Trump, angry over probes, blows up infrastructure meeting
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump abruptly blew up an infrastructure meeting with Democratic leaders at the White House on Wednesday and declared that bipartisan cooperation was impossible while House committees are investigating him, underscoring the increasing combustibility between two warring branches of government.
Trump refused to even sit down when he walked into the scheduled Cabinet Room meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Franciso, and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. He then headed to a hastily called news conference in the Rose Garden.
Trump told reporters there that he gave the surprised Democratic leaders an ultimatum, warning that they needed to choose between pursuing infrastructure or their increasingly aggressive investigations of his finances, businesses and administration.
“You probably can’t go down two tracks,” he said. “You can go down the investigation track, or you can go down the investment track.”
“I walked into the room and I told Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi, ‘I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it,’” said Trump. “... But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with.”
The latest acrimony erupted as the president was dealt another setback in court. For the second time in two days, a federal judge rejected Trump’s refusal to honor congressional subpoenas and ordered him to turn over financial records to Democratic-led committees.
On Wednesday, a federal judge in New York rejected Trump’s efforts to block a subpoena aimed at forcing Deutsche Bank and Capital One to hand over the president’s financial records to the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees. Trump’s attorneys are expected to appeal the decision.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington had ruled that Trump cannot block a subpoena from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for financial information from his accounting firm, Mazars USA. Trump’s lawyers already have appealed.
And lawmakers in New York passed legislation Wednesday that will allow the state’s Department of Taxation and Finance to release the state tax returns of public officeholders at the federal, state and local levels that are requested by the leaders of congressional tax-writing committees. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, is expected to sign the bill into law.
It wasn’t clear if Trump’s threat not to cooperate with Democrats was mere bluster or whether it signaled the death knell to any infrastructure plan or other compromises on other key legislative issues, such as a trade deal or a prescription drug bill, before the 2020 election.
In January, Trump stormed out of a meeting with Pelosi and Schumer during a partial government shutdown over funding for a southern border wall. The 35-day shutdown ended when Trump backed down.
Trump lay down a similar threat of noncooperation during his State of the Union address in February, saying: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation. It just doesn’t work that way!”
Trump made clear Wednesday that he was irked by Pelosi’s charges, made at an earlier news conference, that the president’s stonewalling of up to 20 House investigations amounts to a “coverup,” comments that added fuel to some Democrats’ demands for impeachment proceedings.
“I don’t do cover-ups,” Trump said, blaming Democrats for what he called unfair harassment. “These people are out to get us,” he said.
After returning to the Capitol, Democrats called their own news conference to say they were stunned that Trump had stormed out of the meeting before anyone else could speak.
“To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” Schumer said. “We are interested in doing infrastructure. It’s clear the president isn’t. He is looking for every excuse.”