Trump: I won’t work with Democrats until probes end
President Donald Trump abruptly blew up a meeting with Democratic congressional leaders on Wednesday, declaring that he could not work with them until they stopped investigating him and lashing out at shot — might effectively be frozen for the foreseeable future while the president and his opponents wage war over the various investigations underway.
President Donald Trump demanded that Democrats ‘get these phony investigations over with.’ He said they could not legislate and investigate simultaneously.
The confrontation came on a day when talk of a possible impeachment drive raised temperatures on both sides of the aisle. Restive House Democrats pressed Pelosi to open a formal inquiry aimed at removing the president from office for high crimes and misdemeanors while both sides sought to gain the upper hand in the escalating conflicts over testimony and documents.
The Justice Department struck a deal with the House Intelligence Committee to provide some secret material related to the special-counsel investigation of Trump and Russia, while a second federal judge ruled against the president’s efforts to block the release of financial information sought by lawmakers.
Trump and Democratic leaders were to meet on Wednesday morning to develop a $2 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s roads, bridges, airports, and other infrastructure. But Pelosi first met with Democrats on Capitol Hill to deflect pressure on impeachment, which she has opposed.
Emerging from that meeting, she sought to signal sympathy with Democrats angry at the president’s efforts to block their investigations, declaring “the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up.”
Trump saw the comments and did not hide his fury when she and Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate Democratic leader, arrived at the White House. The president walked into the Cabinet Room and did not shake anyone’s hand or sit down, according to people in the room. He said that he wanted to advance legislation on infrastructure, trade, and other matters, but Pelosi had said something “terrible” by accusing him of a coverup.
After about three minutes, the president stalked out before anyone else could speak. From there, he headed to the Rose Garden, where a lectern had been set up with a sign that said “No Collusion, No Obstruction” along with statistics intended to show that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller was thorough.
“Instead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover-up,” Trump said. “I don’t do cover-ups.”
“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. I’d be really good at that, that’s what I do. But you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances. So get these phony investigations over with,’ ” he said.
Returning to Capitol Hill, the Democratic leader expressed disappointment and said they were ready to make a deal with the president on infrastructure.
“He just took a pass, and it just makes me wonder why he did that,” Pelosi said. “In any event, I pray for the president of the United States and I pray for the United States of America.”
Schumer expressed shock at the outcome: “To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop.”
Schumer said Trump’s eruption was hardly spontaneous, noting the preprinted sign on the lectern. Instead, he suggested that the president had staged it because he had not come up with a way to pay for such an enormous spending package.
“Hello! There were investigations going on three weeks ago when we met, and he still met with us,” Schumer said. “But now that he was forced to actually say how he would pay for it, he had to run away. And he came up with this preplanned excuse.”
Pelosi did not back down later in the day at a forum sponsored by the leftleaning Center for American Progress. “In plain sight, this president is obstructing justice and is engaged in a cover-up,” she said. “And that could be an impeachable offense.”
The blow-up at the White House was reminiscent of a meeting in January when Trump erupted at Pelosi during the partial government shutdown as he sought money for his promised border wall. After she refused to go along, he snapped “byebye” and stormed out.
In this case, Trump has been in a foul mood since Monday, snapping at aides about his rally in Pennsylvania and complaining about news media coverage of the investigations. In his view, people close to him said, Democrats are seeking to render his presidency illegitimate.
While Democrats assumed he planned to stage a scene at the meeting all along, White House aides said it did not come up at an 8:30 a.m. meeting of the communications team. Instead, they said, Trump saw Pelosi’s comments, which she made around 10 a.m., and seethed with anger.
He then met with a small group of aides in the Oval Office about 45 minutes before she was to arrive at 11:15 a.m. and talked through what he planned to do. He did not get pushback from the assembled aides, though others who were not in the room objected, according to an administration official. Another official insisted that was not the case.
In the Rose Garden, Trump emphasized that he and his team provided documents and testimony to Mueller without citing executive privilege even though he said the special counsel was biased against him. Trump did not himself agree to be interviewed in person.
“These people were out to get us, the Republican Party and President Trump, they were out to get us,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. “So here’s the bottom line,” he added. “There was no collusion, there was no obstruction. We’ve been doing this since I’ve been president, and actually the crime was committed on the other side.”
Prospects for any kind of bipartisan agreement were already dim since several Republicans in the Senate majority had balked at the scope of the package, particularly without a way to pay for it. As in the initial infrastructure meeting three weeks ago, no Republicans from either chamber were present for Wednesday’s meeting at the White House.
But Trump’s curt dismissal of infrastructure negotiations cast a shadow on several budget and funding deadlines, just a day after administration officials began talks with congressional leaders over a possible budget deal. Without an agreement before the fiscal year expires at the end of September, federal agencies will be forced to cut billions of dollars and adhere to strict limits on federal spending.
What was not clear was whether Trump would stick by his refusal to work with Democrats unless they drop their investigations.
“There’s going to be investigations on this administration for a while,” said Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del. “To say that we’re not engaged on trade and other issues because of those investigations, I don’t know how realistic that is. It’s disappointing.”