There are approximately 1,500 homes in the area, the spokesman said. The Red Cross reported 66 people in two shelters overnight, he added.
“I never thought I’d ever be faced with this, I’m just shellshocked,” said Carl Yoshimoto, 69. He was sheltering at Pahoa Community Center with his two dogs, Sako and Suki, and his partner since Thursday afternoon. Their house is in Leilani Estates.
“As soon as I heard the order to evacuate, I grabbed important paperwork, medications, my wallet — we were out of the house within a half an hour.”
Maddy Welch, 19, who works at Kalapana Bike rentals and lives in Leilani Estates with her mother, had set up a tent and a space at Pahoa Community Center with her two dogs, a goose and her friend, Taylor. “I woke up around 1:30 in the morning to earthquakes,” she said. “My mom didn’t want to leave. I told her there are two vehicles leaving this driveway — I hope you’ll be in one of them because we can’t come back.”
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” she went on. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
On Thursday evening lava spilled from the crack in the volcano for about an hour and a half, leaving a large smear in a residential area of bushes and trees. Photos and drone footage showed a line of glowing orange slicing through green yards and white vapor and fumes rising above the trees. Gov. David Ige issued an emergency proclamation that made state funding faster to access, and he called up the National Guard to help emergency workers with evacuation efforts.
Kilauea is the youngest of five volcanoes that make up the island of Hawaii, and lies on the island’s south. Dr. Mandeville said the signal that there might be more activity was the little earthquakes, which happen when magma moves against rock, in this case, two miles under the earth’s surface. “That’s where the plumbing system is,” he said.
It remained to be seen how much damage the structures in the evacuation areas have sustained from the eruptions and the earthquakes.
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Dan Jacobs, 47, who has spent the last six months building his house in Leilani Estates, was standing behind Pahoa Village Museum, a downtown hangout. “I invested all my money here, and I probably won’t have anything to show for it in about a month’s time,” he said. “You should see the floors I built, they’re so beautiful, it’s about halfway done.”
Past volcanic eruptions, some that occurred decades ago, have caused lasting damage to parts of the region.
An eruption from the Pu’u ’O’o cone of Kilauea in 1983 has continued to flow, destroying houses in the Royal Gardens subdivision. In 1990 more than 100 homes in the Kalapana community were destroyed by lava flow.
An eruption from Kilauea in 2014 flowed down the surface of the volcano and burned a house in Pahoa. Now residents worry that more structures could be threatened in the area, which is one of the fastest-growing in the state.
“Living on a volcano, everybody has got pretty thick skin. They know the risk,” said Ryan Finlay, who lives in Pahoa and runs an online trade school. “Lava for the most part has flown to the ocean the last 30 years. Everybody gets in a comfort zone. The last couple weeks, everything changed.”
So what does Warren Buffett think about Apple’s announcement that it plans to buy back $100 billion of its shares?
“I’m delighted to see them repurchasing shares,” Mr. Buffett said. “We own five percent of it. With the passage of a little time, we may own 6 or 7 percent because they repurchase shares.”
Charles Munger added that he and Mr. Buffett don’t approve of every buyback plan, but he doubted Apple would find an acquisition target at a good price.
“The reason companies are buying their stocks is that they are smart enough to know it’s better for them than anything else,” Mr. Munger said.
What about Microsoft?
Given Berkshire’s investment in Apple, one shareholder wants to know why Berkshire never invested in Microsoft. The question comes with Bill Gates, Microsoft’s co-founder and a director at Berkshire, sitting in the audience.
“In the earlier years, the answer is stupidity,” Mr. Buffett replies. But then Mr. Buffett adds that his friendship with Mr. Gates has grown over the years, and he has stayed away from investing “because of the inference” that could be drawn.
Photo Credit
Nati Harnik/Associated Press
Mr. Buffett isn’t backing off his comments about guns
In February, Warren Buffett was asked on CNBC about some chief executives distancing their businesses from the National Rifle Association. Mr. Buffett responded: “I don’t think that Berkshire should say we’re not going to do business with people who own guns. I think that would be ridiculous.”
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That comment came up at Saturday’s meeting, and one shareholder wanted to know if Mr. Buffett had misspoken.
Mr. Buffett answered by largely repeating what he had said earlier this year.
“I do not believe on imposing my political opinions on the activities of our businesses.”
“If you get into which of our companies are pure and which ones aren’t pure, I think it will be very difficult. I don’t think that we should question on the Geico policy form: Are you an NRA member? And if you are, you just aren’t good enough for us.”
Mr. Munger then added:
”Certainly we’re not going to ban all guns surrounded by wild turkeys in Omaha.”
Warren Buffett is sticking by Wells Fargo
Over the past two years, regulators and whistle-blowers have revealed Wells Fargo employees were creating fake accounts using customers’ identities, forcing borrowers to buy unnecessary auto insurance, and overcharging on mortgage fees.
The Federal Reserve earlier this year restricted its growth until it demonstrates it is complying with bank regulations.
Berkshire first invested in Wells Fargo nearly three decades ago and is currently the bank’s biggest holder with a nearly 10 percent stake.
In response to a question about whether it was time to abandon the bank, which has already seen turnover in its executive suite and boardroom, Mr. Buffett said he thought Wells Fargo’s problems would only make it stronger in the long run.
“All the big banks have had troubles of one sort or another and I see no reason why Wells Fargo as a company, from both an investment standpoint and a moral standpoint going forward, is in any way inferior to the other big banks with which it competes,” he said.
He specifically praised the bank’s chief executive, Tim Sloan, a longtime Wells Fargo executive who took over when his predecessor John Stumpf resigned at the height of the fake account scandal. Criticism from Mr. Buffett could have increased pressure on Mr. Sloan. But the 87-year-old praised him.
“I like Tim Sloan as a manager,” Mr. Buffett said. “He is correcting mistakes made by other people.”
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Mr. Buffett went further: What happened at Wells Fargo could’ve happened anywhere, he said.
“We know people are doing something wrong as we sit here at Berkshire. You can’t have 370,000 employees and expect that everyone is behaving like Ben Franklin.” On the fake account scandal specifically, which the bank has said resulted from intense pressure on its branch managers to increase sales, Buffett said: “Wells Fargo is a company that proved the efficacy of incentives and it’s just that they had the wrong incentives.”
— Emily Flitter
Is Mr. Buffett semi-retired?
The question of who will succeed Warren Buffett has been a thread through many of the exchanges with shareholders.
Carol Loomis, a former Fortune writer, kicked off the question and answer session by reading a question from an investor, asking if Mr. Buffett is semi-retired now. In recent years, Mr. Buffett has handed off some of his investing duties to Ted Weschler and Todd Combs, Berkshire’s two portfolios managers, and in January, Mr. Buffett promoted longtime Berkshire executives, Gregory E. Abel and Ajit Jain, to oversee Berkshire’s businesses.
“I’ve been semi-retired for decades,” Mr. Buffett replied with a chuckle, but then he got serious.
“Ted and Todd each manage about 12 or 13 billion,” he said. “Together that’s $25 billion. They’re managing $25 billion and doing a very good job.”
He then quickly reminded the questioner of the size of the company’s assets: “I still have the responsibility for the other $300 billion.”
Charles T. Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, added: “I watch Warren. He spends most of his time reading and thinking and occasionally he’ll make a phone call or talk to somebody. Not much has changed.”
Another shareholder asked whether Berkshire will have trouble doing deals once Mr. Buffett is no longer with the company. Companies have famously approached Berkshire over the years about being bought. That has allowed Berkshire to largely avoid bidding wars and to make acquisitions at a discount.
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The shareholder wanted to know if Mr. Buffett’s successor would continue to have access to those deals and whether Mr. Buffett and Mr. Munger should aggressively publicize the work of their successors to help pass on their “hometown advantage.”
“I think the reputation of Berkshire as being a very good home for companies, particularly a very good private home for a company, I don’t think that reputation is dependent on me or Charlie,” Mr. Buffett said. “It may take a little—there may be a little testing period for whoever takes over.”
”The truth is that I think some of the other executives are getting better known,” he added.
— Emily Flitter and Stephen Grocer
Where does Berkshire’s health care venture with JPMorgan and Amazon stand?
A lot remains unknown about Berkshire’s health care partnership with Amazon and JPMorgan Chase more than three months after the companies announced the venture.
The three firms said in January that they were teaming up to try to find a better, cheaper way to provide health care to their own workers, a combined one million people. And they said if their idea worked, they would seek to share it with other companies.
Warren Buffett on Saturday again called the cost of health care “a tapeworm in terms of American business.” He lamented the success other countries—he did not name any—have had keeping their own health care costs at a lower proportion of their gross domestic product.
But just how Berkshire’s partnership will address the problem remains a big question.
Mr. Buffett had no more details to offer on Saturday. He said the people leading the effort a are still searching for a chief executive. They could announce a hire “within a couple of months,” he added.
“Whether we can bring the resources, bring the person, that C.E.O., is terribly important. Bring the person, support that person and somehow figure out a better way for people to continue to receive better medical care in the United States,” he mused “We’ll see if that will happen.”
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But Mr. Buffett seemed uncertain, though hopeful, about the effort as a whole.
“We are attacking an industry moat,” Mr. Buffett said. “That’s a huge moat. We’ll do our best. If we fail, I hope somebody else succeeds.”
Charles Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, weighed in: “I suspect that eventually when the Democrats control both houses of Congress and the White House, I suspect that we will get a single payer system, and I suspect it won’t be very friendly to the existing” pharmacy benefit managers.
— Emily Flitter
PhotoA drawing of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Credit
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Trade ‘is a win-win situation’
The Trump administration has taken a more combative stance on trade, particularly with China.
So it comes as little surprise then that one of the first questions put to Warren Buffett and Charles Munger was about trade. Here’s Mr. Buffett’s response:
“The United States and China are going to be the two superpowers of the world, economically and in other ways, for a long, long, long, long time. We have a lot of common interests, and like any two big economic entities, there are times when there will be tensions. But it is a win-win situation when the world trades, and China and the United States are the two big factors in that.”
“It is a win-win situation. The only problem is when one side or the other wants to win a little bit too much.”
About those accounting changes…
Warren Buffett warned in his annual letter that a new accounting rule would “severely distort Berkshire’s net income figures and very often mislead commentators and investors.”
Saturday morning Berkshire reported a net loss for the first quarter because of those accounting changes. The new rules require Berkshire to include in its earnings the gains and losses on the stocks it holds but has not sold.
In the first quarter, Berkshire’s net loss was $1.14 billion, compared with net income of $4.06 billion a year earlier.
Given the new accounting rule, Mr. Buffett suggested Saturday that shareholders should look at Berkshire’s operating income, which excludes gains and losses for Berkshire’s investments, for a more accurate picture of the company’s performance.
Berkshire reported its operating income rose 49 percent to $5.29 billion from a year ago.
— Stephen Grocer
PhotoShareholders walking through the exhibit hall at Berkshire Hathaway’s 2018 annual meeting. Credit
Rick Wilking/Reuters
Questions for Mr. Buffett
The main event every year at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting is the question and answer session. Elisa Mala, a reporter working for The New York Times asked those attending Berkshire events on Friday what they would ask Mr. Buffett. Here is a sampling:
• What is the single greatest important investment in your lifetime? Is it a company? Is it a relationship? — Conner Van Fossen, Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass.
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• What are your thoughts about the future/sustainability of health care and Medicare, and how is Berkshire Hathaway’s joint venture with JPMorgan Chase and Amazon going to address this? —Timothy Liu, San Francisco Bay Area.
• What does he see in the cryptocurrency market? Is it going to be the future? Is it going to replace the way we exchange value? Is it worth the hype? — Jason Lu, Shanghai
• Where do you see the job market going, given the rise of Artificial Intelligence? — Ralph Humphrey, Hillside, N.J.
• He’s been technology averse in the past. What makes him so bullish on Apple? — Brian Hanks, Salt Lake City, Utah
• How long he plans on doing this. —Bill Skidmore, Omaha, Neb.
— Elisa Mala
PhotoJessica Staben taking a selfie with 1-year-old Cecilia Johnson in front of a caricature of Warren Buffett, right, and Berkshire Hathaway’s vice chairman Charlie Munger. Credit
Nati Harnik/Associated Press
Scenes from Omaha: shopping day
(As Berkshire’s annual meeting has grown over the years, it has become a three-day event. Friday is Berkshire Hathaway’s shopping day, where shareholders can buy products from many Berkshire-owned companies.)
Shareholders moseyed around CenturyLink Center, where the annual meeting takes place, perusing dozens of booths displaying goods — many created specifically for the event — from brands like Geico, NetJets and Coca-Cola.
What was really on sale? All things Warren Buffett.
Investors could snack on a Dilly Bar, the long-favored Popsicle of the Oracle of Omaha, for $1 or snag “Warren and Charlie” rubber ducks ($5 for the pair at the Oriental Trading Company booth). There were Justin cowboy boots embroidered with the words “Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Shareholders Meeting” and guests had the option to “Put yourself in Warren Buffett’s boots,” as the marketing materials suggest, and purchase a style that had been owned by the man himself.
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Jim Van Fossen, a retired financial planner, bought matching Berkshire Hathaway boxers for himself and his son, Conner Van Fossen. In town from Missoula, Mont., he said he wanted a memento of their first trip to the shareholders’ meeting.
Of course, shoppers and vendors were hoping for a sighting and interaction with the man himself. Failing that, they settled for selfies with his many likenesses. See’s Candies displayed Scotch Kiss confections “made by Warren,” and one staff member’s uniform bore Mr. Buffett’s autograph.
The most photographed autograph was at the Benjamin Moore paint booth, where Mr. Buffett had signed his name in permanent marker next to a wall-size mural of his face. All day long, revelers followed suit, decorating the wall with their own signatures in dry-erase ink, and snapping selfies to preserve the memory.
— Elisa Mala
health care
priceyear end
Welcome to ‘the Woodstock for Capitalists’
Omaha, Neb., is not typically the center of the financial world. But once a year, that is what it becomes, attracting hedge-fund managers, business executives and mom-and-pop investors to the annual meeting of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Over the past five decades, the meeting has transformed from a small gathering of shareholders in the cafeteria of National Indemnity into “Woodstock for Capitalists.”
Tens of thousands of shareholders fill the CenturyLink Center in Omaha each year to ask Mr. Buffett and Charles T. Munger, Berkshire’s vice chairman, questions about the conglomerate, investing, the economy and politics. And between bites of See’s toffees and sips of Cherry Coke, the pair dole out their brand of folksy wisdom and corny jokes.
DealBook will be here through it all providing analysis.
Speaking about gun laws, President Trump satirized gun control, noting that Chicago has tough gun laws but a problem with gun violence.
He added that “we are going to have to outlaw” trucks and vans.
“We all know what’s going on in Chicago but Chicago has the toughest gun laws – they’re so tough, but you know what’s happening. It seems that if we’re going to outlaw guns like so many people want to do – Democrats – you better get out and vote, then we will… We are going to have to outlaw immediately all vans and all trucks, which are now the new form of death,” he said.
Citing recent knife attacks in London, Trump said, “They don’t have guns. They have knives and instead there’s blood all over the floors of this hospital.”
“They say it’s as bad as a military war zone hospital … knives, knives, knives. London hasn’t been used to that. They’re getting used to that. It’s pretty tough,” Trump said.
A federal judge in Virginia on Friday accused the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III of pursuing a fraud case against President Trump’s former campaign manager to pressure him to “sing” and provide evidence against the president.
The comments from Judge T.S. Ellis III came during a hearing in Alexandria federal court, where attorneys for Paul Manafort argued that bank- and tax-fraud charges against him are outside the scope of the special counsel’s authority.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Ellis told prosecutors at the morning hearing. “You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
Ellis said the government wanted Manafort, “the vernacular is, to sing.” The judge put it another way, saying the special counsel set out to “turn the screws and get the information you really want.”
Manafort, 69, is accused in federal court in both Alexandria and the District of Columbia of crimes related to his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Manafort served as Trump’s campaign chief for five months before resigning amid news reports that he had received secret cash payments for his Ukraine consulting.
Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington in November. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Michael Dreeben, a prosecutor with the special counsel’s office, did not respond specifically to the judge’s assertions. But he said the investigation fit naturally into a probe of Trump campaign ties to Russia: “In trying to understand the actions of Mr. Manafort in Ukraine and the association he had with Russian individuals and the depths of those financial relationships, we had to follow the money where it led.”
Manafort’s attorneys contend that their client’s alleged crimes in Virginia have nothing to do with the election or with Trump.
Ellis agreed, emphasizing that some of the charges involve purported conduct that occurred over a decade ago. But he made no immediate decision on the defense motion to dismiss. The judge said that even without such a connection, the special counsel, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, may well still have the authority to bring the charges.
“I’m not saying it’s illegitimate,” Ellis said.
But the judge did question why an investigation into Trump attorney Michael Cohen was handed over to federal prosecutors in New York while the Manafort case was kept with the special counsel.
Ellis suggested that if he ruled in Manafort’s favor, the case could simply be returned to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
It is precisely because the probe into Manafort’s financial dealings began years ago with federal prosecutors in that office, Manafort’s defense attorneys argued, that the special counsel should not be involved.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” defense attorney Kevin Downing said in court. “It’s so unrelated,” he said, “as to be in violation” of the special counsel’s mandate.
Dreeben responded in court that the Manafort investigation has expanded significantly since it was taken over by Mueller. “Our investigation has considerably advanced and deepened our understanding” of Manafort’s actions, he said.
The reason the specific parameters of the special counsel’s investigation have not been publicly revealed, Dreeben said, is that to do so would jeopardize ongoing probes and sensitive national security information.
“It would make no sense for the facts to be conveyed publicly,” he argued. Instead, he said, the scope has been defined in “ongoing discussions” with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation.
Dreeben also referred to an August memorandum from Rosenstein authorizing Mueller to investigate whether Manafort illegally coordinated with Russia in 2016.
Ellis asked for an unredacted version of that memo. Dreeben told the judge that all sections of the memo related to Manafort have been publicly revealed. Significant sections remain classified.
Downing said he would also like a copy of any written records justifying Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Downing noted he had worked under the deputy attorney general for five years and knows that “Mr. Rosenstein is a stickler for memos being written.”
Ellis appeared somewhat sympathetic to this argument as well, comparing Mueller to independent counsels criticized in the past for overreach.
“The American people feel pretty strongly about no one having unfettered power,” he said.
Dreeben countered that the special counsel is part of the Justice Department and thus subject to oversight that addresses such concerns. The tax division and national security division signed off on the Manafort indictment, he said.
“We are not operating with unfettered power,” he said. “We are not separate from the Justice Department.”
Ellis is known to be tough on attorneys in court, but those who have appeared before him often say that pressure offers little insight into his ultimate ruling.
“Judge Ellis has high expectations from counsel on both sides of any issue,” said Timothy Belevetz, a former prosecutor in the Eastern District now with the firm Holland Knight. “His interactions with counsel in the courtroom do not necessarily reflect where he’ll end up coming out, because he’s a thoughtful judge who takes into account and carefully analyzes what’s presented to him. But in the meantime, he probes counsel and does so thoroughly.”
Manafort has made similar arguments in D.C. federal court, where he faces charges of money laundering, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent. He is set to go to trial there Sept. 17.
Earlier this week, Manafort’s attorneys accused government officials of falsely telling reporters that conversations between their client and Russian officials were intercepted.
Mueller’s attorneys have no evidence of any such conversations to turn over, the defense said.
Manafort also is arguing that one of the charges against him, failing to register as a foreign agent in 2011, is too old to be prosecuted and that the searches of his home and storage unit were unconstitutional.
Manafort’s attorneys requested that the judge address the motion alleging leaks and other issues at a hearing set for May 25.
Mueller has requested 70 blank subpoenas in preparation for Manafort’s July 10 Virginia trial. He also has added an attorney from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to his legal team for the case: Uzo Asonye, who in 2016 prosecuted Norfolk Treasurer Anthony Burfoot for corruption.
Ellis expressed satisfaction with Asonye’s involvement, having pushed Mueller at an earlier hearing to add local counsel to his team.
The judge noted with pleasure that the fraud prosecutor has appeared before him several times.
“He may tell you some interesting things,” Ellis said.
President Trump’s new lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani sought Friday to clean up a series of comments made during a whirlwind media tour meant to bolster the president’s standing regarding a payment to a porn star but that instead created new problems for his client.
In a statement issued hours after Trump told reporters Giuliani was still getting up to speed on the facts, the former New York mayor said that a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels by longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen would have happened regardless of whether Trump was on the presidential ballot the following month.
“The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family,” Giuliani said in the statement. “It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”
On Wednesday, Giuliani revealed that the president had reimbursed Cohen for the settlement Cohen paid in October 2016 to keep Daniels from disclosing details of a sexual encounter she alleged she had with Trump a decade earlier.
Giuliani has said that the details of the reimbursement showed that Trump paid back Cohen because it was a personal, not a campaign expense. But campaign finance law experts said Giuliani’s remarks did not rule out violations of campaign finance laws, and some of his statements may have actually provided new evidence for investigators.
Appearing Thursday on the Fox News Channel, for instance, Giuliani asked viewers to imagine if Daniels had aired her allegations “on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.”
“Cohen didn’t even ask,” Giuliani told viewers. “Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”
In his statement, Giuliani also sought to make clear that he speaking in television interviews about his understanding of events in which Trump had been involved and not about what the president knew at the time. The distinction is important because if Giuliani publicly described a private conversation with the president, he might have inadvertently waived attorney-client privilege on that conversation, potentially opening the door for prosecutors to probe further into what was said.
One close Trump adviser said Giuliani had “waived the privilege big time” with his appearance on “Fox Friends” and description of his conversations with his client, the president.
This adviser, who requested anonymnity to speak more candidly, said Giuliani’s misstatement came because he relied on Trump’s description of what happened, without independently researching the nature of the payments.
“Rudy followed the client’s wishes without knowing all the facts,” the person said.
Giuliani also stated that it was “undisputed” that Trump had the constitutional power to fire former FBI director James B. Comey, which he did last year. Trump’s action is among those under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Muller III as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
“Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation,” Giuliani said.
In saying that Trump had the power to Comey, Giuliani appeared to be backing away from an assertion he made earlier this week that the president acted out of frustration that Comey wouldn’t publicly state that the president was not under investigation by the FBI.
That earlier statement raised concerns among some legal experts who said Giuliani seemed to say Comey was fired over the Russia investigation – and such an admission could further an obstruction of justice probe involving the president.
Cohen is under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to people familiar with the matter. FBI agents searched Cohen’s house, office, and hotel room.
In early April, after Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was unaware of the settlement that Cohen had paid to Daniels.
Since Giuliani began discussing these matters publicly two days ago, the White House has been besieged with questions about their past denials of the president’s knowledge, and on Friday morning, Trump suggested Giuliani had misspoken.
“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago, but he really has his heart into it, he’s working hard, he’s learning the subject matter,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to leave the White House.
“He knows it’s a witch hunt,” Trump continued. “He’ll get his facts straight.”
Trump talked to reporters again Friday after taking a helicopter from the White House to Joint Base Andrews and before departing to Dallas, where he is addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association Friday afternoon.
“Rudy’s great,” Trump said there. adding: “He wasn’t totally familiar with everything.”
On Thursday morning, Trump issued a trio of carefully worded tweets, largely echoing the points Giuliani had made in his Wednesday night interview.
In a brief telephone interview later Friday, Giuliani said the episode has not hurt his standing with Trump.
“He says he loves me,” Giuliani said, calling the issue a matter of “interpretation.”
On the campaign trail, Trump saw Giuliani as a loyal surrogate – and the two men even watched sports together riding back from events.
But Giuliani and Trump have never been close friends, associates say, and Giuliani was upset by his treatment during the transition – when he was passed over for secretary of state by Trump’s eventual choice of businessman Rex Tillerson.
Over recent months, Giuliani has occasionally spoken to the president but has not been in his coterie of close advisers.
Trump also said Friday that if he could be treated fairly he would “love to speak” to federal prosecutors investigating ties between his campaign and Russia. He said he would do so even over the objections of his lawyers — if he could be convinced the Russia probe is not a “witch hunt.”
“I would love to speak. I would love to go,” Trump said. “Nothing I want to do more, because we did nothing wrong.”
But, he added, “I have to find that we’re going to be treated fairly. … Right now, it’s a pure witch hunt.”
Those comments come as Trump’s lawyers are continuing to negotiate with special Muller about the conditions of a possible interview.
Trump and his lawyers have said in recent days that they fear Mueller is trying to trap Trump into committing perjury during an extended interview. Mueller has suggested Trump could be subpoenaed if he doesn’t voluntarily talk.
Trump also complained that there are too many “angry Democrats” on Mueller’s team. He did not mention that Mueller himself is a Republican.
“Why aren’t we having Republican people doing what these Democratic people are doing?” Trump asked.
Senior White House staffer were caught off guard Wednesday by Giuliani’s first appearance on Fox News when he disclosed that Trump had repaid Daniels. White House press secretary told reporters on Thursday that she had not learned about the repayment until seeing Giuliani on television that night.
On Friday, a person close to the White House said Giuliani was still not consulting with White House counsel Donald McGahn nor Emmet Flood, the White House attorney recently hired to handle the Russia investigation.
The person, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said it is possible that Giuliani had a strategy in mind but that it wasn’t clear.
On Friday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who ran President Trump’s campaign in its closing months, said that she was not aware at the time that Cohen made the $130,000 payment.
“I had never heard about that during the campaign,” Conway told reporters at the White House. “I was the campaign manager. A lot crossed my desk.”
Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
A Puerto Rico Air National Guard plane crashed shortly after taking off in Georgia on Wednesday, killing all nine airmen on board.
The plane, a C-130-type cargo plane from Puerto Rico’s 156th Airlift Wing, had been in Savannah for maintenance and took off about 11:30 a.m., bound for Arizona. The Associated Press reported that the decades-old plane was due to be retired in Arizona, though a National Guard spokesman would not confirm that at a news conference Thursday morning.
The plane made it only about a mile from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport before it nose-dived toward a state highway intersection and exploded into a ball of fire and black smoke, which could be seen across the northern suburbs of the city.
All the victims served in Puerto Rico’s National Guard, officials said. Their names have not yet been released, and the military has only begun to investigate the cause of the crash.
Col. Pete Boone, a spokesman for Georgia’s Air National Guard, denied that the plane was more than 60 years old, as one of his counterparts in Puerto Rico had told reporters.
Boone said at a news conference on Thursday that the C-130 was built in the late 1970s and had been in Georgia for routine maintenance.
Regardless, the colonel said, “the Puerto Rico Air National Guard and the whole Puerto Rico community has been through quite a lot over the last few months.”
Hours after the crash, Isabelo Rivera, an adjutant general of Puerto Rico’s National Guard, described the island’s air fleet as old and in disrepair. Of the unit’s six C-130-type planes, he said, two were inoperable and the one destroyed Wednesday had been scheduled for retirement.
“The planes that we have in Puerto Rico — it’s not news today that they are the oldest planes on [National Guard] inventory,” Rivera told the Associated Press after the crash.
“This pains us,” he added.
Whatever its exact age, the destroyed C-130 had been used to rescue Americans stranded in the British Virgin Islands after Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean late last year, the AP reported.
Days later, Hurricane Maria slammed into the 156th Airlift Wing’s home base in Puerto Rico, and the plane subsequently transported supplies from the U.S. mainland to the ruined island.
All nine crew members killed Wednesday had helped with the hurricane recovery effort, the AP wrote, even as the 156th struggled to rebuild itself.
“Our wing was devastated by two back-to-back Category-4 hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, and we’re still in that process continuing to work with higher-level command to get us through the recovery phases and rebuild the wing,” Col. Raymond Figueroa, wing commander of the 156th, said in a military news release last month.
Now his unit will mourn again.
Chelsea Sinclair, who works at a store near the crash site, told the Island Packet newspaper that the plane went down nose-first and shook the building. Mark Jones, speaking to the Savannah Morning News, said he was in his car when the plane hit the road in front of him.
“It didn’t look like it nose-dived, but it almost looked like it stalled and just went almost flat right there in the middle of the highway,” Jones said. “I’m still shook up and shaking. My stomach is in knots because I know they’re people just like me. I wasn’t that far from it, and I could have just kept going and it would have been me and we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Jones said.
Scott Cohen tweeted what he said was footage of the crash from his business’s surveillance cameras. In it, the plane appears to lose altitude quickly and twirl into the ground.
The Kenilworth school superintendent charged Monday with defecating in public was caught in the act at the Holmdel High School football field and track after surveillance was set up due to human feces being found “on a daily basis,” police said.
Thomas Tramaglini, 42, lives about 3 miles from Holmdel High School in neighboring Aberdeen. He was running at the track on the athletic fields at 5:50 a.m. before he was arrested.
Track coaches and staff at Holmdel High School told the district’s resource officer that they found human feces on or near the football field and track daily, Holmdel police said in a statement Thursday.
School employees began monitoring the area and on Monday police arrested Tramaglini at 5:50 a.m., according to Sgt. Theodore Sigismondi.
Tramaglini is also charged with lewdness and littering. He is due in municipal court in Holmdel at 8:15 a.m. Monday to answer the charges.
Tramaglini has taken a paid leave of absence from his $147,504 a year job in Kenilworth. Leave can only be unpaid if a person is indicted or faces tenure charged, the district said, citing state law.
Tramaglini replaced Superintendent Scott Taylor who resigned in August 2015. Tramaglini previously served as Chief Academic Officer in Keansburg and also held positions in Plumsted and Freehold Borough.
Tramaglini is also a part-time lecturer for the Rutgers Graduate School of Education, according to public records. A Rutgers spokesman didn’t immediately comment on the charges.
No one answered the door at Tramaglini’s home on Thursday.
NJ Advance Media staff writer Jeff Goldman contributed to this report.
Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Does it bother anyone that President Trump has been caught lying? Does it bother anyone that this is not new? Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar?
These questions are again front and center before the country. People will answer them differently, depending on their views about Trump. Some will condemn the behavior. Some will condone it. Many, no doubt, will try to look away, even if that has become more and more difficult. The questions won’t go away. They are part of the fabric of this presidency.
Thanks to Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and current member of the president’s legal team, Trump has been exposed flat out about the $130,000 in hush money that his attorney Michael Cohen paid to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) to cover up an affair that the president denies having with her.
In a remarkable exchange with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel on Wednesday night, Giuliani almost casually dropped the bombshell that, of course, the president reimbursed the money Cohen paid to Daniels, despite a long string of comments from the president and Cohen asserting otherwise.
Even Hannity, long a defender of the president in all manner of controversies, was caught by surprise. “They funneled it through a law firm and the president repaid it,” Giuliani explained. “Oh, I didn’t know that. . . . He did?” Hannity replied. The host apparently hadn’t long ago processed the fact that the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements about the hush money were false. Now they are inoperative.
The circumstances of the transaction — a retainer to Cohen that could be used for whatever — provide the president the ability to claim lack of knowledge. On Thursday morning, Trump blasted out three tweets in defense of himself, describing how common such arrangements are “among celebrities and people of wealth.” Are they common among presidents of the United States?
Cohen had claimed that the money came from his personal finances. “The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank,” he said in a statement in March.
Trump had claimed that he knew nothing about any of it. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” he told reporters in early April on Air Force One, when asked why Cohen had made the payment. Asked whether he knew where the money had come from, he said, “No, I don’t know.” Asked whether he had ever set up a fund from which Cohen could draw money, Trump didn’t respond.
On Wednesday night, Giuliani said there are many instances in which lawyers do things for clients without letting them know, “like I take care of things like this with my clients” because “these are busy people.” On “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning, Giuliani, still claiming there was no affair between Daniels and Trump, credited Cohen with good lawyering. “Cohen made it go away,” Giuliani said. “He did his job.”
That, apparently, is how things work with celebrities and people of wealth. Time to move on.
Trump isn’t the first president to tell lies. Bill Clinton lied about his relationship with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky when he wagged his finger and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Other presidents have lied about events and policies. So this president has some company. But from serial exaggerations to disregard for the facts (his claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in 2016) to obvious falsehoods, deliberate or unconscious, Trump has a pattern and practice that is often breathtaking in its audacity.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported this week that during Trump’s presidency, the number of “false or misleading claims” has now reached 3,000, an average of 6.5 per day.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders decided not to try to decipher or explain or acknowledge the contradictions between the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements and what Giuliani said Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Citing “ongoing litigation,” she said, “I don’t have anything else to say.” What else is there to say after the truth finally catches up with the lies?
The Stormy Daniels episode wasn’t the only instance in which Giuliani provided a new account of events. He also offered a new explanation for the president’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. It was the third attempt to describe a dismissal that ultimately led to the ongoing Russia investigation being turned over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Recall the sequence of events a year ago when Comey was suddenly fired while on a trip to California. The initial account from the White House was that Trump fired Comey after receiving a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein criticizing Comey for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It was, of course, Rosenstein who selected Mueller to oversee the inquiry and it is Rosenstein who is now the target of the president and House conservatives, who want him removed.
That cover story crediting the Rosenstein memo for the firing lasted until the president sat down with NBC’s Lester Holt. He told Holt, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”
Giuliani provided yet another version to Fox News, saying Comey was dismissed because he “would not, among other things, say that he [Trump] wasn’t a target” of the Russia investigation. Trump, by his own admission, was irritated that Comey would not publicly clear him. Perhaps Giuliani’s explanation is partly consistent with Trump’s comment to Holt — it was in one form or another “the Russia thing” that cost Comey his job.
Mueller’s team and Trump’s new legal team appear headed for a major collision over the terms of a possible interview with the president, one that could lead to the Supreme Court for adjudication. Trump allies fear what could happen if the president is required to answer questions verbally, given his tortured relationship with the truth, which is why many have said he should not agree to do so.
There are also potential legal ramifications involving the payment to Daniels, now that the facts of the transaction are becoming clearer. Campaign finance and other lawyers will sort through the possibilities.
All of this will play out in the coming weeks or months. In the meantime, the question of the public’s tolerance for the president’s behavior remains in the forefront. After nearly three years in the political arena, Trump has shown his ability to withstand controversies of many kinds. That may continue to be the case. But that doesn’t make the uncomfortable questions about truth and the president any less important.
President Trump lashed out at the Justice Department on Wednesday, complaining that he may have to “get involved” amid an ongoing dispute between conservative lawmakers and the department over a memo outlining the topics being investigated by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The president’s tweet suggests that friction may be rising again between Trump and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who just a day earlier declared at a public event that “the Justice Department is not going to be extorted” by public and private threats.
Less than 24 hours after Rosenstein’s comments, Trump fired off a tweet declaring: “A Rigged System — They don’t want to turn over Documents to Congress. What are they afraid of? Why so much redacting? Why such unequal “justice?” At some point I will have no choice but to use the powers granted to the Presidency and get involved!”
Before that broadside, Trump sent a tweet promoting Fox News Channel legal analyst Gregg Jarrett’s new book, which is highly critical of how the FBI investigated Hillary Clinton and Trump. “A sad chapter for law enforcement. A rigged system!” the president tweeted.
Precisely what the president is complaining about is unclear, but on Monday, Justice Department officials notified Reps. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that they would not be receiving an unredacted copy of a memo outlining the scope of Mueller’s inquiry, according to officials familiar with the matter. A heavily redacted version of that memo has emerged in the pretrial hearings of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, but Meadows and Jordan, two of the president’s fiercest defenders, want to see the rest of it.
The full memo outlines which Trump associates are under investigation, and for what, according to people familiar with the document.
The Justice Department has turned over other documents relating to the FBI’s work, including memos that former director James B. Comey wrote about his private meetings with Trump, and an internal FBI document from 2016 that led to a key stage of the investigation of whether any Trump associates coordinated with the Kremlin in trying to influence the presidential election.
Justice Department officials said dozens of lawmakers and staff members from both parties have viewed thousands of classified pages, a process that now includes members of both parties being given temporary office space at the Justice Department to review hundreds of thousands of documents.
Many of the issues under review are already the subject of a long-running inspector general investigation. That inquiry is expected to culminate in a long public report in a matter of weeks.
It’s unclear from Trump’s tweet what presidential powers he is threatening to use if the Justice Department doesn’t cooperate more fully. For months, he has complained privately and publicly about Rosenstein, leaving many inside the department worrying that the deputy attorney general, who oversees the Mueller investigation, could eventually be fired.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned Trump against doing so, tweeting: “Mr. President, the powers of the Presidency do not give you the right to interfere with or shut down the Russia investigation. Firing the Deputy AG or Director Mueller would create a constitutional crisis. Do not go down this road.”
At an appearance Tuesday at the Newseum, Rosenstein said the department would resist efforts to force officials to reveal sensitive details of an ongoing investigation.
“I think they should understand by now that the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said. “We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law, and any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.”
Meadows and Jordan, as two members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, have been in a months-long fight with the department over what they say is a failure to turn over documents on sensitive topics, including the court-approved surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The lawmakers ratcheted up the pressure recently by finalizing a draft of impeachment articles for Rosenstein, which criticize him for approving the Page surveillance, and then not producing requested documents.
After Rosenstein’s remarks, Meadows fired back.
“If he believes being asked to do his job is extortion, then Rod Rosenstein should step aside and allow us to find a new Deputy Attorney General — preferably one who is interested in transparency,” he said.
The Freedom Caucus is an influential bloc within Congress, but to impeach Rosenstein its members would need the support of House or Judiciary Committee leaders, and a majority of members. Actually removing Rosenstein from office would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate — which many staff members consider nearly impossible in the current political climate.
