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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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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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.”

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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.

As recently as last Wednesday, Mr. Corker said the final changes being made to the combined Senate and House bill had done little to assuage his concerns that his party was being fiscally reckless.

“My deficit concerns have not been alleviated,” said Mr. Corker, who lamented that the bill could have been improved with more time.

On Friday, Mr. Corker stunned many in Washington when he said he would back the tax bill, which, while imperfect, would still be good for the country.

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.

“There really isn’t any other good explanation is there?” Representative Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, wrote on Twitter, suggesting that the provision was the reason that Mr. Corker decided to back the bill.

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.

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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.

[Trump criticizes how Mueller obtained transition emails, says no plans to fire special counsel]

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.”

[Trump says he won’t fire Mueller, as campaign to discredit Russia probe heats up]

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.

[Amtrak crew member’s call to 911: ‘We went on the ground’]

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.

[Trump budget slashes federal aid for rail, long-distance Amtrak routes]

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.

 

 

Sen. John McCain left the nation’s capital Sunday to spend Christmas in Arizona with his family as he battles brain cancer, giving his Republican Party one less vote as it is expected this week to attempt to push through a contentious tax plan along party lines.

President Trump told reporters Sunday that McCain and his wife, Cindy McCain, have “headed back [to Arizona], but I understand he’ll come if we ever needed his help, which hopefully we won’t.” He added: “But the word is John will come back if we need his vote. It’s too bad. He’s going through a very tough time, there’s no question about it. But he will come back if we need his vote.”

Trump said he spoke to Cindy McCain by phone Sunday. “I wished her well. I wish John well,” he said.

McCain was hospitalized Wednesday while receiving chemotherapy treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda and at the nearby National Institutes of Health. He received a diagnosis this year of glioblastoma, an aggressive, malignant brain tumor that can cause headaches, seizures, blurred vision and other symptoms.

In a brief statement, the senator’s office provided an assessment from Mark Gilbert, chief of neuro-oncology at the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute.

“Senator McCain has responded well to treatment he received at Walter Reed Medical Center for a viral infection and continues to improve,” Gilbert said, according to the Associated Press. “An evaluation of his underlying cancer shows he is responding positively to ongoing treatment.”

News of McCain’s travel first emerged Sunday afternoon after his daughter Meghan McCain tweeted about the family’s holiday plans.

“Thank you to everyone for their kind words,” she wrote. “My father is doing well and we are all looking forward to spending Christmas together in Arizona. If you’re feeling charitable this Christmas @HeadfortheCure or @NBTStweets to help find a cure for brain cancer is what I recommend.”

McCain, 81, missed several Senate votes last week while at Walter Reed. He voted for the initial version of the tax plan, which includes sweeping tax cuts and initially passed the Senate with 51 votes. Without McCain, Republican leaders have a razor-thin margin to pass the final version, which has been in House-Senate negotiations and cannot afford any more defections.

But for Republicans, the bar to pass the legislation isn’t quite as high as initially feared. Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said last week that they will vote for the measure after indicating earlier that they would not.

McCain has been in “good spirits” while receiving treatment, Ben Domenech, Meghan McCain’s husband, said in an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“I’m happy to say that he’s doing well,” said Domenech, a conservative writer. “The truth is that as anyone knows whose family has battled cancer or any significant disease, that oftentimes there are side effects of treatment that you have. The senator has been through a round of chemo and he was hospitalized this week at Walter Reed.”

McCain, Domenech added, “remains one of the toughest men on the face of the earth, as you know.”

CLOSE

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta lost power on Sunday.
USA TODAY

A major power outage halted air traffic Sunday at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, grounding all of the hub’s outgoing flights and halting incoming traffic for tens of thousands of travelers hoping to land at the world’s busiest airport.

The disruption, coming just eight days before Christmas, promises to wreak havoc on one of the busiest travel weeks of the year.

The outage, reported around 1 p.m. ET, forced travelers out of the darkened terminal and into an icy rain for hours, witnesses reported. It stranded others on Atlanta’s tarmac as they waited to get off of incoming flights.

Others were stranded on electric trams that run between terminals — they had to be rescued by firefighters.

Around 7:30 p.m., airport officials said power had been restored to the airport’s Concourse F. Crews, they said, were working “with great urgency” to restore power to the rest of the airport, .

As utility crews worked to fix the outage, passengers described a chaotic scene inside a smoke-filled terminal.

Today in the Sky: Power outage hits Atlanta airport; more than 600 flights canceled

List: List: The world’s 20 busiest airports, 2016

Traveler Olivia Dorfman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution she was about to board a flight home to Indiana when the lights went out. Ten minutes later, she said, “a buzzer went off in the background — that has been going on for over an hour and every so often bright lights flash in the ceiling.”

Dorfman said smoke filled the area near a gate in the D Concourse. She said at least one other passenger described the acrid smoke as that of an electrical fire.

At various times, airport workers tried to herd passengers toward the smoky area and away from it, Dorfman said. “This has been very bizarre. No one seems to know what they’re doing.”

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered a ground stop for flights into the airport, holding them at departure airports across the world. The FAA said departures also were delayed.

Please let the people standing outside on the tarmac back into the building, it is too cold outside.

— Audrey Owens (@audreyowensvb) December 17, 2017

Several airlines, including Southwest and Delta, said they were canceling flights due to the power outage. In a statement, Delta said it had canceled more than 450 flights and was “working to deplane customers from aircraft that have not been able to park at a gate due to the outage.”

Country music star Travis Tritt tweeted late Sunday afternoon that he was stuck in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., because of the outage. “How on earth can the busiest airport on earth have power down and no backup generators up and running?” he wrote. “This makes ATL airport designers look dumb as hell!”

Flight tracker: Is your flight on time?

Late Sunday, Georgia Power said it the outage was likely caused by an electrical fire at an underground facility. It expected to have electricity restored to the airport by midnight.

Hartsfield-Jackson last year handled 104,171,935 passengers, the most of any airport worldwide. 

In a statement the FAA said the airport’s tower could operate normally, but that departures were delayed “because airport equipment in the terminals is not working.”

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Malou Cadavillo and her 16-month-old granddaughter sat on a motionless luggage carousel waiting for a car seat after making it to baggage claim by the light of fellow passengers’ mobile phones.

Cadavillo told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that her grandsons, 7 and 11, were uneasy. One of them added, “I hope there’s no monsters down here.”

Contributing: Michael King, WXIA-TV, Atlanta.

Archives: Snow in Atlanta! Flight cancellations spike as storm intensifies

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President Trump appeared to back the claims of a lawyer for his presidential transition team that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III improperly obtained Trump associates’ emails, saying Sunday that “a lot of lawyers thought that was pretty sad.”

Trump also said he has no plan to fire Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, including the possibility of coordination with the Trump campaign. Mueller’s investigation has resulted in charges against two people and guilty pleas by two others, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“Not looking good. It’s not looking good,” Trump said when asked whether Mueller had received the transition documents improperly.

A lawyer for Trump’s transition team contends that Mueller should not have been able to obtain a trove of emails from the period between Trump’s 2016 election victory and his Jan. 20 inauguration without the consent of transition officials.

The batch of emails totaling thousands of pages of communications was provided to Mueller by the federal General Services Administration, the lawyer representing the organization known as Trump for America said in a letter delivered to congressional investigators Saturday.

“This morning we sent a letter to Congress concerning the unauthorized sharing of private and transition emails with the Mueller team,” lawyer Kory Langhofer said in an interview Saturday.

A spokesman for Mueller’s team rejected the allegations of impropriety.

“When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process,” said Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office.

The letter from Langhofer is the latest in a series of legal and public relations moves by Trump’s allies to attempt to undermine Mueller’s investigation and portray it as politically motivated.

“It’s quite sad to see that. My people were very upset,” Trump told reporters at the White House about the transition emails upon his return from a weekend trip to Camp David.

“I can’t imagine there’s anything on them, because as we said there’s no collusion,” Trump said. “There was no collusion whatsoever.”

Some of the president’s supporters have urged him to fire Mueller, but the White House has consistently said there is no discussion about getting rid of the special counsel.

Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III departs after a meeting with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 17. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

“No, I’m not,” Trump responded Sunday when asked if he intended to fire Mueller.

[Inside Trump’s legal team: Trying to protect the president from Mueller’s ‘killers’]

The letter from Langhofer, who was counsel to Trump for America, alleged that career employees of the GSA improperly provided privileged communications to investigators working for Mueller.

Transition documents are private property, not government records, the transition team contends. The letter invokes federal law and what Langhofer calls decades of precedent to argue that Mueller overstepped.

The transfer of transition documents is “unlawful conduct that undermines the Presidential Transition Act of 1963,” the letter said, “and will impair the ability of future presidential transition teams to candidly discuss policy and internal matters that benefit the country as a whole.”

The letter was sent to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as well as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Trump transition alleges that the handover was done by “career staff at the General Services Administration” and suggested that those employees may have had political motives.

But some legal experts challenged Langhofer’s charge that anything improper occurred.

Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who teaches white collar crime at George Washington University Law School, said it was not at all surprising that Mueller’s team sought Trump transition emails. “It would be almost prosecutorial misconduct for them not to,” he said. He said it was also not surprising that Mueller would ask GSA for emails sent using government accounts.

“It’s not your personal email. If it ends in .gov, you don’t have any expectation of privacy,” he said.

But he said if Trump’s team had a valid legal claim, there is a standard avenue to pursue — they would file a sealed motion to the judge supervising the grand jury and ask the judge to rule the emails were improperly seized and provide a remedy, like requiring Mueller’s team to return the emails or excluding their use in the investigation.

“You go to the judge and complain,” he said. “You don’t issue a press release or go to Congress. It appears from the outside that this is part of a pattern of trying to undermine Mueller’s investigation.”

Eliason said he could think of “no apparent privilege” that would apply to emails sent between private citizens who have not yet joined the government, as Trump’s team suggested.

[Trump calls conduct at the FBI ‘disgraceful’ in latest criticism of bureau]

Trump’s lawyers were given a courtesy notice that the transition team lawyer planned to register a complaint, according to a person familiar with the discussion. The transition team lawyer learned of the records being provided to Mueller by GSA on Tuesday when a member of the transition was being interviewed by investigators and was shown a copy of their own email using transition account.

One White House adviser disputed pundits’ and lawyers’ claims that the only way the transition could object was to file a motion before the chief judge overseeing the grand jury.

“This wasn’t a subpoena pursuant to a grand jury. GSA just turned them over,” the adviser said.

The president’s lawyers are scheduled to meet with Muller’s team later this week for a status conference. His lawyers are expected to ask the special counsel if there are any other outstanding questions or materials that the team needs before it brings its probe to conclusion.

Democrats were quick to challenge the charge that either GSA or Mueller’s team acted improperly.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, the senior Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the 1963 Presidential Transition Act “simply does not support withholding transition team emails from criminal investigators.”

“The President’s lawyers have said they want to fully comply with Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, so it is odd that they now suggest they would have withheld key documents from federal investigators,” Cummings said in a statement.

On Sunday, a Republican aide to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said the specific issues raised in Langhofer’s letter should be dealt with by the legal system — not Congress.

“To the extent the letter raises issues on how to improve subsequent transitions, the Committee takes the letter under advisement,” the aide said in an email.

[FBI director defends bureau’s integrity as GOP lawmakers press him on Trump, Clinton probes]

The GSA provided facilities to the Trump transition team in the weeks before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. Langhofer claims that GSA had assured Trump for America that while it retained copies of transition records, it would not release them without consulting the organization.

GSA Deputy Counsel Lenny Loewentritt disputed Langhofer’s claim in an interview with BuzzFeed News Saturday. He told the news site that members of the transition team were informed that by using devices provided by GSA, materials “would not be held back in any law enforcement” requests.

GSA did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.

Mueller’s team, Langhofer’s letter said, “has extensively used the materials in question, including portions that are susceptible to claims of privilege, and without notifying TFA or taking customary precautions to protect TFA’s rights and privileges.”

This story has been updated to include analysis of Langhofer’s letter from a legal expert, a response from a key Democratic congressman and additional context.

Mike DeBonis, Rosalind S. Helderman and Carol Leonnig contributed to this report.

Just before leaving his Defense Department job two months ago, intelligence officer Luis Elizondo quietly arranged to secure the release of three of the most unusual videos in the Pentagon’s secret vaults: raw footage from encounters between fighter jets and “anomalous aerial vehicles” — military jargon for UFOs.

The videos, all taken from cockpit cameras, show pilots struggling to lock their radars on oval-shaped vessels that, on screen, look vaguely like giant flying Tic Tacs. The strange aircraft — no claims are made about their possible origins or makeup — appear to hover briefly before sprinting away at speeds that elicit gasps and shouts from the pilots.

Elizondo, in an internal Pentagon memo requesting that the videos be cleared for public viewing, argued that the images could help educate pilots and improve aviation safety. But in interviews, he said his ultimate intention was to shed light on a little-known program Elizondo himself ran for seven years: a low-key Defense Department operation to collect and analyze reported UFO sightings.

The existence of the program, known as the Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program, was confirmed officially for the first time Saturday by a Pentagon spokesman. The acknowledgment came in response to media inquiries, which were generated in part by a start-up company Elizondo has joined since retirement. The private company specializes in promoting UFO research for scientific and entertainment purposes.

Current and former Pentagon officials confirm that the Pentagon program has been in existence since 2007 and was formed for the purpose of collecting and analyzing a wide range of “anomalous aerospace threats” ranging from advanced aircraft fielded by traditional U.S. adversaries to commercial drones to possible alien encounters. It is a rare instance of ongoing government investigations into a UFO phenomenon that was the subject of multiple official inquiries in the 1950s and 1960s.

[Do we really want to know if we’re not alone in the universe?]

Spending for the program totaled at least $22 million, according to former Pentagon officials and documents seen by The Washington Post, but the funding officially ended in 2012. “It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding and it was in the best interest of the DOD to make a change,” Pentagon spokesman Tom Crosson explained in a statement.

But officials familiar with the initiative say the collection effort continued as recently as last month. The program operated jointly out of the Pentagon and, at least for a time, an underground complex in Las Vegas managed by Bigelow Aerospace, a defense contractor that builds modules for space stations. It generated at least one report, a 490-page volume that describes alleged UFO sightings in the United States and numerous foreign countries over multiple decades.

Neither the Pentagon nor any of the program’s managers have claimed conclusive proof of extraterrestrial visitors, but Elizondo, citing accounts and data collected by his office over a decade, argues that the videos and other evidence failed to generate the kind of high-level attention he believes is warranted. As part of his decision to leave the Pentagon, he not only sought the release of videos but also penned a letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis complaining that a potential security threat was being ignored.

[No, we haven’t discovered alien megastructures around a distant star]

“Despite overwhelming evidence at both the classified and unclassified levels, certain individuals in the [Defense] Department remain staunchly opposed to further research on what could be a tactical threat to our pilots, sailors and soldiers, and perhaps even an existential threat to our national security,” Elizondo said in the letter, a copy of which was provided to The Post.

The first public revelations of the program came in a video conference aired in October by To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the firm Elizondo joined as a consultant after retiring from his Pentagon job. The New York Times and Politico reported the existence of the program on their websites Saturday. The Washington Post conducted several confidential interviews over two months with Elizondo and Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence who also is an officer of the private firm.

Documents provided by the former officials included letters of support by former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), a key backer of the initiative who helped secure funding for the program and sought to ensure a high degree of secrecy. Elizondo said knowledge of the program was limited, even within the Pentagon itself. He said the program had multiple enemies at senior levels of the department, from officials who were either skeptical or ideologically opposed to AATIP’s mission.

“I was honored to serve at the DOD and took my mission of exploring unexplained aerial phenomena quite seriously,” Elizondo said. “In the end, however, I couldn’t carry out that mission, because the department — which was understandably overstretched — couldn’t give it the resources that the mounting evidence deserved.”

It is difficult to draw conclusions about the nature of the unidentified vessels from the videos alone. Experts generally urged caution, explaining that reported UFO sightings often turn out of have innocuous explanations.

A retired Navy pilot contacted by The Post who was involved in a 2004 encounter depicted in one of the videos confirmed that the images accurately reflected his recollection of the events. The pilot would only speak on the condition of anonymity.

Elizondo, a 22-year veteran of the department who has held top security clearance and worked on secret counterintelligence missions, said he chose to join the private venture because he believed it was the best way to continue the work he was unable to complete as a government employee.

“I left to find an environment where investigating these phenomena is priority number one,” he said.

BIG CORPORATIONS Industries like big retailers will benefit from the new corporate rate of 21 percent, since those companies pay relatively close to the full 35 percent rate. Other aspects of the corporate tax cuts will be enjoyed by an array of multinational industries, particularly technology and pharmaceutical companies, like Google, Facebook, Apple, Johnson Johnson and Pfizer. Such multinational companies have accumulated nearly $3 trillion offshore, mostly in tax haven subsidiaries, untouched by the United States taxman. The tax bill will force those companies to gradually bring that money home, but it will be taxed at rates ranging from 8 percent to 15.5 percent. That’s far lower than the current 35 percent tax rate on corporate profits and even lower than the new 21 percent rate.

Plus, American companies will no longer owe full corporate taxes on future profits they say they earn abroad, providing more incentive to push income into tax haven subsidiaries. The law even includes provisions that could encourage companies to move workers abroad, despite pledges to do the opposite.

MULTIMILLIONAIRES An exemption for estates that owe what Republicans call the “death tax” was lifted to $22 million from $11 million. That doesn’t matter much to billionaires like Charles Koch, but means a big tax cut for people with estates worth tens of millions of dollars.

Plus, the top rate applying to wages and interest income would be cut to 37 percent from 39.6 percent.

PRIVATE EQUITY MANAGERS During the campaign, Donald Trump railed against wealthy investment managers who, thanks to the so-called carried interest loophole, pay taxes on the majority of their pay at a lower capital gains rates. But the purported reform to this tax provision will affect few if any private equity managers, leaving the loophole intact.

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PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND THE PEOPLE WHO CAN AFFORD THEM Parents would be eligible to use a type of tax-preferred savings plan — known as a 529 plan — to save for their children’s’ elementary and secondary education. Right now, those savings plans are only eligible for college. But they would be expanded to allow for up to $10,000 a year for tuition at private and religious schools.

THE LIQUOR BUSINESS Excise taxes for small brewers and distillers are reduced in the final agreement. Those industries are dominated by entrepreneurial small businesses often based in rural areas. They also have strong lobbyists, and many are based in states with powerful senators, like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio. Mr. Portman, who tucked a provision to help craft brewers into the Senate legislation, was part of the small team of lawmakers who merged the two bills into a final version.

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ARCHITECTS AND ENGINEERS They were originally restricted in how much they could benefit from the new pass-through provision. If they structure their businesses a certain way, the final version will let them benefit fully.

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TAX ACCOUNTANTS AND LAWYERS Mr. Trump once said his “dream” was to put tax preparation services out of business by simplifying the tax code. But the rushed legislation will probably have the opposite effect, as individuals try and make sense of the complicated new provisions, staggered dates and new rates. The uncertainty and confusion will probably create numerous new opportunities to game the system: tax preparers are sure to see a boom in business advising clients on how to restructure their employment and compensation arrangements to take advantage of the lower tax rates on income reported by corporations and pass-through entities.

LOSERS

PEOPLE BUYING HEALTH INSURANCE With the repeal of the individual mandate, some people who currently buy health insurance because they are required by law to do so are expected to go without coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office, healthier people are more likely to drop their insurance, leaving insurers stuck with more people who are older and ailing. This is expected to make average insurance premiums on the individual market go up by about 10 percent. All told, 13 million fewer Americans are projected to have health coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

INDIVIDUAL TAXPAYERS IN THE FUTURE To stay under the $1.5 trillion limit for new deficits lawmakers set for themselves, they opted to make the cuts for individuals and families temporary, expiring at the end of 2025 — even as the corporate tax cuts will be permanent. Republicans are counting on a future Congress to extend the lower rates, as has happened in the past. But there are no guarantees, and that could mean a big tax increase down the road. What is more, the use of a different, less generous measure of inflation would push taxpayers into higher tax brackets more quickly.

THE ELDERLY A 2010 law requires that any legislation that adds to the federal deficit be paid for by spending cuts, increases in revenue or other offsets. Some cuts would be automatic, and the biggest program to be affected is Medicare, the health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. Dozens of other programs are likely to be cut as well, but Medicare, which would face a 4 percent cut, is by far the biggest. Republicans say that this rule will be waived and the cuts will be averted, but that will take a bipartisan deal.

LOW-INCOME FAMILIES Low-income families who claim the earned-income tax credit will lose out on at least $19 billion over the coming decade under the bill because of the change in the way inflation is calculated. And a new requirement that families claiming the child tax credit provide a Social Security number is projected to mean a big reduction in the families claiming it, since those who are not in the United States legally would be prohibited, even if their children were born in the United States.

OWNERS OF HIGH-END HOMES Under current law, the interest on mortgages for first and second homes is deductible for the first $1 million of the loan. The overhaul would cut that to the first $750,000 and eliminate the owner’s ability in the current law to deduct the interest on a home-equity loan up to $100,000. This could drive down home prices in some high-end markets; good for prospective buyers but bad for prospective sellers.

PEOPLE IN HIGH PROPERTY TAX, HIGH INCOME STATES Homeowners in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California could be big losers, particularly if they have high property taxes. Their ability to deduct their local property taxes and state and local income taxes from their federal tax bills is now capped at $10,000. In some cases, that could be offset by the lower tax rates that all taxpayers will owe on their ordinary income.

PUERTO RICO Puerto Rico had sought an exemption from new taxes, citing the frail state of its economy nearly three months after Hurricane Maria. But no such luck. The tax bill treats affiliates of American companies on the island as if Puerto Rico were a foreign country and imposes a 12.5 percent tax on intellectual property. Puerto Rico’s governor, Ricardo A. Rosselló, said the tax would hurt the biomedical and technology affiliates that make up about a third of Puerto Rico’s tax base.

THE INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE The tax collection agency has been underfunded and understaffed for years. Now, it will have a raft of new tax rules to deal with that will require upgrading its software, printing new manuals and explaining to confused taxpayers how things work. All this is expected to take place while the commission is working under the supervision of an interim commissioner, who is expected to be replaced sometime next year.

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A lawyer for 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‘s transition team said Saturday that Robert Mueller’s special counsel office obtained tens of thousands of emails from the Trump transition organization illegally, Reuters reports.

Kory Langhofer, counsel to Trump for America (TFA), wrote a letter to several congressional committees claiming that Mueller’s team improperly obtained thousands of emails from the General Services Administration (GSA), where the Trump transition team housed its staffers during the transition.

Langhofer’s letter accuses Mueller’s team of “unlawfully produc[ing] TFA’s private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel’s Office,” according to Reuters.

The illegally obtained documents include “tens of thousands of emails,” the letter adds.

The move from Mueller’s team to obtain the emails from the GSA stymied efforts from transition officials, who were prepared for Mueller’s request for the emails and had separated messages they believed contained privileged information. Mueller now has access to all of them.

Langhofer’s letter, which was sent to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, calls on the committees “to protect future presidential transitions from having their private records misappropriated by government agencies, particularly in the context of sensitive investigations intersecting with political motives.”

Mueller’s investigation entered a new phase earlier this month when former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia.

In a statement, the former Trump aide pledged to cooperate fully with the investigation, which has also ensnared other campaign officials including Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.