President Donald Trump will make an Ohio business that gave it’s employees $1,000 bonuses the poster child for the GOP’s sweeping tax cuts today.
The president is touring and delivering remarks at Sheffer Corporation, a company in Blue Ash that manufactures hydraulic cylinders.
First Lady Melania Trump will accompany her husband to Ohio but will not attend his speech. She is separately visiting a children’s hospital in Cincinnati.
The Trumps’ round trip will keep them away from the hornet’s nest that Republicans dropped on Washington last Friday with the president’s assistance.
President Donald Trump will make an Ohio business that gave it’s employees $1,000 bonuses the poster child for the GOP’s sweeping tax cuts today
Trump declassified a memo put together by top Republican lawmakers on the House Intelligence Committee that accuses the Department of Justice and FBI of FISA surveillance abuses.
The controversial document, nicknamed the ‘Nunes memo’ after the committee’s Republican chair, California Rep. Devin Nunes, claims the FBI relied heavily on an unverified dossier of dirt on Trump to obtain permission from a secretive court to surveil one of his unpaid foreign policy advisers on the basis of their alleged connections to the Kremlin.
The adviser, Carter Page, made a trip to Moscow in 2016 that was technically unaffiliated with Trump’s campaign, though he provided readouts of his activities to senior staff. He was revealed last week to have bragged about being an ‘informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin’ in a 2013 letter.
Federal officials authorized surveillance on Page before and after Trump took office that was carried out with the permission of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge, the Nunes memo revealed.
Nunes classified memo had been the subject of partisan bickering for weeks that reached new heights on Friday when President Trump approved the document’s release.
Former FBI Director James Comey, ex-deputy director Andrew McCabe and the Trump-appointed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were among the senior law enforcement officials to give the application for surveillance their stamp of approval.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee claim that McCabe, who slid into retirement last week, told them in a closed-door session that the dossier, which was complied by an ex-British spy and funded by the Democratic Party, was the basis for the FISA warrant to spy on Page.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee and one of the only Members of Congress who has seen the warrant, has said the claims are untrue.
As he announced his decision to declassify the memo on Friday, President Trump said ‘A lot of people should be ashamed of themselves and much worse than that.’
The president suggested at the tail end of his remarks Rosenstein’s job was in jeopardy, inciting panic within the Beltway that a Nixon-esque Saturday Night Massacre was on the way.
White House deputy press secretaries Raj Shah and Hogan Gidley were sent to play clean up on Fox News and CNN.
‘It’s been very clear throughout the process in the White House, there are no conversations and no considerations about firing Rod Rosenstein,’ Gidley said.
President Trump’s tour of Sheffer today is in support of the agenda he reviewed in his national address on the State of the Union last Tuesday.
It is one of the only ones he has lined up after opting out of the travel blitz that has traditionally dovetailed presidents’ remarks to a joint session of Congress.
Other events outside the White House last week were strictly limited to Republican legislators attending a retreat in West Virginia and Republican National Committee members in Washington for the political organ’s winter meeting.
Trump made a short jaunt to Sterling, Virginia, on Friday afternoon for a discussion on border security with immigration officials before a weekend in Palm Beach, where he attended a Super Bowl Party at his private golf club.
His visit this afternoon to Ohio is his third trip to Cincinnati since he was elected.
Last time he was in town, Trump pushed a $1 trillion infrastructure plan that his administration was unable to get off the ground. Trump hopes to make a new push for the public-private partnership with a new target of $1.7 trillion in spending in the coming weeks.