Trump Watch: Day 180 Wrap-Up
Good evening, Trump watchers. Here is the latest Trump-related news from Wednesday, July 19, 2017:
— On Tuesday Trump said he was okay with letting Obamacare fail. Today he met with and scolded 49 Republican Senators (John McCain was not present due to his surgery; it was just reported by the Washington Post that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer). Trump demanded that they stay in Washington through their scheduled August break until they can reach an agreement on a new healthcare bill. Meanwhile, in light of Trump’s Tuesday comments about repealing Obamacare with no replacement, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that doing so would leave 32 million Americans would lose their health insurance by 2026. The CBO report also said that insurance premiums would double. In light of this report, Larry Levitt, the vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation healthcare research group, tweeted, “CBO projects half the country would have no insurers in the individual market by 2020 under the new repeal bill. That’s a true death spiral.”
— Meanwhile, Politico reported this evening that a group of Republican senators were meeting tonight to discuss a way to move the latest healthcare bill forward. The group included Senators Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rob Portman of Ohio, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Notably absent was Susan Collins of Maine, who was asked to attend but reportedly decided to skip the meeting. Stay tuned.
— The Washington Post reported today that “Trump has decided to end the CIA’s covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad, a move long sought by Russia, according to U.S. officials.” The Obama administration started the covert program in 2013 in an attempt to persuade Bassad to step aside.
— The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to include grandparents and other relatives of Americans in his travel ban from six Muslim-majority countries. The court did, however, grant Trump more leeway in enforcing a separate ban on refugees, which could end up blocking 24,000 refugees who currently have a connection to a U.S. resettlement agency.
— In an interview today with the New York Times, Trump said that he wouldn’t have appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General if he knew that Sessions would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. The direct quote from Trump was, “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.” Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest political supporters, yet the feeling does not seem mutual anymore. In the interview Trump also criticized former FBI director James Comey, Comey’s replacement (acting director Andrew McCabe), and special counsel Robert Mueller who is currently leading the investigation into Russian interference in our election. Trump also disclosed an informal dinner discussion that he had with Vladimir Putin during the G20 summit, in which the two talked about “pleasantries”. You can read many more details about the interview here.
— The eighth person present in Donald Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian government lawyer has been identified as Ike Kaveladze, a man accused of being involved in a U.S.-Russia money laundering scheme involving $1.4 billion. Former Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan investigated Kaveladze during his time on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and CNN reported that he wrote on Facebook today that Kaveladze had “established ‘some 2,000’ US corporations and bank accounts on ‘behalf of people in Russia.’” Additionally, “The owners of those accounts then moved some $1.4 billion through those accounts. Kaveladze claimed he did all this without knowing for whom he was doing it.” Levin called him the “poster child of this practice.”
— In more Trump-Russia news, Trump’s son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner is scheduled to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday regarding the alleged ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but it will be a closed-door session, so we still won’t get to hear Jared’s voice and find out what he sounds like.
—Similarly, Donald Jr. and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort are scheduled to testify before the Senate committee on Wednesday regarding the same topic as Kushner.
That’s all for tonight. Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with another update on Friday evening!
