Tag: Mr.

Since Amazon’s pullout last week, Messrs. Van Bramer and Gianaris have been admonished by public-housing tenants who hoped to land jobs at the campus and supporters who saw the tech giant’s arrival as a boost for Long Island City. “I don’t know where you go from here,” he said. “Jimmy Van Bramer and Mike Gianaris used to be the politicians we came to when we needed help,” the statement said. Mr. Gianaris’s nomination to a state board with sway over the tax incentives also fueled Amazon’s decision. The company said Thursday that some politicians “made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward with the project.” Mr. Van Bramer, a two-term councilman, said Tuesday that he knew opposing Amazon could hurt his political future. Mr. Van Bramer read the polls showing many Queens residents backed the deal. But he said he spoke with residents, many of whom had mixed feelings. He ultimately went with his conscience, he said. But after the Amazon deal ended, he said, “New York will be just fine.” Justin Potter, a 39-year-old Long Island City resident, said he created the website DefeatGianaris.com on Thursday, hours after Amazon’s announcement. While she was angry at Amazon for leaving, she put a lot of the blame on the elected officials opposing the deal, she said.

Since he campaigned here in his losing bid for the presidency two years ago, Bernie Sanders’s brand of politics has surged in the Pittsburgh area. It tells me that when candidates run on a progressive agenda, when they mount strong grassroots campaigns involving in this case hundreds of people, there's no way they're going to lose," Mr. Sanders told the Post-Gazette in an interview Thursday. When the Vermont senator and Democratic Socialist visits Pittsburgh this Sunday to attend a teachers’ union conference and rally with lieutenant governor candidate John Fetterman, he’ll likely ride in on a wave of momentum from the area’s leftward shift in politics, but come equipped with a message of urgency: that in the age of Donald Trump, candidates must fight even harder for the Democratic Socialist ideals of health care for all, raising the minimum wage and reforming the criminal justice system. Tom Wolf against the Republican ticket of Scott Wagner and Jeff Bartos. He said the Braddock Mayor is aware of the difficulties facing the average worker, including that real wages are declining despite low unemployment. "I think John is cognizant of all that, and is a candidate for lieutenant governor who is going to do his best not only to fight for working families, but to bring them into the political process through grassroots organizing," Mr. Sanders said, "and that is exactly what we need all over the country." The recent successes of DSA-backed state House candidates Summer Lee and Sara Innamorato serve as validation, Mr. Sanders said, that the “political revolution,” as he calls it, is picking up steam across the country. He said he was told they would both be attending this Sunday’s rally. Republicans, on the other hand, have sought to link Democratic candidates to the Democratic Socialist message, saying that the platform is unrealistic, unaffordable and disconnected from real working class Americans. Mr. Sanders said he will start his remarks by thanking teachers for making sacrifices and standing up for education, but also promote the ideas of making Pre-K universal and college more affordable.

The prime minister’s challenge is how to manage both the most important Canadian ally and his own domestic politics. “The charm offensive has produced little of what the prime minister hoped.” Even before Mr. Trump came to power, Mr. Trudeau, and his closest aides and cabinet members rushed to connect with the new president and his advisers. Now Mr. Trump is challenging Canada’s longtime dairy system, which uses high tariffs to largely exclude imports. The prospect of a full-on trade war is an alarming proposition; trade with the United States is the economic lifeblood of Canada. “We cannot win a trade war with 75 percent of our trade going to the U.S. We’re highly vulnerable to American actions. He has to deal with the survival of the Canadian economy.” In recent days, Mr. Trump has focused mainly on Canada’s dairy system, known as “supply management,” which is a longstanding irritant between Canada and several other countries, including the United States. Still, the United States sells about five times more dairy products to Canada than Canada exports south. Nonetheless, the supply management system riles up Mr. Trump, who says the Canadian market should be fully opened to American dairy farmers. “The U.S. position on supply management hasn’t changed since President Obama,” said Meredith Lilly, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa and the former international trade adviser to former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Politicians of all political stripes have avoided pushing back, and Canada has won exemptions for the system in several trade agreements, including Nafta and, most recently, a free-trade pact with Europe.

Image WASHINGTON — Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been granted his permanent security clearance, a person briefed on the matter said on Wednesday, ending a period of uncertainty that had fueled questions about whether Mr. Kushner was in peril in the special counsel investigation. background checks dragged on for a year and became one of many political distractions for the White House. Top-secret clearances are typically required for people viewing foreign intelligence or sitting in on high-level White House meetings. But with the special counsel investigating some of Mr. Kushner’s meetings with Russian officials, it left open the question of whether investigators had uncovered evidence that made him a security threat. The special counsel’s investigation had not caused the delay, said Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell. “With respect to the news about his clearances, as we stated before, his application was properly submitted, reviewed by numerous career officials and underwent the normal process,” Mr. Lowell said. Mr. Kushner was among several White House officials who spent the first year of the administration working under provisional clearances, meaning he was allowed to view classified information while his F.B.I. Mr. Kushner met during the campaign with a Russian lawyer who came to Trump Tower promising political dirt on Hillary Clinton. They said he did not conceal Russian contacts; he had not yet begun completing the section requiring him to disclose his foreign contacts. That led only to new questions about Mr. Kushner’s relationship with Mr. Kelly and his future in the White House.

In addition to addressing dozens of party events in recent months, Mr. Pence has effectively made himself the frontman for America First Policies, an outside group set up to back Mr. Trump’s agenda. And Mr. Pence has worked insistently to shape Mr. Trump’s endorsements, prodding him in the contests for governor of Florida and speaker of the House, among others. And Mr. Pence has been intimately involved in planning for the 2020 campaign: He joined Mr. Trump for the meeting where the president told Brad Parscale, a digital strategist in the 2016 election, that he would manage the 2020 race. Mr. Pence recently abandoned an attempt to hire Jon Lerner, a Republican pollster close to Mr. Ayers, as a national security aide, after Mr. Trump discovered Mr. Lerner had helped lead attacks on him in the 2016 election. Two senior White House officials said the Lerner episode made Mr. Trump more acutely aware of what these aides described as Mr. Pence’s empire-building. Mr. Ayers again unsettled skeptics in the West Wing this month by poaching a politically savvy aide to Mr. Trump, William Kirkland, to join the Pence team. “The vice president’s political and fund-raising travel advances the president’s agenda by aiding targeted candidates and committees during the midterms, which is what the president asked us to do,” Ms. Farah said. Mr. Pence counseled the president to let congressional Republicans work things out on their own, according to Republicans close to the White House and congressional leaders. Advisers to Mr. DeSantis remain optimistic that Mr. Trump will intervene again in the race, despite internal resistance. “And the president needs that.”

Image The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently provided President Trump’s lawyers a list of questions he wants answered in an interview. What was the purpose of your Feb. 14, 2017, meeting with Mr. Comey, and what was said? Mr. Comey was fired soon after. There, The Times revealed, Mr. Trump suggested he had fired Mr. Comey because of the pressure from the Russia investigation. Mr. Trump has criticized Mr. Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation. The Times has reported that Mr. Trump told his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, to stop Mr. Though Mr. Trump’s own advisers informed Mr. Mueller about that effort, Mr. Trump denied it: “Fake news,” he said. What discussions did you have during the campaign regarding any meeting with Mr. Putin? This is a key question. This question, along with the next two, show that Mr. Mueller is still investigating possible campaign cooperation with Russia.

WASHINGTON — The White House said Tuesday night that President Trump planned to deploy the National Guard to the southern border to confront what it called a growing threat of illegal immigrants, drugs and crime from Central America after the president for the third consecutive day warned about the looming dangers of unchecked immigration. Speaking to reporters during a news conference with the presidents of three Baltic nations, Mr. Trump described existing immigration laws as lax and ineffective, and called for militarizing the border with Mexico to prevent an influx of Central American migrants he said were ready to stream across it. Last year, the number of illegal immigrants caught at the border was the lowest since 1971, said the United States Border Patrol. That strategy, she said, included mobilizing the National Guard — though Ms. Sanders did not say how many troops would be sent or when — and pressing Congress to close what she called “loopholes” in immigration laws. That prompted White House officials to organize a conference call on Monday afternoon to outline a detailed legislative push they said the president was starting for the new immigration restrictions. The announcements on Monday and Tuesday appeared to be more about political messaging than practical action. “The big Caravan of People from Honduras, now coming across Mexico and heading to our ‘Weak Laws’ Border, had better be stopped before it gets there,” he posted Tuesday on Twitter. “And they did it because, frankly, I said, ‘You really have to do it.’” A White House official said later that Mr. Trump had not, in fact, spoken with President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico on Monday. While the active-duty military is generally barred by law from carrying out domestic law enforcement functions, such as apprehending people at the border, previous presidents have deployed National Guard troops to act in support roles on the border with Mexico. Last February, he called his immigration crackdown “a military operation,” prompting Rex W. Tillerson, then the secretary of state, and Mr. Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, who were visiting Mexico at the time, to push back vigorously.