Trump: Never was, never will be fan of McCain
WASHINGTON — Carrying a bitter personal feud beyond the grave, President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on the late Sen. John McCain on Tuesday, declaring he will “never” be a fan of the Vietnam War hero and longtime Republican lawmaker who died last year of brain cancer.
“I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
The fresh vitriol followed Trump’s weekend tweets insulting the 2008 Republican presidential candidate. He repeated some of those attacks, complaining about McCain’s vote against repealing President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Trump’s initial tweets drew a sharp rebuke from McCain’s daughter, Meghan. “He spends his weekend obsessing over great men because he knows it and I know it and all of you know it — he will never be a great man,” Meghan McCain said on ABC’s “The View.’’
Flattery pays for ‘Trump of the Tropics’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump welcomed Brazil’s new far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro — the “Trump of the Tropics” who ran an unabashedly pro-Trump campaign — to the White House Tuesday and made clear that flattery pays. At a joint news conference, Trump announced that he’d agreed to designate Brazil a “major non-NATO ally” — something Brazil had pursued to smooth U.S. weapons purchases and military coordination.
Records show special counsel zeroed in on Cohen early on
NEW YORK — Hundreds of pages of court records made public Tuesday revealed that special counsel Robert Mueller quickly zeroed in on Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, in the early stages of his Russia probe.
The heavily blacked-out records, released by a judge at the request of news organizations, show that Mueller was investigating Cohen by July 2017 — much earlier than previously known — and practically a year before an FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office.
The full scope of Mueller’s interest in Cohen is not clear, but the documents made public Tuesday show that Mueller’s investigators early on began looking into possible misrepresentations Cohen made to banks to shore up his financially troubled taxi business.