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President Donald Trump said Thursday he thinks the appointment of special counsel for the Russia investigation is bad for the United States.

"I believe it hurts our country terribly, because it shows we're a divided, mixed-up, not-unified country," Trump said. "And we have very important things to be doing right now, whether it's trade deals, whether it's military, whether it's stopping nuclear all of the things that we discussed today. And I think this shows a very divided country."

Trump made his comments during a lunch with reporters and TV anchors.

"It also happens to be a pure excuse for the Democrats having lost an election that they should have easily won because of the Electoral College being slanted so much in their way. That's all this is. I think it shows division, and it shows that we're not together as a country. And I think it's a very, very negative thing. And hopefully, this can go quickly, because we have to show unity if we're going to do great things with respect to the rest of the world."

On Wednesday, Justice Department officials announced that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had tapped former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel, taking over the investigation into Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 election.

After the announcement, the White House issued a measured statement on the president's behalf:

"As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly. In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country."

But Thursday morning, Trump tweeted a more aggressive tone, calling the investigation into potential ties between Russia and his presidential campaign a "witch hunt," a sentiment he reiterated later Thursday during a joint press conference with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Trump also asked why no special counsel was appointed for what he called "all of the illegal acts" of Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Obama administration.

In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 78 percent of respondents said they would rather see the investigation led by an independent commission or special prosecutor, versus one led by Congress.

NBC News and CNBC's Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.

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Trump says appointment of special counsel 'hurts our country terribly' - CNBC

At first glance, it looks like a standard cartoon for kids. Claymation figures ofdifferent ethnicities dance, clap, rap and play little clay instruments, frolicking in front of neon backdrops andsingingout peppy lyrics.

Ive got your back, and youve got mine. Everybody, lets make friends! they sing.

But it's not a simple kids' cartoon. It's a propaganda film fromthe Chinese state-run media outlet Peoples Daily aimed at promoting the Silk Road Economic Belt, a massive investment infrastructure project to link Asia and Europe.

The video is just one piece in a series of articles, speeches and videos from within China that have recently portrayed the country as a defender of globalization and free trade.

In another from the state media organization China Daily, cute kids of various ethnicities peak out from behind giant animated camels and jump around in front of animated factory settings.

When trade routes open up, thats when the sharing starts. Resources changing hands and shipping auto parts! they sing.

As China paints itself as a pro-free-trade agent of global harmony, it also notes that the United States passed on opportunities to join the Asian infrastructure project. And while Trump is not named,the videos draw a clear rhetorical contrast with the newpresident, whofrequentlyderides globalism andwon the election running on an anti-free-trade platform.

But that self-characterization is a bit rich, experts on the country say.

Having China be the worlds leading advocate for globalization is like having Al Capone be put in charge of tax reform, said Scott Kennedy, deputy director of the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

It is beyond ironic, he added.

The problem with this characterization is that Chinas economy is still far more closed than the United States' when it comes to trade and especially investment and China has shown less, not more, willingness to open its economy to foreign investment in recent years.

Chinas economy was completely shut off to foreign investment for decades under Mao Zedong, and since the 1980s, it has done a lot to open to foreign business, becoming an integrated part of the global supply chain.

Yet much of that business is still done on Chinas terms. In many industries, state-owned companies still dominate, and foreign businesses face high barriers to entry. In some industries, such as automotive manufacturing, foreign companies can operate only by forming joint ventures with Chinese partners. In other sectors, such as media, energy and banking, foreign companies are entirely excluded often in contravention of World Trade Organization rules.

Under President Xi Jinpings leadership over the past four years, China has tended to show more-intensive government intervention in the economy, not less, Kennedy says.

It is true that China is becoming a de facto leader in foreign trade. But the sole reason that China can make this claim is that the United States is receding from that role, Kennedy says.

Trump signed a presidential memorandum to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade pact, on one of his earliest days in office, and he has repeatedly questioned the importance of multilateral institutions such as the World Trade Organization and NATO.

The only reason China has a leg to stand on in this argument is the campaign rhetoric and ongoing statements of President Trump and his advisers, Kennedy says. Were Alice in Wonderland and we have gone down the rabbit hole.

As the United States has withdrawn, China has very transparently tried to fill that vacuum. But without significant liberalization to further open its economy, the countrys professed dedication to free trade and globalization rings hollow.

In January, Xi, the leader of the Communist Party of China, gave a speech at Davos to an audience of the most powerful capitalists on the planet, expounding on a doctrine of inclusive globalization.

China is pushing its own international trade deal that excludes the United States, called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. And it has launched the Silk Road Economic Belt (also called One Belt, One Road), in which an institution it created, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, is leading investment in roads, railways and ports across the Asian continent.

In a speech at a forum for the project on Sunday, Xi called the plan theproject of the century" and emphasized its open and inclusive nature.

The United States declined to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, viewing it as a potential challenge to the U.S.-dominated multilateral institutions such as the World Bank. The United States' absence is noted in Chinas propaganda videos.

Some countries are moving away from globalization. So the Belt and Road is an opportunity to move globalization forward, a bespectacled man tells his daughter in a video made by the state media organization China Daily. But the United States hasnt joined the initiative.

Is that because its too far away? the little blonde girl asks.

Actually any country can join anywhere, the man responds.

Continued here:
Chinese propagandists are using adorable kids to take on Donald Trump - Washington Post

New York Times

Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Google: Your Thursday Briefing New York Times Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, offered to give Congress a record of Mr. Trump's recent meeting with the Russian foreign minister to show that the American leader had not divulged any secrets so long as Mr. Trump did not object. In the ... After speaking to Donald Trump, Turkish president's bodyguards beat up Kurdish protesterSalon Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trump hold talksAljazeera.com all 1,087 news articles »

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Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, Google: Your Thursday Briefing - New York Times

Does Donald Trumphave even an ounce of shame?

As a presidential candidate, he spent much of the election campaign needling, critiquing, denouncing, and even threatening the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yet as president, he is making his first foreign visit this weekend to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Even by Trumpian standards, the volte-face is brazen. In his first few months in power, we have witnessed the trademark Trump Turnabout on issues ranging from NATO to China to the Export-Import Bank. We have listened to him go from praising Bashar al-Assad and rebuking Janet Yellen on the campaign trail, to praising Yellen and rebuking Assad in office. Last October, he saidthat then-FBI DirectorJames Comey had guts for doing the right thing; last week, he sacked Comey and called him a showboat and a grandstander.

Trump, to put it mildly, is no stranger to the shameless U-turn. Still, the Trump Turnabout on Saudi Arabia one of Americas closest allies since President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the USS Murphy in 1945 is a true sight to behold. This weekend, Trump will arrive in Saudi Arabia for a bilateral summit with King Salman as well as a series of meetings with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

There will be handshakes, hugs, and smiles galore. We will be expected to forget how Trump blasted the Saudi royals for being freeloaders and threatened them with an economic boycott. Speaking to the New York Times last year, Trump claimed that, without U.S. support and protection, Saudi Arabia wouldnt exist for very long. The real problem, he continued, was that the Saudis are a money machine and yet they dont reimburse us the way we should be reimbursed. Asked if he would be willing to stop buying oil from the Saudis if they refused to pull their weight, Trump responded: Oh yeah, sure. I would do that.

We will be also expected to ignore the fact that Trump slammed the Saudi government for executing homosexuals and treating women horribly. In the third presidential debate last October, Trump attacked Hillary Clinton for taking $25 million from the Saudis, from people that push gays off buildings. These are people that kill women and treat women horribly and yet you take their money.

Perhaps above all else, we will be expected to brush under the carpet the fact that, twice in a single day, Trump accused Saudi Arabia of being behind the 9/11 attacks. Who blew up the World Trade Center? Trump asked his pals at Fox and Friends on the morning of February 17, 2016. It wasnt the Iraqis, it was Saudi take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.

At a campaign event in South Carolina later that day, he again cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were in fact responsible for the attacks on 9/11. It wasnt the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Center because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find its the Saudis, OK?

(To be fair to Trump, far more credible and better-informed figures have come to a similar conclusion: I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks and the government of Saudi Arabia, wrote former Florida Sen.Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Senate intelligence committees inquiry into 9/11, in an affidavit in 2012.)

Donald Trump walks from a campaign stop Feb. 17, 2016, in Bluffton, S.C. At the event, he cited secret papers that could prove it was the Saudis who were responsible for the attacks on 9/11.

Photo: Matt Rourke/AP

Whether or not the Saudi government played a role in the 9/11 attacks and we may never know for a leading U.S. presidential candidate to claim that they did, not once but twice, had to be seen to be believed. And yet, astonishingly, a little over a year later, it is to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that Trump has chosen to make his maiden foreign voyage rather than to Canada or Mexico, as every president since Ronald Reagan has.

Will Trump return from his Saudi jaunt with a big fat check? His much-hyped reimbursement? Will he dare raise the issue of gay rights while in Riyadh? Or womens rights? Will he manage to bring back a Saudi royal or two in handcuffs for their (alleged) role in the 9/11 attacks?Please. There are greater odds of the American president coming back as a proud convert to Islam.

Hypocrisy is not the exclusive preserve of Trump or the United States, of course. Saudi Arabia sees itself as the the birthplace of Islam, ruled by a king who styles himself custodian of the two holy mosques. Yet this coming weekend, the Saudi government will offer a warm and lavish welcome to a president who has said Islam hates us and wanted to ban all of the worlds 1.6 billion Muslims from entering the United States. The Saudi position on the latest iteration of the Trump travel ban, targeted at 170 million-odd Muslims? A sovereign decision aimed, apparently, at preventing terrorists from entering the United States of America and made by a true friend of Muslims.

On Sunday, the fawning Saudis will offer a platform to the worlds most famous Islamophobe, to give a speech on Islam in the birthplace of Islam. AndTrump will likely take the opportunity to decry radical Islamic terrorism while visiting a country thathas perhaps done more than any other to incite, fund, and fuel it.

Hypocrisy unites them both. So too does their fear and loathing of the Iranians the Saudis are busying dropping bombs and backing militants to push back Iranian influence in Yemen and Syria. The Trump administration, filled with Iran hawks, is on the verge of inking a series of arms deals with Riyadh worth more than $100 billion.

To be clear: Trumps U-turn on Saudi Arabia has little to do with being moderated by the realities of high office or swayed by the Beltways foreign policy elites. Despite his bombastic campaign rhetoric, he never planned to go after the Saudis in office even after publicly accusing them of murdering 3,000 Americans. Early on in the campaign, in 2015, a senior Arab diplomat told me, on condition of anonymity, that Trump had informed most of the Gulf governments, in private, that his anti-Muslim and anti-Arab rhetoric was all for the campaign and that it would be business as usual once he was elected (or, for that matter, defeated).

As ever, for Trump, it is always, above all else, about the bottom line his bottom line. The Saudi-bashing Trump sold an entire floor of the Trump World Tower to the Saudis for $4.5 million in 2001. And would it surprise you to discover that Trump also registered eight companies tied to hotel interests in Saudi Arabia inthe midst of his Saudi-bashing presidential campaign?

Of course not. Business is business. Trump is Trump. You might be repulsed by his deceitfulness but you have to admire his chutzpah.

Top photo: A view aboard an American warship at Great Bitter Lake, Egypt, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt conferred with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia in 1945.

Excerpt from:
Donald Trump Said Saudi Arabia Was Behind 9/11. Now He's Going There on His First Foreign Trip. - The Intercept

A battalion of White House aides entered the Oval Office together to present a unified front after the bombshell.

The Justice Department had appointed a special prosecutor to oversee the probe into Russia's alleged involvement in the 2016 presidential election, White House counsel Don McGahn had just told President Donald Trump. Many of Trumps top aides gathered with the president Wednesday evening just after Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed the order and called McGahn and just before the news exploded publicly in Washington.

Story Continued Below

Trump handled it better than anyone expected, according to a person in the room. His reaction was extremely measured, another said.

He didn't yell or scream. He told the assembled crowd they had nothing to hide.

But that levelheadedness was quickly replaced Thursday morning by a wounded tweeter in chief lashing out as some of his staffers had been expecting the news would bring out.

With all of the illegal acts that took place in the Clinton campaign & Obama Administration, there was never a special councel appointed! Trump tweeted, after an unusually quiet 24 hours online.

He added in a second tweet: This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!

The change in attitude followed a typical pattern with Trump: accepting a defeat in real time, then later raging against it after talking to friends and watching television. After his first attempt at repealing and replacing Obamacare failed, he was calm and conciliatory, then later began blasting the House Freedom Caucus from his online pulpit.

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True to form, Thursdays screed was a stark contrast to the response Wednesday night in the Oval Office, according to aides present, where the mood in the room appeared to be one of resigned acceptance even though they were blindsided. Everyone knew this wasn't good news," this person said.

The announcement marked yet another severe blow to the 45th president just 118 days into his term. It followed eight days of chaos inside the White House after the president suddenly fired FBI Director James Comey, further crippling an administration already struggling with internal discord and mounting crises at home and abroad.

The president Wednesday afternoon had been interviewing candidates for FBI director when the news arrived. His staff had no advance notice that a special prosecutor would be appointed.

The crowd entering Trumps office was sizable, as is often the case: chief of staff Reince Priebus, McGahn and other lawyers, senior advisers Kellyanne Conway and Jared Kushner, communications aides Michael Dubke and Hope Hicks and others.

Aides outlined the background of the special counsel, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who Trump had met before. Some explained to the president what a special prosecutor can do.

Over the course of about 40 minutes, aides streamed in and out of the Oval Office. The team drafted a statement from the president for Trumps approval. A gaggle of reporters camped outside press secretary Sean Spicers office to wait for it.

It was released Wednesday at about 7:20 p.m., 80 minutes after the Justice Departments public announcement and two hours after staff first got word of the action.

As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity, Trump said in the statement. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly. In the meantime, I will never stop fighting for the people and the issues that matter most to the future of our country.

Priebus and Trump together delivered a rally-the-troops message to the team: This is an opportunity to let them do their work so we can do ours, Priebus and Trump both reiterated multiple times to the aides gathered.

Outside the White House grounds, the news would soon be interpreted as a potential step that could drain the presidency for months to come.

Trump's upbeat response surprised some aides, though it brought the team together in the face of a common outside threat, according to a source who was present Wednesday.

No one really thinks having a special prosecutor is good and no one is happy" about it, a senior administration official said.

But the communications staff agreed on a positive message for the wrenching news: Because of the special prosecutor, the brewing Russia-related controversies would become something that we just can't talk about, one aide said.

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In the communications office, which has suffered some of the most brutal criticism internally from Trump, the feeling was the special counsel would be a burden off its shoulders.

In the weeks leading up to the decision to appoint a special counsel, Spicer and deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders both publicly said there was no need for the step Rosenstein finally took Wednesday.

Now, Spicer and other briefers would no longer have to look as if they were stonewalling on Russia questions, and could refer those elsewhere.

Aides are now urging Trump to tweet and speak cautiously. "I think he actually understands what a mess this is," one person said. "He has lawyers telling him nonstop what the stakes are here."

On Thursday, Trump was to meet at the White House with the president of Colombia and participate in a joint news conference in the afternoon.

He'll depart Friday for his first international trip as president: an eight-day, five-country journey from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican to Brussels to Sicily, where he is attempting to shift the narrative away from his domestic crises.

One of the things Trump is most looking forward to about his upcoming trip, according to a White House aide, is a reprieve from the daily press briefings.

On Wednesday night, a person close to him said, Trump was in the White House residence talking to friends and associates about how it was playing on TV.

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

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How Trump learned about the special prosecutor - Politico