President-elect Donald Trump’s long-awaited news conference is taking on new significance Wednesday.

The news conference, Trump’s first since winning the election, was already looming as a significant rite of passage for someone who is undergoing a transformation from rabble-rousing candidate to the next American President. But new allegations involving Russia are sure to inject an extra charge.

The news conference, expected to begin at 11 am ET in midtown Manhattan, follows exclusive reporting by CNN on Tuesday that classified documents presented last week to President Barack Obama and Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and drew in part from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible.

The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The news conference comes at an intense political moment as key Cabinet nominees face a grilling on Capitol Hill Wednesday. The event, delayed from December, was scheduled for Trump to outline how he will address questions about possible conflicts-of-interest related to his vast business empire. But if he opens the session to free-flowing questions from reporters, he is also likely to face scrutiny over the Russian claims as well as his refusal to accept intelligence agency consensus that Moscow interfered in the election, his request for Congress — not Mexico — to initially pay for a border wall, his plans to replace Obamacare and other detailed domestic and foreign policy questions.

It will amount to more than a test of his familiarity with policy questions and the duties and responsibilities that a President must shoulder. Coming hours after Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago, the news conference will reinforce a sense of historic change pulsating through Washington. It will also provide hints about the demeanor and attitude he will adopt as commander-in-chief and head of state, potentially shedding light on how he envisions his new role.

“This is a possibly a useful throat-clearing exercise for Mr. Trump to start trying out some of the themes of the presidency,” said CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali.

“He is as likely not to use it as he is to use it. At the moment, there is very little difference between the pre-election messaging of Mr. Trump and the transition messaging of Mr. Trump,” said Naftali, who also teaches at New York University.

Trump will enter the White House with the most estranged relationship with journalists of any new President in recent memory after repeatedly branding the press “dishonest” and using it as a foil during his campaign and transition.

Still, the news conference represents Trump’s most extended appearance before the American people since the election and will go some way to showing whether he will adopt his trademark brazen, confrontational style as president.

“I would be very surprised if there is any chance in his demeanor,” said David Caputo, a specialist on the Presidency at Pace University, New York. “Look at what he has done since the election. There has not been any change. If there is going to be a change, I would expect that it would happen after the inauguration, and after he is convinced it is not going to work.”

Caputo argued Trump will likely reason that he was elected to challenge the political system and establishment and that he would therefore see little reason to honor conventions in Washington.

“This is going to be an individual who is convinced that he is correct that the old system is corrupt and has to be changed. I think he will use the news conference accordingly,” Caputo said.

Trump will enter the presidency from a position of political strength, given that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and so far have shown little inclination to probe his finances or ethical questions. With that in mind and having shown little desire to reach out to the majority of voters who did not chose him in November, Trump may feel under little pressure to modify his approach as he prepares to take office.

Trump defied the normal rules of politics, for example, on disclosure about his wealth and assets by refusing to release his tax returns during the campaign. But the question of how his business holdings around the globe can be squared with his wider obligations as President without raising questions of conflicts-of-interest threatens to cast a shadow over the Trump presidency.

The President-elect has indicated he will not divest his interests as called for by some ethics campaigners. The fact that his two sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, are in line to control the family empire also creates a gray area over the extent to which he plans to separate himself from his business as president.

Still, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, announced substantive steps to do just that on Monday, including the divestment of some of his assets, shares in buildings and his ownership of the New York Observer newspaper as he prepares to take on a senior adviser role in the White House.

It is unclear if Trump will go as far, however, though he said Wednesday he was ready to disentangle himself from his business obligations.

“All I can say is, it’s very simple, very easy. Sure I’m ready, been ready for a while. (It’s) going to be very, very easy to do,” Trump told reporters.

Trump has announced that he will close down his charitable foundation, which is under investigation by the New York attorney general’s office. A Trump aide did not respond to a request Wednesday to provide a list of other steps he has already taken to avoid business conflicts while he is in office.

However, Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, confirmed to reporters Tuesday that the issue would come up Wednesday.

“The President-elect will address how he’s handling the transfer of his business to folks around the country and getting Americans back to work and spur American growth,” Spicer said.

As well as those issues, the President-elect is also under pressure to demonstrate he has a real plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, as a debate rages on Capitol Hill about the timing and character of an alternative to President Barack Obama’s signature law.

His remarks will also be closely watched around the world, as foreign governments struggle to get a fix on Trump’s foreign policy intentions, including his vow to improve relations with Russia, make allies shoulder more of the cost of their own defense and his brewing confrontation with China.

While Trump’s appearance is set to dominate media coverage on Wednesday, it is not the only consequential test for the administration.

Several Trump cabinet nominees, including his pick for secretary of state, former ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson are facing confirmation hearings.

Tillerson will come under pressure to explain the friendly personal relationship that he forged with Russian President Vladimir Putin and positions on climate change and human rights that he took while leading the energy giant.

When the appointment was announced it appeared that Tillerson could have trouble being confirmed, but his embrace by senior members of the Republican foreign policy establishment appear to have significantly improved his chances.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker on Tuesday argued that Tillerson should not be seen as a departure from establishment thinking on Russia, which many senators view as a resurgent US enemy.

“I don’t get the sense his views on Russia are out of the mainstream at all,” Corker told CNN’s Manu Raju in an interview on Monday. “Obviously on both sides of the aisle, people will ask that question when he’s here.”</s>WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President-elect Donald Trump said on Wednesday that Russia had never tried to sway his actions and furiously blamed U.S. intelligence agencies for news reports that Moscow had compiled compromising information on him.

Trump slammed as “fake news” the reports that classified documents presented to him last week by the heads of four U.S. intelligence agencies included claims that Russian intelligence operatives have compromising information about him.

“Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!” Trump wrote in one of the Twitter posts.

Two U.S. officials said Tuesday evening that the allegations on the Russian dossier, which one called “unsubstantiated,” were contained in a two-page memo appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that was presented last week to Trump and to President Barack Obama.

Trump, due to hold his first news conference in nearly six months on Wednesday, pointed to the Kremlin’s denials of the reports on the dossier that emerged late on Tuesday, first reported by CNN.

Reince Priebus, who will be Trump’s White House chief of staff, called the Russian dossier report “phoney baloney garbage.” He told NBC’s “Today” show he had raised the matter with Trump. “He said it was ‘total garbage and I’m keeping it clean,’” Priebus said.

Even before the reports, Russia had been likely to take center stage during Trump’s first formal session with reporters since he won the Nov. 8 presidential election. The news conference was scheduled for 11 a.m. ET (1600 GMT) at his New York offices.

The Republican president-elect has long said he hopes to improve ties with Moscow, but this effort will come under intense scrutiny after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia used cyber attacks and other tactics to try to tilt the presidential election in his favor over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

At the same time in Washington, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, former Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, will likely be grilled at his Senate confirmation hearing over his long business relationship with Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin.

There was an unpredictable element to Trump’s news conference, given his repeated criticism of the U.S. news media and his belief that many news organizations favored Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump, a New York real estate developer, has been under pressure to separate himself from his global business operations to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest once he succeeds Obama on Jan. 20.

After initially declaring there was no law that prohibited him from maintaining control of his business while serving as president, Trump switched gears in December and said legal documents were being crafted “which take me completely out of business operations.”

Trump has said his two adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, will manage his businesses and no new deals will be done during his time in office, but has offered few details.

He has not said he would divest from his companies, a step some ethics experts say he should take. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, announced plans on Monday to divest much of his own business holdings in preparation for taking a senior advisory role in the White House.

Trump has faced persistent questions about Russia throughout the past year given his reluctance to criticize Putin and his desire to improve U.S. relations with Moscow, including working together to defeat Islamic State militants.

Apparently referring to the Russian dossier on Trump, Republican U.S. Senator John McCain said in a statement on Wednesday that he had received “sensitive information that has since been made public.” He said he could not make a judgment about its accuracy and had passed it to the FBI director.</s>NEW YORK (AP) — Defiant and unyielding, President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday adamantly denied reports that Russia had obtained compromising personal and financial information about him, calling it a “tremendous blot” on the record of the intelligence community if it had released such material.

The incoming president, in his first news conference since late July, firmly pushed back on the media reports and chided news organizations for publishing the material late Tuesday night. His extraordinary defense, coming just nine days before Trump’s inauguration, dominated a highly anticipated press conference in which the future president also announced a new Cabinet member and his plans to disentangle himself from his sprawling global business empire.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information, I read the information outside of that meeting,” he said, a reference to a classified briefing he received from intelligence leaders. “It’s all fake news, it’s phony stuff, it didn’t happen,” Trump said. “It was gotten by opponents of ours.”

Asked about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump called it “an asset, not a liability” and an improvement over what he called America’s current “horrible relationship with Russia.”

“If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset not a liability. I don’t know if I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin — I hope I do — but there’s a good chance I won’t.”

Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer denounced the reports about Russia’s influence on Trump and the incoming president said the report never should have been released. He thanked some news organizations for showing restraint.

A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday night that intelligence officials had informed Trump last week about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had obtained compromising personal and financial information about him. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not allowed to publicly discuss the matter.

Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community’s findings last week, the official said.

Media outlets reported on the document late Tuesday and Trump denounced it on Twitter before his news conference as “fake news,” suggesting he was being persecuted for defeating other GOP presidential hopefuls and Democrat Hillary Clinton in the election.

The dossier contains unproven information about close coordination between Trump’s inner circle and Russians about hacking into Democratic accounts as well as unproven claims about unusual sexual activities by Trump among other suggestions attributed to anonymous sources. The Associated Press has not authenticated any of the claims.

Pence said the decision by some media to publish the reports could “only be attributed to media bias” and an attempt to “demean” Trump.

Only days from his inauguration as the nation’s 45th president, Trump announced that he would nominate David Shulkin to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, elevating him from his current role as VA undersecretary.

Trump also announced his plans for the future of the Trump Organization, bringing to the podium attorney Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis, who worked with the Trump Organization on the arrangement.

Dillon said the Trump Organization would continue to pursue deals in the U.S., though Trump will relinquish control of the company to his sons and an executive, put his business assets in a trust and take other steps to isolate himself from his business. She said Trump “should not be expected to destroy the company he built.”

The move appears to contradict a previous pledge by the president-elect. In a tweet last month, Trump vowed to do “no new deals” while in office.

The lawyer who advised Trump also said that the Trump Organization will appoint an ethics adviser to its management team who must approve deals that could raise concerns about conflicts.</s>A defiant President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday adamantly denied reports that Russia had compromising personal and financial information about him, calling it a “tremendous blot” on the record of the intelligence community if material with any such allegations had been released.

The incoming president, in his first news conference since late July, firmly chided news organizations for publishing the material late Tuesday night. After weeks of scoffing at reports that Russians had interfered in the election, he conceded publicly for the first time that Russia was likely responsible for the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” he said and quickly added that the United States is hacked by other countries as well, including China.

Trump’s extraordinary defense against the unsubstantiated intelligence report, just nine days before his inauguration, dominated a highly anticipated press conference in which he also announced a new Cabinet member, detailed his plans to disentangle himself from his sprawling global business empire, gave his outlook on the future of the “Obamacare” health care law and said he would soon nominate someone to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information, I read the information outside of that meeting,” he said, a reference to a classified briefing he received from intelligence leaders. “It’s all fake news, it’s phony stuff, it didn’t happen,” Trump said in a news conference that saw him repeatedly joust with reporters. “It was gotten by opponents of ours.”

Asked about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump boasted that it is an improvement over what he called America’s current “horrible relationship with Russia” and did not criticize the Russian leader for any interference in the election.

“If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset not a liability. I don’t know if I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin – I hope I do – but there’s a good chance I won’t.”

Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer also denounced the report about Russia’s influence on Trump, and the incoming president said it never should have been released. He thanked some news organizations for showing restraint.

A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday night that intelligence officials had informed Trump last week about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had compromising personal and financial information about him. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not allowed to publicly discuss the matter.

Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community’s findings last week, the official said.

Media outlets reported on the document late Tuesday and Trump denounced it on Twitter before his news conference as “fake news,” suggesting he was being persecuted for defeating other GOP presidential hopefuls and Democrat Hillary Clinton in the election.

The dossier contains unproven information about close coordination between Trump’s inner circle and Russians about hacking into Democratic accounts as well as unproven claims about unusual sexual activities by Trump among other suggestions attributed to anonymous sources. The Associated Press has not authenticated any of the claims.

Only days from his inauguration as the nation’s 45th president, Trump announced that he would nominate David Shulkin to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, elevating him from his current role as VA undersecretary.

He promised that a replacement for the health care overhaul would be offered “essentially simultaneously” with the repeal of Obama’s signature health law – something that would be virtually impossible to quickly pass given the complexity of the policy changes. Republicans agree on repealing the law but nearly seven years after its passage have failed to reach agreement on its replacement.

Trump has repeatedly said that repealing and replacing “Obamacare” was a top priority, but has never fully explained how he plans to do it. House Speaker Paul Ryan has said that the House would seek to take both steps “concurrently.”

Turning to his plans to build a border wall along the southern border, Trump said he would immediately begin negotiations with Mexico on funding his promised wall after he takes office. He again vowed that “Mexico will pay for the wall but it will be reimbursed.” Trump recommitted to his plans to impose a border tax on manufacturers who shut plants and move production abroad. While the tax policy could retain jobs, it would also carry the risk of increasing prices for consumers.

Trump also said he would probably name his choice to fill the vacancy left by the death of Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in about two weeks after the inauguration.

And he announced his plans for the future of the Trump Organization, bringing to the podium attorney Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis, who worked with the Trump Organization on the arrangement.

Dillon said the Trump Organization would continue to pursue deals in the U.S., though Trump will relinquish control of the company to his sons and an executive, put his business assets in a trust and take other steps to isolate himself from his business. She said Trump “should not be expected to destroy the company he built.”

The move appears to contradict a previous pledge by the president-elect. In a tweet last month, Trump vowed to do “no new deals” while in office.

The lawyer said Trump would donate all profits from foreign government payments to his hotels to the U.S. treasury.

And pushing back against some ethics experts, Dillon said the so-called emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution does not apply to foreign payments to Trump’s company. While some ethics officials have said that foreign leaders who pay for rooms and services at his various hotels would run afoul of the constitutional ban on foreign gifts or payments to the president, Dillon referred to it as a “fair-value exchange.”

Associated Press writer Ken Thomas in Washington and Jonathan Lemire in New York contributed to this report.</s>Donald Trump is notorious for making controversial statements that set the internet on fire. But the relatively mild kerfuffle about whether his wife actually received a college degree appears to be something the Trumps would rather not see broadcast across the web.

Melania Trump’s personal and professional site, the Huffington Post reported on Wednesday, has disappeared. A search of Google’s cache reveals that sometime after 22 July, MelaniaTrump.com was redirected to Trump.com, the official site for the Trump Organization.

Speculation immediately centered on a claim made on Ms Trump’s online biography that she obtained “a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia” shortly before embarking on her modeling career.

An an unauthorized biography of Ms Trump, published in February, claims the prospective first lady left the university after a year without obtaining her degree. Critics have accused the Trump campaign of deleting the site in order to hide her biography.



An image posted to Melania’s Twitter account earlier today states: “The website in question was created in 2012 and it has been removed because it does not accurately reflect my current business and professional interests.”

The tweet was an unusual one for Mrs Trump, who rarely posts to that account and usually only with photos. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Copies of Melania Trump’s biography page containing the controversial claim were still visible on the Internet Archive at the time of writing. However, there are also inexplicable gaps in the archive’s record. After 14 March 2013, for example, the MelaniaTrump.com home page is no longer visible.

Mark Graham, director of the Archive’s Wayback Machine, said “there are various technical factors … that can affect the quality of both the capture and replay of web pages.” He added no one from the Trump campaign contacted the archive to request the pages be removed.

According to the domain registration records, MelaniaTrump.com was registered in April 2004 and existed for more than a year as a parody/squatter account consisting of two sentences: “MelaniaTrump.com For Sale @ the bargain price of 1 Million Dollars! Cmon Donald Trump of apprentice, you can afford it!”

Sometime between December 2005 and March 2006, it passed into the control of the Trump organization and served as Mrs Trump’s personal site.

This is not the first time Trumps have attempted to stuff things down the memory hole. The Politwoops site, which archives tweets deleted by US politicians, has an entire page devoted to things The Donald tried to unsay, many of them entirely innocuous.

@realDonaldTrump: “Clinton made a false ad about me where I was imitating a reporter GROVELING after he changed his story. I would NEVER Moch disabled. Shame!”

Nor is Trump is the only politician to allegedly attempt to scrub things from the web that might be considered damaging to one’s reputation.

In 2013, the UK’s Conservative party was accused of purging the party’s website of content published between 2000 and 2010, allegedly to remove evidence of unfulfilled campaign promises. It also ensured Internet Archive had not indexed the pages. One of the deleted pages detailed a speech that David Cameron, then prime minster, made at Google in which he said that “political leaders will have to learn to let go of the information that we have guarded so jealously”.

Multiple US politicians, including current vice-president Joe Biden and Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence, have been caught editing their own Wikipedia entries to suppress unflattering information. Pence allegedly edited his page to remove a reference to a former job as a conservative talk radio host, and adding awards, senior job roles and glowing summaries of his political career. Members of British parliament have been similarly snagged.

If the Trumps were attempting to hide this information, they went about it the wrong way, says Aaron Minc, an internet defamation attorney who specializes in removing things from the net. If Trump really wanted to remove this information, he would have deleted the site before having it redirect to Trump.com, says Minc, and then notified Google to remove it from its search engine cache.

“There are ways to permanently delete things from the net, but you have to act quickly and do the right things, especially if you’re under public scrutiny,” he says. To keep pages out of the Internet Archive, website owners can add a file to their site’s main directory called Robots.txt containing the word “disallow”, says Graham. This will prevent the archive’s bots from crawling the site’s pages.

Rich Matta, CEO of ReputationDefender, says there isn’t much a public figure such as Trump can do besides change the behavior that creates the negative publicity in the first place.

“We have worked with some individuals that have similarly massive public profiles as Donald Trump and that have a penchant for making controversial statements,” says Matta. “But when you reach the level of intense scrutiny of a major party nominee for the presidency, the only realistic way to control your online reputation is through your own statements and actions.”

He adds that one of the worst things you can do is try to remove things after the fact, which can make the negative information spread further and faster – a phenomenon commonly known as the “Streisand effect”.

The best thing Trump could do is create more positive content that will keep the negative stuff from showing up higher in search results, says attorney Bennet Kelley, founder of the Internet Law Center. “Stop being so belligerent and intolerant, and promote stuff that people like rather than attacking others,” he said.</s>Donald Trump hasn't held a wide-ranging press conference in 167 days. That streak is expected to be broken Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. ET, when Trump holds his first news conference since being elected president.

He'd tweeted 1,601 times in that time, as of midnight Wednesday.

Ironically, Trump's last news conference, in July 2016, was when he seemed to encourage Russia to "find" more of Hillary Clinton's emails. The topic of Russian hacking — and his alleged ties to the Kremlin — is sure to be Item A of Trump's press conference. That's especially true, since Trump still hasn't yet explicitly accepted the findings of the intelligence community that Russia was, in fact, responsible for hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and a top Clinton aide — and that Russia's intent to was to get him elected.

This press conference comes nine days before Trump is set to be sworn in as a the 45th president of the United States and nearly a month after Trump canceled his last scheduled news conference. That one was supposed to be about how he would unwind the complex international financial entanglements of the Trump Organization to avoid a potential conflict or perceived conflict of interest. This press conference is not specifically billed to be about that, but Trump has not fully answered how he would do this, beyond tweeting that he'd hand off management to his sons.

It also comes amid the busiest week since his electoral victory — and as more than half a dozen of his Cabinet nominees have testified about their records. Some of them have disagreed on expressed desired Trump policies — like on waterboarding and a border wall.

And, of course, there's policy and the issue of Obamacare. Republicans have said they want to "repeal and replace" it, but they can't agree on what to replace it with, whether it should be repealed and replaced at the same time, or repealed and then replace it at a later date. A growing chorus of Republicans is arguing to do them at the same time. So what does Trump believe?

There's a lot to ask. Here are just some that some of us at NPR would like answered:



1. Last week, you received the classified briefing on Russia. Are you now persuaded that Vladimir Putin personally ordered a campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election? Are you persuaded that he did so in order to help you get elected?

2. Will you continue tweeting after you are sworn in as president? Why do you prefer to communicate via Twitter as opposed to the channels that presidents and presidents-elect have traditionally used?



3. You told an interviewer you're "not sure" whether you want to retain FBI Director James Comey and that you'd like to understand his reasons "for doing what he did" in the email investigation of Hillary Clinton. Will you keep him on board or have you found a reason to demand his resignation?

Context: The FBI director became the focus of bipartisan criticism for his extraordinary disclosures to Congress about the email probe as the election loomed. Traditionally, the Justice Department takes pains to avoid public action that could influence a political contest. Clinton aides have blamed Comey in part for their election loss. But Comey is only about three years into a 10-year-term, designed to insulate the FBI from political pressure during any single administration. Firing Comey could carry political risk for Trump, who may fear the former prosecutor will turn his energy toward investigating cabinet members and the White House.

4. The Office of Government Ethics, a federal watchdog, took to Twitter last year to urge you to divest your holdings to resolve conflicts of interest before you're sworn into office. Are you and your counsel and cabinet nominees following guidance you have received from OGE? In which instances have you ignored or countermanded their advice to divest?

Context: In a break with years of protocol, the OGE went public on social media to encourage the president elect to divest some of his real estate and other investments. "Divestiture is good for you, very good for America," one tweet read. "We can't repeat enough how good this total divestiture will be." But it's not clear whether Trump will in fact completely divest or create a truly blind trust. The public statements hint at a bigger controversy: a behind the scenes battle over whether the nascent Trump administration is following advice from the federal ethics cops.



5. Mr. President-elect, Senator Rand Paul says he spoke with you and got assurances that you supported his position that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced simultaneously. The Majority Leader, who you met with earlier this week, says the plan is to pass a repeal measure soon, and then work on passing a replacement later. Who do you agree with? What is your view about the appropriate timing and sequencing for undoing and replacing the Affordable Care Act?

Context: Repealing key parts of president Obama's signature healthcare law would only require 51 votes in the Senate, thanks to a procedural maneuver. If Republicans are united, they have the numbers to meet that threshold. Replacing the law would be harder as other legislation will require at least 60 votes in the Senate. In recent days there have been a number of cracks emerging in Republican unity, with a small but growing number of senators insisting that repeal and replace happen at the same time, while others have expressed concerns about some elements of previous repeal legislation. As Democrats know all too well, the US healthcare system is massive and complex with competing interests and reforming it is both challenging and politically perilous.</s>President-elect Donald Trump said for the first time he believes Russia was behind hacking ahead of the election.

“I think it was Russia,” Trump said during his first news conference as President-elect.

He added that Russia is not the only nation that hacks US targets and accused Democrats of not having sufficient cybersecurity programs.

The news conference opened with his spokesman, Sean Spicer, slamming a “political witch hunt” following reports that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Trump.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence also criticized the media before introducing Trump, who kept up his criticism of US intelligence.

“I do have to say and I must say that I want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today because they looked at that nonsense that was released by maybe the intelligence agencies,” Trump said. “But maybe the intelligence agencies which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they did that. A thing like that should never have been written, it should never have been had and it certainly should have never been released.”

He reiterated that he doesn’t plan to release his tax returns, saying they are under audit and don’t include relevant information

The news conference follows exclusive reporting by CNN on Tuesday that classified documents presented last week to President Barack Obama and Trump included the allegations about Russia. The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and drew in part from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible.

The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The news conference, delayed from December, was scheduled for Trump to outline how he will address questions about possible conflicts-of-interest related to his vast business empire. Trump appeared beside a large pile of files he claimed were pertinent to the companies that are going to be placed in a trust to be run by his sons.

After taking a handful of questions, Trump turned the event over to Sheri Dilon, an attorney who was on hand to discuss Trump’s business interests.

She said Trump planned to put in place a structure that will “completely isolate him from the management of the company.”

“He further instructed that we build in protections that will assure the American people that the decisions that he makes and the actions he takes as President are for their benefit and not to support his financial interests,” she said.

Trump will place all his financial and business assets in a trust, Dillon said. The Trump organization meanwhile will not enter into any new deals abroad and all domestic deals will be subject to a heavy vetting process. The firm will also appoint a new ethics officer, she said. The President-elect has also terminated a number of deals set to close shortly, a step that had cost him millions of dollars, she said.

Dillon argued that the decision had been made not to put all Trump’s assets in a blind trust or to divest of all his assets because it would be impractical. She also said that Trump should not be forced to destroy the business that he had built up.

“President Trump can’t unknow he owns Trump tower,” Dillon said, explaining why a blind trust would not be a workable solution to addressing conflicts of interest issues while he is President.

Dillon said Trump would take other actions to avoid the appearance of a conflict over the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits the president from accepting gifts from foreign governments unless authorized by Congress. She said it was unfair to apply the clause to Trump’s “arms length” transactions that he had nothing to do with or was not aware of.

“Just like with conflicts of interests, he wants to do more than what the Constitution requires,” she said. “President-elect Trump has decided and we are announcing today that he is going to voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotels to the United States Treasury.”

When he returned to the podium, Trump turned to policy, vowing to press ahead with a near simultaneous repeal and replacement of Obamacare at the same time, rejecting the approach of some Republicans on Capitol Hill who worry that rushing could create problems.

“It will be repeal and replace. It will be essentially simultaneously,” he said, saying the two goals would be accomplished in the same week, day or even hour.

Trump reiterated that he will build a wall on the southern border and Mexico will pay for it, but defended his decision to ask Congress to fund it initially.

“We are going to build a wall,” he said, adding that he didn’t want to wait a year and a half to finish negotiating how Mexico would pay for it. “Mexico, in some form … will reimburse us.”

He added that the financing was more likely to take the form of a tax than a payment.

The President-elect also said he had been looking at the list of 20 potential Supreme Court nominees he had proposed to replace late Justice Antonin Scalia.

He said he would announce his decision “within two weeks of the 20th, probably the second week.”

The news conference amounts to more than a test of his familiarity with policy questions and the duties and responsibilities that a President must shoulder. Coming hours after Obama’s farewell speech in Chicago, the news conference reinforces a sense of historic change pulsating through Washington.

The confrontational tone he displayed at points, especially when it came to critiques of the press, provides hints about the demeanor and attitude he will adopt as commander-in-chief and head of state.

Trump will enter the White House with the most estranged relationship with journalists of any new President in recent memory after repeatedly branding the press “dishonest” and using it as a foil during his campaign and transition.</s>President-elect Donald Trump at his last news conference on July 27, 2016. (Photo: Gustavo Caballero, Getty Images)</s>NEW YORK (AP) — Defiant and unyielding, President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday adamantly denied reports that Russia had obtained compromising personal and financial information about him, calling it a “tremendous blot” on the record of the intelligence community if it had released such material.

The incoming president, in his first news conference since late July, firmly pushed back on the media reports and chided news organizations for publishing the material late Tuesday night. His extraordinary defense, coming just nine days before Trump’s inauguration, dominated a highly anticipated press conference in which the future president also announced a new Cabinet member and his plans to disentangle himself from his sprawling global business empire.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information, I read the information outside of that meeting,” he said, a reference to a classified briefing he received from intelligence leaders. “It’s all fake news, it’s phony stuff, it didn’t happen,” Trump said. “It was gotten by opponents of ours.”

Asked about his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump called it “an asset, not a liability” and an improvement over what he called America’s current “horrible relationship with Russia.”

“If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset not a liability. I don’t know if I’m going to get along with Vladimir Putin — I hope I do — but there’s a good chance I won’t.”

Trump, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer denounced the reports about Russia’s influence on Trump and the incoming president said the report never should have been released. He thanked some news organizations for showing restraint.

A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday night that intelligence officials had informed Trump last week about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had obtained compromising personal and financial information about him. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not allowed to publicly discuss the matter.

Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community’s findings last week, the official said.

Media outlets reported on the document late Tuesday and Trump denounced it on Twitter before his news conference as “fake news,” suggesting he was being persecuted for defeating other GOP presidential hopefuls and Democrat Hillary Clinton in the election.

The dossier contains unproven information about close coordination between Trump’s inner circle and Russians about hacking into Democratic accounts as well as unproven claims about unusual sexual activities by Trump among other suggestions attributed to anonymous sources. The Associated Press has not authenticated any of the claims.

Pence said the decision by some media to publish the reports could “only be attributed to media bias” and an attempt to “demean” Trump.

Only days from his inauguration as the nation’s 45th president, Trump announced that he would nominate David Shulkin to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, elevating him from his current role as VA undersecretary.

Trump also announced his plans for the future of the Trump Organization, bringing to the podium attorney Sheri Dillon of Morgan Lewis, who worked with the Trump Organization on the arrangement.

Dillon said the Trump Organization would continue to pursue deals in the U.S., though Trump will relinquish control of the company to his sons and an executive, put his business assets in a trust and take other steps to isolate himself from his business. She said Trump “should not be expected to destroy the company he built.”

The move appears to contradict a previous pledge by the president-elect. In a tweet last month, Trump vowed to do “no new deals” while in office.

The lawyer who advised Trump also said that the Trump Organization will appoint an ethics adviser to its management team who must approve deals that could raise concerns about conflicts.</s>Donald Trump hasn't held a wide-ranging press conference in 167 days. That streak is expected to be broken Wednesday morning at 11 a.m. ET, when Trump holds his first news conference since being elected president.

He'd tweeted 1,601 times in that time, as of midnight Wednesday.

Ironically, Trump's last news conference, in July 2016, was when he seemed to encourage Russia to "find" more of Hillary Clinton's emails. The topic of Russian hacking — and his alleged ties to the Kremlin — is sure to be Item A of Trump's press conference. That's especially true, since Trump still hasn't yet explicitly accepted the findings of the intelligence community that Russia was, in fact, responsible for hacking the emails of the Democratic National Committee and a top Clinton aide — and that Russia's intent to was to get him elected.

This press conference comes nine days before Trump is set to be sworn in as a the 45th president of the United States and nearly a month after Trump canceled his last scheduled news conference. That one was supposed to be about how he would unwind the complex international financial entanglements of the Trump Organization to avoid a potential conflict or perceived conflict of interest. This press conference is not specifically billed to be about that, but Trump has not fully answered how he would do this, beyond tweeting that he'd hand off management to his sons.

It also comes amid the busiest week since his electoral victory — and as more than half a dozen of his Cabinet nominees have testified about their records. Some of them have disagreed on expressed desired Trump policies — like on waterboarding and a border wall.

And, of course, there's policy and the issue of Obamacare. Republicans have said they want to "repeal and replace" it, but they can't agree on what to replace it with, whether it should be repealed and replaced at the same time, or repealed and then replace it at a later date. A growing chorus of Republicans is arguing to do them at the same time. So what does Trump believe?

There's a lot to ask. Here are just some that some of us at NPR would like answered:



1. Last week, you received the classified briefing on Russia. Are you now persuaded that Vladimir Putin personally ordered a campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election? Are you persuaded that he did so in order to help you get elected?

2. Will you continue tweeting after you are sworn in as president? Why do you prefer to communicate via Twitter as opposed to the channels that presidents and presidents-elect have traditionally used?



3. You told an interviewer you're "not sure" whether you want to retain FBI Director James Comey and that you'd like to understand his reasons "for doing what he did" in the email investigation of Hillary Clinton. Will you keep him on board or have you found a reason to demand his resignation?

Context: The FBI director became the focus of bipartisan criticism for his extraordinary disclosures to Congress about the email probe as the election loomed. Traditionally, the Justice Department takes pains to avoid public action that could influence a political contest. Clinton aides have blamed Comey in part for their election loss. But Comey is only about three years into a 10-year-term, designed to insulate the FBI from political pressure during any single administration. Firing Comey could carry political risk for Trump, who may fear the former prosecutor will turn his energy toward investigating cabinet members and the White House.

4. The Office of Government Ethics, a federal watchdog, took to Twitter last year to urge you to divest your holdings to resolve conflicts of interest before you're sworn into office. Are you and your counsel and cabinet nominees following guidance you have received from OGE? In which instances have you ignored or countermanded their advice to divest?

Context: In a break with years of protocol, the OGE went public on social media to encourage the president elect to divest some of his real estate and other investments. "Divestiture is good for you, very good for America," one tweet read. "We can't repeat enough how good this total divestiture will be." But it's not clear whether Trump will in fact completely divest or create a truly blind trust. The public statements hint at a bigger controversy: a behind the scenes battle over whether the nascent Trump administration is following advice from the federal ethics cops.



5. Mr. President-elect, Senator Rand Paul says he spoke with you and got assurances that you supported his position that Obamacare must be repealed and replaced simultaneously. The Majority Leader, who you met with earlier this week, says the plan is to pass a repeal measure soon, and then work on passing a replacement later. Who do you agree with? What is your view about the appropriate timing and sequencing for undoing and replacing the Affordable Care Act?

Context: Repealing key parts of president Obama's signature healthcare law would only require 51 votes in the Senate, thanks to a procedural maneuver. If Republicans are united, they have the numbers to meet that threshold. Replacing the law would be harder as other legislation will require at least 60 votes in the Senate. In recent days there have been a number of cracks emerging in Republican unity, with a small but growing number of senators insisting that repeal and replace happen at the same time, while others have expressed concerns about some elements of previous repeal legislation. As Democrats know all too well, the US healthcare system is massive and complex with competing interests and reforming it is both challenging and politically perilous.
President-elect of the United States Donald Trump holds his first post-election press conference in New York City.