Donald Trump says he will not wait for negotiations with Mexico to be completed before starting to build a wall along the two countries' border.
“I could wait about a year and a half until we finish our negotiations with Mexico which will start immediately after we get into office, but I don't want to wait.” He saus his vice president-elect Mike Pence is “leading an effort to get final approvals through various agencies and through Congress for the wall to begin.”
“Mexico in some form ... will reimburse us,” he adds.
Donald Trump says that more factories open in the industrial Midwest, highlighting his direct outreach to companies and repeating his campaign pledge to be “the greatest jobs producer that God created.”
He focuses on plans by Fiat Chrysler to add 2,000 jobs at plants in Michigan and Ohio. He also notes that Ford will not be building a $1.6 billion plant in Mexico and will instead update an existing Michigan factory and add 700 jobs.
Trump says additional factory job announcements will be coming, saying, “I hope General Motors will be following.”
He says he wants to bring overseas pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs to the United States, although he plans to negotiate on the prices the government pays for medication.
Donald Trump plans to put all his business assets in a trust and hand control of his company to his two adult sons and a longtime business executive to allay concerns about conflicts of interest.
A lawyer who worked with the Trump Organisation on the plan says the President-elect is planning to make the change by Inauguration Day, relinquish control over the organization and isolate himself from the business.
The lawyer says the company will do no new foreign deals but can pursue domestic ones, and says that the Trump Organization will appoint an ethics adviser to its management team who must approve deals that could raise concerns about conflicts.
The lawyer spoke to reporters before Trump’s news conference, the first since his Nov. 8 election, and requested anonymity to discuss details of the plan.
Trump says he’s finally settled on a candidate to lead the sprawling Veterans Affairs department. His choice is David Shulkin, who is currently the department’s undersecretary for health. He says Shulkin is “fantastic” and will do a “truly great job.”
The president—elect focused on veterans’ issues during the presidential campaign. He says veterans have been mistreated under the Obama administration and promises to straighten things out.
The VA secretary post was one of two Cabinet posts Trump still has to fill. Agriculture secretary is the other one.
Donald Trump says intelligence agencies will have a “tremendous blot on their record” if they leaked a report claiming top intelligence officials told him about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had about him.
A U.S. official says top intelligence officials told Trump about an unsubstantiated report last week.
A summary of the allegations was separate from a classified assessment of Russia’s suspected attempts to meddle in the U.S. presidential election. Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community’s findings last week.
The dossier contains unproven information about close coordination between Trump’s inner circle and Russians about hacking into Democratic accounts as well as other unproven claims.
"It's all fake news. It's phony stuff. It didn't happen." "As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I also think we've been hacked by other countries, other people."
Vice president-elect Mike Pence says it was an irresponsible decision of a few news organisations to run with false report. President- elect Trump spokesman condemns publication of dossier on Trump and Russia as ‘outrageous and irresponsible’, says Buzzfeed And CNN reports are a sad attempt to gain clicks.
Wall Street stocks treaded water early Wednesday as U.S. investors traded cautiously ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's first news conference since the November election. Mr. Trump's appearance follows revelations that U.S. intelligence chiefs told the President-elect of unsubstantiated claims that Russian intelligence has gathered compromising information on him.
Mr. Trump dismissed the controversy as "utter nonsense."
The news conference "could be a driver of things today," said Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare.
"No one knows for certain where the questions and answers will lead, so just about everything can be regarded as fair trading game at this juncture, which may help explain why there isn't a great deal of conviction among buyers or sellers in the futures market at this point."
Questions about Russia also are expected to play a prominent role in the Senate confirmation hearing of former ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson to serve as secretary of state.
About 15 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 29,892.48, up 0.2 percent. The broad-based S&P 500 was up 0.1 percent at 2,270.32, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index dipped 0.1 percent to 5,548.74.
