WASHINGTON — The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday launched a broad inquiry into the potential influence that Russia and other foreign powers may be exercising over President Trump, acting just hours after a defiant Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that the House would not be cowed by the president’s “all-out threat” to drop its investigations of his administration.
Other committees were zeroing in on similarly sensitive oversight targets. On Thursday, Democrats will begin their quest to secure the president’s long-suppressed tax returns. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, warned the acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, on Wednesday that he could not avoid Democratic questioning. And a House Appropriations subcommittee chairwoman began an inquiry into administration rule-bending during the 35-day government shutdown.
“It’s our congressional responsibility, and if we didn’t do it, we would be delinquent in that,” Ms. Pelosi said of the House’s oversight role, just hours after Mr. Trump used his State of the Union address to warn that “ridiculous partisan investigations” threatened the nation’s economic health and the prospects of bipartisan legislating.
That, Ms. Pelosi said, “was a threat; it was an all-out threat.”
Despite Mr. Trump’s warning, the gears of congressional oversight — which were mostly still under Republican control during Mr. Trump’s first two years in office — began to turn in the portrait-lined hearing rooms of the House office buildings.
Democrats will reopen the inquiry into Russia’s election interference efforts and possible collusion with the Trump campaign that the Republican majority closed last year. But they will add “interconnected lines of inquiry,” including whether Russia or other foreign actors hold financial or other leverage over Mr. Trump and his associates that at any point could have influenced American policy. Democrats also added a broadly construed obstruction of justice component to their work for the first time.
President Trump dismissed the inquiry, saying he had “never heard of” the Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam B. Schiff of California, even though he has previously taunted Mr. Schiff with a vulgarism.
“He’s just a political hack. He’s trying to build a name for himself,” the president said, adding, “no other politician has to go through that. It’s called presidential harassment. And it’s unfortunate. And it really does hurt our country.”
Mr. Schiff shot back, “I can understand why the idea of meaningful oversight terrifies the president. Look, several associates of his have gone to jail. Others are awaiting trial. But we’re going to do our oversight. We are not going to be intimidated by his vulgar threats.”
He said the expanded Russia investigation would be done in collaboration with other committees, presumably including the Financial Services Committee, which is pursuing potential money laundering in the Trump Organization.
“Our job involves making sure the policy of the United States is being driven by the national interest, not by any financial entanglement, financial leverage or other form of compromise,” Mr. Schiff said in a news conference.
Intelligence Committee Republicans, who have already begun to accuse the Democrats of politically motivated overreach, did not sign on to the investigation. In a separate statement, they called on Democrats to subpoena unnamed witnesses they recommended.
In its meeting, the committee also voted to share transcripts of witness interviews that it conducted related to Russian election interference with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Mueller has already used two such transcripts to charge associates of the president with lying to Congress, and Democrats believe others could have intentionally misled the committee.
Other committees were making moves, too.
The Judiciary Committee had called a meeting on Thursday to vote on a subpoena to compel testimony from Mr. Trump’s acting attorney general, if needed. Mr. Whitaker, a loyalist of the president’s who is currently overseeing Mr. Mueller’s work, is scheduled to testify voluntarily on Friday, but Democrats have concerns that he may try to back out or dodge questions about the firing of his predecessor, the president’s attacks on the Justice Department and other matters related to the Mueller inquiry.
“For the first two years of the Trump Administration, Congress allowed government witnesses to dodge uncomfortable questions,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement. “That era is over.”
Perhaps most personally for the president, a Ways and Means oversight subcommittee will hold its first hearing on Thursday to start building a public rationale to pursue Mr. Trump’s tax returns.
Democrats view obtaining Mr. Trump’s returns — which he has refused to release, defying modern political norms — as necessary for their broader inquiries into potential conflicts of interest between his role as president and his business operations, as well as accusations of money laundering that may have involved Russian oligarchs or other financial crimes, including those being pursued by the Intelligence Committee. But the request is fraught with tension, both because of an anticipated legal challenge from the administration and pressure from the party’s left flank on leaders who are proceeding slowly to try to build an airtight public relations and legal case.
Meantime, Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, chairwoman of the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Interior Department, asked the Government Accountability Office to issue a formal opinion on the administration’s diversion of user fees at the national parks to fund operations during the government shutdown. Such funds are supposed to be earmarked for long-term capital improvement projects.
“We will not be bullied by the president of the United States,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The days of the House operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump administration are over.”
Advisers around the president have been preparing for the congressional onslaught for months, and they know there is little hope of dissuading Democrats, who won control of the House by promising to be a check on Mr. Trump. That, and the long history of congressional oversight of the executive branch, made Mr. Trump’s comments on Tuesday night all the more surprising to lawmakers.
“An economic miracle is taking place in the United States — and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics or ridiculous partisan investigations,” the president said amid a broader call for bipartisan cooperation between the two branches. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”
Ms. Pelosi said that was a false choice, telling reporters on Wednesday that Democrats could engage with Mr. Trump on issues like immigration and reducing prescription drug pricing while also holding his administration accountable.
Ms. Pelosi also offered measured optimism around ongoing negotiations between appropriators from the House and Senate over a spending package to secure the southern border. But she hinted that Mr. Trump could pose a threat to any final deal.
“Left to their own devices, I think they could have an agreement by, on time by Friday,” she said. Ms. Pelosi added that she would support any such agreement, and urged the White House to “have the same attitude and respect for the appropriations process.”
Earlier, in a closed-door meeting with House Democrats, Ms. Pelosi had privately lambasted the president.
“He was a guest in our House chamber, and we treated him with more respect than he treated us,” she said, according to a Democratic aide in the room who was not authorized to discuss the private session publicly.
Ms. Pelosi also took a dig at Mr. Trump’s plan, detailed on Tuesday, to invest $500 million over ten years to developing new cures for childhood cancer, characterizing it as paltry.
“Five hundred million dollars over 10 years — are you kidding me?” she said, according to the aide. “Who gave him that figure? It’s like the cost of his protection of his Mar-a-Lago or something.”
El Paso’s Message for Trump Before Rally: Don’t Speak for Us
"Fact-checking President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address"
Trump's scare tactics, and constant lying, and fraudulent abuse of American citizens who are affected the most in this issue, and others, is umm, annoying more people than not.
A young woman and her friends celebrate her quinceañera by posing for photographs at an overlook in El Paso. The tension surrounding President Trump’s planned visit to the city on Monday is revealing political fissures. Jessica Lutz for The New York Times
By Simon Romero Feb. 10, 2019
EL PASO — Ahead of President Trump’s scheduled rally in this West Texas city aimed at building support for his proposed wall on the border with Mexico, people from across the ideological spectrum in El Paso had a message for him on Sunday: Don’t speak for us.
“The president is just wrong about the wall and wrong about El Paso,” said Jon Barela, a lifelong Republican and chief executive of the Borderplex Alliance, an organization promoting economic development in a cross-border industrial hub with a combined population of more than 2.7 million, taking in the cities of El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and Las Cruces.
“As a fiscally conservative Republican, I just don’t understand how spending $25 billion on a wall with limited effectiveness is a good idea,” Mr. Barela said in an interview. “Mexico is an economic and strategic ally of the United States, and an antiquated effort to place a barrier between us just won’t work.”
Dee Margo, the Republican mayor of El Paso, voiced similar criticism of Mr. Trump’s description of El Paso, in his State of the Union address, as “one of the nation’s most dangerous cities” before the barrier went up on the border. Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat recently elected to Congress to represent El Paso, is asking Mr. Trump to apologize .. https://kfoxtv.com/news/local/rep-escobar-asking-president-trump-to-apologize-to-el-pasoans .. and meet with migrant families seeking asylum in the United States.
The tension surrounding Mr. Trump’s planned visit to El Paso on Monday is revealing political fissures. A Democratic bastion in a state where Republicans have long wielded dominance in statewide politics, El Paso is also home to Beto O’Rourke, the former local congressman who is a star of the Democratic Party and a potential challenger to Mr. Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
At the same time Mr. Trump is scheduled to speak before about 6,000 people at the El Paso County Coliseum, Mr. O’Rourke will speak at another rally a mile away. Mr. O’Rourke said in an essay on Medium that Mr. Trump “will promise a wall and will repeat his lies about the dangers that immigrants pose.”
El Paso, where Hispanics account for about 80 percent of the population, was already hostile ground for Mr. Trump. In the 2016 election, he took only about 26 percent of the vote in El Paso County.
Friends play a weekly game of handball at El Paso’s Lincoln Park.CreditJessica Lutz for The New York Times
Still, the president shouldn’t have a problem filling the venue. Some of his supporters in the city remain eager to hear what Mr. Trump has to say.
“I’d like to see a wall go up along the entire border,” said Joshua Ascencio, 21, a cavalry scout in the United States Army who has plans to become an agent with the Border Patrol when he leaves the military. Mr. Ascencio said he was looking forward to Mr. Trump’s rally.
“I’m a supporter of the president and I think it’s important to be there for him,” said Mr. Ascencio. “I want to hear him on border security.”
Still, for many others in this city of immigrants the mere idea of Mr. Trump coming to El Paso to promote his administration’s crackdown on immigration raises hackles.
“The president of the United States is, disgracefully, nothing more than a racist,” said Mayra Cabral, 37, an immigrant who grew up across the border in Ciudad Juárez and now cleans tables at a restaurant in El Paso, where she has lived for the last 19 years after marrying an American citizen.
Ms. Cabral laughed out loud when asked about Mr. Trump’s claims that Hispanic immigrants bring crime to the United States. She said that El Paso is normally so calm that it’s “boring here sometimes.” Ms. Cabral added that she and her family were not getting waylaid by talk of the president’s visit; on Saturday night, they hosted a quinceañera .. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/nyregion/the-quinceanera-a-rite-of-passage-in-transition.html?module=inline .. for her 15-year-old daughter attended by about 300 people.
“I was able to do this for my daughter because I work at a job that people born in the United States won’t do,” Ms. Cabral said. “Trump likes to call us criminals, but what about all the Americans in the country who commit violent crimes? Why doesn’t he talk about them for once?”
Mr. Trump appears to have homed in on El Paso after meeting with Republican officials from Texas in January in McAllen, a city affected by a large influx of migrant families traveling through the Rio Grande Valley. At that meeting, Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas told Mr. Trump that the construction of border fencing in El Paso caused crime to fall in the city.
But while El Paso has long been relatively safer than other American cities its size, the violent crime rate in the city actually climbed briefly just before and in the two years after authorities installed fencing on the border as part of an effort to improve border security during the administration of George W. Bush.
Pedestrians in Chihuahuita, considered by many to be El Paso’s oldest neighborhood.CreditJessica Lutz for The New York Times
The contested assertions of a senior state official comes at a time of ratcheting tension in Texas over the treatment of Latino voters by Republican state officials, who in January called into question the citizenship status of nearly 100,000 voters. County officials found that the list of voters, which was referred to by Mr. Paxton in a campaign fund-raising email with the headline “VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” actually included scores of naturalized citizens.
The Mexican American Legal Defense Fund filed a lawsuit .. https://www.maldef.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Texas-SOS-Complaint.pdf .. this month against Mr. Paxton, Gov. Greg Abbott and Secretary of State David Whitley of Texas, arguing that they conspired to purge Latinos from voter rolls following a surge in turnout by Latino voters in the midterm elections.
Governor Abbott and United States Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican who narrowly defeated Mr. O’Rourke to hold on to his seat in November, are among the Republican officials from around the state who are expected to attend the rally on Monday in support of Mr. Trump.
In Nogales, Ariz., the City Council on Wednesday passed a resolution .. https://nogalescityaz.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=1&ID=1396&Inline=True .. condemning the recent installation of new barbed wire along the existing border wall in that city, calling it an “indiscriminate use of lethal force” that is “typically only found in a war, battlefield or prison setting.”
Gaining public support for the idea of a wall at an event such as the rally in El Paso will be important for Mr. Trump, as talks for a bipartisan agreement on border security appeared to have stalled .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/10/us/politics/trump-border-wall.html?module=inline .. on Sunday amid lingering disagreement over how much should be spent on a border barrier. President Trump, who initially proposed spending $25 billion on a wall, now is looking for $5.7 billion. Democratic lawmakers have talked about a figure closer to $1.3 billion to $2 billion.
A second government shutdown could be in the works if no agreement is reached.
Bob Giles, a car dealer from Lafayette, La., who is building a new Volvo dealership in El Paso, said that he understood how Mr. Trump’s proposed wall could seem like a good idea from an “outside perspective.”
“But when you spend time in El Paso and talk to people, it’s clear they take offense that a wall made a difference in the city,” said Mr. Giles. While Mr. Trump often speaks of a crisis on the border, Mr. Giles said he hasn’t seen one.
“That’s not the word I would choose,” he said. His own hope is to sell cars not just to Americans, but also to business executives from Juárez who have homes in El Paso. “This is an incredibly vibrant market with lots of construction going on,” he said. “It makes a difference when you see it with your own eyes.”
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
