabilize Afghanistan. What set Trump apart in the July meeting was his open questioning of the quality of the advice he was receiving.
During the meeting, Trump criticized his military advisers seated around the table in the White House Situation Room for what he said was a losing U.S. position in the war, according to the senior administration officials. At one point the president directed his frustration at Mattis, saying Trump had given the military authority months ago to make advances in Afghanistan and yet the U.S. was continuing to lose ground, the officials said.
"We aren't winning," Trump complained, according to these officials. "We are losing."
One official said Trump pointed to maps showing the Taliban gaining ground, and that Mattis responded to the president by saying the U.S. is losing because it doesn't have the strategy it needs.
The White House declined to comment on internal deliberations.
"The president's national security team is developing a comprehensive, integrated strategy for South Asia that utilizes all aspects of our national power to address this complex region," said Michael Anton, spokesman for the National Security Council. "That strategy has been worked carefully in the interagency process and while no decision has been made the president's team continues to develop options for him that address threats and opportunities to America arising from this vital region."
Told that Trump was considering firing Gen. Nicholson, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, "I can't think of a good reason to fire the general. I think he's done an admirable job."
"If the president doesn't listen to the generals, like Gen. Nicholson and he goes down the road that President Obama went, Afghanistan is going to collapse," Graham said. "Here's my advice to the president — listen to people like Gen. Nicholson and McMaster and others who have been in the fight."
Trump Compares Afghanistan to a Famous New York Restaurant
The president's advisers went into the mid-July meeting hoping he would sign off on an Afghanistan strategy after months of delays, officials said. One official said the president's team has coalesced around a strategy, though it had presented him with other options as well such as complete withdrawal.
Trump, however, appeared to have been significantly influenced by a meeting he'd recently had with a group of veterans of the Afghanistan war, and he was unhappy with the options presented to him.
Trump vented to his national security team that the veterans told him forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have not been helpful, and he lamented that China is making money off of Afghanistan's estimated $1 trillion in rare minerals while American troops are fighting the war, officials said. Trump expressed frustration that his advisers tasked with figuring out how the U.S. can help American businesses get rights to those minerals were moving too slowly, one official said.
China purchased mineral rights in Afghanistan a decade ago, an investment the U.S. supported at the time. Beijing has since had teams mining copper outside of Kabul.
The focus on the minerals was reminiscent of Trump's comments early into his presidency when he lamented that the U.S. didn't take Iraq's oil when the majority of forces departed the country in 2011.
To underscore his view that the veterans who fought in the war may be better positioned to advise him on an Afghanistan strategy, Trump compared the policy review process to the renovation of a famed New York restaurant in the 1980s, officials said.
Trump told his advisers that the restaurant, Manhattan's elite '21' Club, had shut its doors for a year and hired an expensive consultant to craft a plan for a renovation. After a year, Trump said, the consultant's only suggestion was that the restaurant needed a bigger kitchen.
Officials said Trump kept stressing the idea that lousy advice cost the owner a year of lost business and that talking to the restaurant's waiters instead might have yielded a better result. He also said the tendency is to assume if someone isn't a three-star general he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that in his own experience in business talking to low-ranking workers has gotten him better outcomes.
One senior administration official said the president mentioned the restaurant in an attempt to convey to his advisers that sometimes the best advice comes from those working day-to-day in a place, rather than those who are farther removed.
"The clear message if you heard the story was: high-priced consultants or high-priced anybody, expensive supposedly-big-brained people, but who are physically far from the source of the problem, often give you much worse advice than the supposedly low-ranking guys who are right there," the official said.
Mattis Upset After Trump Meeting
Trump left the national security meeting without making a decision on a strategy. His advisers were stunned, administration officials and others briefed on the meeting said.
Two Pentagon officials close to Mattis said he returned from the White House that morning visibly upset. Mattis often takes a walk when grappling with an issue. That afternoon, the walk took longer than usual, the officials said.
Among those at the meeting were Trump's senior White House advisers including Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, and then chief-of-staff Reince Priebus, plus Mattis, Dunford, Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
At one point, Dunford offered to set up a meeting for Trump with Gen. Nicholson in the hopes that personal interaction may soothe Trump's concerns about his leadership.
Mattis also defended Gen. Nicholson, an official said, adding that the conversation about the commander ended inconclusively.
In an interview with MSNBC on Wednesday, McMaster praised Nicholson.
"I've known him for many years," McMaster said. "I can't imagine a more capable commander in any, on any mission." Asked whether the president had confidence in Nicholson, McMaster said "absolutely."
But a defense official confirmed that discussions are underway at the Pentagon regarding Nicholson's future in Afghanistan.
Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana White told NBC News that Mattis “has confidence in Gen. Nicholson’s leadership.”
Retired Adm. James Stavridis, a former head of NATO and an NBC News analyst, suggested the delay in finalizing a strategy has hurt U.S. efforts in the war.
"The situation in Afghanistan is not improving, but I think it's hardly irretrievable at this point, and what the president needs to be doing is deciding on the strategy," Admiral Stavridis said.
"What is hurting the process at the moment is this back and forth about do we stay or do we go, how many troops," he added. "Any commander is going to be incredibly handicapped in an environment like that. So I think the fundamental problem here is lack of decisiveness in Washington, specifically in the White House."
During the presidential campaign, Trump often talked about knowing more than U.S. military generals. Last September, he suggested he would probably have different generals from those who served under former President Barack Obama.
Retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey advised against shaping a strategy around advice from troops serving on the ground.
"One of the last things you necessarily want to do is form policy advice based on what the current combatants think about something in a war zone," said Gen. McCaffrey, an MSNBC military analyst. "They're qualified totally to talk about tactics and things like that and what they're seeing, but the president's job is to formulate strategy and policy not to do tactical decisions."
He also said acquiring mineral rights in Afghanistan is complicated and potentially costly because it would require the type of security the U.S. has been unable to achieve, as well as a workforce and access to a port to ship the materials.
Nicholson has called the war a "stalemate" and said he needs a "few thousand" additional troops. "Offensive capability is what will break the stalemate in Afghanistan," he said in February during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
His comments angered White House officials who thought they boxed in the president before he had made any decisions, according to Pentagon officials.
In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of key counties where Trump had broad support in the November election, 46 percent of respondents supported sending more troops to Afghanistan while 36 percent opposed.
Heading into its 16th year, the war in Afghanistan is the longest war in U.S. history.
A decision on an Afghanistan strategy was expected more than two months ago, but it has been delayed as the president remains unsatisfied with the options. Last month he gave Mattis authority to set troop levels in Afghanistan, but Mattis has been unable to do so absent a presidential strategy. Trump also gave his military commanders broad authority to make key decisions. The move resulted in the U.S. dropping its largest non-nuclear weapon in Afghanistan several months ago.
The U.S. currently has about 8,400 troops in Afghanistan. Some of Trump's advisers are advocating for a very limited U.S. role in the war, while others have recommended several thousand additional troops. Officials said it's unclear when the president will sign off on a new strategy.
Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. This will be the first public meeting of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which will be chaired by the Vice President.
GOP Seeks to Close Federal Election Agency House Republicans are pressing to defund the sole federal agency that exclusively works to ensure the voting process is secure July 17, 2017 WASHINGTON—House Republicans are seeking to defund the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [ https://www.eac.gov/ ], the sole federal agency that exclusively works to ensure the voting process is secure, as part of proposed federal budget cuts. The defunding move comes as the EAC is working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation to examine an attack late last year on the agency’s computer systems by a Russian-speaking hacker. House Republicans say the EAC no longer is necessary, and that the Federal Election Commission could bear its responsibilities. They also say the agency’s work duplicates efforts at the Department of Homeland Security and FBI, and that it improperly interferes in the right of states to conduct their elections. “People supporting the EAC are quite frankly proponents for a greater federal role in our elections,” said Rep. Tom Graves (R., Ga.) at a June committee hearing on the proposal to eliminate the agency. “States themselves, they’re responsible for all the elections. We do not have a federally run election system.” Democrats oppose the proposal, arguing that alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election has boosted the importance of the EAC. The agency helps train local officials on such tasks as recruiting poll workers, and during last year’s campaign, it distributed memos keeping election officials apprised of potential vulnerabilities in voting systems. The commission “has a unique task that they’re best situated to accomplish,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, an Illinois Democrat who has been fighting to preserve the agency. Mr. Quigley said that the intelligence community judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a campaign of interference in the 2016 election [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-campaign-digital-chief-to-meet-with-house-russia-investigators-1500054319 ] makes it the “worst time” to try to eliminate the agency. “Cutting funding to it is a green light to Putin to do it again,” said Mr. Quigley. The EAC said in December it was “working with federal law enforcement agencies to investigate the potential breach [by the Russian-speaking hacker] and its effects.” It said recently it has thoroughly scanned its systems to make sure there are no additional security concerns. [...] https://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-seeks-to-close-federal-election-agency-1500325218 [with comments]
Faith Nation hosts White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer to talk health care, press briefings and Israel. Also on this episode: Faith Nation hits the streets to ask the question, “should faith and politics mix?” We also take a look at ... ...
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President Trump speaks at GOP health care luncheon, urges action
Published on Jul 19, 2017 by PBS NewsHour
President Donald Trump address Republican senators on Wednesday during a GOP luncheon at the White House focused on health care. During the lunch, the president expressed that the Senate should not go on recess until a health care bill was passed.
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Published on Jul 19, 2017 by The Alex Jones Channel
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Trade talks fizzle as China rebuffs key Trump team demand White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is joined by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, left, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for the U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue at the Treasury Department on July 19. U.S. officials fell short of securing ambitious gains in trade with China in a meeting Wednesday and news conferences planned to cap off the event were canceled as the two countries wrapped up 100 days of trade talks. July 19, 2017 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/19/u-s-unsuccessfully-presses-china-on-ambitious-steel-cuts-in-trade-talks/ [with comments]
US and China emerge from trade talks without agreement Steel from China coming into the US has been a point of contention. The US and China have wrapped up contentious trade talks in Washington without agreement. 20 July 2017 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40664590
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China’s Jack Ma has penetrated the Trump administration — and he knows what he wants President-elect Donald Trump and Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma in January. July 19, 2017 Alibaba chief Jack Ma has done more to penetrate the top ranks of the Trump administration and the Trump family than any other foreign business leader. Meanwhile, his investment company is trying to take over a large piece of the U.S. commercial financial infrastructure. Lawmakers and experts are asking if that’s really in America’s interest. [...] Ma’s broad pitch to the Trump administration is that he can open up the Chinese e-commerce market to small and medium-sized U.S. businesses, as he promised to do [ http://www.businessinsider.com/alibaba-ceo-jack-ma-meets-with-trump-pledges-1-million-us-jobs-2017-1 ] after meeting the president-elect at Trump Tower in January. Given the various barriers to U.S. companies doing business in China, that promise will be hard to keep. But in the interim, Ma has something he wants from the Trump team: approval of his planned takeover of the second-largest financial remittance firm in the United States. In April, Ma’s investment firm Ant Financial struck a deal [ http://www.reuters.com/article/us-moneygram-intl-m-a-ant-financial-idUSKBN17J02P ] to acquire MoneyGram. The Dallas-based firm allows people to send money to each other from about 350,000 locations in more than 200 countries. The deal is Ant’s largest acquisition in the United States, by far. The Trump administration is currently examining the deal under a process run by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews potential effects on national security. The case is the first major China-related CFIUS review for the Trump administration and Congress is watching closely. “The question is whether they are going to sweep the security concerns aside because of this friendship,” said Wessel, a Democrat. “This transaction will be one important gauge of that.” [...] Security concerns aside, if Ma is able to convince the Trump team to help him take over the money-remittance industry worldwide, he — and China — will be one step closer to dominating global e-commerce. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/07/19/chinas-jack-ma-has-penetrated-the-trump-administration-and-he-knows-what-he-wants/ [with comments]
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Six months of spelling mistakes from the Trump White House: Analysis Forget Trump’s tweets. From “lasting peach” to “putting our minors back to work,” the White House has produced a stream of mistakes in formal statements that would be unusual even for a small-town mayor. In six months, the White House of President Donald Trump, seen here signing an executive order in an Jan. 24 file photo, has produced at least 29 spelling mistakes or identification errors in formal statements, comments to the media and promotional graphics. July 19, 2017 https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/07/19/six-months-of-spelling-mistakes-from-the-trump-white-house-analysis.html
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Big German Bank, Key to Trump’s Finances, Faces New Scrutiny
Trump family properties, clockwise from top left: Trump World Tower, New York; Trump National Doral in Miami; Trump International Hotel in Washington; Trump International Hotel in Chicago; 40 Wall Street in New York and the former New York Times building in New York. The New York Times
By BEN PROTESS, JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERG and JESSE DRUCKER JULY 19, 2017
After a string of bankruptcies in his casino and hotel businesses in the 1990s, Mr. Trump became somewhat of an outsider on Wall Street, leaving the giant German bank among the few major financial institutions willing to lend him money.
Now that two-decades-long relationship is coming under scrutiny.
Banking regulators are reviewing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans made to Mr. Trump’s businesses through Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management unit, which caters to an ultrarich clientele, according to three people briefed on the review who were not authorized to speak publicly. The regulators want to know if the loans might expose the bank to heightened risks.
Separately, Deutsche Bank has been in contact with federal investigators about the Trump accounts, according to two people briefed on the matter. And the bank is expecting to eventually have to provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
It was not clear what information the bank might ultimately provide. Generally, the bank is seen as central to understanding Mr. Trump’s finances since it is the only major financial institution that continues to conduct sizable business with him. Deutsche Bank has also lent money to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and to his family real estate business.
Donald J. Trump in 1996 at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. Two years later, he began a banking relationship with Deutsche Bank. Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Although Deutsche Bank recently landed in legal trouble for laundering money for Russian entities — paying more than $600 million in penalties to New York and British regulators — there is no indication of a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, people briefed on the matter said. The bank, which declined to comment, scrutinizes its accounts for problematic ties as part of so-called “know your customer” banking rules and other requirements.
And with one of its most famous clients headed to the White House, the bank designed a plan for overseeing the accounts of Mr. Trump and Mr. Kushner and presented it to regulators at the New York State Department of Financial Services early this year. The plan essentially called for monitoring the accounts for red flags such as exceptionally favorable loan terms or unusual partners.
Additionally, the New York regulators recently requested information related to the hundreds of millions in loans Deutsche Bank’s private wealth management division provided Mr. Trump, one of the people said, paying particular attention to personal guarantees he made to obtain the loans. Those guarantees have declined as the loans were paid down and the property values increased, but it remains a source of interest to the regulators.
While there is no formal investigation of the bank — and personal guarantees are often required when people receive big loans from their wealth managers — the New York regulators have questioned whether the guarantee could create problems for Deutsche Bank should Mr. Trump fail to pay his debts. To collect, the bank would either have to sue the president, or risk being seen as cutting him a special deal.
It is not a hypothetical concern: Mr. Trump sued the bank in 2008 to delay paying back an earlier loan.
Deutsche Bank expects it must eventually provide information to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Trump has had a complicated relationship with the bank over the past 20 years, which has included more than $4 billion in loan commitments and potential bond offerings, a majority of which were completed, according to a New York Times review of securities filings and interviews with people with knowledge of the deals. Despite all the risk-taking — and a brief loan default that spurred the 2008 litigation — Mr. Trump’s business has made the bank money, the people said.
A spokesman for the New York regulators declined to comment, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
A few years after Mr. Trump sued the bank in 2008, he moved his business from the bank’s commercial real estate lending division to its private wealth division, where executives were more willing to deal with him, according to the people briefed on the matter.
In the past six years, the private wealth unit helped finance three of Mr. Trump’s properties, including a golf course near Miami and a hotel in Washington, according to Mr. Trump’s most recent financial disclosures and the people with knowledge of the loans.
The size of the loans — totaling about $300 million — is somewhat unusual by Wall Street standards, according to former and current Deutsche Bank executives and wealth managers at other Wall Street firms.
The Trump National Doral resort in Miami. Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times
While it is not unheard-of for real estate developers to obtain large wealth management loans for projects deemed too risky for an investment bank, it differs from bank to bank, and those that do issue loans of that size typically do so for top clients known to pay their bills.
Mr. Trump’s wealth manager at Deutsche Bank, Rosemary Vrablic, has specialized in real estate lending and is known for taking risks on clients, two of the executives and wealth managers said. And her relationship with Mr. Trump is close enough that Ms. Vrablic attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, according to a person who attended.
Mr. Kushner has established his own relationship with the bank. He and his mother have an unsecured line of credit from Deutsche Bank, valued at up to $25 million, and the family business he ran until January, Kushner Companies, received a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank last year.
Mr. Kushner’s dealings at the bank have included Ms. Vrablic. In 2013, he ordered up a glowing profile of her in the real estate magazine he owned, The Mortgage Observer, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The piece concluded with a disclaimer that her “past clients” included Mr. Kushner.
In an interview with The Times last year, Mr. Trump suggested reporters speak with Ms. Vrablic about his banking relationships.
Trump International Hotel in Washington. Al Drago/The New York Times
“Why don’t you call the head of Deutsche Bank? Her name is Rosemary Vrablic,” he said. “She is the boss.”
A Relationship Is Born
It was 1998, and Mike Offit, fresh off the trading floor of Goldman Sachs for a new job at Deutsche Bank, was hired to put Deutsche Bank’s real estate lending business on the map. To do that, Mr. Offit knew he had to snag big name developers.
That moment arrived when Rob Horowitz, with the real estate firm Cooper-Horowitz, approached him with an idea: Would he work with Mr. Trump, who at the time had a tarnished reputation after several of his casinos landed in bankruptcy?
“My reaction was, why wouldn’t I?” Mr. Offit recalled in a recent interview.
To Mr. Offit, there was little downside to hearing Mr. Trump’s pitch. A short time later, Mr. Trump came by Mr. Offit’s Midtown Manhattan office to discuss a loan for renovations at his 40 Wall Street building. Unlike other developers who arrived with their entourages, Mr. Trump showed up alone, Mr. Offit said, and despite a reputation for bluster, he knew the financials of the deal cold.
“There was some resistance from management because of Donald’s reputation, but I told them that our loan would be wildly overly collateralized even in the worst-case scenario,” Mr. Offit said.
Rosemary Vrablic of Deutsche Bank helped facilitate loans to Mr. Trump. Michael Nagle
More deals followed. Later in the year, Mr. Trump needed $300 million to build Trump World Tower near the United Nations. But he required a construction loan, which, at the time, Deutsche did not have the right staff to manage. Determined to get the deal nonetheless, Mr. Offit found another German bank to make the loan with the commitment that Deutsche Bank would take possession once the building was constructed.
But as the deal was being finalized, the other German bank had second thoughts because of worries of a labor strike. Just as the deal seemed to be falling apart, Mr. Trump produced a signed commitment from all the major construction unions promising not to strike.
“We were all amazed he managed to get that,” said Mr. Offit, who retired from the bank in 1999.
In the mid 2000s, Mr. Trump was in need of another construction loan. But this time, the loan — up to $640 million to build Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago — did not go as well.
A few years after the project began, the 2008 financial crisis upended the global economy and Mr. Trump fell behind on loan payments. According to a person briefed on the deal, Deutsche Bank was discussing a possible extension, when Mr. Trump sued it to avoid paying $40 million that he had personally guaranteed.
His argument, as detailed in a letter to the bank, was novel: “Deutsche Bank is one of the banks primarily responsible for the economic dysfunction we are currently facing,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago. Nathan Weber for The New York Times
With the help of a lawyer — Steven Schlesinger of Garden City, N.Y. — Mr. Trump argued that the financial crisis allowed him to invoke the extraordinary event clause in his contract with the bank. Mr. Trump argued Deutsche Bank should pay him $3 billion in damages.
The bank filed its own action against Mr. Trump, demanding he make good on the loan. In a legal filing, Deutsche Bank, which had distributed the loan to a number of other banks, called the lawsuit “classic Trump.”
The standoff culminated with a meeting in Trump Tower, Mr. Schlesinger said.
At the meeting, Mr. Trump threatened to remove his name from the building if he did not get more time to pay. That move, Mr. Trump suggested, would reduce the value of the building.
Ultimately, the bank granted Mr. Trump additional time to repay. And when he did, it was through the Wall Street equivalent of borrowing from one parent to repay the other.
Mr. Trump received a loan from Deutsche Bank’s wealth management unit to pay off the debt he owed the bank’s real estate lending division, according to two people briefed on the transaction. The wealth management unit later issued another loan for the Chicago project that is valued at $25 million to $50 million.
Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s former chief executive, now chairman of the Bank of Cyprus. Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, was a large shareholder of that bank. Thomas Peter/Reuters
A Personal Banker
Ms. Vrablic, who helped facilitate the wealth management unit’s loans to Mr. Trump, has built a career lending to the rich and famous.
She got her start on Wall Street at Citibank’s private bank in the late 1980s and later worked at Bank of America before joining Deutsche Bank in 2006.
Ms. Vrablic, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has a reputation for being an aggressive advocate for her clients, according to two executives familiar with her work and profiles written in The American Banker and The Mortgage Observer.
In a 2013 Mortgage Observer article, one of her clients, Herbert Simon, owner of the Indiana Pacers, remarked that “when she came into the picture, it was a tough time to get money, and she was able to be very creative and get us what we needed.”
In a 1999 American Banker article, Ms. Vrablic described her clients as having “many homes, ex-wives, and many children.”
Mr. Rybolovlev in Monaco in 2015. He purchased Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida, Benjamin Bechet for The New York Times
Mr. Trump fit that mold, but he was far from her only client in the rarefied world of New York real estate. Others included Stephen Ross, the chairman and founder of the Related Companies in New York.
Mr. Ross extolled Ms. Vrablic’s ability to make deals happen. “She brings knowledge — and the fact is that if she tells you something, you know it’s going to get done,” he told The Mortgage Observer.
Ms. Vrablic was quoted in the same article as saying that real estate is her “deep dive.”
While Mr. Kushner has never disclosed the exact nature of his business with Ms. Vrablic, his financial disclosure shows a line of credit worth between $5 million and $25 million. And according to securities filings, Deutsche Bank provided a $285 million mortgage to Kushner Companies to help it refinance the loan it used to purchase several floors of retail space in the former New York Times building on 43rd Street in Manhattan.
Mr. Kushner’s company bought the space from Africa Israel Investments, a company owned by Lev Leviev, which has a sizable real estate portfolio in Russia.
Deutsche Bank, other securities filings show, is also involved in loans the Kushner Companies received for the Puck Building in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood and a property on Maiden Lane near Wall Street. The bank was responsible for either pooling those loans into mortgage-backed securities that were sold to investors, according to Trepp, a data and analytics firm, or distributing payments to the investors.
Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who was among the people who met with Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign. Yury Martyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the autumn of 2014, Ms. Vrablic and Mr. Kushner attended the Frick Collection’s dinner, a black-tie event where patrons dined among famous works of art by Manet, El Greco and Turner.
A picture of the pair appeared in the New York Social Diary. Mr. Kushner, dressed in a tuxedo, had his arm around Ms. Vrablic.
The Russia Question
There is no indication that federal investigators suspect a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s dealings with Deutsche Bank, according to people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Horowitz, of the real estate firm Cooper-Horowitz, also saw no Russian ties in his many years of working with Mr. Trump.
“I’ve arranged financing for the majority of Mr. Trump’s transactions, and I’ve never once seen any money coming to him from Russia,” he said. Mr. Horowitz was not involved in any of the private wealth management loans from Ms. Vrablic.
But separate from Mr. Trump, the German bank has a host of Russian connections.
Soon after Mr. Trump took office, the bank settled allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, London and New York. In May, the Federal Reserve reached its own settlement with the bank over the money laundering violations.
Deutsche Bank also had a “cooperation agreement” with the Russian state-owned development bank, Vnesheconombank, which has been swept up in the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election. And it had ties to VTB Bank, a far larger Russian bank facing sanctions in the United States and the European Union. The Russian firm’s investment banking arm, VTB Capital, was created by hiring dozens of bankers from Deutsche Bank’s Moscow office.
Some ties are less direct. Josef Ackermann, Deutsche Bank’s former chief executive, is now chairman of the board at the Bank of Cyprus. A large shareholder of that bank was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who purchased Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida.
And in May, federal prosecutors settled a case with a Cyprus investment vehicle owned by a Russian businessman with close family connections to the Kremlin.
The firm, Prevezon Holdings, was represented by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who was among the people who met during the presidential campaign with Donald Trump Jr. about Hillary Clinton.
Federal prosecutors in the United States claimed Prevezon, which admitted no wrongdoing, laundered the proceeds of an alleged Russian tax fraud through real estate. Prevezon and its partner relied in part on $90 million in financing from a big European financial institution, court records show.
It was Deutsche Bank.
Adam Goldman and Sharon LaFraniere contributed reporting from Washington, and Steve Eder from New York. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Deutsche Bank Is Turning Over Information on Trump The president's favorite financial institution. Regulators are scrutinizing hundreds of millions in loans and a subpoena from Robert Mueller is expected. July 20, 2017 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/07/donald-trump-deutsche-bank-russia
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Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions
In a remarkable public break with one of his earliest political supporters, Mr. Trump complained that Mr. Sessions’s decision ultimately led to the appointment of a special counsel [ ] that should not have happened. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller was running an office rife with conflicts of interest and warned investigators against delving into matters too far afield from Russia. Mr. Trump never said he would order the Justice Department to fire Mr. Mueller, nor would he outline circumstances under which he might do so. But he left open the possibility as he expressed deep grievance over an investigation that has taken a political toll in the six months since he took office.
Asked if Mr. Mueller’s investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family’s finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, “I would say yes.” He would not say what he would do about it. “I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia.”
While the interview touched on an array of issues, including health care, foreign affairs and politics, the investigation dominated the conversation. He said that as far as he knew, he was not under investigation himself, despite reports that Mr. Mueller is looking at whether the president obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey.
“I don’t think we’re under investigation,” he said. “I’m not under investigation. For what? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions facing the Senate Intelligence Committee in June. He recused himself from overseeing the Russia inquiry in March after it was revealed he had failed to report having met with the Russian ambassador. Eric Thayer for The New York Times
Over the course of 50 minutes, the often-fiery Mr. Trump demonstrated his more amiable side, joking about holding hands [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/politics/trump-macron-holding-hands.html ] with the president of France and musing about having a military parade down a main avenue in Washington. He took satisfaction that unemployment has fallen and stock markets have risen to record highs on his watch.
At one point, his daughter Ivanka arrived at the doorway with her daughter, Arabella, who ran to her grandfather and gave him a kiss. He greeted the 6-year-old girl as “baby,” then urged her to show the reporters her ability to speak Chinese. She obliged.
But Mr. Trump left little doubt during the interview that the Russia investigation remained a sore point. His pique at Mr. Sessions, in particular, seemed fresh even months after the attorney general’s recusal [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/us/politics/jeff-sessions-russia-trump-investigation-democrats.html ]. Mr. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Mr. Trump’s candidacy and was rewarded with a key cabinet slot, but has been more distant from the president lately.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he added. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair — and that’s a mild word — to the president.”
Mr. Trump also faulted Mr. Sessions for his testimony during Senate confirmation hearings when Mr. Sessions said he had not had “communications with the Russians” even though he had met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey I. Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” the president said. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”
A spokesman for Mr. Sessions declined to comment on Wednesday.
The president added a new allegation against Mr. Comey, whose dismissal has become a central issue for critics who said it amounted to an attempt to obstruct the investigation into Russian meddling in the election and any possible collusion with Mr. Trump’s team.
Mr. Trump recalled that a little more than two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials briefed him at Trump Tower on Russian meddling. Mr. Comey afterward pulled Mr. Trump aside and told him about a dossier that had been assembled by a former British spy filled with salacious allegations against the incoming president, including supposed sexual escapades in Moscow. The F.B.I. has not corroborated the most sensational assertions in the dossier.
In the interview, Mr. Trump said he believed Mr. Comey told him about the dossier to implicitly make clear he had something to hold over the president. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Mr. Trump said. As leverage? “Yeah, I think so,” Mr. Trump said. “In retrospect.”
The president dismissed the assertions in the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.”
Mr. Comey declined to comment on Wednesday.
But Mr. Comey and other intelligence officials decided it was best for him to raise the subject with Mr. Trump alone because he was going to remain as F.B.I. director. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that he disclosed the details of the dossier to Mr. Trump because he thought that the news media would soon be publishing details from it and that Mr. Trump had a right to know what information was out there about him. A two-page summary about the dossier was widely reported [ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/10/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-intelligence.html ] the week before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, including by The Times.
Mr. Trump rebutted Mr. Comey’s claim that in a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, the president asked him to end the investigation into his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn. Mr. Comey testified before Congress that Mr. Trump kicked the vice president, attorney general and several other senior administration officials out of the room before having the discussion with Mr. Comey.
“I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?”
He expressed no second thoughts about firing Mr. Comey, saying, “I did a great thing for the American people.”
Mr. Trump was also critical of Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, reprising some of his past complaints that lawyers in his office contributed money to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. He noted that he actually interviewed Mr. Mueller to replace Mr. Comey just before his appointment as special counsel.
“He was up here and he wanted the job,” Mr. Trump said. After he was named special counsel, “I said, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”
The president also expressed discontent with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, a former federal prosecutor from Baltimore. When Mr. Sessions recused himself, the president said he was irritated to learn where his deputy was from. “There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any,” he said of the predominantly Democratic city.
He complained that Mr. Rosenstein had in effect been on both sides when it came to Mr. Comey. The deputy attorney general recommended Mr. Comey be fired but then appointed Mr. Mueller, who may be investigating whether the dismissal was an obstruction of justice. “Well, that’s a conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. “Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are?”
In an interview with Fox News before Mr. Trump’s comments were published, Mr. Rosenstein said he was confident Mr. Mueller could avoid any conflict of interests. “We have a process with the department to take care of that,” he said.
As for Andrew G. McCabe, the acting F.B.I. director, the president suggested that he, too, had a conflict. Mr. McCabe’s wife, Jill McCabe, received nearly $500,000 in 2015 during a losing campaign for the Virginia Senate from a political action committee affiliated with Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who is close friends with Hillary and Bill Clinton.
In his first description of his dinnertime conversation with Mr. Putin at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, Mr. Trump played down its significance. He said his wife, Melania, was seated next to Mr. Putin at the other end of a table filled with world leaders.
“The meal was going toward dessert,” he said. “I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.”
He noted the adoption issue came up in the June 2016 meeting between his son and Russian visitors. “I actually talked about Russian adoption with him,” he said, meaning Mr. Putin. “Which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don had in that meeting.”
But the president repeated that he did not know about his son’s meeting at the time and added that he did not need the Russians to provide damaging information about Mrs. Clinton.
“There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying,” he said. “Unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.”
President Trump spoke on Wednesday with three New York Times reporters — Peter Baker, Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman — in an exclusive interview in the Oval Office. Also in attendance was Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman. At one point, the president’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump appeared at the door, and her daughter, Arabella, entered the room.
The following are excerpts from that conversation, transcribed by The Times. They have been lightly edited for content and clarity, and omit several off-the-record comments and asides.
TRUMP: Hi fellas, how you doing?
BAKER: Good. Good. How was your lunch [with Republican senators]?
TRUMP: It was good. We are very close. It’s a tough — you know, health care. Look, Hillary Clinton worked eight years in the White House with her husband as president and having majorities and couldn’t get it done. Smart people, tough people — couldn’t get it done. Obama worked so hard. They had 60 in the Senate. They had big majorities and had the White House. I mean, ended up giving away the state of Nebraska. They owned the state of Nebraska. Right. Gave it away. Their best senator did one of the greatest deals in the history of politics. What happened to him?
But I think we are going to do O.K. I think we are going to see. I mean, one of my ideas was repeal. But I certainly rather would get repeal and replace, because the next last thing I want to do is start working tomorrow morning on replace. And it is time. It is tough. It’s a very narrow path, winding this way. You think you have it, and then you lose four on the other side because you gave. It is a brutal process. And it was for Democrats, in all fairness.
I mean, you think of Hillary Clinton, and you look, she went eight years — very capable — went eight years as the first lady, and could not get health care. So this is not an easy crack. The one thing I’ll say about myself, so, Obama was in there for eight years and got Obamacare. Hillary Clinton was in there eight years and they never got Hillarycare, whatever they called it at the time. I am not in here six months, and they’ll say, “Trump hasn’t fulfilled his agenda.” I say to myself, wait a minute, I’m only here a very short period of time compared to Obama. How long did it take to get Obamacare?
BAKER: March, March 2010.
TRUMP: So he was there for more than a year.
HABERMAN: Fourteen months.
TRUMP: And I’m here less than six months, so, ah, you know. Something to think about.
BAKER: We wrote the same stories, though, in August of 2009. “Obama can’t get it.”
SCHMIDT: It died several times.
HABERMAN: Several times.
TRUMP: Well, it was a tough one. That was a very tough one.
BAKER: He lost that election [the 2010 midterms].
TRUMP: Nothing changes. Nothing changes. Once you get something for pre-existing conditions, etc., etc. Once you get something, it’s awfully tough to take it away.
HABERMAN: That’s been the thing for four years. When you win an entitlement, you can’t take it back.
TRUMP: But what it does, Maggie, it means it gets tougher and tougher. As they get something, it gets tougher. Because politically, you can’t give it away. So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal. Because you are basically saying from the moment the insurance, you’re 21 years old, you start working and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance, and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan. Here’s something where you walk up and say, “I want my insurance.” It’s a very tough deal, but it is something that we’re doing a good job of.
HABERMAN: Am I wrong in thinking — I’ve talked to you a bunch of times about this over the last couple years, but you are generally of the view that people should have health care, right? I mean, I think that you come at it from the view of …
TRUMP: Yes, yes. [garbled]
- - -
TRUMP: So I told them today, I don’t want to do that. I want to either get it done or not get it done. If we don’t get it done, we are going to watch Obamacare go down the tubes, and we’ll blame the Democrats. And at some point, they are going to come and say, “You’ve got to help us.”
BAKER: Did the senators want to try again?
TRUMP: I think so. We had a great meeting. Was I late?
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: It was a great meeting. We had 51 show up, other than John.
BAKER: Senator McCain.
TRUMP: That’s a lot. Normally when they call for a meeting, you have like 20.
HABERMAN: How about the last one in June? Do you guys remember how many came?
TRUMP: Ah, 49. It was actually 48, but John McCain was there. But I guess we had 51 today, so that counts. That shows the spirit.
BAKER: Who is the key guy?
TRUMP: Well, they are all key. The problem is we have 52 votes. Don’t forget, you look at Obama, he had 60. That’s a big difference. So, we have 52 votes. Now, I guess we lose Susan Collins. I guess we lose Rand Paul. Then we can’t lose any votes. That is a very tough standard. Statistically, you want to bet on that all day long. With that being said, I think we had a great meeting. I think we had a great meeting.
HABERMAN: Where does it go from here, do you think?
TRUMP: Well, I say, let’s not vote on repeal. Let’s just vote on this. So first, they vote on the vote. And that happens sometime Friday?
HABERMAN: Next week.
TRUMP: Or Monday? Monday. And then they’ll vote on this, and we’ll see. We have some meetings scheduled today. I think we have six people who are really sort of O.K. They are all good people. We don’t have bad people. I know the bad people. Believe me, do I know bad people.
And we have a very good group of people, and I think they want to get there. So we’ll see what happens. But it’s tough.
SCHMIDT: How’s [Mitch] McConnell to work with?
TRUMP: I like him. I mean, he’s good. He’s good. It’s been a tough process for him.
HABERMAN: He’s taken on some water.
TRUMP: Yeah. It’s been a tough process for him. This health care is a tough deal. I said it from the beginning. No. 1, you know, a lot of the papers were saying — actually, these guys couldn’t believe it, how much I know about it. I know a lot about health care. [garbled] This is a very tough time for him, in a sense, because of the importance. And I believe we get there.
This is a very tough time for them, in a sense, because of the importance. And I believe that it’s [garbled], that makes it a lot easier. It’s a mess. One of the things you get out of this, you get major tax cuts, and reform. And if you add what the people are going to save in the middle income brackets, if you add that to what they’re saving with health care, this is like a windfall for the country, for the people. So, I don’t know, I thought it was a great meeting. I bet the number’s — I bet the real number’s four. But let’s say six or eight. And everyone’s [garbled], so statistically, that’s a little dangerous, right?
BAKER: Pretty tight.
TRUMP: I hope we don’t have any grandstanders. I don’t think we do.
[garbled]
TRUMP: I think it will be pretty bad for them if they did. I don’t think we have any — I think it would be very bad for — I think this is something the people want. They’ve been promised it.
- - -
HABERMAN: [In Paris], I don’t think I’ve seen you look like you were enjoying yourself that much since the convention, really.
TRUMP: I have had the best reviews on foreign land. So I go to Poland and make a speech. Enemies of mine in the media, enemies of mine are saying it was the greatest speech ever made on foreign soil by a president. I’m saying, man, they cover [garbled]. You saw the reviews I got on that speech. Poland was beautiful and wonderful, and the reception was incredible.
And then, went to France the following week, because it was the 100th year. [inaudible] The Paris Accord — I wasn’t going to get along with France for a little while, because people forget, because it is a very unfair agreement to us. China doesn’t get [garbled] until 2030. Russia goes back to 1994 as a standard — a much, much lower standard. India has things that are [garbled]. I want to do the same thing as everyone else. We can’t do that? We can’t do that? That’s O.K. Let me get out. Frankly, the people that like me, love that I got out.
After that, it was fairly surprising. He [President Emmanuel Macron of France] called me and said, “I’d love to have you there and honor you in France,” having to do with Bastille Day. Plus, it’s the 100th year of the First World War. That’s big. And I said yes. I mean, I have a great relationship with him. He’s a great guy.
HABERMAN: He was very deferential to you. Very.
TRUMP: He’s a great guy. Smart. Strong. Loves holding my hand.
HABERMAN: I’ve noticed.
TRUMP: People don’t realize he loves holding my hand. And that’s good, as far as that goes.
- - -
TRUMP: I mean, really. He’s a very good person. And a tough guy, but look, he has to be. I think he is going to be a terrific president of France. But he does love holding my hand.
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: At that note, the cameras are gone. I was standing there with him, with probably hundreds of thousands of people.
HABERMAN: It was a very crowded [garbled].
TRUMP: And it was one of the most beautiful parades I have ever seen. And in fact, we should do one one day down Pennsylvania Ave.
HABERMAN: I wondered if you were going to say that.
TRUMP: I’ve always thought of that.
HABERMAN: Really?
TRUMP: I’ve always thought of that. I’ve thought of it long before.
TRUMP: But the Bastille Day parade was — now that was a super-duper — O.K. I mean, that was very much more than normal. They must have had 200 planes over our heads. Normally you have the planes and that’s it, like the Super Bowl parade. And everyone goes crazy, and that’s it. That happened for — and you know what else that was nice? It was limited. You know, it was two hours, and the parade ended. It didn’t go a whole day. They didn’t go crazy. You don’t want to leave, but you have to. Or you want to leave, really.
These things are going on all day. It was a two-hour parade. They had so many different zones. Maybe 100,000 different uniforms, different divisions, different bands. Then we had the retired, the older, the ones who were badly injured. The whole thing, it was an incredible thing.
HABERMAN: It was beautiful.
TRUMP: And you are looking at the Arc [de Triomphe]. So we are standing in the most beautiful buildings, and we are looking down the road, and like three miles in, and then you had the Arc. And then you have these soldiers. Everyone was so proud. Honestly, it was a beautiful thing. I was glad I did it.
People were surprised because I’d just come back from Hamburg. So I was back for three days, and then I had to go out again. But when he [Mr. Macron] invited me, he and I have a very good relationship. I have a very good relationship with Merkel [Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany]. Do you know what happened with Merkel? So I am sitting in the chair. We’d been sitting there for two hours. So it’s not like, “Nice to see ya.” So the press comes in. So I guess someone screamed out, “Shake her hand, shake her hand!” I didn’t even hear. So I didn’t shake her hand, because I’d been with her for so long. I’d been with her for a long period of time. So I didn’t shake her — the next day, “Trump refused to shake…” [garbled]
- - -
TRUMP: She actually called me, and she said, um, “You know, I think we get along very well.” I said we do, we really do. I said, “You gotta put more money into NATO,” No. 1. And No. 2 is like, our trade imbalance is ridiculous. You know, it’s a money machine.
- - -
TRUMP: It’s been a long time. Nothing changes. Wait till you see what we’re going to do on trade.
HABERMAN: Sounds like it’s going to be very interesting.
TRUMP: Much more interesting than anybody would understand.
HABERMAN: O.K.
- - -
BAKER: Will you go to Britain? Are you going to make a state visit to Britain? Are you going to be able to do that?
TRUMP: As to Britain?
BAKER: Yeah.
HABERMAN: Will you go there?
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: Ah, they’ve asked me. What was interesting — so, when Macron asked, I said: “Do you think it’s a good thing for me to go to Paris? I just ended the Paris Accord last week. Is this a good thing?” He said, “They love you in France.” I said, “O.K., I just don’t want to hurt you.”
- - -
TRUMP: We had dinner at the Eiffel Tower, and the bottom of the Eiffel Tower looked like they could have never had a bigger celebration ever in the history of the Eiffel Tower. I mean, there were thousands and thousands of people, ’cause they heard we were having dinner.
[crosstalk/garbled]
HABERMAN: You must have been so tired at, by that point.
TRUMP: Yeah. It was beautiful. We toured the museum, we went to Napoleon’s tomb …
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: Well, Napoleon finished a little bit bad. But I asked that. So I asked the president, so what about Napoleon? He said: “No, no, no. What he did was incredible. He designed Paris.” [garbled] The street grid, the way they work, you know, the spokes. He did so many things even beyond. And his one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death. How many times has Russia been saved by the weather? [garbled]
[crosstalk/unintelligible]
TRUMP: Same thing happened to Hitler. Not for that reason, though. Hitler wanted to consolidate. He was all set to walk in. But he wanted to consolidate, and it went and dropped to 35 degrees below zero, and that was the end of that army.
[crosstalk]
But the Russians have great fighters in the cold. They use the cold to their advantage. I mean, they’ve won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. [crosstalk] It’s pretty amazing.
So, we’re having a good time. The economy is doing great.
SCHMIDT: The markets are doing great.
TRUMP: They’re going to really go up if we do what we’re doing. I mean, cut regulations tremendously. Sometimes — you know, one thing they hadn’t thought about at The Times, where they said I didn’t really cut regulations as much. I heard that because I said — it could have been a little slip-up in terms of what I said — I meant, for the time in office, five months and couple of weeks, I think I’ve done more than anyone else. They may have taken it as more than anyone else, period.
[crosstalk]
But I’m talking about for my time. I heard that Harry Truman was first, and then we beat him. These are approved by Congress. These are not just executive orders. On the executive orders, we cut regulations tremendously. By the way, I want regulations, but, you know, some of the — you have to get nine different regulations, and you could never do anything. I’ve given the farmers back their farms. I’ve given the builders back their land to build houses and to build other things.
The energy stuff is going really well. We’re going to be an exporter — we already are an exporter of energy. We’re doing well. I mean, the banks, you look at rules and regulations, you look at Dodd-Frank, Dodd-Frank is going to be, you know, modified, and again, I want rules and regulations. But you don’t want to choke, right? People can’t get loans to buy a pizza parlor, to buy a — you know, I saw out on the trail — people say, Mr. Trump, we’ve dealt with banks, my own bank, and they can’t loan me anymore. I’ve never had a bad day with a bank. You know? So we’ll put — yeah, because of statutory [garbled], they can’t loan to that kind of a business. And they’re good businesses to loan to. So I think we’ve — I think we’re set to really go [garbled].
- - -
BAKER: As long as we’re on the record, a lot of people are curious about your conversation with President [Vladimir V.] Putin at dinner. Not surprising. But what did you all talk about, and——
TRUMP: So, that dinner was a very long time planned dinner. And what it was was an evening at the opera. It was a final night goodbye from Germany and from Chancellor Merkel. It was her dinner. It was, you know, everybody knew about it. It was well-known.
- - -
TRUMP: So when we got there, it was with spouses, and when we got there, there were a thousand media. You guys know, were you guys there?
BAKER: No, it was Julie [Hirschfeld Davis] and Glenn Thrush.
TRUMP: So, it was tremendous media. And we took a picture of everybody, the wives and the leaders, and then the leaders, and, you know, numerous pictures outside on the river. Then everybody walked in to see the opera. Then the opera ended. Then we walked into a big room where they had dinner for not only the leaders — Lagarde [Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund] was there, who I think is terrific, and various others. You had the E.U. people there, people other than just the leaders, but quite a few people. I would say you have 20 times two, so you had 40, and then you probably had another 10 or 15 people, you had Christine Lagarde, you had some others also.
So, I was seated next to the wife of Prime Minister Abe [Shinzo Abe of Japan], who I think is a terrific guy, and she’s a terrific woman, but doesn’t speak English.
HABERMAN: Like, nothing, right? Like zero?
TRUMP: Like, not “hello.”
HABERMAN: That must make for an awkward seating.
TRUMP: Well, it’s hard, because you know, you’re sitting there for——
HABERMAN: Hours.
TRUMP: So the dinner was probably an hour and 45 minutes.
- - -
TRUMP: You had an opera, and then you had a cocktail party for the people at the opera, and then you had the leaders with the spouses, and other leaders in Europe and maybe other places, go in. We sat at this really long table, which held, has to be at least 60, 65 people with room. O.K., it’s a very big table, big room. But there was nothing secretive about it.
It was like, that’s where we’re going. And I think it even said on the list, at the request of the German chancellor and Germany, it’s going to be the opera, it’s going to be cocktails, it’s going to be dinner. I think the crowd thinned out for the dinner — you know, it was the leaders, primarily. But the leaders and Lagarde. And [inaudible].
O.K., so we’re sitting at this massive table. And the wives are separated from their husbands, which sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. But they did. It’s always easier when they don’t do it, because you always have somebody to talk to, right? And I was sitting next to the president of Argentina — his wife — [Mauricio] Macri — nice woman, who speaks English. And the prime minister of Japan’s wife, Prime Minister Abe. Great relationships. So I’m sitting there. There was one interpreter for Japanese, ’cause otherwise it would have been even tougher. But I enjoyed the evening with her, and she’s really a lovely woman, and I enjoyed — the whole thing was good.
And now Melania was sitting on the other side of the table, way down on the other end, very far away. She was sitting next to Putin and somebody else, I don’t know. She was sitting next to Putin.
HABERMAN: She had been the whole time?
TRUMP: Yes. She was sitting next to Putin.
BAKER: Does she speak Russian at all?
TRUMP: No. She speaks other languages.
TRUMP: She was sitting next to Putin and somebody else, and that’s the way it is. So the meal was going, and toward dessert I went down just to say hello to Melania, and while I was there I said hello to Putin. Really, pleasantries more than anything else. It was not a long conversation, but it was, you know, could be 15 minutes. Just talked about — things. Actually, it was very interesting, we talked about adoption.
HABERMAN: You did?
TRUMP: We talked about Russian adoption. Yeah. I always found that interesting. Because, you know, he ended that years ago. And I actually talked about Russian adoption with him, which is interesting because it was a part of the conversation that Don [Jr., Mr. Trump’s son] had in that meeting. As I’ve said — most other people, you know, when they call up and say, “By the way, we have information on your opponent,” I think most politicians — I was just with a lot of people, they said [inaudible], “Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?” They just said——
HABERMAN: The senators downstairs?
TRUMP: A lot of them. They said, “Who wouldn’t have taken a meeting like that?”
BAKER: You asked them about it at lunch?
TRUMP: Nah, a couple of them. They — now, that was before Russia was hot, don’t forget. You know, Russia wasn’t hot then. That was almost a year and a half ago. It wasn’t like it is, like it is radioactive, then. Russia was Russia.
HABERMAN: Then can I ask you——
BAKER: Sorry to interrupt. The email, though, said something I thought was really interesting, and I wonder what you thought of it. It said this “is part of Russia and its government’s support of Mr. Trump.” So whatever actually happened at the meeting——
TRUMP: Well, I never saw the email. I never saw the email until, you know——
BAKER: Right, but now you have. So, what do you interpret that to mean, now that you have seen it?
- - -
TRUMP: Well, Hillary did the reset. Somebody was saying today, and then I read, where Hillary Clinton was dying to get back with Russia. Her husband made a speech, got half a million bucks while she was secretary of state. She did the uranium deal, which is a horrible thing, while she was secretary of state, and got a lot of money.
- - -
TRUMP: She was opposing sanctions. She was totally opposed to any sanctions for Russia.
BAKER: When was that?
HABERMAN: Do you remember when that was? I don’t remember that.
- - -
TRUMP: I just saw it. I just saw it. She was opposed to sanctions, strongly opposed to sanctions on Russia.
HABERMAN: This is post-Crimea, I’m assuming? Is that what we would be talking about?
TRUMP: I don’t really know. … But in that time. And don’t forget, Crimea was given away during Obama. Not during Trump. In fact, I was on one of the shows, I said they’re exactly right, they didn’t have it as it exactly. But he was — this — Crimea was gone during the Obama administration, and he gave, he allowed it to get away. You know, he can talk tough all he wants, in the meantime he talked tough to North Korea. And he didn’t actually. He didn’t talk tough to North Korea. You know, we have a big problem with North Korea. Big. Big, big. You look at all of the things, you look at the line in the sand. The red line in the sand in Syria. He didn’t do the shot. I did the shot. Had he done that shot, he wouldn’t have had — had he done something dramatic, because if you remember, they had a tremendous gas attack after he made that statement. Much bigger than the one they had with me.
HABERMAN: It was sarin as well?
TRUMP: Sarin. And, and tremendous numbers of people were killed, young people, children. And he didn’t do anything. That was a famous weekend where they were all asking him to do it, do it, do it. They thought they had it, and then he — not easy to do, I will say this, ’cause when I had to make that decision, I was with the president of China, and General Mattis [Defense Secretary Jim Mattis] said, “We’re locked and loaded, sir,” and I’m saying [mumbles], you know. [mumbles] Look, you’re killing people.
HABERMAN: Yes.
TRUMP: You hate it, it’s tough. Obama — you know, I can understand it in a way, but some things you have to do. But it’s, it’s a tough, it’s a tough decision to make.
BAKER: I do want to come out, on the email, now that you have seen that email that said Russia’s government — I mean, how did you — did you interpret it that way?
TRUMP: Well, I thought originally it might have had to do something with the payment by Russia of the D.N.C. Somewhere I heard that. Like, it was an illegal act done by the D.N.C., or the Democrats. That’s what I had heard. Now, I don’t know where I heard it, but I had heard that it had to do something with illegal acts with respect to the D.N.C. Now, you know, when you look at the kind of stuff that came out, that was, that was some pretty horrific things came out of that. But that’s what I had heard. But I don’t know what it means. All I know is this: When somebody calls up and they say, “We have infor—” Look what they did to me with Russia, and it was totally phony stuff.
HABERMAN: Which, which one?
SCHMIDT: The dossier.
TRUMP: The dossier.
HABERMAN: The dossier. Oh, yes.
- - -
TRUMP: Now, that was totally made-up stuff, and in fact, that guy’s being sued by somebody. … And he’s dying with the lawsuit. I know a lot about those guys, they’re phony guys. They make up whatever they want. Just not my thing — plus, I have witnesses, because I went there with a group of people. You know, I went there with Phil Ruffin——
HABERMAN: Oh, I didn’t know that.
- - -
TRUMP: I had a group of bodyguards, including Keith [Schiller] —
HABERMAN: Keith was there, right?
TRUMP: Keith was there. He said, “What kind of crap is this?” I went there for one day for the Miss Universe contest, I turned around, I went back. It was so disgraceful. It was so disgraceful.
- - -
TRUMP: When he [James B. Comey] brought it [the dossier] to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about anything. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.
HABERMAN: You said that to him?
TRUMP: Yeah, don’t forget——
- - -
TRUMP: I said, this is — honestly, it was so wrong, and they didn’t know I was just there for a very short period of time. It was so wrong, and I was with groups of people. It was so wrong that I really didn’t, I didn’t think about motive. I didn’t know what to think other than, this is really phony stuff.
SCHMIDT: Why do you think — why do you think he shared it?
TRUMP: I think he shared it so that I would — because the other three people left, and he showed it to me.
- - -
TRUMP: So anyway, in my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there.
SCHMIDT: As leverage?
TRUMP: Yeah, I think so. In retrospect. In retrospect. You know, when he wrote me the letter, he said, “You have every right to fire me,” blah blah blah. Right? He said, “You have every right to fire me.” I said, that’s a very strange — you know, over the years, I’ve hired a lot of people, I’ve fired a lot of people. Nobody has ever written me a letter back that you have every right to fire me.
[crosstalk]
BAKER: Do you think in hindsight, because of what’s happened since then——
TRUMP: Comey wrote a letter.
HABERMAN: Which letter?
SCHMIDT: To you? To the F.B.I. staff or to you?
TRUMP: I thought it was to me, right?
BAKER: I think he wrote it to the staff, saying——
TRUMP: It might have been——
BAKER: That “the president has every right to fire me.”
TRUMP: It might have been. It was just a very strange letter to say that.
BAKER: But do you think in hindsight, given that——
TRUMP: What was the purpose in repeating that?
BAKER: Do you think what’s given that——
TRUMP: Do you understand what I mean? Why would somebody say, “He has every right to fire me,” bah bah bah. Why wouldn’t you just say, “Hey, I’ve retired …”
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: It was very — a lot of people have commented that.
BAKER: Given what’s happened since then, though, was it a political mistake to have fired him, given what’s happened?
TRUMP: I think I did a great thing for the American people.
- - -
SCHMIDT: But look at the headache it’s caused, you know?
TRUMP: It’s okay. I have headaches, that’s what I have, I have headaches. … But you know what, I think I did a great thing for the American people.
HABERMAN: Do you wish you had done it on Day 1? When you got in? Because I honestly had assumed that you, if you were going to do it, that’s when you would do it.
TRUMP: Well, it could’ve been. It could’ve been. I feel like it was very dishonest when he wouldn’t say what he knew he said to the public. I thought that was very honest. And I thought that he did that for the reason I just said.
- - -
SCHMIDT: What do you understand to be the four corners of what Mueller [Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in the Russia investigation] can look at, if he steps—— [crosstalk]
TRUMP: I don’t know. Nobody has contacted me about anything.
- - -
TRUMP: Because I have done nothing wrong. A special counsel should never have been appointed in this case.
BAKER: Can we put that on the record?
TRUMP: Because so far, the only — yeah, you can put it down.
SCHMIDT: Was that [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s mistake or [Deputy Attorney General Rod J.] Rosenstein’s mistake?
- - -
TRUMP: Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.
BAKER: Was that a mistake?
TRUMP: Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.
HABERMAN: He gave you no heads up at all, in any sense?
TRUMP: Zero. So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.
HABERMAN: Rosenstein.
TRUMP: Who is he? And Jeff hardly knew. He’s from Baltimore.
- - -
TRUMP: Yeah, what Jeff Sessions did was he recused himself right after, right after he became attorney general. And I said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I would have — then I said, “Who’s your deputy?” So his deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any. So, he’s from Baltimore. Now, he, we went through a lot of things. We were interviewing replacements at the F.B.I. Did you know Mueller was one of the people that was being interviewed?
HABERMAN: I did, actually.
TRUMP: He was sitting in that chair. We had a wonderful meeting.
HABERMAN: Day before, right?
SCHMIDT: Did he want the job?
TRUMP: The day before! Of course, he was up here, and he wanted the job.
HABERMAN: And he made that clear to you? He would have——
- - -
TRUMP: So, now what happens is, he leaves the office. Rosenstein leaves the office. The next day, he is appointed special counsel. I said, what the hell is this all about? Talk about conflicts? But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point. So Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.
HABERMAN: You mean at the hearing?
TRUMP: Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t. He then becomes attorney general, and he then announces he’s going to recuse himself. Why wouldn’t he have told me that before?
HABERMAN: Why do you think it was? What do you think it was?
TRUMP: I don’t know.
BAKER: What would cause you — what would be the line beyond which if Mueller went, you would say, “That’s too far, we would need to dismiss him”?
TRUMP: Look, there are so many conflicts that everybody has. Then Rosenstein becomes extremely angry because of Comey’s Wednesday press conference, where he said that he would do the same thing he did a year ago with Hillary Clinton, and Rosenstein became extremely angry at that because, as a prosecutor, he knows that Comey did the wrong thing. Totally wrong thing. And he gives me a letter, O.K., he gives me a letter about Comey. And by the way, that was a tough letter, O.K. Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K. But he gives me a very strong letter, and now he’s involved in the case. Well, that’s a conflict of interest. Do you know how many conflicts of interests there are? But then, then Comey also says that he did something in order to get the special prose— special counsel. He leaked. The reason he leaked. So, he illegally leaked.
- - -
TRUMP: So think of this. Mike. He illegally leaks, and everyone thinks it is illegal, and by the way, it looks like it’s classified and all that stuff. So he got — not a smart guy — he got tricked into that, because they didn’t even ask him that question. They asked him another question, O.K.?
- - -
TRUMP: He said I said “hope” — “I hope you can treat Flynn good” or something like that. I didn’t say anything.
But even if he did — like I said at the news conference on the, you know, Rose Garden — even if I did, that’s not — other people go a step further. I could have ended that whole thing just by saying — they say it can’t be obstruction because you can say: “It’s ended. It’s over. Period.”
- - -
TRUMP: And nothing was changed other than Richard Nixon came along. And when Nixon came along [inaudible] was pretty brutal, and out of courtesy, the F.B.I. started reporting to the Department of Justice. But there was nothing official, there was nothing from Congress. There was nothing — anything. But the F.B.I. person really reports directly to the president of the United States, which is interesting. You know, which is interesting. And I think we’re going to have a great new F.B.I. director.
HABERMAN: Chris Wray.
TRUMP: He’s highly thought of by everybody. I think I did the country a great service with respect to Comey.
BAKER: Did you shoo other people out of the room when you talked to Comey?
TRUMP: No, no.
BAKER: That time [inaudible] [Michael T.] Flynn —
TRUMP: No. That was the other thing. I told people to get out of the room. Why would I do that?
SCHMIDT: Did you actually have a one-on-one with Comey then?
TRUMP: Not much. Not even that I remember. He was sitting, and I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff. He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.? But people didn’t — we had a couple people that said — Hi baby, how are you?
ARABELLA KUSHNER: [enters room] Hi, Grandpa.
TRUMP: My granddaughter Arabella, who speaks — say hello to them in Chinese.
KUSHNER: Ni hao.
[laughter]
TRUMP: This is Ivanka. You know Ivanka.
IVANKA TRUMP: [from doorway] Hi, how are you? See you later, just wanted to come say hi.
TRUMP: She’s great. She speaks fluent Chinese. She’s amazing.
BAKER: That’s very impressive.
TRUMP: She spoke with President Xi [Jinping of China]. Honey? Can you say a few words in Chinese? Say, like, “I love you, Grandpa” —
KUSHNER: Wo ai ni, Grandpa.
BAKER: That’s great.
TRUMP: She’s unbelievable, huh?
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: Good, smart genes.
[laughter]
TRUMP: So the bottom line is this. The country’s doing well. We are, we are moving forward with a lot of great things. The unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 16 years. The stock market is the highest it’s ever been. It’s up almost 20 percent since I took office. And we’re working hard on health care. Um, the Russian investigation — it’s not an investigation, it’s not on me — you know, they’re looking at a lot of things.
HABERMAN: It’s a broad —
TRUMP: They’re looking at a big picture.
BAKER: This is why I want to come back to that email, because, like — does it concern you? Let’s say that the election didn’t change because of anything Russia did, which has been your point, right? You point —
TRUMP: By the way, it’s everybody.
BAKER: Right, your point is that Democrats are trying to use this as an excuse, fine. But did that email concern you, that the Russian government was trying something to compromise——
TRUMP: You know, Peter, I didn’t look into it very closely, to be honest with you.
BAKER: O.K.
TRUMP: I just heard there was an email requesting a meeting or something — yeah, requesting a meeting. That they have information on Hillary Clinton, and I said — I mean, this was standard political stuff.
SCHMIDT: Did you know at the time that they had the meeting?
TRUMP: No, I didn’t know anything about the meeting.
SCHMIDT: But you didn’t——
TRUMP: It must have been a very important — must have been a very unimportant meeting, because I never even heard about it.
HABERMAN: No one told you a word, nothing? I know we talked about this on the plane a little bit.
TRUMP: No, nobody told me. I didn’t know noth—— It’s a very unimportant — sounded like a very unimportant meeting.
BAKER: But on the date you clinched the nominations with New Jersey and California and the primaries, when you give the speech that night, saying you’re going to give a speech about Hillary Clinton’s corrupt dealings with Russia and other countries, and that comes just three hours after Don Jr. —
TRUMP: Number one, remember, I made many of those speeches.
BAKER: People wondered about the timing.
TRUMP: Many of those speeches. I’d go after her all the time.
BAKER: Yeah, I know, but——
TRUMP: But there was something about the book, “Clinton Cash,” came out.
BAKER: Yeah, a year earlier, though. But you were talking about——
TRUMP: But we were developing a whole thing. There was something about “Clinton Cash.”
- - -
TRUMP: Peter, that’s all I did, was make those speeches about her. … I don’t think I added anything much different than I had been doing. … I’ve made some very strong speeches about the corrupt emails. The 33,000 emails being deleted and bleached, and all of the things she was doing. I would make those speeches routinely. … There wasn’t much I could say about Hillary Clinton that was worse than what I was already saying.
HABERMAN: [laughs] I’m sorry.
TRUMP: I mean, I was talking about, she deleted and bleached, which nobody does because of the cost. How she got away with that one, I have no idea. 33,000 emails. I talked about the back of the plane, I talked about the uranium deal, I talked about the speech that Russia gave Clinton — $500,000 while she was secretary of state — the husband. I talked about the back of the plane — honestly, Peter, I mean, unless somebody said that she shot somebody in the back, there wasn’t much I could add to my repertoire.
HABERMAN: On Fifth Avenue——
TRUMP: I mean, look at what we have now. We have a director of the F.B.I., acting, who received $700,000, whose wife received $700,000 from, essentially, Hillary Clinton. ’Cause it was through Terry. Which is Hillary Clinton.
HABERMAN: This is [Andrew] McCabe’s wife, you mean?
TRUMP: McCabe’s wife. She got $700,000, and he’s at the F.B.I. I mean, how do you think that? But when you say that — and think about this for a second. I don’t think — you could give me a whole string of new information. I don’t think I could really have — there’s only so much. You know, you can only say many things. After that it gets boring, O.K.? How can it be better than deleting emails after you get a subpoena from the United States Congress? Guys go to jail for that, when they delete an email from a civil case. Here, she gets an email from the United States Congress —
- - -
BAKER: Should she be prosecuted now?
TRUMP: What?
BAKER: Should she be prosecuted now? Why, then, should she not be prosecuted now——
TRUMP: I don’t want to say that. I mean, I don’t want to say.
SCHMIDT: Last thing.
TRUMP: You understand what I mean, Peter.
BAKER: I know.
TRUMP: I mean, supposing they were able to give me additional — it wouldn’t have helped me. I had so much stuff——
SCHMIDT: Last thing, if Mueller——
TRUMP: And I couldn’t have been better than the stuff I had. Obviously, because I won.
SCHMIDT: Last thing, if Mueller was looking at your finances and your family finances, unrelated to Russia — is that a red line?
HABERMAN: Would that be a breach of what his actual charge is?
TRUMP: I would say yeah. I would say yes. By the way, I would say, I don’t — I don’t — I mean, it’s possible there’s a condo or something, so, you know, I sell a lot of condo units, and somebody from Russia buys a condo, who knows? I don’t make money from Russia. In fact, I put out a letter saying that I don’t make — from one of the most highly respected law firms, accounting firms. I don’t have buildings in Russia. They said I own buildings in Russia. I don’t. They said I made money from Russia. I don’t. It’s not my thing. I don’t, I don’t do that. Over the years, I’ve looked at maybe doing a deal in Russia, but I never did one. Other than I held the Miss Universe pageant there eight, nine years [crosstalk].
SCHMIDT: But if he was outside that lane, would that mean he’d have to go?
[crosstalk]
HABERMAN: Would you consider——
TRUMP: No, I think that’s a violation. Look, this is about Russia. So I think if he wants to go, my finances are extremely good, my company is an unbelievably successful company. And actually, when I do my filings, peoples say, “Man.” People have no idea how successful this is. It’s a great company. But I don’t even think about the company anymore. I think about this. ’Cause one thing, when you do this, companies seem very trivial. O.K.? I really mean that. They seem very trivial. But I have no income from Russia. I don’t do business with Russia. The gentleman that you mentioned, with his son, two nice people. But basically, they brought the Miss Universe pageant to Russia to open up, you know, one of their jobs. Perhaps the convention center where it was held. It was a nice evening, and I left. I left, you know, I left Moscow. It wasn’t Moscow, it was outside of Moscow.
HABERMAN: Would you fire Mueller if he went outside of certain parameters of what his charge is? [crosstalk]
SCHMIDT: What would you do?
[crosstalk]
TRUMP: I can’t, I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Trump: I wouldn’t have hired Sessions if I knew he’d recuse
All In with Chris Hayes 7/19/17
Donald Trump told the New York Times he never would have hired Jeff Sessions as attorney general if he knew he was going to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Duration: 9:31
CBO: New health care bill would leave 32 million uninsured
All In with Chris Hayes 7/19/17
The president threatens and cajoles Republican senators as the CBO says the new, repeal-only plan will leave 32 million people uninsured and double premiums. Duration: 6:38
Rachel Maddow reports on a New York Times interview of Donald Trump in which Trump expresses his dissatisfaction with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Justice Department officials, raising the question of whether any of them will resign. Duration: 15:26
Trump, feeling heat, attacks Justice Department independence
The Rachel Maddow Show 7/19/17
Matthew Miller, former spokesman for the Department of Justice, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump's distorted view that the Justice Department, including the FBI, should be in his loyal service. Duration: 6:51
Congressman Adam Schiff, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, talks with Rachel Maddow about Donald Trump's apparent accidental admission that he talked about sanctions at his second meeting with Vladimir Putin, and concerns about what he may have said. Duration: 9:29
Former Government Ethics Director Shaub: Trump setting wrong tone
The Rachel Maddow Show 7/19/17
Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, talks with Rachel Maddow about the appropriateness of A.G. Jeff Sessions' recusal from campaign-related investigations, and Donald Trump's inappropriateness in addressing his myriad conflicts. Duration: 9:49
Lawrence: Sessions will be a witness against Trump
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell 7/19/17
In an astonishing interview with the New York Times, Trump said if knew Sessions would recuse himself in the Russia probe, he'd have picked a different Attorney General. Lawrence O'Donnell explains this is a "signal" from Trump about the unfolding investigation. Duration: 8:57
Trump attack on Sessions shows he wants loyalty over the law
The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell 7/19/17
Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks says Trump's extraordinary public attack on AG Jeff Sessions reminds her of Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre – and warns Sessions against taking Nixon's legal advice. Mieke Eoyang and John Heilemann also join Lawrence O'Donnell. Duration: 7:58
Lawrence O'Donnell translates what Mitch McConnell told President Donald Trump today after Trump invited all Republican senators to the White House to discuss the Senate's floundering health care legislation. Duration: 3:19
Former congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) joins Lawrence O'Donnell to talk about Trumpcare, the importance of presidential leadership in passing legislation, and Trump's public attack on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Duration: 6:50
NYT: Trump says he regrets making Jeff Sessions attorney general
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 7/19/17
In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Pres. Trump says he wouldn't have hired Jeff Sessions if he knew he was going to recuse himself and blasts James Comey & Bob Mueller. Duration: 9:46
Graham on McCain: Cancer has never had a more worthy opponent
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 7/19/17
Bipartisan support is pouring in after the news Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been diagnosed with brain cancer. MSNBC's Garrett Haake joins with the latest from Capitol Hill. Duration: 3:32
Charlie Sykes: Trump's undermining legitimacy of our elections
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 7/19/17
Discussing the comments from both Pres. Trump and the vice chair of his election integrity commission, Charlie Sykes argues the president is undermining our entire election system. Duration: 4:48
Why did Trump warn Mueller not to go after his finances?
The 11th Hour with Brian Williams 7/19/17
In his stunning interview with The New York Times, Pres. Trump said if Special Counsel investigates too deep into his finances that would be a 'red line.' Charlie Sykes & Eugene Robinson react. Duration: 1:46
Published on Jul 19, 2017 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
The Russian media warns that fidget spinners are a symbol of government opposition, and President Trump holds a secret meeting with Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit.
'How To Be A Russian Oligarch' With Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov
Published on Jul 20, 2017 by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Billionaire Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov shows Stephen the ways of a Russian oligarch, which involves luxurious mansions, grandiose yachts and plentiful bologna.
this is part 5 of a 14-part post which proceeds (point arising on the given) day by (point arising on the given) day from July 15, 2017 through July 28, 2017 -- the preceding part is the post to which this is a reply; the next part is a reply to this post -- the following 'see also (linked in)' listing, updated for intervening posts along the way, is common to all 14 parts
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in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
