ImageRepresentative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, in Washington on Thursday, as negotiations continued on funding the government to avert a shutdown that would go into effect Friday at midnight.CreditMark Wilson/Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Congress gave final approval on Thursday to legislation to keep the government funded into January, averting a government shutdown this weekend but kicking fights over issues like immigration, surveillance and health care into the new year.
The stopgap spending bill extends government funding until Jan. 19 while also providing a short-term funding fix for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, whose financing lapsed at the end of September.
The House passed the bill 231 to 188, with most Republicans voting for it and most Democrats opposing it. The Senate later gave its approval, as well, in a 66-to-32 vote.
The extension of government funding saves Republicans from what would have been a colossal embarrassment just after they celebrated passage of the biggest tax rewrite in decades. But the lack of a resolution to several pressing issues leaves lawmakers facing a tough task when they return after the holidays, with the possibility of a high-stakes showdown when the next government funding deadline approaches.
“I guess we better recharge our batteries,” said Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican. “It seems like Groundhog Day. We get up and do the same thing over and over and over again. It’s maddening.”
Separately, the House voted Thursday to approve $81 billion in additional disaster aid in response to this year’s hurricanes and wildfires. But the Senate does not plan to take action on the aid package until the new year.
The failure to resolve so many issues left bruised feelings in both parties. Promised bills to shield young immigrants from deportation, extend a surveillance program, bolster the military and stabilize health insurance markets were all left for another day.
Representative Nita M. Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, declared the stopgap bill to be an “epic failure of governing.”
But the disappointment was not enough to keep Congress away from its holiday break.
Lawmakers needed to take action because government funding was set to lapse at the end of Friday, though as Thursday began, it was unclear whether Republican leaders would be able to find the votes they needed to avert a crisis.
President Trump weighed in on Twitter in the morning, accusing House Democrats of wanting a government shutdown in order to take attention away from the tax overhaul.
Representative Alcee L. Hastings, Democrat of Florida, read Mr. Trump’s tweet aloud at a House committee meeting and said that he knew no Democrat or Republican who wants to shut the government down. Mr. Trump, he said, needs to put his Twitter account “under his pillow and sleep on it rather than continue to divide this country the way that he has.”
On Capitol Hill, the big question was whether enough Republicans would support the stopgap spending bill in the House in order to pass it.
Many Republicans in the House have grown impatient as they seek to raise military spending. An earlier stopgap bill would have included long-term funding for the Defense Department, but Republicans ended up backing away from that approach, which would not have been able to get through the Senate. The stopgap bill does include funds for missile defense and for repairs to two Navy destroyers involved in collisions this year.
House Democrats showed little willingness to support a stopgap measure as they push for other priorities, including securing a deal to shield from deportation young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. Such “Dreamers” will have to wait until at least January for action on that issue.
“All of us as members of Congress, we’re eager to return to our families as soon as possible back across America,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. “But our Dreamers are left with fear and uncertainty about returning to their families and about their future.”
Democrats complained that Congress was lurching from one crisis to the next, with a stack of big issues still unresolved, including a long-term spending deal.
“We shouldn’t be funding the government week to week, month to month, but yet my Republican friends have ended up doing just that,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They can’t seem to get their act together.”
The stopgap bill provides money for CHIP and community health centers through March. And it directs the secretary of health and human services to distribute leftover CHIP funds to states with the most urgent financial problems so they do not have to shut down the program.
But the $2.85 billion provided for CHIP is far less than the five years of funds that congressional leaders had promised, and it is unclear whether those funds will be adequate. Some states had already begun to inform parents that their children could lose coverage early next year if Congress did not act. The bill does not provide the certainty that state officials had been seeking.
“I do not think this is anywhere close to enough money,” said Bruce Lesley, the president of First Focus, a child advocacy group. “For a $12 billion to $14 billion program, this provides less than $3 billion for what is effectively six months” — the first half of the 2018 fiscal year, which began in October.
Leaders of both parties in the House and the Senate support legislation to provide five years of funds for CHIP, but they have been unable to agree on how to pay for it. The standoff over CHIP is remarkable because the program has had strong bipartisan support since it was created 20 years ago, when Bill Clinton was president and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.
It also comes after the Republicans passed the $1.5 trillion tax measure with little effort to pay for it.
The stopgap bill also extends through Jan. 19 a statute that provides the legal basis for the National Security Agency and F.B.I.’s warrantless surveillance program, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which is set to expire on Dec. 31. Congress will have to return to the issue of whether to impose new privacy safeguards on that program as part of a longer-term extension.
The bill also includes $2.1 billion to prop up the Veterans Choice program, which pays for veterans facing barriers to care within the government’s health system to get outside help. Lawmakers have been trying for months — thus far, unsuccessfully — to reach an agreement to permanently overhaul and fund the program, and a funding extension would buy them more time.
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President TrumpDonald John TrumpHouse Democrat slams Donald Trump Jr. for ‘serious case of amnesia’ after testimony Skier Lindsey Vonn: I don’t want to represent Trump at Olympics Poll: 4 in 10 Republicans think senior Trump advisers had improper dealings with Russia MORE on Wednesday issued his first commuted sentence for a federal prisoner, freeing Sholom Rubashkin, the former owner of the country’s largest kosher meat-processing plant who in 2009 was sentenced to 27 years in prison for a litany of financial crimes.
The commutation had bipartisan support from lawmakers and had become a cause among many leading voices in the legal community, petitioning the Obama and Trump administrations to draw attention to a sentence they said was wildly disproportionate to the crime that had been committed.
Rubashkin, a father of 10, will have served eight years of his sentence. The commutation is not a presidential pardon — Rubashkin’s conviction will stand, as will his terms of release and the restitution payments he will be obliged to pay.
Still, the commutation will clear Rubashkin of the remaining 19 years of a sentence that had been condemned by politicians on the left and the right as cruel and unusual.
“The President’s review of Mr. Rubashkin’s case and commutation decision were based on expressions of support from Members of Congress and a broad cross-section of the legal community,” the White House said in a statement.
“A bipartisan group of more than 100 former high-ranking and distinguished Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars have expressed concerns about the evidentiary proceedings in Mr. Rubashkin’s case and the severity of his sentence. Additionally, more than 30 current Members of Congress have written letters expressing support for review of Mr. Rubashkin’s case.”
Rubashkin was the CEO of a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, the largest in the country. Federal law enforcement raided the company in November 2008 and Rubashkin was found guilty of bank fraud and money laundering. Hundreds of Rubashkin’s employees were arrested for working in the country illegally.
Scores of the country’s leading legal experts, including four attorneys general, wrote to Trump earlier this year asking that Rubaskin’s sentence be commuted, arguing that the 27-year sentence was excessive because he was a first-time, non-violent offender.
“Essentially, Mr. Rubashkin was convicted of fraud offenses stemming from inflating collateral to obtain a higher line of credit for Agriprocessors, his father’s kosher meat business, and for paying some cattle owners 11 days late,” the lawyers wrote.
“Mr. Rubashkin is a devoted husband and father, a deeply religious man who simply doesn’t deserve a sentence of this length, or anything remotely close to it,” the letter continued. “Indeed, his sentence is far longer than the median sentences for murder, kidnapping, sexual abuse, child pornography and numerous other offenses exponentially more serious than his.”
This is the first time Trump has used the executive power to commute a federal prisoner’s sentence, although earlier this year he pardoned Joe Arpaio, the controversial former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arpaio had been convicted of criminal contempt for disobeying a Justice Department edict against racially profiling Latinos.
HONG KONG — A North Korean soldier defected to South Korea on Thursday through the heavily guarded demilitarized zone separating the two countries, leading to gunfire on both sides of the border, the South Korean military said.
The “low ranking” soldier was manning a guard post along the DMZ when he fled through thick fog, the South Korean military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The escape follows a similar one last month, in which another North Korean soldier was shot by his colleagues as he successfully fled his DMZ posting.
In that case, South Korean border guards who heard the gunshots found the soldier 55 yards from the border line that bisects Panmunjom, the so-called truce village in the Joint Security Area, and carried him to safety. Doctors later found dozens of parasitic worms in his digestive system, some as long as 11 inches, which officials said was a sign of the poor hygiene and nutrition afflicting North Korea.
Officials said the soldier who fled Thursday was not fired upon. South Korean soldiers later fired 20 warning shots at North Korean border guards who were searching for the defector, which was followed 40 minutes later by gunfire in the North, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
More than 30,000 North Koreans have fled to South Korea since a famine killed at least a million people in the North in the 1990s. The country has recently been the subject of a tightening grip of sanctions that have curbed exports that provide urgently needed revenue, and it has been struggling with the impact of a drought that has reduced agricultural yields.
But it is extremely rare for people to flee across the demilitarized zone. The 2.5-mile-wide DMZ, considered the most heavily fortified border in the world, is guarded by minefields, sentry posts and tall fences topped with barbed wire, some electrified.
The soldier’s defection to South Korea on Thursday was the fourth this year, and the gunfire over the episode is certain to raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula just as hopes have grown for a thaw in relations between the South and North.
South Korean officials have recently held out the possibility that they might be willing to push back the timing of planned joint military exercises with the United States to reduce tensions.
Those exercises have traditionally drawn a fierce response from North Korea, which sees them as a preparation for military action against the North.
On Tuesday, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, told NBC News that he was open to curtailing the exercises ahead of next year’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February.
“It is possible for South Korea and the U.S. to review the possibility of postponing the exercises,” he said. “I’ve made such a suggestion to the U.S., and the U.S. is currently reviewing it. However, all this depends on how North Korea behaves.”
China and Russia have proposed a “freeze for freeze” agreement in which North Korea would halt its nuclear and missile tests in return for a halt to the military exercises.
But on Wednesday, the Pentagon distanced itself from Mr. Moon’s suggestion about delaying the exercises.
“The United States and our allies and partners in the region have long conducted routine exercises to maintain readiness,” Lt. Col. Chris Logan, a Defense Department spokesman, told Yonhap. “But it would be inappropriate to discuss plans for future exercises at this time.”
In a possible sign of worsening conditions in the North, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said that 15 North Koreans, including the four soldiers, had fled directly to South Korea this year, compared with five people, including one soldier, last year. Most defectors avoid such a perilous crossing to the South, instead fleeing through China.
It is not clear whether Mr. Trump is going to sign the bill before the end of the year. Republicans need to work with Democrats to avert automatic spending cuts that could be set off as a result of the tax bill adding to the deficit. They need support from Democrats to avoid these spending cuts, and if they wait until next year, it will buy them extra time to reach such a deal. Republicans in Congress were struggling to reach an agreement that would keep the government funded into January and avoid a shutdown.
At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump presided over a grand celebration on the South Portico, flanked by Republican lawmakers and members of his cabinet in a show of unity. A Marine Band played Christmas carols while the president and his party soaked up a moment long in coming.
“This will indeed be a very big day, when people look back at our country. It’s a whole different attitude, a whole different way,” Mr. Trump said, congratulating the lawmakers behind him. “They have been working on this for years, years and years. And I just want to turn around and I want to thank them all. They are very, very special people.”
The lawmakers — many of whom face re-election next year — eagerly returned the favor as the president brought several of them to the lectern, where they offered a common refrain: paeans to Mr. Trump, his legislative victory and his presidency.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said Mr. Trump might end up being one of the country’s greatest presidents. Members of Congress who have at times been on the receiving end of brutal Twitter posts made by the president, including Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, returned the president’s praise in kind.
“This has been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration,” Mr. McConnell said, as the president grinned broadly behind him.
But though Mr. Trump listed a series of accomplishments during his first year in office, he confronts a challenge in the new year of persuading more Americans to get behind him.
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His approval rating in polls of the American public is at historic lows, with a majority of people holding negative views of his presidency. Next year, he will face a Senate majority that will have shrunk to just one vote, making it even harder to win approval for the rest of the Republican agenda.
And while his lawyers have suggested that they believe the special counsel’s Russia investigation is winding down, there is evidence that Mr. Trump and his associates will remain under scrutiny for months, if not longer. Two members of Mr. Trump’s campaign team have been indicted, and two others, including Michael T. Flynn, his former national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy consultant, have pleaded guilty to federal crimes and are cooperating with the special counsel.
The tax victory was a rare moment of legislative success for a president who has struggled to govern in a city that he derided as “a swamp.” He has repeatedly used Twitter, his favorite means of communication, to demean and belittle members of both parties, undermining Republican leaders and generating intense opposition from Democrats.
On Wednesday, he struck a different tone, posting on Twitter to praise Mr. McConnell for shepherding the tax bill through the bitterly divided chamber.
I would like to congratulate @SenateMajLdr on having done a fantastic job both strategically politically on the passing in the Senate of the MASSIVE TAX CUT Reform Bill. I could have not asked for a better or more talented partner. Our team will go onto many more VICTORIES!
The president’s most significant legislative misstep was a failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a Republican pledge that he echoed repeatedly on the campaign trail. In May, the president and his Republican allies in the House held what proved to be a premature victory ceremony over the chamber’s vote to replace the health care law, a feat that the Senate never matched.
The tax bill that passed includes the elimination of the Obama-era requirement that people have health insurance, handing Mr. Trump and Republicans a talking point when they confront constituents who expected full repeal of the health care law. Speaking to reporters before a cabinet meeting Wednesday morning, Mr. Trump bragged about getting rid of the health care mandate, saying that it amounted to a full repeal of Mr. Obama’s signature law.
“We didn’t want to bring it up,” Mr. Trump said. “I told people specifically, ‘Be quiet with the fake news media because I don’t want them talking too much about it.’”
Whether that proves to be a political victory for Mr. Trump and Republicans is unclear. Many of his core supporters will appreciate the move. But the president’s eager declaration that “Obamacare has been repealed” also means that he will be held responsible if premiums rise or people struggle to secure health insurance.
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The tax overhaul also provides a break to owners of pass-through businesses, whose profits are taxed through the individual code, and lowers the top individual rate to 37 percent, down from 39.6 percent. It nearly doubles the standard deduction and doubles the child tax credit and the size of inheritances shielded from estate taxation.
In a move that drew significant criticism from lawmakers from states with high taxes, the bill caps the deduction for state and local taxes at $10,000. Twelve House Republicans voted against the tax bill, and 11 of those members were from California, New Jersey and New York, three states with high taxes.
It also opens the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling.
Polls suggest that most Americans view the tax overhaul with suspicion. In a Quinnipiac University poll released last week, a majority of people said they saw the plan negatively, with only about 16 percent saying they believe it will lower their taxes. Democrats predicted Wednesday that the political benefits for Mr. Trump would evaporate quickly.
“He hasn’t accomplished any meaningful part of his legislative agenda since the beginning of the year,” said Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado. He added, referring to the fact that the cut is so large that independent analysts say it will produce a deficit for years to come, “As soon as the American people see what’s in the bill, and that it borrows from their children to pay for it, it they will reject it.”
Republican lawmakers said they believed the public’s opinions about the tax overhaul would improve as more people began paying lower taxes next year. If they are right, the party could benefit just as lawmakers face voters in the fall.
Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who spent most of his almost 20 years in Congress pushing for an overhaul of the tax code, said he was “excited” about making good on a core part of the Republican Party’s orthodoxy.
“We are going to launch next year this fantastic tax reform so that the American people can see how we can truly reach our economic growth and our economic potential,” Mr. Ryan said.
In remarks before the cabinet meeting, Vice President Mike Pence offered the kind of effusive praise that Mr. Trump is unlikely to receive very often, even after the tax bill victory.
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“I want to thank you, Mr. President,” Mr. Pence said. “I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America. Because of your determination, because of your leadership, the forgotten men and women of America are forgotten no more, and we are making America great again.”
For the president, passage of the tax bill could be even more important — depending on how people come to view the legislation. As a candidate, Mr. Trump pitched himself as a champion of working Americans whose interests had been forgotten or ignored by a political establishment that cared little about their fortunes.
If people conclude that the tax bill lowers their taxes, that could improve Mr. Trump’s dismal job approval rating. If they decide that rich people and corporations benefit most, the president could anger his own supporters.
“Trumpism, in the end, as a domestic policy, comes down to jobs,” Mr. Gingrich said. “As a baseline of the conversation, he has to produce a better economy for anything else he is doing to make sense.”
A train car was removed from the scene of an Amtrak train derailment near Tacoma, Wash., on Tuesday. Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
DUPONT, Wash. — The investigation into the fatal Amtrak crash near Tacoma, Wash., is focusing on the possibility that the engineer was distracted by a cellphone, another person in his cab or something else when the train barreled into a curve 50 miles per hour over the posted speed limit.
The crew did not activate the emergency brake before the derailment on Monday morning, said Bella Dinh-Zarr, the National Transportation Safety Board official overseeing the investigation, which might indicate that the engineer failed to perceive the danger.
At a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, she said the badly damaged cameras in the engineer’s cab — one facing forward, and the other inward, toward the person driving the train — had been sent to the safety board’s laboratory in Washington D.C. There, investigators will try to extract images showing what went on in the moments before the train plunged into a stand of trees and onto a busy highway, killing three people.
Ms. Dinh-Zarr stressed that the crew members — all of them hospitalized — had not yet been interviewed, and most of the evidence not yet analyzed. A data recorder on the train, carrying 77 passengers and seven crew members, indicated that it was racing at 80 miles per hour into a curve that is limited to 30 miles per hour, the safety board said. Excessive speed appeared to be the immediate cause of the crash, but the reason for that speed remained unknown.
“Distraction is one of our most wanted list of priorities at the N.T.S.B.” she said. “It’s protocol for us to look at all of the cellphone records of all the crew members whenever there is an accident of this type.”
There was a second person in the cab at the time of the crash, “a conductor who was getting experience and familiarizing himself with the territory,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said. While that is common practice, rail safety experts say it can also be a distraction to the engineer, a possibility that she said would be investigated.
Drug and alcohol testing of crews is routine after train accidents, and the inward-facing cameras could show not only whether the engineer was distracted, but also whether he was impaired or fatigued — factors that have been blamed in other rail accidents.
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By SARAH STEIN KERR and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date December 19, 2017.
Amtrak 501, on the Cascades service between Seattle and Portland, was the first to carry passengers on a new, faster route between Tacoma and Olympia, on tracks recently upgraded for passenger service. The unfamiliar, 14.5-mile stretch includes a spot where southbound trains leave a straightaway on a downhill slope before reaching the crash site, where the tracks curve onto an overpass crossing Interstate 5.
On that new part of the trip, “crews have been operating for at least two weeks prior to the accident with nonrevenue trains,” she said, including the engineer who was at the controls on Monday morning. But she would not say whether they had enough training before hauling passengers.
The fact that the train was on its inaugural run — and that the tracks had only recently been improved — may have contributed to the derailment, said Allan Zarembski, a professor of railroad safety and engineering at the University of Delaware.
The accident mirrored a 2015 crash in Philadelphia that killed eight people, when an Amtrak train took a turn much too fast and jumped the tracks. In the 2015 Philadelphia Amtrak derailment, the N.T.S.B. found that the engineer had lost “situational awareness” of where the train was on the route.
In this week’s accident, “the operator may not have been 100 percent familiar with that route or misjudged where he was and didn’t start to slow down for that curve,” Dr. Zarembski said. “I’m sure there was some familiarization, but the question is, how familiar was he with it?”
Operators generally carefully study documents known as track charts, which describe the route’s speed limits and tricky areas, before stepping into the cab, he said.
A former safety board railroad investigator, Russell Quimby, said that while there was no national standard for how many dry runs a railroad had to perform before opening a line, it was common to run practice trains under a variety of weather conditions and other circumstances.
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Amtrak Train Derails South of Seattle
An Amtrak passenger train derailed and crashed into oncoming traffic on Monday morning. Multiple deaths were reported.
By BARBARA MARCOLINI, SARAH STEIN KERR and CHRISTOPH KOETTL on Publish Date December 18, 2017.
After a private briefing by investigators, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington said, “there are a thousand unanswered questions about this right now.”
The safety board blamed the 2008 crash of a commuter train in Los Angeles, which killed 25 people, on the distraction of the engineer, who was composing a text message when he ran a red light and collided with a freight train.
That accident played an important role in evolving rail safety standards. It led the safety board to recommend inward-facing cameras in train cabs, and Amtrak committed in 2015 to installing them.
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The crash also prompted Congress to require that railroads adopt a system called positive train control — which the safety board has sought for decades — that automatically slows or stops a train that is moving too fast, or is in danger of running a red light or hitting another train. The law originally set a 2015 deadline for positive train control, which uses sensors both on the trains and along the tracks, communicating by radio frequencies. But after lobbying by railroads, Congress postponed the requirement.
“Unfortunately, the deadline was the end of 2015, but Congress extended that deadline to the train companies, and allowed them to have until the end of 2018,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.
Richard H. Anderson, the president of Amtrak, said at a news conference in Tacoma on Tuesday evening that it was too early to know whether positive train control could have prevented the accident. While some Amtrak routes have the technology, the Cascades line is scheduled to have it by the end of 2018, he said.
“We have to keep this as a wake-up call,” Mr. Anderson said. “It is not acceptable that we are involved in these kinds of accidents.”
Photo
Investigators inspected the tracks at the scene of an Amtrak train derailment near Tacoma, Wash., on Monday. Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Sound Transit, the regional agency that owns the track where the train derailed on Monday, said the system had been installed along the line, and the Washington State Department of Transportation has said that the entire Cascades route will have the system by mid-2018.
“The locomotive was in the process of getting a P.T.C. system installed but it was not yet functional,” Ms. Dinh-Zarr said.
Last Friday, a Cascades train took local dignitaries on the new route, including Eric F. Corp, a DuPont city councilman. Long before then, he said, people who knew anything about the line knew that there was a big curve going over the highway, requiring a major slowdown.
“What speed we were going when we went around the corner I’m not sure, but it was slow and methodical,” he said. “It wasn’t like we were leaning or at no time did I think we were going too fast.”
Two of the people killed, Zack Willhoite and James Hamre, were close friends and rail enthusiasts, traveling together on the train’s first public voyage. Mr. Hamre, a retired engineer, was a volunteer for All Aboard Washington, a rail advocacy organization; Mr. Willhoite worked as a customer support specialist for Pierce Transit, a local transportation agency.
“It was just a given that they would be there,” said Lloyd Flem, a friend of the victims and the executive director of All Aboard Washington. “They had wanted to be on that very, very first run.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Flem said that he had seen both men just a few days ago and that they were eager to board the train early Monday morning.
On Tuesday, the scene of the crash, surrounded by police and emergency vehicles, began to look more like a construction site than a disaster. In a steady rain, huge cranes moved into place and began to lift the wrecked pieces of the train, while the crumpled remains of cars and trucks were loaded onto tractor-trailers to be taken away.
The crash left at least two coaches tumbled onto their sides, one of them on top of another coach, and two dangling precariously off the edge of the bridge; the locomotive that was pulling the train came to a stop on the highway. Of the 14 cars in the train, only the locomotive at the rear, which was not in use at the time, did not derail.
The Virginia state capitol in Richmond. (Sue Kovach Shuman for The Washington Post)
The surprise victory of Democrat Shelly Simonds after a nail-biting recount has given Democrats yet another win in Virginia’s legislature, ending 17 years of Republican control.
But the question of who will be in control of the House of Delegates going forward is a bit up in the air. Simonds’s victory brought the House of Delegates to a rare 50-50 tie between the parties, a split that could change depending on the outcome of a couple of other recounts in the state. But the split raises questions about how the legislature will govern, given that Virginia has no official tie-breaking mechanism for its House of Delegates, if the results hold.
“It’s not a crisis,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center For Politics. “This happens almost every election in one of the 50 states.”
Some clues about how the state might proceed can perhaps be found by looking at how some recent partisan stalemates have been broken around the country. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks the bodies, notes more than 40 state legislatures that have dealt with even partisan splits in the last 50 years.
These splits have been resolved through a few ways:
1) State laws. At least three states have laws that help break ties, according to the NCSL. In the event of a tie in Montana and South Dakota, the leaders of the chambers are chosen from the party of the governor, for example. In Indiana, the speaker must be chosen by the party affiliated with either the governor, or the secretary of state, if the governor was not up for election.
2) Lieutenant governor’s vote. In about half of the states in the country, a lieutenant governor presides over the senate and can break ties the way a vice president can in the U.S. Senate. The Virginia Senate has considered this option during previous splits — Republicans currently have a two-vote margin — but it is not available to the state’s House of Delegates.
3) Coin toss. Not kidding. The use of coin toss helped break a legislative tie in Wyoming in 1974 and remains the preferred method to dealing with partisan gridlock, according to the NCSL.
4) Negotiation The most common way to break a legislative gridlock is through good old-fashioned dealmaking.
“Most ties have been settled when the two political parties negotiate a shared power agreement,” the NCSL says. Many states have negotiated power-sharing agreements that involve co-chairing leadership and committee positions. These include the Washington House in 1978, 1998, and 2000, the Indiana House in 1988, the Michigan House in 1992 and many others.
“The dual leaders and committee chairs alternate the times during which they preside,” the NCSL said. Some power structures alternated daily; others monthly or bimonthly.
Another way to compromise is a division of power made in the spirit of balance, giving one party a presiding officer and the other leadership of the most powerful committees, according to the NCSL. For example, in a divided house in Minnesota in 1978, “the speaker of the House was Republican, but the chairmen of the powerful rules, appropriations and tax committees were Democrats.”
The NCSL writes that deadlocked chambers have generally performed better than many expect. “Cooperation rather than confrontation seems to be key to the success of shared power in a chamber, as well as good will and the personalities of the players,” it noted.
In Virginia, the Democrats could have a slight upper hand given the near landslide victory that swept them into power, Sabato said, beginning with Gov. Ralph Northam.
“They had a wave with Northam, who deserves a lot of the credit,” he said. “Trump deserves even more credit. If the state Senate had been on the ballot, I’m convinced Democrats would have one that too. The Republicans are narrowly in charge of the Senate mainly because they weren’t on the ballot.”
Defections from one party to another are possible but not likely, Sabato said. And in a highly partisan era, compromise is going to be hard to come by, he said.
“It’s not going to be easy because of the polarization,” he said. “They’re politicians, they make do. They pursue partisan advantage when they can. And the voters spoke. They have to live with it.”
Of course, the final makeup of the legislature may yet change. Two additional recounts are taking place this week for seats won by slim margins: a Democrat in Richmond and a Republican in Fredericksburg, where Democrats are pushing for a new vote after 100 voters were given ballots for the wrong district.
There have been some famously split legislatures federally, of course. What is referred to by the Senate Historical Office as the Great Senate Deadlock of 1881 ensued after the 47th Congress convened, with 37 Republicans, 37 Democrats and two independents on the Senate. Each side was able to persuade one of the independents to join, giving the Republicans an edge with a Republican vice president. The independent who helped sway the advantage for the Republicans was awarded with a plum position as the chair of the powerful Agriculture Committee.
In recent times, the Senate found itself in a similar position in 2000, after a contentious election awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. Democrats, who had evened up the seats in the Senate and seen their candidate, Al Gore, take the popular vote, argued that the committees should reflect an even divide.
“The agreement for equal shares of committee seats — Republicans held all the chairmanships — was reached largely through a direct conversation between the two Senate leaders at the time, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott and South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle,” CNN reported.
And Republicans allowed Daschle to serve as Senate majority leader for 17 days until George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were sworn in, before handing the position over to Lott.
There were crucial steps that ensured passage, including a deficit bargain struck between Senators Patrick J. Toomey and Bob Corker in September, pressure from Mr. Trump on a controversial push to tweak retirement savings in the bill and, in the Senate, an early and crucial endorsement from John McCain of Arizona, the Republican wild card whose late defection killed the health care bill.
“There was never a moment where I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, we’re going to fail at this,’” Mr. Toomey said in an interview. “There were many moments I thought, ‘This is still an open question.’”
What there never was, in the minds of Republican leaders, was doubt the bill would pass — not even in the scattered moments over the past several weeks when individual senators held it up to demand changes.
“At the end of the day,” Mr. McConnell said in an interview, “I didn’t have a single person say, ‘If you don’t do this, I’m going to vote no.’”
The House approved the final version of the bill on Tuesday afternoon over the opposition of 12 Republicans and every Democrat who cast a vote. Because of a procedural issue, the House will have to vote again on Wednesday, but the bill is expected to land on Mr. Trump’s desk within days.
On the House floor, Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s voice cracked as he signaled victory.
“My colleagues, this is a day I’ve been looking forward to for a long time,” Mr. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, said Tuesday, in teeing up a vote he had worked toward his entire career. “Today, we are giving the people of this country their money back.”
To get to that moment, Republicans walled themselves off from criticism, convincing one another that unfavorable economic analyses of their bill were wrong, and that its poor poll numbers would improve once the cuts worked their way into Americans’ paychecks.
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The schedule minimized time back home for members, allowing them to largely avoid the contentious town hall meetings that helped sink their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They caught a break when Democrats reached a deal with Mr. Trump to keep the government open in early fall, freeing up valuable legislative time to push the tax bill forward.
Mr. Trump pushed party leaders again and again to deliver a bill quickly, and for the most part, he let them write it, intervening only to push for a low corporate rate and to nix an idea to meddle with tax-advantaged 401(k) plans. At times, the president would briefly derail the process with stray and unexpected Twitter posts that sent lawmakers and his own staff scrambling to reconsider major parts of the plan.
In the end, the bill met nearly every deadline in an “optimistic” timeline party leaders prepared in early October. That timeline called for House and Senate votes on a conference committee bill to occur Dec. 18. It was off by a day.
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Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, in October in Washington. Credit
Tom Brenner/The New York Times
The failure of health care gave life to the tax bill
Mr. Ryan and other Republican leaders have laid the groundwork for a large tax bill for years, but their efforts stalled in the early months of the Trump administration, as the party engaged in a high-visibility effort to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health law. That effort crashed to the ground in the early hours of July 28, when Mr. McCain and Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine broke from their Republican colleagues in a dramatic late-night defeat for party leaders.
Republicans took fire from the party’s base, which had voted for Republicans in large part over health care concerns, from conservative donors and from the president himself. Congressional aides said that criticism galvanized lawmakers, almost immediately, to rally behind what at that point was still only the broad outlines of a tax plan — but which Mr. McConnell and others saw as the key to appeasing furious Republican voters.
A congressional aide said the health care failure united Republicans toward a single goal: tax cuts.
At the time of the health care collapse, Republicans had made little public progress toward a tax bill, and it appeared on the back burner. The White House had released a one-page memo in April outlining its priorities. The House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Kevin Brady of Texas, a low-key business advocate better known for his work on health care, had put forth a tax-reform framework. But conservative groups had spent months killing one of its core provisions, a so-called border adjustment that would have effectively taxed imports, raising an estimated $1 trillion over a decade to help offset the revenues lost from reducing tax rates.
When Mr. Brady and Mr. Ryan officially abandoned that provision in late July, Republicans faced a difficult question: How would they raise enough revenues in a tax bill to ensure they did not add further to the federal budget deficit, after complaining throughout the Obama administration that deficits and debt were choking the economy?
The answer was, they did not.
Deficit concerns were played down
This was the first critical decision Republicans made to keep on their accelerated timeline: They embraced a budget that allowed for much higher deficits, on the assumption that their tax cuts would generate enough new growth and revenues to pay for themselves.
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A few senators voiced concerns about the possibility of adding more to the debt. They included Mr. Corker of Tennessee, a member of the Budget Committee, who announced this year he was not going to run for re-election and got into a public Twitter fight with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Corker was one of the committee members who gathered in Mr. McConnell’s office in August and were charged with writing a budget document that would accelerate passage of the tax bill. Congressional leaders and administration officials had already agreed to utilize the budget reconciliation process, which would allow them to bypass a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and approve a bill entirely on party lines. To do that, they needed a budget, which would include a limit on how much the tax cuts in the bill could add to the budget deficit over the next decade.
Many senators, led by Mr. Toomey, wanted a $2.5 trillion limit, which was less than Mr. Trump had proposed in his campaign tax plan but would all but ensure an immediate return to $1 trillion a year deficits.
At Mr. McConnell’s request, Mr. Toomey negotiated for weeks with Mr. Corker, and they eventually compromised on a $1.5 trillion limit. Mr. Toomey convinced many of his colleagues, including Mr. McConnell, that the bill could easily produce enough growth to offset those lost revenues — an estimate that no detailed economic analysis of the bill has yet supported.
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“For some time there was a lot of talk from a lot of sources that tax reform had to score as revenue neutral,” Mr. Toomey said. “I was 100 percent certain we would never get it done if we held ourselves to that constraint, and furthermore that there was no need to hold ourselves to that constraint.”
Mr. Corker felt $1.5 trillion was the best deal he could get, and he worried that if he refused, party leaders would bypass his committee and allow a vote on a budget with a much larger tax-cut cap.
“Hindsight being 2020,” Mr. Corker said this week, “I wish we had attempted to limit even more on that front end.”
Key votes fall into place
A significant moment came in September, when Mr. Trump cut a deal with the Democratic leaders, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, to prevent a government shutdown and raise the federal debt limit. Republicans say the move averted a protracted fight in both chambers, and left Republican leaders optimistic that they could move quickly on a tax bill by fall.
In the Senate, groups of members and their staff met on an almost daily basis to work through individual provisions in the bill to come.
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By the end of the month, top congressional Republicans and Mr. Trump had released a more detailed framework, identifying a 20 percent corporate tax rate, down from a high of 35 percent today.
But Mr. McConnell and Mr. Ryan pushed back on administration officials, including Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, when they attempted to release even more details, such as the break points for individual tax rates. That move, congressional staff said, gave House and Senate tax writers more freedom to craft their own bills and avoid getting boxed into proposals that could prove problematic.
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Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, left; Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah; and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, at a Senate Finance Committee meeting in November in Washington. Credit
Eric Thayer for The New York Times
The House and Senate approved Mr. Corker and Mr. Toomey’s budget compromise in October. House leaders introduced their bill at the start of November, and it sailed to passage two weeks later. Senators released their bill before Thanksgiving and quickly amended it in two controversial ways: To stay within the budget guidelines, they set individual tax cuts to expire at the end of 2025. And to free up more space for tax cuts, they eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate for health insurance coverage.
To the surprise of their aides, senators embraced both changes.
Mr. Trump beat a public drum for the tax bill throughout the process, but he engaged selectively on policy details, often over Twitter, sometimes backed with phone calls. He urged lawmakers to eliminate the mandate, and he scuttled a proposal in the House that would have raised revenue by shifting the tax treatment of some popular retirement contributions.
On a long trip to Asia, Mr. Trump often called Mr. Brady to discuss the bills. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump stayed behind to lobby senators, and she helped push for an expansion of the child tax credit that was added in the Senate Finance Committee.
In late November, Mr. Trump flew to the St. Louis suburbs to rally for the tax bill on a stage decorated for the holidays. It was there that he unveiled what would become his tagline for the closing presidential push on the bill, promising Americans a tax cut for Christmas.
Back in the Senate, key votes were falling into place. Mr. McCain, satisfied that the bill was moving through proper Senate channels, turned to an old friend to assess its effect on the economy. That was Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a conservative economist who had overseen economic policy on Mr. McCain’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, who gave Mr. McCain a frame for considering the bill.
“‘This is first and foremost about giving better opportunity to workers,’” Mr. Holtz-Eakin recalled Mr. McCain saying. “I said, ‘It’s going to create some debt. It’s going to have some deficits, no matter what you hear. So your question is, is it worth it?’”
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Mr. McCain concluded it was. He announced his support for the bill before the Senate vote.
That was a crucial moment, Mr. McConnell. “John was not there for us on Obamacare, and he was getting urged by everybody center-left,” Mr. McConnell said, “to do it to us one more time.” Mr. McCain will ultimately not vote on the bill, having returned to Arizona for medical treatment.
Ms. Collins also announced her support, after conversations with business owners in her state and with Mr. Holtz-Eakin, though she came away with the impression that the bill would pay for itself. Other wavering senators signed on — all but Mr. Corker, who was alone in being rattled by a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis that showed the bill would add $1 trillion to deficits even after accounting for additional growth. His lone no was not enough to stop the bill, even when coupled with every Democrat in the chamber, though it gave Republicans a slim margin for error. Mr. Corker later reversed course and said he would support the final version.
Choosing to negotiate with Republicans
As the bill raced through Congress, it sank in the eyes of the public. Majorities of Americans told pollsters they opposed it, and that they expected it would raise, not lower, their tax bills. Republicans told each other those polls would flip — that the country would come to love the bill when it saw its benefits.
Democrats fanned the dissatisfaction, with constant complaints about the bill and its process. Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi thundered on the Senate and House floor that the bill would hurt middle-class Americans, clearly setting up a campaign theme for Democrats to embrace in the midterm elections.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee, said he started the year with a sense of cautious optimism about tax policy but found Republicans unwilling to engage in a serious way.
Mr. Wyden described a visit from Gary D. Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, as a “show and tell” and said that Mr. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, never followed up on a promise to look into ways to make the tax plan more populist.
Mr. McConnell and Mr. Toomey lamented that the bill was not bipartisan and thus was less likely to be enduring. Mr. Toomey said that Republican leaders talked seriously about working across the aisle, but that when Democratic senators sent a letter last summer with strict conditions for working with them, it was clear that Republicans would have to proceed on their own.
The final negotiations this month were entirely between Republicans. The Senate version of the bill largely won out, but House leaders pushed, successfully, for an immediate cut of the corporate rate, which was raised slightly to 21 percent from 20 percent, and for a reduction in the top individual tax rate to 37 percent.
Negotiations completed, Republicans congratulated each other for what they remain convinced will be seen as a landmark legislative victory. On Tuesday, a few hours before the final Senate vote on the bill, Mr. McConnell acknowledged that Democrats believe the bill will spark a backlash that could determine control of Congress.
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“They must believe it must be a political winner for them,” he said. “We believe it’s a political win for the country, and thus, it’s going to be good for us. So we’ll take it to the country and see what happens in 2018.”
His decision highlights the trade-offs that Republicans, who have long pushed for fiscal responsibility, are making as they seek to score their first legislative victory since assuming political control. The $1.5 trillion tax bill, which cuts taxes for businesses and individuals, is expected to add $1 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. Rather than pay for those cuts, lawmakers are relying on rosy assumptions about economic growth and suggesting they will cut spending on programs like Medicare and Social Security to help bring down the deficit.
Mr. Corker has been the most vocal about the need to rein in the federal deficit. He voted against the initial Senate bill, the only Republican to do so, after party leaders rejected his request to require automatic tax increases down the road if the overhaul did not generate enough revenue to pay for itself.
Opponents of the tax plan immediately searched for a motive in the hope that they could alter his vote in the narrowly-held Senate. With just a 52-to-48 majority in the Senate, Republicans have little room for defections given that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is receiving medical treatment in his home state and is not expected to return to Washington in time for the vote. On Monday, two additional Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Susan Collins of Maine, said they would vote yes.
As new details in the tax bill came to light over the weekend, an article published by the International Business Times suggested that Mr. Corker’s vote was won in exchange for a last-minute provision that would benefit real estate developers by making it easier for them to take advantage of a new, more generous tax structure for so-called pass-through businesses, whose owners pay taxes on profits through the individual code.
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Mr. Corker, who was active in the real estate business in Tennessee before becoming a senator, retains a financial stake in companies that could benefit from the change.
Critics of the Republican tax overhaul adopted a new rallying cry to criticize a bill that they say is packed with advantages for the rich: “The Corker Kickback.”
Mr. Corker, in the interview, called the accusations ”disheartening” and said that he had not changed anything in the final bill.
“There’s nothing to buy me off with,” Mr. Corker said.
On Sunday, Mr. Corker sent a letter to Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, asking that he explain how the provision became included in the bill.
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“Because this issue has raised concerns, I would ask that you provide an explanation of the evolution of this provision and how it made it into the final conference report,” Mr. Corker wrote. “I think that because of many sensitivities, clarity on this issue is very important and hope that you will respond in an expeditious manner.”
Mr. Hatch, in a letter issued on Monday morning, defended Mr. Corker and said he was “disgusted” by reports that suggested Mr. Corker had played a role in the provision’s addition. He said Mr. Corker had wanted a less generous pass-through exemption than had been included.
“I am unaware of any attempt by you or your staff to contact anyone on the conference committee regarding this provision or any related policy matter,” Mr. Hatch wrote. “To the contrary, virtually all the concerns you had raised in the past about the treatment of pass-through businesses in tax reform were to voice skepticism about the generosity of various proposals under consideration.”
In fact, the Senate bill that Mr. Corker voted against already contained big benefits for the real estate industry. In large part, that is because of a provision cutting taxes for the owners of pass-through entities. Such businesses, like partnerships and limited liability companies, do not pay taxes themselves, but instead pass through their tax liabilities to their owners. Currently, such income is taxed at rates as high as 39.6 percent. But under the Senate bill, much of that income could be taxed at a rate as low as 29.6 percent. The bill limited those tax savings, partly by pegging the lower taxes to the size of a company’s workforce.
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The final bill released on Friday included a new provision permitting the real estate industry to take advantage of the lower tax rate, tying the savings to the value of their properties — regardless of their size or their number of employees. Mr. Hatch said he had inserted the provision after discussions with the House and Senate negotiators writing the final bill and a congressional leadership aide pointed out that a version of it was in the House bill.
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Democrats remain unconvinced, and they have taken to social media to voice their concerns.
Others, however, suggested that Mr. Corker’s change of heart was more political than financial and that he did not want to be the lone Senate Republican to vote against his party’s tax bill.
“The conspiratorial speculation about Corker’s real estate pass-through holdings seems thin to me,” said Scott Greenberg, a tax analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation. “Perhaps a simpler explanation for Corker’s flip is that his vote wasn’t needed before but is needed now.”
In Tennessee, Mr. Corker’s intended vote was welcomed on Monday.
“We’re very happy with his final position,” said Bradley Jackson, the president of Tennessee’s Chamber of Commerce, who had discussions with Mr. Corker and his office in recent weeks.
Mr. Corker said his turnaround came after he engaged in deep discussions with business groups in Tennessee and around the country, the Republican leadership in Congress, his Senate colleagues and his wife. He also spent many private moments considering how to vote, meditating over the question on the balcony of the Senate chamber.
While Mr. Corker said it was “not something that’s pleasant” to be the only Senate Republican to oppose the tax bill, his colleagues were generally respectful of his decision and only prodded him gently.
In the end, Mr. Corker was convinced that the additional debt that the tax bill would pile on was manageable relative to the country’s $43 trillion balance sheet and that businesses in his home state should have the opportunity for the additional foreign investment and other benefits that he believed the tax cuts would facilitate.
He said that he planned to make fiscal restraint a priority next year as Republicans move on to other initiatives like infrastructure and wanted to ensure that any legislation to help rebuild America’s roads and bridges was actually paid, and not financed, through deficit spending. After 2018, when his term expires, Mr. Corker’s future is less clear. But he said he was not ruling out running for office again in some capacity.
The final bill was not a ‘home run,’” Mr. Corker said, noting that he was at peace with his choice.
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“I feel like it was the right decision. I have no qualms about it,” Mr. Corker said.
White House lawyers are expected to meet with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s office late this week seeking good news: that his sprawling investigation’s focus on President Trump will soon end and their client will be cleared.
But people familiar with the probe say that such assurances are unlikely and that the meeting could trigger a new, more contentious phase between the special counsel and a frustrated president, according to administration officials and advisers close to Trump.
People with knowledge of the investigation said it could last at least another year — pointing to ongoing cooperation from witnesses such as former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, as well as a possible trial of two former Trump campaign officials. The special counsel’s office has continued to request new documents related to the campaign, and members of Mueller’s team have told others they expect to be working through much of 2018, at a minimum.
The dynamic threatens to intensify the already inflamed political atmosphere enveloping the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Even as White House lawyers have pledged to cooperate with Mueller, Trump and his allies have accused the Justice Department and FBI of bias and overreach.
The latest salvo came this past weekend, when a lawyer for the presidential transition accused Mueller of wrongfully obtaining thousands of emails sent and received by Trump officials before the start of his administration. The special counsel’s office said all the material was legally obtained.
The meeting’s outcome could deepen tensions as many Trump supporters question Mueller’s credibility and Democrats express fear that the president will seek to fire the special counsel.
Ty Cobb, the White House lawyer overseeing the response to the Russia investigation, did not respond to phone calls and text messages seeking comment. Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel, declined to comment.
White House lawyers have told the president he could be exonerated as early as the beginning of the year, after previously reassuring him that he would be cleared by Thanksgiving and Christmas, as The Washington Post previously reported. They have stated publicly that all White House interviews are over and that Mueller’s team is no longer seeking White House documents.
In the meeting this week, they plan to ask Mueller’s investigators if they need more information before reaching a conclusion that the probe as related to Trump is complete, according to a person familiar with the Trump team’s plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
The question that White House lawyers will pose to the special counsel’s office, according to the person: “You’ve had all these witnesses, all these records. Is there anything else you need from the White House?”
Until now, Trump’s legal team has repeatedly pledged cooperation with Mueller’s office. A White House spokesman said there was no plan to change the strategy.
Trump’s legal team has reassured him that it sees no evidence of collusion or obstruction in the records that it turned over, White House advisers said. While the lawyers have told Trump that they expect the investigative team will continue its work related to former campaign chairman Paul Manafort deep into next year, as well as possibly Flynn, they said they believe Mueller should be close to wrapping up the focus on the current White House.
Trump himself has expressed frustration with the probe but has shown optimism that it will not touch him. He told associates recently that he harbors no deep concern over the investigation and noted that his lawyers talk with Mueller’s team regularly, according to a person who spoke with Trump last week and spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation.
When pressed by two advisers to take the matter more seriously and asked why he is so confident in his lawyers, Trump brushed off the concerns. “He is living in his own world,” the person said, predicting that Trump would erupt at some point in 2018 if the probe continued to drag on.
Another associate said that even in private, Trump is “confident, even arrogant” that he has done nothing wrong.
“There is no collusion,” the president said at the White House on Sunday, after saying he was not planning to fire Mueller.
Among people familiar with the probe, there is widespread skepticism that the special counsel’s investigation is drawing to a close.
Already, Manafort and his former deputy Rick Gates have been indicted on money-laundering and other charges related to work they did in Ukraine before the 2016 race. Two others have pleaded guilty and are cooperating, giving investigators new leads to pursue. Agents have gathered huge volumes of documents and conducted their first round of interviews with White House officials.
As recently as last week, Mueller’s team was still asking questions about the firing of James B. Comey as FBI director, one person said.
Legal experts said Mueller would have little incentive to clear the president or other White House aides while he is seeking more information from witnesses.
“I think it’s possible Mueller’s team could give them an idea of how much longer they anticipate their investigation will last,” said Peter Zeidenberg, the former deputy special counsel who helped investigate the leak of Valerie Plame’s covert role as a CIA operative. “I would be shocked if they have a timeline anything similar to what we’ve heard coming from the White House.”
“As far as a clean bill of health, I can’t imagine they are going to be prepared to make a decision like that at this point,” he said of the special counsel’s team. “They are not going to be in a position to make that call until they finish this case and finish discussing all the evidence they have.”
Mark Corallo, a former spokesman for Trump’s legal team, said he thinks it is unlikely that the probe wraps up by the end of the year, but he said he believes it could conclude in the spring. He said that Mueller is aware of the political implications surrounding his investigation.
“Bob understands you can’t have a president who is living under this cloud of uncertainty,” Corallo said, adding that he believes it is possible that the special counsel will at some point call Trump’s lawyers and say, “We are done with the president. There is nothing there.”
The high-stakes meeting between White House lawyers and Mueller’s team comes as conservative lawmakers and pundits have intensified their demands for a second special counsel to investigate the FBI, pointing to text messages between two former FBI officials discussing their dislike of Trump.
“We are now beginning to understand the magnitude of the insider bias on Mueller’s team,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said last week. Another member of the committee, Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), said Mueller and his team should wear “Democratic Donkeys or Hillary T-shirts.”
A White House adviser said the president has enjoyed the attacks. In recent weeks, he has spoken to a number of Fox News hosts, Republican lawmakers and others who have castigated Mueller’s team, the adviser said.
The attacks on Mueller’s investigation grew this weekend after an attorney for the presidential transition told congressional investigators Saturday that thousands of pages of the organization’s communications were provided to Mueller by the federal General Services Administration.
Trump’s lawyers learned Mueller had the emails this month when witnesses were quizzed on the material. Some of the documents contained sensitive information that wasn’t related to the Russia investigation, according to a person familiar with the material.
A GSA spokeswoman declined to comment. Mueller’s team said it obtained all documents legally.
Tom Hamburger and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.
DUPONT, Wash. — An Amtrak train making its inaugural trip on a new service from Seattle to Portland, Ore., derailed near here early Monday while crossing an overpass, toppling cars onto one of the busiest highways on the West Coast, killing at least three people and injuring about 100.
The wreck left 65-ton passenger rail cars scattered — several of them on the highway below, one tucked under the bridge it was to cross, others beside the railroad embankment and one dangling from the bridge with an end resting on the rail car that had been in front of it. In all, 13 of the train’s cars jumped the tracks, officials said.
At least five vehicles passing below on Interstate 5 — including two tractor-trailers — were heavily damaged as the rail cars from Amtrak Cascades train 501 fell from above.
Seconds later a member of the train crew radioed a dispatcher: “Amtrak 501, emergency, emergency, emergency. We’re on the ground. . . . We were coming around the corner to take the bridge over I-5 there, right north in Nisqually, and we went on the ground.”
The dispatcher asked, “Is everybody okay?”
The crew member replied: “I’m still figuring that out. We got cars everywhere and down onto the highway.”
He was one of five crew members aboard the train, along with 80 passengers, Amtrak said.
Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste speaks with the media about the Amtrak derailment.
A Washington State Police spokeswoman said three people had been confirmed dead and about 100 people were transported to hospitals, many of whom remain in critical condition. It was unclear whether everyone had been accounted for.
“There are a lot of critical injuries,” spokeswoman Brooke Bova said. “This is a very complex scene.”
Authorities said they do not know what caused the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was sending 20 of its investigators to the scene. They were expected to arrive late Monday.
At a news conference at NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C., board member Bella Dinh-Zarr had few details about the crash or potential causes but said agency officials would know more once their team arrived.
Those investigators will include at least a dozen specialists in train operations, mechanics, tracks, signal systems, human performance and survival factors. The lead investigator is Ted Turpin, who also Washinworked on the 2015 Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia and was the lead investigator for the Long Island Rail Road train crash at New York’s Atlantic Terminal early this year.
A website that collects train location and speed information from Amtrak’s live map said the train was traveling at 81 mph as it neared the curve. Trains are supposed to reduce their speed to 30 mph to negotiate the curve, according to Rachelle Cunningham, a spokeswoman at Sound Transit, which owns the tracks.
Dinh-Zarr said that speed is one of the first factors that NTSB investigators will be looking at. They will also be assessing what crash-avoidance technology existed on the tracks or on the train and whether that technology functioned properly.
Though Amtrak trains are equipped with it, the railroad said the train was not using positive train control, a system that would have slowed it as it entered the curve. The system requires that sensors also be placed along the rail bed, and those were not scheduled to be in place until sometime next year, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation.
The Amtrak Cascades train has daily service between Seattle and Portland, departing from Seattle at 6 a.m. local time. DuPont is about 50 miles south of Seattle; the crash happened between the Tacoma and Olympia rail stops, shortly after 7:30 a.m.
Chris Karnes, a passenger, said the train was approaching a curve at a high speed before it came off the tracks.
“It seemed like we were reaching sort of a bend in the tracks and all of a sudden we were slammed into the seats in front of us,” Karnes told CBS News. “And then the car careened down an embankment and came to a stop. After that happened we could hear and feel the cars crumpling and breaking apart.”
Karnes, who was in a car toward the front of the train, said he and other passengers had to kick out a window to get out. Passengers had visible injuries — “cuts, people bleeding,” he said. “I did see one person who was laying on the ground and not moving.”
Daniel Konzelman was driving down the highway when he and a friend saw the jumble of derailed cars. The emergency response training he’d acquired during his Eagle Scout days kicked in, and Konzelman, 24, immediately pulled over, according to the Associated Press.
He and his friend climbed into train cars to look for victims. Some were pinned under the train; others appeared to be dead. Konzelman helped the passengers who looked as if they could move out of the train and tried to comfort those who looked seriously injured. He and his friend stayed for almost two hours. “I wasn’t scared. I knew what to expect,” Konzelman said, adding: “I prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. I saw a little bit of both.”
Danae Orlob, 27, of Olympia was in the back seat of a car that passed under the bridge moments after the derailment occurred, before any authorities had arrived.
“What I originally thought was a semi was actually a train car just flattened on the ground,” said Orlob, who was on her way into work in Bellevue. “The train cars were on both sides of the bridge, which I can’t even imagine how that would have happened.”
She said there was a stillness in the moments after the crash, as if everyone was stunned. “It was quiet. It was weird, and made me think the accident had been there much longer than it had,” she said. “It was definitely surreal.”
She looked back and saw a single rail car dangling over the highway from the bridge.
“It looked mostly intact, so the best thing I could hope was, I hoped everybody could have gotten out of there okay,” she said.
Within a minute, she said, a police car pulled up to the scene. Then an avalanche of first responders, ambulances, firetrucks and other emergency vehicles poured onto the highway.
The Amtrak train was on its first run on tracks that had been rebuilt at a cost of $181 million, using a 14.5-mile bypass owned by the regional transit authority and avoiding a more scenic but slower passage along the coastline. Officials celebrated the opening of the Tacoma station along the rebuilt route with a ribbon cutting Friday.
The new Amtrak Cascades service is part of an expansion of Amtrak intercity passenger rail service that includes station upgrades and expansions and the addition of new locomotives.
An Amtrak train derailed Monday morning in Washington state about 40 miles south of Seattle. (Washington State Patrol)
Though the train had been tested on the track, Monday’s run was the first time it made the trip with a full load of about 80 passengers and their baggage.
Washington and Oregon jointly operate the Amtrak Cascades intercity passenger service. The trains share the tracks with freight trains and are authorized to travel at top speeds of 79 mph, according to information from the Washington State Department of Transportation.
The new service is said to save 10 minutes in travel time between Seattle to Portland.
“On behalf of everyone at Amtrak, we are deeply saddened by all that has happened today,” Amtrak president and co-chief executive Richard Anderson said in a statement Monday. “We will do everything in our power to support our passengers and crew and their families.”
At an afternoon news conference, Gay Banks Olson, assistant superintendent at Amtrak, said the railroad’s first priority is to take care of passengers, employees and relatives affected.
“It is horrible that this happened to these passengers, but we are very grateful that there weren’t more people involved,” Banks Olson said. “We are going to do everything we can in the next few days and weeks to support these passengers and their families.”
State police are providing resources and getting supplies to the scene, the spokeswoman said.
Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said on Twitter: “Today’s tragic incident in Pierce County is a serious and ongoing emergency. Trudi and I are holding in our hearts everyone on board, and are praying for the many injured.”
Rescue crews had to use chain saws, hydraulic equipment, air chisels and various other tools to extricate victims.
Jay Sumerland, battalion chief with West Pierce Fire and Rescue, described the scene as surreal.
“When there are cars dangling over the freeway, it’s very precarious and dangerous to the fire service crews,” he said. “Firefighters put themselves in a very dangerous place and did a great job searching all over those cars.”
The power car behind the locomotive carried 350 gallons of fuel. The Washington State Department of Ecology and Amtrak were working on mitigation. Washington State Patrol Chief John Batiste said his agency performed an initial investigation in anticipation of NTSB’s arrival.
Cranes also were being brought in to stabilize the cars before state transportation officials could inspect the bridge.
Lazo and Halsey reported from Washington, D.C. Martine Powers and Faiz Siddiqui in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
