NATION
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news
conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York,
Wednesday.
he had spoken with Trump
Wednesday evening and told
him he does not believe any
leaks came from the intelli-
gence community.
One U.S. official told The
Associated Press Tuesday
night that intelligence people
had informed Trump last
week about an unsubstanti-
ated report that Russia had
compromising personal and
financial information about
him. Some media outlets
reported on the document,
which contains unproven
information alleging close
coordination
between
Trump’s inner circle and
Russians, as well as unver-
ified claims about unusual
sexual activities by Trump.
The AP has not authenticated
any of the claims.
Clapper said Wednesday
he had told Trump the intel-
ligence community “has not
made any judgment that the
information in this document
is reliable.”
Wednesday’s
news
conference was initially
billed as a chance for Trump
to answer questions about
his plans for distancing
himself from his sprawling,
family-owned real estate and
licensing business. Lawyer
Sheri Dillon stepped to the
lectern midway through
the event to announce that
the president-elect was
relinquishing control of the
Trump Organization to his
adult sons and an executive,
as well as putting his busi-
ness assets in a trust. While
new international business
deals will be banned, the
company will be allowed to
start new projects in the U.S.
The move appears to
contradict a previous pledge
by the president-elect. In a
tweet last month, Trump said
that “no new deals” would be
done while he was in office.
With dramatic flair, Trump
aides piled stacks of manila
folders on a table next to the
lectern - in front of 10 Amer-
ican flags - before the news
conference began. Trump
said the folders contained
documents he had signed
formalizing the new business
arrangements, though jour-
nalists were not able to view
and independently verify the
materials.
Some 250 journalists
crammed into the Trump
Tower lobby for the news
conference, which was not
only Trump’s first since the
election, but his first since
July. Journalists shouted
for his attention. At times,
he skipped past questions
he appeared to not want to
answer, including an inquiry
about whether he would keep
in place sanctions Obama
slapped on Russia in retali-
ation for the election-related
hacking.
Tillerson takes tough line on Moscow
WASHINGTON
(AP)
— Barraged by questions
about
Russia,
Donald
Trump’s pick for secretary
of state promised a far more
muscular approach toward
the Kremlin on Wednesday,
abandoning much of the
president-elect’s emphasis
on improving ties between
the Cold War foes. Instead,
Rex Tillerson suggested the
outgoing Obama adminis-
tration responded too softly
to Moscow’s takeover of
Ukrainian territory.
The surprising shift in
tone by Tillerson, a former
Exxon Mobil CEO and
Russian “Order of Friend-
ship” recipient, reflected the
difficulty Trump will have
in persuading Democrats
and Republicans to broach
a broad rapprochement with
President Vladimir Putin’s
government. Calling Russia a
“danger” to the United States,
Tillerson said he would
keep U.S. sanctions in place
and consider new penalties
related to Russian meddling
in the presidential election.
Although he said he
Tillerson
hadn’t read last week’s
classified assessment by the
U.S. intelligence community,
Tillerson said it was a “fair
assumption” that Putin would
have ordered the operation
that purportedly included
hacking, propaganda and
internet trolls to harm Hillary
Clinton’s candidacy and
advance Trump’s. But in a
puzzling revelation, Tillerson
conceded he hadn’t yet talked
with Trump about a Russia
policy.
“Russia today poses a
danger, but it is not unpre-
dictable in advancing its own
interests,” Tillerson told the
Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. He added that
Trump’s
administration
would be committed to the
defense of America’s NATO
partners, an obligation the
president-elect called into
question during the campaign
if allies failed to meet defense
spending pledges.
While
his
prepared
statement reflected some of
Trump’s desire for improved
ties, Tillerson quickly pivoted
under pressure from both
sides of the aisle. On Russia’s
2014 annexation of the
Crimea region, he said, “That
was a taking of territory that
was not theirs.”
Still, he criticized Presi-
dent Barack Obama’s sanc-
tions on Russia, which ended
up costing Exxon hundreds
of millions of dollars. And he
declared that he would have
responded by urging Ukraine
to send all available military
units to its eastern border with
Russia and recommending
U.S. and allied support
through defensive weapons
and air surveillance, to send
a message to Moscow.
Ethics chief blasts Trump plan to keep business profits
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The director of the federal
government’s ethics agency
Wednesday blasted Presi-
dent-elect Donald Trump’s
plan to maintain his business
empire by turning it over to
his sons instead of selling off
all his corporate assets and
placing remaining profits in a
government-approved blind
trust.
U.S. Office of Govern-
ment Ethics Director Walter
Shaub took the rare step of
commenting publicly about
a presidential ethics decision,
warning that Trump’s solu-
tion to a potential cascade
of conflicts spurred by his
global business holdings
breaks 40 years of precedent
by presidents from both
parties.
Shaub, a 2013 Obama
appointee who also worked at
the agency during the George
W. Bush administration,
openly pleaded with Trump
to reconsider his plan before
his inauguration. Shaub said
Trump should commit to
“divestiture,” a process under
which he would sell his
corporate assets and place the
profit in a blind trust admin-
istered by a neutral trustee
approved by the OGE.
Emails between the
OGE and the Trump tran-
sition team obtained by the
Associated Press show that
Shaub repeatedly tried to
engage with Trump’s aides
late last year to persuade
the president-elect and his
Cabinet choices to agree to
divestiture as the cleanest
way to clear aware potential
ethics conflicts posed by their
investments and businesses.
But
while
lawyers
for several Trump picks,
including prospective Secre-
tary of State Rex Tillerson and
senior adviser Jared Kushner,
have worked closely with the
OGE in shaping divestiture
plans, Trump’s own lawyers
and aides gave the federal
agency no official advance
notice of his plan to turn
over his global empire to his
sons, according to an official
familiar with interactions
between the two sides.
The
official,
who
requested anonymity to
detail the sensitive contacts
between the two sides,
said that Shaub met once
with Trump’s prospective
White House counsel, Don
McGahn, in recent weeks,
but only to discuss ethics
plans for several of Trump’s
picks, not for Trump’s own
plan to deal with his holdings.
An outside attorney for
Trump, Sheri Dillon of firm
Morgan Lewis & Bockius,
said that Trump plans to have
his companies’ operations
directed by his two sons, but
they would pursue new deals
only in the U.S., not abroad.
Additionally, Dillon said,
Trump would put his business
assets in a trust but would
hand over management of his
international real estate firms
to a management company
based in New York.
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NEW YORK (AP) — In a
combative and freewheeling
news conference, Presi-
dent-elect Donald Trump said
for the first time Wednesday
that he accepts Russia was
behind the election year
hacking of Democrats that
roiled the White House race.
Looking ahead, he urged
Congress to move quickly
to replace President Barack
Obama’s signature health
care law and insisted anew
that Mexico will pay the cost
of a border wall.
The hour-long spectacle in
the marbled lobby of Trump’s
Manhattan skyscraper was
his first news conference
since winning the election
in early November, and the
famously
unconventional
politician demonstrated he
had not been changed by the
weight of his victory.
He defiantly denied
reports that Russia had
collected
compromising
personal
and
financial
information about him,
lambasting the media for
peddling “fake news” and
shouting down a journalist
from CNN, which reported
on the matter. His family and
advisers clapped and cheered
him on throughout.
Trump’s transition has
been shadowed by U.S.
intelligence assessments that
Russia not only meddled in
the election, but did so to help
him defeat Democrat Hillary
Clinton. After spending
weeks challenging that idea,
Trump finally accepted at
least part of the intelligence
conclusions.
“As far as hacking, I think
it was Russia,” Trump said,
quickly adding that “other
countries and other people”
also hack U.S. interests.
Still, he kept needling the
intelligence agencies, saying
it would be a “tremendous
blot” on their record if
officials were leaking infor-
mation from his classified
briefings.
Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper
said in a statement later that
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Combative Trump concedes
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Thursday, January 12, 2017