Companies and banks doing business with pyongyang. And with word that Chinas Central Bank has ordered its Financial Institutions to stop dealing with north korea. John bolton is the former United States ambassador to the u. N. And a fox news contributor. Ambassador, welcome back. Glad to be with you. Paul so since those remarks by the president , kim jong un has now said maybe we will send a missile with a Hydrogen Bomb over the pacific. Right. I think it shows hes trying to demonstrate hes not intimidated by everything thats going on. This would be the first atmospheric test in more than paul 1980, yeah. The environmental consequences would be enormous. But the steps that have been taken, you mentioned the executive order, i think, is potentially quite Senate Although the words china and russia dont appear in it, those are the two targets to make it very specific whos aiding north korea. Paul lets go back to this Hydrogen Bomb incident because that would be a serious escalation on the
Republican congress too. How do you size it up . Lets look at the high points. Oh, the high points . Well, we would start with the Tax Reform Act of 2017. That was a very high point. The highest point at the beginning was the confirmation of neil gorsuch to the supreme court. And i suppose we should also mention that there were all of the regulatory rollbacks of obamas regulations using the congressional review act. But once passed, through the end there werent a lot of high points because they spent most of middle of the year trying toc reform obamacare. That was a failure. But, you know, theyve gone off on a true high. The economy is strong, Tax Reform Act should probably propel that economy, so theyve got the winds at their back going into the 2018. Paul we do want to talk about the economy in more detail later, mary, but i think the deregulatory agenda is really both what congress did with the congressional review act. Itd only been used once before, i think theyve used it 13 or 14
Champagne down pennsylvania avenue. There are only two places where americas popping champagne; the white house and the corporate boardrooms including trump tower. The gop tax scam is about bleeding the middle class dry to pad the pockets of Corporate America and the wealthiest 1 . Paul joining the panel, wall street journal columnist and Deputy Editor dan henninger, columnist kim strassel and Mary Anastasia ogrady and editorial page writer kate odell. Why did they succeed on taxes when they failed on health care . Right. That is one question, because you would expect a failure to make it harder to succeed. But i think here the Health Care Failure really focused the minds for the gop that, for them, it was do or die for their majority in 2018 to get a tax bill passed. And it wasnt always clear they would choose do. [laughter] but also i think there was a rougher consensus on what a tax bill should look like where on health care a lot of variety, you know, some wanted to keep entitlemen
Cooperate with Justice Department committee and new cooperation but if history is a guide here we have to wait and see what happens because theres history of not cooperating. Yeah, i would bet on not cooperation not only refusal to make documents available but serious redactions have been sent over, dojs refusal to make witnesses available for different members an committees in the house and in the senate. They dont want a lot of this information to come out so i think we can expect that its all going to have to be pride out bit by bit. Paul okay, now we do the name of this contractor has been widely reported, but we know a fair number of things about it, hes an american who is resident in the uk, he met with three Trump Campaign officials, all of this from stories that clearly seemed leaked by the Justice Department and fbi, is that how you read it, they are responsible for leaking details . Absolutely, according to government sources and that usually means department of justice, fbi,
Note . Not really in terms of the rush shoo probe as yorussia pro. There are two filings, one from the Southern District that dealt with the main crimes that cohen agreed that he had done, tax evasion, misrepresentation to financial institutions, Campaign Finance violations. Recommending a pretty harsh sentence for him. Then there was a shorter memo from the pecial counsel that goes to russia and we didnt learn anything. It sought to detail the ways in which he cooperated with the special counsels office. The only thing new there was that there had been some contact between cohen and an unnamed russian individual in 2015. But even the special counsel document has to acknowledge that that meeting never went anywhere. This is the meeting where russia approached cohen and suggested synergy on a government level between russia and the Trump Campaign. Correct. But again the memo admits that cohen didnt take the meeting. Suggested a meeting between trump and putin and that never took place.