Mulvaney: Trump May Declare Border Wall Emergency Even If Congress Approves Funds

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Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said Sunday that President Donald Trump may still declare a national emergency in order to secure additional funds for a border wall even if Congress appropriates money for a wall.

Mulvaney also said “you absolutely cannot” rule out Trump shutting the government down again at the end of the week if he isn’t satisfied with what Congress approves.

“You cannot take a shutdown off the table, and you cannot take $5.7 [billion, Trump’s initial recent demand for border wall funds] off the table, but if you end up someplace in the middle, yeah, then what you’ll probably see is the President say, ‘Okay, and then I’ll go find the money someplace else,'” Mulvaney said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday.

Host Chuck Todd pressed the chief of staff on the White House’s hunt for already-appropriated money in various executive agencies that could be diverted for wall construction.

“Do you find money without declaring a national emergency or do you need to declare the national emergency to use this other money?” Todd asked.

“The answer to the question is both,” Mulvaney began. “There are certain sums of money that are available to the President, to any president.”

But, he added later, while “there are pots of money all presidents have access to without a national emergency … there [are] ones that he will not have access to without that declaration.”

“What we’re trying to, what we’re looking at doing with President Trump is stuff that is entirely legal,” Mulvaney said.

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Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for zsak zsak says:

    Emergency - a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.

    to Trumpites: three strikes and you’re out

  2. “The answer to that is both.”

    transl: “Please stop asking me to take a specific position when the instant that I do the sociopathic TV-addicted narcissistic in the West Wing will promptly throw me under the bus to his feral Twitter mob.”

    Portrait in courage.

  3. We’re really going to need some Nuremberg Trials after these fuckers are out and I’d gladly buy tickets when Mulvaney is up.

  4. An “emergency” that can wait for weeks of a government shutdown (and maybe another one soon), that can be put off until months of negotiations have failed. Yep, “emergency” is clearly an understatement. We’re all gonna be murdered by “bad hombres” pouring over the southern border.

  5. “Mulvaney also said ‘you absolutely cannot’ rule out Trump shutting the government down again at the end of the week.”

    Shorter Mick: “We have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. None whatsoever.”

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