The White House is denying charges that it intentionally created a spectacle Wednesday when President Trump walked out of a White House meeting with Democratic leaders and headed to the Rose Garden for a press conference.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the attendees, accused the president of preplanning a stunt and avoiding the issue of paying for an infrastructure bill, the intended subject of the meeting. “To watch what happened in the White House would make your jaw drop,” he said in a joint press conference with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who was also left to cool her heels in the Cabinet Room.
A White House official denied that the move was “not spontaneous,” saying Schumer’s claim was “completely false.”
The meeting, closed to the press, was scheduled for 11:15 am. Democrats waited for the president for 15 minutes, according to a person familiar with what happened in the room. Upon entering the Cabinet Room, the president did not shake hands with anyone. He spoke for about three minutes about wanting to work on infrastructure, a trade agreement, a farm bill and other things. But he then asserted that Pelosi had “said something terrible” by accusing him of a cover-up earlier in the day and said that he would not work on infrastructure while the investigations continued.
“POTUS told the Democrats that once your investigation is done — we can talk about these things. And then he left the room before anyone else could speak,” the person said.
At around 11:15 a.m., the scheduled time of the meeting, the White House press office called reporters to gather for what appeared to be an impromptu press conference in the Rose Garden.
They discovered the White House had placed a new white and blue sign on Trump’s podium with the words, “No collusion, no obstruction,” and a few statistics on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, such as the roughly 2,500 subpoenas and 500 witnesses involved.
After the press conference ended, White House officials handed reporters printouts titled “Mueller Probe by the Numbers.” The papers, printed in blue and black ink, also offered several statistics related to the probe.
The props were designed to hammer home the president’s “no collusion, no obstruction” message about the findings of Mueller’s investigation.
Democrats said it was an obvious setup, but the sign on the president’s lectern was printed several weeks ago and was not created specifically for today’s Rose Garden conference, the Washington Examiner has learned.
During the press conference, Trump said he had laid down requirements for restarting negotiations.
“I just wanted to let you know that I walked into the room and I told Sen. Schumer, Speaker Pelosi, ‘I want to do infrastructure. I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that. That’s what I do. But, you know what? You can’t do it under these circumstances,’” the president said. “‘So, get these phony investigations over with.’”
Schumer wasn’t having any of it.
“There were investigations going on three weeks ago when we met, and he still met with us. But now that he was forced to actually say how he’d pay for it, he had to run away, and he came up with this preplanned excuse, and one final point: It’s clear that this was not a spontaneous move on the president’s part,” Schumer added. “It was planned.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., also suggested that the president had “no intention” of working on infrastructure at the meeting.
“It was clear the President had no intention of working with us today,” Hoyer said. “This meeting was a show, and it is deeply disappointing the President walked out on us and the American people.”
Trump and Democrats have been struggling to work together on infrastructure for months, but negotiations have repeatedly been derailed. In the past 24 hours, prospects dimmed even further when Trump told Democrats that he wanted to pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement before working on infrastructure, and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Democrats would need to figure out their own priorities on infrastructure before a conversation could take place on funding.
Wednesday morning’s blowup further diminishes prospects for an infrastructure deal. Trump said Wednesday that he would not be willing to work on infrastructure unless Democrats halted their investigations.
[Related: Pelosi: Trump infrastructure meeting was ‘very, very, very strange’]
