Tracking Trump
Paul Owen in New York
Saturday 24 June 2017 06.00 EDT
Last week on Tracking Trump we left you with the US president appearing to confirm that he was under investigation for firing FBI chief James Comey. On Sunday his lawyer toured the TV shows to say that nothing could be further from the truth. “The fact of the matter is the president has not been and is not under investigation,” said Jay Sekulow. But he also admitted that actually he didn’t know one way or the other. So that cleared that up ...
Tuesday. At his first on-camera press briefing in more than a week, Spicer refused to say if Trump believed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, despite the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that it did. He and the president hadn’t discussed the matter, Spicer said, reassuringly. Asked about the status of his own job, the press secretary joked “I’m right here”, telling reporters, in a belligerent line that could have been uttered by his impersonator Melissa McCarthy: “You can keep taking your selfies” ...
Wednesday ... Trump rounded off his day with a campaign-style rally in Iowa, where he told the crowd he wouldn’t want a “poor person” to hold an economic role in his administration. “I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?” The same day, Bloomberg News reported that Trump’s own net worth had slipped to $2.9bn, down from $3bn a year ago ...
Thursday ... Trump spent the morning tweeting about the Democrats and the Russia inquiry before exclusively revealing that – contrary to the implication of a menacing tweet he had sent in May – he did not, in fact, possess any tapes of his conversations with Comey. Asked if he now regretted that first “tapes” tweet, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: “Uh, I don’t think so.” Meanwhile CNN reported that director of national intelligence Dan Coats and NSA director Mike Rogers had told Mueller’s team, and Senate investigators, that Trump asked them to state publicly he had not colluded with Russia in its meddling in the 2016 election ...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/24/tracking-trump-russia-investigation-healthcare-bill
