SUMMARY: Ohio Gov. John Kasich told an audience one year ago that voters faced a choice; a path based on solutions, or one based on paranoia that exploits fear and anger. At the time, Kasich was running for President and today, he's written a new book called “Two Paths: America Divided or United.” Judy Woodruff sits down with Kasich for a discussion about NAFTA, healing division and President Trump.
I just read that the Trump administration has filled only 22 of the 553 key positions that require Senate confirmation. This makes me worry that the administration will not have enough manpower to produce the same volume and standard of incompetence that we've come to expect so far.
Granted, in its first few months the administration has produced an impressive amount of ineptitude with very few people.
On his worst days Sean Spicer can produce more errors than 10 normal men on their best days. Kellyanne Conway can flail her way through television confrontations 24/7 and still have the stamina to lose to the Teletubbies on Saturday morning.
The White House staffing system is successfully answering the question, 'How many scorpions can you fit in a bottle?' And in general, the personnel process has been so rigorous in its selection of inexperience that those who were hired on the basis of mere nepotism look like Dean Acheson by comparison.
But still, I worry that at the current pace the Trump administration is going to run out of failure. So far, we've lived in a golden age of malfunction. Every major Trump initiative has been blocked or has collapsed, relationships with Congress are disastrous, the President's approval ratings are at cataclysmic lows.
But can this last? By midsummer, during the high vacation and indictment season, we could see empty hallways in the West Wing and a disorienting incompetence shortage emanating from Washington.
The executive branch could simply go dark. CNN's ratings will plummet. Columnists will wither and die. Liberals will have to go without the delicious current of schadenfreude and their daily ritual baths of moral superiority.
Now I'm not underestimating the President's own capacity for carrying on in an incompetent manner almost indefinitely. I don't think we've reached peak Trump.
The normal incompetent person flails and stammers and is embarrassed about it. But the true genius at incompetence like our President flails and founders and is too incompetent to recognize his own incompetence. He mistakes his catastrophes for successes and so accelerates his pace toward oblivion. Those who ignore history are condemned to retweet it.
Trump's greatest achievements are in the field of ignorance. Up until this period I had always thought of ignorance as a void, as an absence of knowledge. But Trump's ignorance is not just an absence; it is a rich, intricate and entirely separate universe of negative information, a sort of fertile intellectual antimatter with its own gravitational pull.
It's not so much that he isn't well informed; it's that he is prodigiously learned in the sort of knowledge that doesn't accord with the facts of our current dimension.
It is in its own way a privilege to be alive at the same time as a man who is the Albert Einstein of confirmation bias, a man whose most impressive wall is the one between himself and evidence, a man who doesn't need to go off in search of enemies because he is already his own worst one.
But even Trump will eventually hit the limits of human endurance. I know what it is like to be profoundly incompetent, and it is exhausting.
Just to take a small example by way of illustration, in the days before GPS I was (and remain) profoundly incompetent at comprehending driving directions. I would ask for directions and all would start off normally: “Go down Fourth Street and take a right on Poplar.”
But then all would slide into a fog of incomprehensibility and I would keep nodding furiously to try to persuade the person that I could follow what was being said: “Then you toggle over that spur of the thruway that goes under the overpass before the six roundabouts of the gargle.”
By this time entire hemispheres of my brain had shut down, and as the person kept talking, my entire existence slipped into a catatonic mist: “After that it's just six wheedles up the perplex and after a quick stop at the bolint it's the 27th driveway on the right.”
The incompetent person in the Trump administration has to live in that stupor shroud every day.
So I hope the Trump team learns to delegate — carelessness in one office, backbiting in another. I hope the president continues to play golf (I don't get those progressive critics who say Trump is ruining the world and then they complain because he takes time off). I hope his team continues to take advantage of the fact that it takes only one inexperienced stooge to undo the accomplishments of 100 normal workers.
And I hope it continues to negatively surpass all expectations. I remain a full-fledged member in the community of the agog.
One of the things I've learned about incompetence over the past few months is that it is radically nonlinear. Competent people go in one of a few directions. But incompetence is infinite.
The human imagination is not capacious enough to comprehend all the many ways the Trumpians can find to screw this thing up.
SUMMARY: Steve Bannon, chief strategist to President Trump, has also worked extensively in the film world, including writing and directing documentaries on the global financial crisis, alleged corruption in the Clinton Foundation, and what he sees as the rise of a violent and radical Islam. Jeffrey Brown speaks with he Washington Post's Ann Hornaday and Matea Gold on Bannon's past work.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): He is chief strategist to President Trump, close at hand as policy is made and decisions come from the White House, the President even recently appointing him to a seat on the National Security Council, a controversial decision.
Stephen Bannon has quickly gained so much of a reputation as an influential behind-the-scenes string-puller that “Saturday Night Live” portrayed him as the Grim Reaper in a recent skit.
ALEC BALDWIN, Actor: Send in Steve Bannon.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: Bannon was well-known previously as chairman of Breitbart News, the right-wing news organization, that Bannon himself once called the platform of the alt-right, a fringe conservative group that mixes populism, white nationalism and racism.
But he's also worked extensively in the film world, as executive producer on two traditional dramas, including “The Indian Runner,” Sean Penn's directorial debut, and as producer, writer and director of political documentaries often released during election cycles.
Among his film topics, the global financial crisis in 2010's “Generation Zero,” Sarah Palin, featured in “The Undefeated” in 2011, more recently, 2016's “Clinton Cash” about alleged corruption in the Clinton Foundation, and also last year “Torchbearer,” about an America turning from God, and the concurrent rise of a violent and radical Islam.
Reporters at The Washington Post have been looking at Stephen Bannon's work in films and how they may inform his role as the President's right-hand man.
Ann Hornaday is a film critic for The Post. Matea Gold covers politics.
Welcome, both of you.
MATEA GOLD, The Washington Post: Great to be here.
JEFFREY BROWN: Ann, give us first an overview of themes, style, approach that emerge when you look at the films.
ANN HORNADAY, Film Critic, The Washington Post: Well, Bannon has really come into his own as mostly a documentary maker.
He has made and produced fiction films in the past, but it's really his documentaries that get the most attention. And often they have political themes. He has a few sort of canards and villains that he returns to. He doesn't like the Clintons very much. He doesn't like any political elite very much.
He rails against the sort of permanent political class. He sees — the films often predict the world in very Manichaean terms, apocalyptic terms.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Hinting darkly that “there's something going on,” Donald J. Trump complained on Friday that he has been treated “very unfairly” by the people who wrote the United States Constitution.
“If the Constitution prevented me from doing one or two things, I'd chalk that up to bad luck,” he said. “But when literally everything I want to do is magically a violation of the Constitution, that's very unfair and bad treatment.”
Lashing out at the document's authors, Trump said that “America is a great country, but we have maybe the worst Constitution writers in the world.”
“Russia has much better constitution writers than we do,” he said. “I talked to Putin, and he said their constitution never gives him problems.”
“The situation is very unfair!” he added.
In an ominous warning, Trump said that, as of Friday, he was putting the writers of the U.S. Constitution “on notice.”
“I don't have their names yet, but that's something I'm looking into,” he said. “These jokers are not going to get away with this.”
Deutsche Bank is Trump's largest lender. While the troubled bank has settled several of the charges against it, it's still undergoing scrutiny by the Justice Department and other federal regulators, and is being overseen by six independent monitors, making conflicts of interest inescapable.
If you measure President Donald Trump's conflicts of interest by the amount of money at stake, or the variety of dicey interactions with government regulators, one dwarfs any other, his relationship with Deutsche Bank.
In recent weeks, Deutsche Bank has scrambled to reach agreements with American regulators over a host of alleged misdeeds. But because the President has not sold his company, the bank remains a central arena for potential conflicts between his family's business interests and the actions of officials in his administration.
“Deutsche poses the biggest conflict that we know about in terms of dollar amounts and the scale of legal exposures,” says Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor and author of “Too Big To Fail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations.” In trying to clear up its outstanding regulatory troubles, the bank “may have tried to do its best to avoid the appearance of impropriety but it may be impossible for them to do so.”
Deutsche is Trump's major creditor, having lent billions to the President since the late 1990s even as other American banks abandoned Trump, who frequently bankrupted his businesses. While the President hasn't released his tax returns, he has made public some information about his debts. According to these incomplete disclosures and reports, the Trump Organization has roughly $300 million in loans outstanding from the bank. Trump continues to own the business, although he has turned over day-to-day management to his sons.
At the same time that it is Trump's biggest known creditor, Deutsche is in frequent contact with multiple federal regulators. While the bank agreed last week to pay $630 million to settle charges by New York state's top financial regulator as well as the U.K.'s Financial Conduct Authority that it had aided Russian money-laundering, it's still undergoing a related federal investigation into those activities, which it is also trying to settle. That will be an early big test of the Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Justice Department also has an ongoing probe of foreign exchange manipulation by several banks, including Deutsche Bank.
Even if the bank clears up the ongoing federal cases, it will remain weighed down by past transgressions. During the housing bubble, Deutsche Bank misled buyers about the quality of its mortgage securities and omitted important information. In 2015, its London subsidiary pleaded guilty in connection with the multi-bank conspiracy to manipulate global interest rates and paid $775 million in criminal penalties.
Deutsche will soon have an astonishing six independent monitors monitoring its conduct — the most ever for one company, according to Garrett. Drawn from the ranks of consultancies and law firms, these overseers make sure Deutsche complies with previous state and federal settlements and regulations relating to its foreign exchange manipulations, global interest rate fraud, sales of dodgy mortgage securities, derivatives trading, and sanctions evasion.
Indeed, the independent monitor of Deutsche's derivatives reporting, Paul Atkins from Patomak Partners, has his own conflict of interest. Atkins served on Trump's transition team and played a role in appointing federal financial regulators. He is now monitoring whether Trump's business partner complies with the terms of a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on derivatives reporting.
A Patomak spokeswoman declined to comment.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has regulators sitting in Deutsche's offices, as it does with every big bank, keeping a watchful eye on the firm's safety and soundness. Last year, the Fed failed Deutsche Bank during its annual stress test, finding that it had insufficient capital and could not withstand another financial crisis. And the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC regulate its investment banking and trading activities.
A Deutsche Bank spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House did not return an email seeking comment.
The Trump Organization's wide-ranging business dealings could raise quandaries for an array of government agencies, from the Department of Labor, which regulates the company's employment practices, to the General Services Administration, which leases Trump his hotel in Washington, D.C. “Just about everything that every branch, every type of enforcement, every action from every agency could touch on Trump's conflicts. There is no end to the corruption and ethics concerns,” Garrett says.
But the potential conflicts may be most acute at the Justice Department. Whether the Justice Department walks away from an investigation or takes a hard line against Deutsche Bank, its every move will be scrutinized as either too tough or too weak.
With new management, Deutsche Bank has embarked on an effort to rebuild its reputation. Deutsche CEO John Cyran has conducted an apology tour for the bank's multiple and serial misdeeds. The money-laundering settlement isn't Deutsche's only recent move to close out government probes. In January, it agreed to pay $95 million to end a tax fraud investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And in December, it became one of the last of the global banks to resolve civil charges over the creation and sale of misleading mortgages investments, agreeing to pay a penalty of $3.1 billion.
In these agreements, Deutsche capitalized on the Obama Department of Justice's eagerness to settle, according to defense attorneys who don't represent the bank but are familiar with the cases. Outgoing administrations desire to wrap investigations up so departing prosecutors may shine their resumes on the way out the door.
The Obama administration had an added incentive to reach settlements because it worried the Trump administration Justice Department might seek smaller penalties or otherwise go soft on corporations. That helps explain why Deutsche Bank's mortgage securities settlement, which included $4.1 billion in credit for consumer aid in addition to the penalty, was far below the $14 billion figure reported in the fall as Justice's opening bid. While most observers expected that figure to come down sharply, Deutsche's terms were still widely considered favorable.
Even so, Deutsche's share price remains depressed as investors worry about the bank's future payouts and ongoing fragility. The bank faces class action suits alleging efforts to manipulate interest rates and the currency markets.
Given the government's responsibilities, Trump's regulators face a fraught and sensitive task of proving their independence and fair-mindedness when it comes to Deutsche Bank. Prior White Houses have taken great care to avoid interfering in Justice Department investigations and prosecutions. Despite his early support for Trump's campaign and their personal friendship, Sessions has said he will not recuse himself from any Justice Department probe into the President, the Trump family or any of his political advisors.
The relationship Deutsche Bank has with the President cuts two ways, defense lawyers and former prosecutors say. It might be advantageous to be in business with a President who appears to regard the office as an opportunity for brand enhancement and enrichment. The bank might hope for leniency from the President's regulators because of its business ties to him.
There are signs that Deutsche's new management is not eager to continue serving as Trump's financier. Trump sued the bank in 2008 to avoid paying a loan for a Trump hotel in Chicago. The parties settled, but lawsuits have a way of fraying friendships. A former top executive at Deutsche Bank says the current top management does not like the real estate developer. “They don't want to do business with him anymore,” he says.
Given the tension, Deutsche may worry about the mercurial President. The bank's concern is that the Trump administration could use its regulatory powers to secure better business terms. Nationalist strains course through his inner circle. A top Trump economic advisor recently accused Germany of currency manipulation. Trump, some observers fear, may seek to boost American financial institutions over foreign ones like Deutsche.
In recent months, Deutsche has also sought to renegotiate its loans with Trump, according to a Bloomberg report, in an effort to reduce its exposure to the President. The bank hoped to eliminate the President's personal guarantee on loans. But such a move would not eliminate the conflict of interest, since the President's company, which Trump still owns, would remain on the hook to pay back the loans.
Correction, Feb 10, 2017: Patomak Global Partners' Paul Atkins is monitoring whether Deutsche Bank complies with the terms of a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on derivatives reporting. This story incorrectly said the settlement was with New York state financial regulators.
Back in the waning days of the election, Melania Trump vowed that as first lady she would dedicate herself to combating cyberbullying. You know, of the sort popularized by her husband. Whatever happened to that?
Three months later, Melania Trump is indeed first lady. But what of her pledge to take up cyberbullying? Mother Jones contacted a wide range of organizations and individuals who work on cyberbullying, and not a single one of them reported being contacted by Trump or anyone in the Donald Trump administration.
Wow, go figure. But wait: in fairness to Melania Trump, she also hasn't moved into the White House. Or done anything else as first lady. Or made any substantive statements about anything. Or, apparently, appeared with her husband in public since the inauguration. (No, Mar-a-Lago does not count.)
And you know what? That's to be respected, right there. No joke—there's a lot of powerful people in this country who wish they didn't have to appear with Donald Trump in public, so we should probably be giving Melania a big thumbs-up for being one of the few who has had the courage to pull it off.
In the meantime, Donald Trump continues to cyberbully American companies, individual media figures, specific American judges, and just to mix things up, an American university. Nobody else in America has been able to figure out how to get him to shut up. There's no reason for anyone to think Melania could, so let's cut her some slack on this one.
SUMMARY: President Trump acted on one of his most polarizing promises, signing an executive action to curb the admission of refugees, including an indefinite ban on accepting refugees from war-torn Syria. Lisa Desjardins offers a roundup of news from the White House, including a press conference with British Prime Minister Theresa Day and a phone call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
SUMMARY: An executive order to limit refugees, immigrants and visitors to the United States, especially from Muslim countries, is meant to reduce the chance of terrorist attacks on home soil. But is the move by President Trump an effective form of deterrence? Antonio Mora talks with Reuel Marc Gerecht from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and former State Department official Daniel Benjamin.
SUMMARY: The U.S. admitted 12,500 Syrian refugees in 2016, but President Donald Trump's executive order Friday indefinitely bans any more from entering the U.S. NewsHour Weekend Correspondent Megan Thompson reports on how the Trump administration's policy has left some refugees already in the country very concerned.
SUMMARY: Protests erupted across the country following President Trump's executive order banning immigrants from seven countries. The administration cited national security concerns as the reason for the order, even as a federal judge blocked part of it on Saturday night. USA Today Immigration Reporter Alan Gomez joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss.
SUMMARY: A federal judge on Saturday issued a stay to halt portions of President Trump's executive order banning entry to the U.S. for people from seven countries. The order prevents the government from deporting people that are detained at U.S. airports. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, whose organization filed the complaint, joins Hari Sreenivasan to help us understand what happened.
SUMMARY: As the Republican-led House and Senate seek to help President Trump deliver on many of his campaign promises, Democrats -- led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer -- plan to make it a bumpy road. Schumer sits down with Judy Woodruff to discuss the president's debut, the challenge of repealing the Affordable Care act, Trump's Cabinet nominees and where both parties might work together.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Republican control of the House and Senate offers President Trump an opportunity to deliver on many of his campaign promises. But Democrats plan to make that a rocky road.
The main voice of the opposition is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
We sat down at the Capitol this afternoon.
And I began by asking him how he would characterize these first days of the Trump administration.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER, Minority Leader: It's been bumpy, to say the least.
The rollout, so to speak, at the CIA was really terrible, to stand on sacred ground, people who had given their lives for our country, and then to spend all his time talking about extraneous things that related to himself.
You know, what he has to realize is, he's president, not candidate. Instead of talking about the numbers of people who showed up at his inauguration, he ought to be talking about the number of people he's gotten into the middle class, gotten good-paying jobs.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, already this morning and over the last few days, he started signing executive orders.
One of them has to do with the Trans-Pacific partnership, the trade pact. There was another one on the Affordable Care Act. So they are making some statements, aren't they?
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: But some of these mean very little.
The TPP was dead long before he became President. If he wanted to do something real on trade, he could have done what he promised to do over and over again in his campaign, call China a currency manipulator. He said, on the first day I'm in office, I will call China a currency manipulator.
That would have done something.
On his ACA, on the Obamacare, he said, keep the good things, get rid of the bad things and obey the law.
They're so locked in a terrible position on ACA. In other words, they want to keep the good things and repeal it, but they don't know how to do it.
SUMMARY: It was a weekend of conflict over facts between the Trump administration and the news media. Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report, Tamara Keith of NPR, and Reuters' Jeff Mason president of the White House Correspondents' Association, join Judy Woodruff to discuss the president's tense relationship with the press and more.
“Restricting extraneous Freedoms of Press, Religion and Speech, and establishing Christianity as the State Religion are also ‘Alt-Word' permitted,” said Kellyanne Conway, “as is, of course, the quartering of soldiers in your home.”
NYC – Motormouth propagandist Kellyanne Conway, Trump's ministress of misinformation, said today that “alternative words” in the Bill of Rights “clearly permit Congress to impose legal restrictions on an unpatriotic and out-of-control lugenpresse.”
Asked to cite the actual language allowing Congress to restrict press and religious liberty, Ms Conway laughed merrily.
“Freedom is in the eye of the beholder,” she said, adding that “citing actual words is what liberals do.”
The First Amendment's “Alt-Word” meanings, she noted, “are as clear as the photographs of Mr Trump's million-person inauguration.
“Just take a look, and you'll see for yourself.”
The misinformation ministress went on: “The trick is to view the First Amendment in a shady light. If you squint your eyes and hold it at the right angle, and I do mean the Right angle, you'll see that its Alt-Words reveal numerous restrictions.”
“It's like that blue dress/gold dress thing. You see it one way but Mr Trump sees it another — gold, of course.”
Kellyanne listed some of the First Amendments' alt-word limits. “For example, you can't shout ‘Donald Trump is lying, racist, fascist bastard!' in a crowded election,” she said. “Even if it's true.”
Finally, Ms Conway noted that the inability of some Americans to view the Bill of Rights in the proper light was a “tragic disability” comparable to color blindness or muscular degeneration.
The White House would shortly be issuing government “Alt-Read” spectacles to help disadvantaged citizens who stubbornly continue to see things in the old way.
Press secretary proclaims new era for ‘free press,' thanks to the White House.
Amid all the controversy over Trump's war against the media, he made a stunning announcement today: “To stop the fake news that the lying liberal press like the New York Times is feeding to the American public, I have decided to funnel all White House news through an 'Official White House News Outlet.' From this day forward, all White House News will be reported through the only reputable newspaper in the country, The National Enquirer.”
Trump then left the podium and press secretary Sean Spicer remained to answer questions from White House staffers who had just been hired on as reporters by the National Enquirer. Reading from the 3 X 5 cards with assigned questions from the press secretary, a novice reporter asked how this was going to improve communication with the public.
“I'm glad you asked that,” he responded. “Now every citizen will be able to know what the President is thinking or doing without paying a hefty subscription fee. They can just pick it up at their local grocery or liquor store.”
“Were any other newspapers considered?” read another.
“The Star was a close second, so as a consolation, they will be given a front row seat at any future press conference.” The press secretary smiled and added as he left the podium, “It will be great to have a truly free press again.”
An interview with the editor of The National Enquirer revealed that due to a huge influx of cash from an anonymous investor, they will be tripling their output, having purchased a new fleet of delivery trucks and three times their present printing equipment, all to be housed for free in the Trump Tower, which he called a “magnanimous gesture” by the President. They are expecting a surge in sales, particularly in the Rust Belt.
A dark expression then came over the editor's face. “We have just one problem,” he continued. “Now that we're giving the White House so much space, we haven't figured out where to put the news on Bigfoot and alien abductions.”
SUMMARY: When Donald Trump moves into the White House, Trump Tower will still be a home of the first family. Securing the skyscraper presents unprecedented challenges, not to mention traffic gridlock, a hardship on nearby businesses and a fight over who should be paying the sky-high costs. The NewsHour's Rhana Natour reports.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): With just a couple days left until the inauguration, much of the nation's attention is on President-elect Trump's move into the White House.
But Midtown Manhattan residents are still focusing on the gold skyscraper of Trump Tower, which will continue to be a home for the Trump family.
Producer Rhana Natour looks at the unprecedented challenges of securing that residence and the financial fallout.
RHANA NATOUR, Producer: This is the new reality along the storied Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, dogs, chains, and intense security.
The President-elect has used Trump Tower as a base for transition meetings since the election, and while he will relocate to the White House after the inaugural, his wife, Melania, and 10-year-old son Barron plan to stay in Trump Tower through the end of the school year.
Evy Poumpouras is a former Secret Service agent. For 12 years, she was part of the presidential detail for Presidents Obama, Clinton and both Bushes.
We are seeing delivery truck after delivery truck being searched in and out. What is happening here?
EVY POUMPOURAS, Former Secret Service Agent: So, we want to control what's coming into the area of Trump Tower.
And one of the biggest issues are large vehicles that can actually have large amounts of an explosive. And a truck would be a perfect thing, a perfect IED, a vehicle device, to use.
So, what they will do is, you will typically have the vehicle stopped. They will search the vehicle, make sure there's nothing inside the vehicle, underneath the vehicle, make sure it's clean.
RHANA NATOUR: Trump Tower stretches 57 stories, with 26 floors of offices, three retail stores and hundreds of tenants. It is also surrounded by other skyscrapers, compounding the security challenge.
EVY POUMPOURAS: Right now, planes aren't allowed to fly over Trump Tower, same thing that happens over at the White House. But then you have that variable. He's up top. He's high on the floor. Planes are a concern.
RHANA NATOUR: And, as technology evolves, there are ever greater risks.
EVY POUMPOURAS: Drones. Can somebody use a drone, not just to go up there and, you know what, I want to see the future president? You can actually strap explosives, weapons to those drones, fly them up, and then cause harm in that way.
And then also even cyber-security, radiation, contamination in the air, chemical — any type of chemical airborne attack, that's also an issue. The tower itself, one of the things we look at is what we call the H-VAC system, which is where the air intake system is. That's super dangerous as well.
SUMMARY: Capitol Hill will be buzzing this week as President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees answer questions in Senate hearings. But as of last weekend, some nominees hadn't finished turning in their paperwork or cleared their ethics reviews. Democrats are calling it a rush job and have threatened to slow down the process. Lisa Desjardins sits down with Judy Woodruff for more.
LISA DESJARDINS (NewsHour): The president-elect walked out of Trump Tower with a business leader, Jack Ma of the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, but his words were about politics and his Cabinet nominees.
DONALD TRUMP (R), President-Elect: I think they will all pass.
LISA DESJARDINS: That after Trump met with a key ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who dismissed concerns about vetting.
SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, Majority Leader: Yes, everybody will be properly vetted, as they have been in the past, and I'm hopeful that we will get up to six or seven picks of the national security team in place on day one.
LISA DESJARDINS: All this ahead of a packed week, with two confirmation hearings set for tomorrow, five more set for Wednesday, and at least three slated for Thursday.
But NewsHour learned that education secretary-designate Betsy DeVos and three other Trump nominees have not yet cleared an ethics review. Democrats with their Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, called it a rush job.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER, Minority Leader: Jamming all these hearings into one or two days, making members run from committee to committee makes no sense.
Even if it takes a few weeks to get through them all in order to carefully consider their nominations, that is well worth it.
LISA DESJARDINS: Schumer has threatened to slow down the Senate confirmation process if senators don't have all the nominees' information.
Meanwhile, Republicans point to 2009, when the hearing schedule was nearly as packed, and 14 Obama nominees, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, were confirmed in the first nine days after inauguration.
Now that is being called the Obama treatment, relatively fast confirmation. But Democrats say the difference is that President Obama's nominees all cleared their ethics review process before their hearings, even before they were announced. The Office of Government Ethics says some Trump nominees have not even filed their paperwork yet.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): So, Lisa, thank you for that report, but take us through this process. What exactly is required of these nominees?
LISA DESJARDINS: Well, it depends on what committee you're going in front of.
Take you through what everyone is required of, first of all, three things. Every one of these nominees has to have an FBI background check, they have to have given financial disclosures to their committee of choice — or the committee that oversees their nomination, and they have to fill out a committee questionnaire.
But, Judy, what depends on each committee is the following, whether or not an ethics review must be filed before a hearing or simply before a vote. It must be filed at some time. But that's why we see these hearings this week before the ethics reviews are all in. Also, only three committees require tax forms from the past.
SUMMARY: It's the first day of confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet. Attorney general nominee Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions spent the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee defending his views on race and civil rights and separating himself from the president-elect's campaign statements. Lisa Desjardins reports from Capitol Hill and joins Judy Woodruff for more.
SUMMARY: President-elect Trump says he's going above and beyond in mitigating potential conflicts between his government office and his private interests. But is his plan for his sons to manage his company while he retains ownership sufficient? Steve Inskeep discusses with Norman Eisen former Special Counsel to President Obama, and Richard Painter former associate counsel to President George W. Bush.
SUMMARY: President-elect Trump has said he would like to improve relations with Russia. But his choice for defense secretary, Gen. James Mattis, views Russia as America's number one threat. What's the reality of the White House-Kremlin dynamic? Steve Inskeep discusses with Evelyn Farkas a former Defense Department official, and Michael McFaul former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
SUMMARY: Russia loomed over this week's congressional hearings. What kind of investigation is needed to look into unverified reports that Russia has information on the president-elect? And why didn't the White House do more early on to stop Russian hacking? Steve Inskeep speaks with David Ignatius of The Washington Post, who has been compiling unanswered questions about each of the players.
SUMMARY: At their confirmation hearings, many of the opinions voiced by the president-elect's nominees were very different from what Mr. Trump proposed during the campaign. From Sen. Jeff Sessions' position on waterboarding to retired Gen. James Mattis' take on the Iran nuclear deal, nominees made it clear that the administration will have a diversity of opinions. Steve Inskeep reports.
