On Politics A.M.: Mulvaney Undercuts Trump on Ukraine Aid

2019年10月18日星期五

October 18, 2019

Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.

Undercutting President Trump, Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, said Thursday that the Trump administration withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to pressure Ukraine to investigate Democrats. He later took back his comments.

The United States ambassador to the European Union told House impeachment investigators on Thursday that Mr. Trump had delegated American foreign policy on Ukraine to his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani.
Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas who has become enmeshed in the Ukraine scandal, said he would resign as secretary of energy.

Mr. Trump decided to host the Group of 7 meeting next June at Trump National Doral, his luxury resort near Miami, a decision that prompted immediate questions about whether it was a conflict of interest for him to choose one of his own properties for a diplomatic event.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, a son of sharecroppers who rose to become one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, died on Thursday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. He was 68.
The death of Mr. Cummings left a void at the helm of a crucial investigative committee leading the impeachment inquiry into Mr. Trump, setting off a quiet but consequential contest among Democrats to succeed him as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
Vice President Mike Pence on Thursday agreed to a deal with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that accepted a Turkish military presence in a broad part of northern Syria in exchange for the promise of a five-day cease-fire, completing an abrupt reversal of American policy in the Syrian conflict.
The cease-fire agreement amounts to a near-total victory for Mr. Erdogan, who gains territory, pays little in penalties and appears to have outmaneuvered Mr. Trump.
The Senate failed to overturn Mr. Trump's veto of a resolution that would have terminated the national emergency he declared at the southwestern border. The defeat allows Mr. Trump to continue to defy Congress and divert federal funds to the construction of a border wall.