Trump set to authorize steel, aluminum tariffs on Thursday
March 8, 2018 by admin
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump plans to offer Canada and Mexico a 30-day exemption from planned tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which could be extended based on progress in NAFTA talks, a White House official said on Wednesday night.The move, first reported by the Washington Post, followed comments earlier in the day by a White House spokeswoman that the impending tariffs could exclude Canada, Mexico and a clutch of other countries “based on national security.”
Trump was expected to sign a presidential proclamation to establish the tariffs during a ceremony on Thursday, but a White House official said later it could slide into Friday because documents had to be cleared through a legal process.
The president has faced mounting opposition to the tariffs from prominent congressional Republicans and business officials worried about their potential impact on the economy.
The tariffs would impose duties of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum to counter cheap imports, especially from China, that the president says undermine U.S. industry and jobs.
A senior U.S. official said the measures would take effect about two weeks after Trump signs the proclamation.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told a regular media briefing on Wednesday: “We expect that the president will sign something by the end of the week and there are potential carve-outs for Mexico and Canada based on national security, and possibly other countries as well based on that process.
“It will be country by country, and it will be based on national security,” she said.
Trump had said on Monday that Canada and Mexico would only be excluded after the successful renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Efforts by Trump and U.S. trade negotiators to link the NAFTA talks to the duties have received short shrift from Ottawa and Mexico City.
Action that does not include exemptions risks retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports – not least by Canada and Europe – and complicates already tough trade talks on NAFTA.
The benchmark Standard Poor’s 500 stock index ended slightly lower following a volatile session after Trump promised the tariffs but then said Mexico and Canada could be exempt.
The SP closed 0.05 percent lower after being down 0.4 percent, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended down 0.33 percent. The U.S. dollar pared gains to end little changed, while the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso pared some losses.
Markets were rattled by Tuesday’s resignation announcement by Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who was seen as a bulwark against Trump’s economic nationalism.
Cohn’s departure, after an internal White House battle over Trump’s plans to impose the tariffs, clears the way for greater influence by trade hardliners such as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade policy adviser.
Sanders said Trump was considering several candidates to fill Cohn’s position, while Navarro said he was not short-listed for the job.
CHINA
In his first tweet on Wednesday, the Republican president showed no sign of backing away from the tariffs, saying the United States had lost more than 55,000 factories and 6 million manufacturing jobs and let its trade deficit soar since the 1989-1993 administration of President George H.W. Bush.
Later, his tweets turned to trade with China, demanding that Beijing lay out plans for reducing its trade surplus with the United States by $1 billion, which appeared to have been raised during a meeting with a top Chinese official last week.
“China has been asked to develop a plan for the year of a One Billion Dollar reduction in their massive Trade Deficit with the United States,” Trump tweeted, without saying where the message had been conveyed.
China ran a record goods trade surplus with the United States last year of $375.2 billion
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On Wednesday, more than 100 House of Representative Republicans, including Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee that oversees U.S. trade policy, wrote to Trump praising him for standing up to “bad actors,” but emphasized that fairly traded products should be excluded from the tariffs.
In a separate letter, Iowa’s congressional delegation, including two Republican senators, warned that the tariffs would hurt the state’s farmers and manufacturing.
The head of the influential U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue, warned about the impact to the economy.
“We won’t drive the economy to over 3 percent growth or continue to create jobs if we go down this path,” said Donohue, the chamber’s president and chief executive. “We urge the administration to take this risk seriously.”
Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton, David Shepardson, Susan Heavey, Makini Brice and Jason Lange in Washington, Tom Miles in Geneva and Phil Blenkinsop in Luxembourg; Writing by Robin Pomeroy and Lesley Wroughton; Editing by James Dalgleish and Peter Cooney
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Trump Lawyer Obtained Restraining Order to Silence Stormy Daniels
March 8, 2018 by admin
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Ms. Clifford filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Tuesday asserting that the nondisclosure agreement that accompanied the $130,000 payment was void because Mr. Trump never signed it.
Ms. Sanders said that the president had denied having an affair with Ms. Clifford or making the payment himself. She added that she was not aware of whether Mr. Trump knew about the payment to Ms. Clifford at the time.
“I’ve had conversations with the president about this,” Ms. Sanders said. “This case has already been won in arbitration, and there was no knowledge of any payments from the president, and he has denied all these allegations.”
Lawrence S. Rosen, a lawyer representing Mr. Cohen, said in a statement on Wednesday that an arbitrator, who “found that Ms. Clifford had violated the agreement,” barred her from filing her lawsuit and making other disclosures of confidential information.
Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, said that he did not consider the restraining order, dated Feb. 27, valid, and that his client would proceed with her lawsuit in open court. “This should be decided publicly,” he said.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
Ms. Clifford’s nondisclosure contract, made public through her lawsuit, calls for disagreements to be settled through confidential, binding arbitration. The lawsuit was filed a week after Mr. Cohen initiated arbitration proceedings, but the court papers did not say what was at issue or refer to the restraining order.
The contract gives Mr. Trump the right to seek financial penalties of more than $1 million in arbitration should Ms. Clifford break or threaten to break her agreement to stay silent. It also gives him the right to obtain an injunction barring her from speaking while disputes are considered in arbitration or open court. Those terms prompted Ms. Clifford to change her plans about going public, according to two people familiar with the situation who were not authorized to speak about it.
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Ms. Clifford had suggested she was free to speak out after Mr. Cohen disclosed last month that he had arranged the payment, prompting her to claim that the contract had been breached.
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The restraining order took her by surprise. A close friend of Ms. Clifford’s, J. D. Barrale, said in an interview that she learned Mr. Cohen initiated arbitration proceedings when she landed on a flight from Los Angeles to Texas. “She was shocked,” Mr. Barrale said.
Mr. Avenatti said Ms. Clifford had “never even been provided an opportunity to respond” to Mr. Cohen’s action in arbitration.
A copy of the restraining order, obtained by The Times and first reported by NBC News, left open the possibility that it could be modified in the future. But Mr. Avenatti said he questioned its validity because it was brought on behalf of Mr. Cohen, not Mr. Trump.
Asked if Ms. Clifford would drop her court case if Mr. Cohen provided her with more money, he said she would not. “At this point, we are well beyond that — this is a search for the truth,” he said.
The lawsuit by Ms. Clifford adds weight to allegations in a separate legal complaint brought by Common Cause, a public interest group that has asked the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department to investigate the $130,000 payment by Mr. Cohen. Common Cause argues that the payment amounted to an undeclared in-kind contribution to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
Federal election law requires contributions and expenditures for a campaign to be promptly disclosed, and prohibits a candidate from dipping into campaign funds to cover personal expenses. There is no evidence that campaign money was used to make the payment.
Common Cause filed a similar complaint about a $150,000 payment made shortly before the election by American Media Inc., owner of The National Enquirer, to Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate who has said she had an affair with a married Mr. Trump about a decade ago. The company dismissed the complaint as meritless.
The Enquirer never published a story about the alleged affair, and Common Cause asserts that if the payment was intended to keep Ms. McDougal quiet, it would be an illegal coordinated expenditure by a company on behalf of the Trump campaign.
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