Trump says Pelosi is behaving ‘irrationally’ in shutdown impasse as Russia questions mount

By Laura King, Los Angeles Times–

As a damaging partial government shutdown hit the 30-day mark on Sunday, President Donald Trump sought to allay criticism from conservative critics who fear he is softening his hard line on immigration, while unleashing strident new attacks against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Trump, in Twitter posts, lambasted the San Francisco Democrat, who has emerged as his chief antagonist in the standoff, for behaving “irrationally” in rejecting his offer Saturday of temporary legal protection for some immigrants and refugees in exchange for the funding he wants for a barrier along the border with Mexico.

Yet the president’s suggested compromise was dismissed as well by his usual allies on the anti-immigration right, many of whom last month encouraged him to provoke the shutdown by refusing to sign funding for a quarter of the government unless he got the $5.7 billion installment he wanted for a border wall.

Meanwhile, questions intensified Sunday over Trump’s efforts to build a tower named for himself in Moscow while he was running for president, an element in wider investigations of the president and his campaign’s relationship with Russia.

The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, confirmed Sunday that talks about the prospective Moscow project continued up to the 2016 election, months longer than previously acknowledged. He also said he was certain that Trump did not urge his former fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about the timeline, while also admitting that he wasn’t sure whether Trump and Cohen spoke about it.

But Giuliani – whose pronouncements on Trump’s legal problems tend to raise more questions than they quell – said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that if the president did communicate with Cohen about his testimony beforehand, it would have been “perfectly normal.”

“So what if he talked to him about it?” Giuliani said.

Senior Democrats who appeared on Sunday’s news talk shows said they would scrutinize both the timing of Trump Tower talks with Russian officials and questions surrounding Cohen’s congressional testimony – even as a Buzzfeed report last week that Trump had instructed Cohen to lie was disputed by the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own Russia investigation, said it was “big news” that Trump was “actively trying to do business in Moscow” as the campaign was nearing its end.

“If those negotiations were ongoing up until the election, I think that’s a relevant fact for voters to know, and I think it’s remarkable we are two years after the fact and just discovering it today,” Warner said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Cohen, who has pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, is due to appear before the House Oversight and Reform Committee next month before going to prison.

Giuliani, also on “Meet the Press,” said conversations about the Trump Tower project “went on throughout 2016.”

“Probably could be up to as far as October, November,” he said. He provided a similar estimate to CNN in December, which contradicted previous public assertions that the project faded away much earlier.

Initially Cohen had testified under oath that talks had ended by January 2016, and then acknowledged in his guilty plea that they stopped in June, just before Trump accepted the Republican nomination. If negotiations with Moscow continued through the year, they took place while Trump, as a presidential nominee, was entitled to see classified intelligence.

Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, who heads the House Intelligence Committee now that Democrats are the majority in the House, reaffirmed that his panel will look closely at Trump’s Russia ties, including the Trump Tower talks and Cohen’s previous testimony.

“We have to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Separately, Schiff joined other senior Democrats in accusing Trump of not making any serious effort to end the partial government shutdown, which is leaving some 800,000 federal workers without pay and crimping a broad range of services to the public, including airport security and payment of farm subsidies.

Pelosi, on Twitter, again urged Trump to “reopen the government, let workers get their paychecks and then we can discuss how we can come together to protect the border.”

The president and his allies slapped back, hitting Democrats for refusing to entertain Trump’s proposal for three years of protection against deportation for about 1 million immigrants, including some immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children and refugees who’ve long been eligible for U.S. residency because of disasters or conflicts in their home countries.

In effect, Trump has offered to provide relief to the groups after he acted to end the programs protecting them; federal courts have intervened to limit his actions.

© Reuters Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks during a press briefing on the 27th day of a partial government shutdown on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 17, 2019. REUTERS/Joshua RobertsThe president aimed most of his wrath at Pelosi, posting on Twitter that she “is so petrified of the ‘lefties’ in her party that she has lost control.” He also took a swipe at her congressional district, adding: “And by the way, clean up the streets in San Francisco, they are disgusting!”

Trump, who has been highly sensitive to criticism from right-wing media outlets about any softening of his immigration stance, insisted that his offer Saturday did not amount to an “amnesty” –– which is anathema to his conservative base.

Vice President Mike Pence, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said the proposal did not amount to an amnesty because “there’s no pathway to citizenship.”

Yet in his Twitter posts, Trump tipped his hand about the administration’s longer-term strategy to extract concessions from the Democrats –– one that would undoubtedly rile his hardest-line supporters.

“Amnesty will be used only on a much bigger deal, whether on immigration or something else,” the president wrote.

Trump included a thinly veiled threat of a large-scale roundup of immigrants here illegally, many of whom have been in the country for many years: “There will be no big push to remove the 11,000,000 plus people who are here illegally – but be careful Nancy!”

In a separate appearance on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Pence suggested that some rank-and-file Democrats were ready to break with Pelosi and other Democratic leaders and seek a deal to end the shutdown, though he refused to name them.

The No. 3 House Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, suggested that Trump’s plan could at least serve as the basis for talks.

He said on “Fox News Sunday” that Democrats sought a “permanent fix” both for participants in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and for the refugees, many of them from Central America, whose temporary protected status is in jeopardy.

“Let’s go back and forth on this and see where we can find common ground,” Clyburn said. “We are all for negotiations.”

But, echoing other Democratic leaders, Clyburn said that before to any such talks, Trump should first agree to fund and reopen the government.

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