Rudolph W. Giuliani on Sunday defended the payment an attorney for President Trump made in 2016 to an adult-film star who had alleged a relationship with Trump, and said it was possible that that lawyer may have paid off other women as well.
The comment from Giuliani, the former New York mayor who recently joined Trump’s legal team, comes amid an ongoing furor over a string of assertions he has made regarding the 2016 payment to Stormy Daniels, why it was made and how much the president knew about it.
When asked during an interview on ABC News’s “This Week” whether Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, had made payments to other women, Giuliani said he did not know of any but acknowledged that this could have happened.
“I have no knowledge of that,” Giuliani said. “But I would think if it was necessary, yes.”
Giuliani has given a string of interviews and made a series of public comments in recent days regarding the $130,000 that Cohen gave to Daniels — who had spoken with journalists about her claims of an affair with Trump years earlier — just days before Trump won the presidency in 2016.
He revealed last week that Trump had reimbursed Cohen, a startling announcement that stood in direct contrast to the president’s own public claims weeks earlier. After making other remarks to the media — including seemingly connecting the payment to the presidential election — Giuliani then released a cautiously worded statement Friday trying to clean up his comments.
“The reality is, those are not facts that worry me as a lawyer … those don’t amount to anything, what’s said to the press,” Giuliani said. “That’s political.”
Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Trump, said Sunday that Trump’s comments on Air Force One were him saying “he didn’t know when the payment occurred.”
“I’m going to relay to you what the president has told me, which is the best I can do,” Conway said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He didn’t know it at the time that the payment occurred.”
Conway said she has “no reason” not to believe Trump’s comments denying the affair, and she denied that the White House has a problem with credibility. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker has been tracking Trump’s false or misleading public claims in office, and so far, it has found more than 3,000 such comments — an average of 6.5 claims per day.
Conway also said she did not know of any other payments made to women during the campaign that were similar to the Daniels transaction, saying “they didn’t cross my desk as campaign manager.”
In his interview, Giuliani again sought to argue that the payment was not a campaign contribution, saying it was “entirely reimbursed out of personal funds.” Experts have said that even if it was not made with campaign money, the timing of it raises questions, as does the fact that it was never revealed in financial disclosure forms.
Giuliani said he did not know the answers to numerous questions, including when Trump learned that Daniels would take money to remain quiet, whether Trump knew about it after the campaign and precisely when Trump found out about the payment.
He said the money was paid “to settle a personal issue that would be embarrassing” to Trump and his wife, and also argued that the amount of money made it seem like more of “a nuisance payment” than anything else.
“I never thought $130,000 — I know this sounds funny to people there at home,” he said. “I never thought $130,000 was a real payment; it’s a nuisance payment. When I settle this, when it was real or a real possibility, it’s a couple million dollars, not $130,000.”
Giuliani said that Cohen is no longer Trump’s personal attorney, adding that that would be a conflict. He also said that the possibility of pardoning Cohen — who is facing scrutiny from federal investigators exploring whether he committed bank fraud and wire fraud — has not been raised.
“Michael’s lawyers all know that that obviously is not on the table,” Giuliani said. “That’s not a decision to be made now; there’s no reason to pardon anybody now.”
Giuliani also spoke critically of Daniels, who made an appearance on “Saturday Night Live” the previous night, something he brought up three times during the interview. He said Daniels “was opportunistic” in seeking money before the election and suggested that she was just seeking “fame and fortune,” adding: “She’s become rich as a result of this. The $130,000 doesn’t mean anything.
“I do think it’s suspect that she waits until the very last minute with regard to the campaign, and where you could get the maximum personal damage against the president.”
Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had told her story to multiple journalists over the years, including reporters from Slate and In Touch magazine, before signing the confidentiality agreement and a statement denying the affair. Daniels said she is being paid more nowadays for doing the same things she was already doing, but she pushed back against the notion that she was happy to be receiving so much notoriety because of Trump.
“This isn’t what I want to be known for,” Daniels said on “The View” last month. She said she has had to hire bodyguards, describing the situation as “overwhelming and intimidating and downright scary a lot of the times.”
Michael Avenatti, an attorney for Daniels, appeared on “This Week” after Giuliani and called the former mayor’s comments “a train wreck.”
“This guy’s all over the map over the last 72 hours on some very simple facts that should be very straightforward,” Avenatti said. “I think it is obvious … to the American people that this is a coverup, that they are making it up as they go along, they don’t know what to say because they’ve lost track of the truth.”
Legal experts have said Giuliani’s remarks in recent days may have exposed Trump to potential legal risks and could have compromised his attorney-client privilege with the president.
In his comments, Giuliani appeared to be trying to play down the payment, and he repeatedly argued that it did not amount to a campaign finance violation. A watchdog group filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission and the Justice Department, alleging that the Daniels payment violated campaign finance laws.
Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. officials.
Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said.
Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Trump learned of the drama Friday, calling officials from his trip to Dallas. He decided to push for Haspel to remain as the nominee after initially signaling he would support whatever decision was taken, administration officials said.
Haspel, who serves as the CIA’s deputy director and has spent 33 years in the agency, most of it undercover, faces some opposition in Congress because of her connection to the interrogation program, which was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Three years later, Haspel was involved in the CIA’s destruction of nearly 100 videotapes that recorded the men’s interrogations, touching off an investigation by a special prosecutor who ultimately decided not to bring charges against those involved.
“There has been a fascinating phenomenon over the last few weeks. Those who know the true Gina Haspel — who worked with her, who served with her, who helped her confront terrorism, Russia and countless other threats to our nation — they almost uniformly support her,” said Ryan Trapani, a CIA spokesman. “That is true for people who disagree about nearly everything else. There is a reason for that. When the American people finally have a chance to see the true Gina Haspel on Wednesday, they will understand why she is so admired and why she is and will be a great leader for this agency.”
Sanders declined to comment on Haspel’s offer to withdraw or internal White House discussions, but she stressed that Haspel is a dedicated public servant qualified for the role and that she has the full support of the president.
“She is the best of the best,” Sanders said of Haspel, describing her as a “patriot.”
An administration official said the nomination remains on track. “There is a hearing prep session today, courtesy calls with senators Monday and Tuesday, and classified materials will be delivered to Senate security so senators can read the real record instead of relying on gossip and unfounded smears,” the official said.
But Haspel’s nomination to become the first woman to lead the CIA came close to being scuttled Friday ahead of any hearings — and largely at her own hand, the U.S. officials said. The problem came to a head Friday afternoon when she was summoned to the White House for some urgent questions, particularly on her role in the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques.
She had been in a meeting with her staff at CIA headquarters in Langley, fielding mock questions to prepare for her confirmation hearing, when the summons arrived.
Some White House officials were concerned by material being raised in questions from Congress, information they were just learning about, according to the U.S. officials. Those officials said the material was not revelations that have been unearthed in recent months, but the White House wanted to hear Haspel’s explanation of it.
Some records from the interrogation program, including documents that haven’t been made public, show that Haspel was an enthusiastic supporter of what the CIA was doing, according to officials familiar with the matter. But others have disputed any characterization of Haspel as some kind of cheerleader of the harsh treatment of detainees and noted that the program was authorized by the president, deemed legal by administration lawyers and briefed to members of Congress.
Haspel’s chances of winning Senate confirmation are considered uncertain, in part because of the 51-to-49 party split and the prolonged absence of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is undergoing treatment for a rare form of brain cancer. Members of Congress, particularly Democrats, have been resistant to Haspel’s nomination without more information about her role in the program. The nomination has sparked trepidation inside the White House, with some Trump advisers telling the president in recent weeks she was unlikely to be confirmed.
Lawmakers had been pushing last month for more access to a handful of cables and other CIA material that might shed more light on Haspel’s work. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said the more material she reads about Haspel’s role in the interrogation program, including the destruction of tapes, the more unsettled she has become.
Last month, the CIA declassified an internal disciplinary review that “found no fault with the performance” of Haspel in the destruction of the videotapes. Haspel drafted a cable approving the destruction that her boss ultimately sent to field officers, who fed the tapes into a shredding machine. But she believed that he would first get the approval of senior CIA leaders before sending it, according to people with knowledge of the episode.
The release of the disciplinary review may persuade some lawmakers who had been undecided to support Haspel, said congressional officials tracking the nomination process.
Amid the questioning in the West Wing on Friday afternoon, Haspel told White House aides she did not want her nomination to harm the CIA. She also feared unfair attacks on her own reputation, saying that she didn’t want to be “the next Ronny Jackson,” one official said. Jackson, Trump’s White House doctor, withdrew his nomination to become Veterans Affairs secretary following questions regarding alleged misconduct earlier in his career.
Short, the White House legislative affairs director, told Haspel she could still be confirmed despite the information that had recently come to attention of the White House — and the administration expected some Democrats to support her, officials said.
Short declined to comment.
By Saturday, the officials said, Haspel had agreed to continue with her nomination.
Sanders issued a tweet in support of Haspel and rebuking her detractors on Capitol Hill late Saturday afternoon.
“There is no one more qualified to be the first woman to lead the CIA than 30+ year CIA veteran Gina Haspel,” she tweeted. “Any Democrat who claims to support women’s empowerment and our national security but opposes her nomination is a total hypocrite.”
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.
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.”
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — NASA’s latest Mars explorer is on its way to the Red Planet.
The agency’s InSight Mars lander lifted off today (May 5) atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, rising off a pad here at 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT, 4:05 a.m. local California time) and disappearing into the thick predawn fog moments later.
“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars,” NASA’s new administrator Jim Bridenstine, who took charge of the agency last month, said in a congratulatory call to the InSight team after launch. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.” [Launch Photos: See NASA’s InSight Soar Toward Mars]
InSight is the first interplanetary mission ever to launch from the West Coast and NASA’s first Mars surface craft to lift off since the Curiosity rover started its deep-space journey in November 2011.
Credit: NASA TV
If everything goes according to plan, InSight will reach its destination in a little less than seven months, touching down Nov. 26 on a nice, flat plain just north of the Martian equator. After a series of checkouts, the stationary lander will then begin a mission unlike any ever undertaken in the annals of planetary exploration.
InSight “will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust — and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green said during a prelaunch news conference on Thursday (May 3). “This is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”
Two briefcase-size satellites also hitched a ride on this morning’s launch and will make their own way to Mars, in an attempt to become the first-ever interplanetary “cubesats.” The probe is also carrying a chip with 2.4 million names from space fans, including “Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk William Shatner, who signed up to send their names to Mars.
Taking Mars’ vital signs
NASA officials have compared InSight — whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — to a doctor performing a long-overdue checkup. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: 10 Wild Facts]
For example, the solar-powered lander will take Mars’ temperature using a heat probe that will hammer itself about 16 feet (4.9 meters) beneath the red dirt. And InSight will monitor the planet’s pulse, detecting vibrations caused by “marsquakes,” meteorite strikes and other events, all using an ultraprecise seismometer called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).
“Ultraprecise” is no exaggeration: SEIS will be capable of spotting vibrations smaller than a hydrogen atom, mission team members have said. The instrument must therefore be encased in a vacuum chamber, so its observations aren’t swamped by environmental noise.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
InSight will place SEIS directly on the ground using the lander’s robotic arm, and then place a shield over SEIS to block wind and dampen temperature variations. That’s another first that this mission will achieve: Other Mars robots have generally kept their scientific gear close, and none have deployed an instrument using their arms in this way.
“It’s a first-time event, so we’re always concerned about that,” Chuck Scott, InSight flight system manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, told Space.com.
But the InSight team has done “an extreme amount of testing” here on Earth to prepare for the milestone deployment, Scott added, so the team isn’t unduly worried.
SEIS and the heat probe — which is known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) — are InSight’s main scientific instruments. But the mission will perform another experiment using the lander’s communications gear.
Credit: NASA TV/JPL-Caltech
During this investigation, known as the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), scientists will track InSight’s location precisely — to within 1 foot (0.3 m). This work will allow team members to detect tiny wobbles in Mars’ axis of rotation, which should reveal key insights about the planet’s core, including its size.
Analysis of the HP3 and SEIS data will also shed light on Mars’ interior, including the thickness of the planet’s crust and the structure and dynamics of Mars’ mantle. Taken together, this information will help researchers better understand how rocky planets form and evolve, mission team members have said.
We can’t look to our own planet for such information, because Earth’s roiling insides have erased the evidence of what happened long ago. The long-dead moon does preserve such evidence, but our natural satellite is so much smaller than Earth that the processes that occurred inside each world in the ancient past are very different, said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, of JPL. [InSight in Pictures: NASA’s Mission to Probe Mars’s Core]
“So, Mars is kind of a unique opportunity. We call it the Goldilocks planet — it’s not too big, it’s not too small, it’s just right,” Banerdt said during Thursday’s news conference.
“It’s actually undergone the processes of planetary differentiation that the Earth did,” he added. “But about maybe 20 [million] to 50 million years after it was formed, it just kind of stopped. We have lots of geology going on on the surface, but all those fingerprints of those early processes are still retained in the deep interior. And so, that’s why we want to go measure the fundamental parameters of the deep interior.”
The HP3 data may also reveal temperature differentials that humans could harness to heat habitats, Green added.
“This mission does so many fundamental things, not only in planetary science but in human exploration,” he said.
A two-year delay
InSight was originally supposed to launch in March 2016. In advance of that date, NASA and the mission team decided to launch from here, on the central California coast, rather than the usual site for interplanetary missions, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
Launching from the East Coast offers a distinct advantage for such missions: Rockets get an extra push from Earth’s rotation, which is going in the “right” direction. But Cape Canaveral was forecast to be pretty busy in early 2016, and the InSight team wanted to avoid congestion. So, they picked Vandenberg. And InSight is light enough, and the Atlas V powerful enough, to overcome the Earth-rotation issue, mission team members said.
The launch-site decision held even after InSight failed to hit the original window. In late 2015, the mission team detected a tiny leak in SEIS’ vacuum chamber — so tiny that it would take 50 years to lower the pressure by 1 lb. per square inch in a car tire, Banerdt said.
But SEIS’ need for precision is so great that the team had to fix the leak. And they couldn’t do so properly before the 2016 launch window ended, so InSight’s liftoff was pushed back more than two years. (Mars and Earth align favorably for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months.)
The fix and the delay added $154 million to the mission’s price tag, NASA officials said in 2016. U.S. investment in the mission is now $814 million, with about $163 million of that total going to launch services, according to NASA officials.
France and Germany have contributed an additional $180 million, mostly to develop SEIS and HP3. The French space agency, CNES, provided SEIS for the mission, and the German space agency, DLR, built HP3.
NASA and JPL ponied up another $18.5 million for those two cubesats. The duo are officially known as MarCO-A and MarCO-B (“MarCO” being short for “Mars Cube One”), but their developers have dubbed them Wall-E and Eva. That’s because the cubesats’ propulsion system uses compressed R236FA gas, which is the propellant in many fire extinguishers — and in the 2008 movie “Wall-E,” the eponymous, trash-compacting robot famously used a fire extinguisher to zoom around space. (Eva was Wall-E’s friend in the film.)
Wall-E and Eva (the cubesats) are tasked with a demonstration mission: to show that cubesats, which to date have stuck close to Earth, can journey to other planets. The plan calls for the two tiny satellites to fly by Mars as InSight arrives for its crucial entry, descent and landing (EDL) sequence. Wall-E and Eva will attempt to beam EDL data from the lander back to controllers here on Earth, but it won’t be a disaster for InSight if the cubesats fail to pull it off. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will perform the relay work regardless. [Latest Photos from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter]
MarCO team members will assess the health of Wall-E and Eva within a few weeks of the Mars flyby, and that will be the end of the cubesats’ mission.
InSight, of course, will just be getting started at that point; the lander’s prime science mission is designed to last until Nov. 24, 2020.
Mars is still hard
The main body of the 790-lb. (358 kilograms) InSight is based heavily off NASA’s Phoenix lander, which landed near the Martian north pole in May 2008 (and found water ice just beneath the surface shortly thereafter). InSight will also employ Phoenix’s landing technique, relying on parachutes and engine firings to slow itself enough for a soft and safe touchdown on the Red Planet (as opposed to the much heavier Curiosity, which also used parachutes but was lowered to the surface on cables by a rocket-powered “sky crane”).
And InSight’s avionics and other electronics borrow from the agency’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since September 2014.
Leveraging such heritage hardware is a way to save money and reduce risk. And Mars missions are still risky, despite the lengthy run of success that NASA has enjoyed at the Red Planet recently. That active six-mission streak of safe arrivals runs from the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which reached the Red Planet in October 2001, through MAVEN’s orbital insertion.
“Mars is hard,” said Tim Linn, InSight deputy program manager and EDL manager at aerospace company Lockheed Martin, which built the spacecraft for NASA.
“It’s one of the neatest things we do, but it’s still really hard,” Linn told Space.com.
The West Wing shouting match was so loud that more than a dozen staffers heard it.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cursed and yelled at White House Counsel Donald McGahn during the February confrontation, according to two people familiar with the episode. Misleading statements about the domestic abuse scandal that felled staff secretary Rob Porter had dragged the administration into a maelstrom of chaos and contradictory public statements.
Exasperated, Sanders told McGahn she would not continue to speak for the administration unless she was provided more information about Porter’s situation.
The dispute, which erupted in a hallway outside Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin’s office, was resolved after Sanders received the clarity she sought, the people familiar with the argument said. Hours later, Sanders returned to her lectern to field queries from a skeptical press corps, though her answers left reporters with more questions.
The moment illustrates the precarious role Sanders has chosen to fill as the public face of the Trump administration — and the doubts about her credibility in representing a president who traffics in mistruths and obfuscations.
Sanders was thrust into an especially harsh limelight over the past week. She was the subject of an acerbic broadside about her “bunch of lies” by comedian Michelle Wolf at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. Then she was forced to explain the inconsistent accounts from her, President Trump and his new personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, about the hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. The week was punctuated by an onslaught of commentary about Sanders’s character.
By virtue of her position, Sanders is inextricably bound in the mistruths of the Trump administration. She is a willing warrior for Trump, and her critics say she should be held accountable for his utterances — from the untruthful to the racist to the sexist. Since taking office, Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims, according to an analysis by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
“When the president blithely admits to lying, it makes all those who are paid to repeat and defend his stories liars, as well,” said David Axelrod, who was a senior White House adviser under President Barack Obama. “Their credibility is tied to his. It’s a high price to pay for a job, even in the White House.”
Sanders, 35, is no political ingenue. She was raised in the wild-and-woolly politics of Arkansas, the only daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee, and grew up to work on his two unsuccessful presidential campaigns.
By the time she took over as White House press secretary from Sean Spicer in July, the administration’s penchant for misleading the public at the president’s direction was well established. At his first press briefing, Spicer vigorously misrepresented the size of Trump’s inaugural crowds, soaring to national fame for the wrong reasons.
Those in Trump’s orbit argue that the attacks on Sanders have been more sustained and personally vicious than those faced by press secretaries in previous administrations. They argue that in a hyper-polarized nation — and amid the frenzied environment nurtured by a president who is at war with what he calls the “Fake News” media — Sanders has become an unwitting Rorschach test for Trump’s critics.
Allies of Sanders say that she often pushes back on Trump, who wants her to attack the media even harder and more frequently, and that other administrations have also faced credibility problems, such as the mistruths on the Monica Lewinsky affair under President Bill Clinton and the false information on weapons of mass destruction under President George W. Bush.
“It doesn’t matter who holds this job for President Trump, they’re going to be unfairly attacked and ridiculed,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser. “Since Sarah Huckabee Sanders works for President Trump, it seems to be open season on her professionally and personally.”
Sanders declined to be interviewed for this article.
Fresh trouble for Sanders arose Wednesday night, when Giuliani, in a freewheeling interview with Sean Hannity, told the friendly Fox News host that Trump had reimbursed his longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, for the $130,000 in hush money he paid to Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford. The payment helped secure her silence shortly before the 2016 election about an alleged sexual affair with Trump a decade earlier, which the president has denied.
Giuliani’s disclosure appeared to be at odds with Sanders’s repeated insistence that Trump was not aware of Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The interview, which Sanders did not coordinate, left her in an untenable position, she told colleagues.
So did Giuliani’s proclamation that three American prisoners soon would be released from North Korea, a development the White House had not confirmed.
Reporters pressed Sanders on Thursday: Was she a liar or simply in the dark? And why was the president’s personal attorney authorized to announce news about sensitive hostage negotiations?
“I’ve given the best information I had at the time,” Sanders said, a line she repeated in general six times. “Some information I am aware of, and some I’m not.”
Sanders said she first learned that Trump had reimbursed Cohen by watching Giuliani’s interview with Hannity. At another point in her briefing, she repeated her assertion that she does not intentionally mislead the public, but acknowledged that she is not always provided the most accurate or complete information about her boss.
Sanders also offered a general criticism of peddling untruths — or, as White House counselor Kellyanne Conway once memorably dubbed them, “alternative facts.”
“I would always advise against giving false information,” Sanders said. “As a person of human decency, I do my best to give the right information.”
Sanders’s defenders say she spends considerable time crafting talking points that convey the president’s wishes but also are technically truthful. If she is guilty of anything, they say, it is providing incomplete information.
In the Daniels episode, for instance, Sanders has largely cited the president’s own statements and referred questions to his outside attorneys.
Before most briefings, she meets with Trump in the Oval Office to discuss how he would like her to answer news-of-the-day questions, White House officials said. The president sometimes dictates lines for her to read or orders her to use precise words on particularly sensitive matters.
Sanders routinely dodges questions on hot topics by telling reporters she has not asked the president about it — a deliberate strategy to avoid having to wade into delicate issues, according to a Sanders confidant.
She deflects nearly every question about the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the election unless she has a prepared statement from the president to read — a protective move against creating legal exposure for herself with extemporaneous answers.
“Sarah has done a fantastic job of keeping in line with understanding how to effectively communicate what the president’s thoughts are at any given time, recognizing that it is a very dynamic and fluid situation in many cases,” Spicer said. “What she has done is, she has realized, you can’t get in trouble for what you don’t say.”
Behind the scenes, Sanders has joked with colleagues that she has no idea whom the president will fire, what he will tweet or when he might change his mind. Unlike the more pugilistic Spicer, Sanders has privately displayed a gallows humor.
Sanders sometimes finds herself out of the loop and is not the ubiquitous presence that former communications director Hope Hicks was in the president’s daily life.
When Trump offered John Bolton the job as national security adviser, the president had already begun configuring his own press strategy before Sanders was alerted, according to White House officials, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. Sanders was soon hustled into the Oval Office shortly before Trump tweeted about the hiring.
After Trump revealed that he was urging states to send troops to the U.S.-Mexican border, Sanders scurried to figure out why he had said that and how it would work, only to learn he had been briefed on a proposal the week before, officials said.
In a West Wing riven by infighting and a revolving door, Sanders is one of the only senior officials who does not generally draw arrows. She has lasted longer than some of her colleagues expected.
During the Porter saga, colleagues say, they frequently saw Sanders upset as she managed the fallout. She helped craft a statement that defended Porter and that later became an embarrassment to the administration. But, officials said, she was careful not to betray the administration’s missteps publicly, as her deputy Raj Shah had when he said that “we all could have done better” — which attracted criticism from the president.
Although combative with reporters on camera, Sanders is largely regarded as more pleasant and helpful behind the scenes. She works to provide reporters answers to their questions, including hunting down colleagues for help.
Sanders often mentions her three small children during her briefings, reminding the millions of viewers tuning in on television that she is a mother. She sometimes makes hokey jokes to leaven the mood in the briefing room and is known to wish some reporters a happy birthday from the lectern.
“Sarah has always been coolheaded and professional and always gives our arguments for greater transparency and openness a respectful hearing,” said Olivier Knox, the chief Washington correspondent for SiriusXM, who will assume the presidency of the White House Correspondents’ Association this summer.
Last Saturday night, Sanders sat next to Knox at the head table for the correspondents’ dinner. She did not stand up to congratulate the journalists who were presented awards — including a team from CNN, which Trump has assailed as “fake.” And as Wolf mocked her, joking that she “burns facts and then uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye,” Sanders sat stoically.
Later that evening, Sanders and her husband, Bryan, were spotted at the invite-only MSNBC after-party, greeting friends and reporters well after midnight.
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.
