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Capital Journal
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Good morning from the WSJ's Washington bureau. Federal government offices in the Washington, D.C., area are closed due to the snow storm.
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Trump's Day: President Trump meets with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz at the White House to discuss new avenues for cooperation.
Fed Minutes: Minutes from the January policy meeting should provide new clues into how officials judge risks to the economy and illustrate how they are approaching plans to complete the runoff of their portfolio.
Mideast Allies: The U.S. was planning to host a meeting of Mideast allies that will focus on modest security goals.
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President Trump displayed a directive in 2018 on space policy. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
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President Trump scaled back his plan to create a Space Force as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces, signing a directive that would establish the new military branch as part of the Air Force at first, report Alex Leary and Nancy A. Youssef.
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Vice President Mike Pence has put religion at the heart of key diplomatic efforts, Jessica Donati and Peter Nicholas report. He has steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid toward Christians and other minorities victimized by Islamic State, and advocated last year for the imposition of sanctions on officials in Turkey over a detained U.S. pastor.
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Mike Pence's new chief of staff is Marc Short. The former Trump White House legislative-affairs director, who left the White House last summer, was occasionally blamed by the president for the administration's failure to secure more money for a border wall, Michael C. Bender reports.
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The White House selected Jeffrey Rosen, the No. 2 official at the Transportation Department, to be deputy attorney general, reports Sadie Gurman. The move puts a seasoned bureaucrat in charge of the day-to-day operations of a Justice Department battered by political storms.
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Mr. Rosen is known as a sharp and apolitical lawyer familiar with the levers and gauges of government, but he has never worked at Justice.
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The Trump administration said it would cancel almost $1 billion in funding for the California high-speed rail network, reports Ted Mann. The move casts doubt on whether the state will be able to complete even the first phase of the troubled project.
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President Trump gave his firmest indication yet that the U.S. may not increase tariffs on Chinese goods on March 1, as scheduled, despite statements by his top trade official that the U.S. should stick to a firm deadline, report Bob Davis and Alex Leary.
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The deadline to complete talks with Beijing is “not a magical date,” the president told reporters.
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Midlevel U.S. and Chinese negotiators have started this week’s trade meetings, and cabinet-level officials will join the discussions Thursday.
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Sanders Sees Room in Crowded Democratic Primary. Will Biden?
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Sen. Bernie Sanders’s decision to join the Democratic presidential primary race was a sign that he still saw space for his candidacy among a field already packed with candidates issuing progressive policy proposals.
Many of the policies and issues that Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent, championed during his 2016 bid—Medicare for All, debt-free college, and raising the minimum wage—are now commonplace among Democratic presidential candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. Now Mr. Sanders has joined the fray himself. National name recognition and an established small-dollar fundraising prowess will make Mr. Sanders a formidable candidate, though a poor showing with black voters in 2016 suggests an obstacle to his 2020 prospects.
An important question in the primary: Will other candidate lanes follow a similar pattern as Mr. Sanders and the liberal wing. Former Vice President Joe Biden could reshape the field if he joins the primary, for example.
Other Democrats have launched campaigns targeted at winning back Midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan, where voters in 2016 chose President Trump after years of casting ballots for Democrats. The presence of those candidates—including Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Sherrod Brown of Ohio—could influence Mr. Biden’s decision. Mr. Biden, a Delaware senator for 36 years and later vice president, campaigned extensively in Midwestern states during the midterm election and has been one of the party's chief emissaries to the white working class.
Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Brown have made clear that they will chart a slightly different course than other major Democratic candidates like Sen. Sanders and Warren. Ms. Klobuchar, for instance, laid out a vision of fiscal restraint that is at odds with the ambitious and likely costly proposals put forth by other candidates.
“If I was a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would,” said Ms. Klobuchar during a CNN event in New Hampshire this weekend when asked about her position on free four-year college tuition. Ms. Klobuchar said such a proposal would be too costly.
“I’ve got to tell the truth,” she said.
Whether the presence of other moderate Democratic candidates in the primary will crowd out a candidate like Mr. Biden remains to be seen. Mr. Sanders was undeterred by competitors with parallel ideas and a head start in the primary.
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American efforts to create a new alliance of Middle East nations to counter Iran are faltering, reports Dion Nissenbaum. The so-called Middle East Strategic Alliance, or MESA, is no longer expected to bring countries together with a NATO-style agreement holding that an attack on one member would be seen as an act of war by all the others.
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Qatar has made it clear that it is difficult for Doha to embrace the idea when it is being isolated by its Gulf rivals, and Arab countries are resisting efforts to bring Israel into the alliance planning.
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The administration is focused instead on less ambitious goals, such as setting up trade deals and creating joint military training centers.
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A former North Korean diplomat has warned that North Korea would try to deceive Washington by offering hollow concessions, reports Andrew Jeong. Thae Yong Ho said the U.S. should press the North to rejoin the nuclear nonproliferation treaty as a step toward denuclearization.
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Mike Flynn, seen here in 2017, is President Trump’s former national-security adviser. PHOTO: ANDREW HARRER, PRESS POOL
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Former national-security adviser Mike Flynn and others pushed a Saudi nuclear-plant plan despite warnings, according to a House Oversight Committee report. It describes how Mr. Flynn worked on the plan with a group of retired U.S. generals and admirals who had formed a private company to promote it, reports Warren P. Strobel.
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One unnamed senior official quoted in the report derided the idea as “a scheme for these generals to make some money.”
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The committee said it was launching a formal investigation into the possible transfer of sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
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The WSJ first reported many of the details of the Saudi plan and Mr. Flynn’s efforts to advance it in a series of articles in 2017.
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Congressional leaders didn’t object to the FBI’s probe of Mr. Trump's ties to Russia, former deputy director Andrew McCabe said on NBC. The revelation adds a new wrinkle to criticism from Mr. Trump and his Republican allies about the FBI’s decision to open the investigation, reports Sadie Gurman.
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The Gang of Eight members who were briefed on the matter didn’t immediately respond to Mr. McCabe’s comments.
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Amtrak wants to offer more frequent service between cities in fast-growing regions to expand ridership, Ted Mann reports. Running more trains over shorter distances, at the expense of long-haul routes, would allow Amtrak to better serve those commercial corridors where rail can compete with flying and driving, railroad officials said.
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The change will require approval from Congress, which has agressivelty defended the long-distance routes in the past.
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Pentagon lawyers filed a new motion in the legal battle over a military cloud-computing contract worth up to $10 billion, asking federal judges to stay a lawsuit that Oracle filed alleging the procurement process had been skewed to favor Amazon. The move marks a tactical shift that could signal more trouble for a procurement that Amazon.com has been favored to win, report John D. McKinnon and Kate O’Keeffe.
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Years of growing gun sales have overtaxed the federal background-check system, Dan Frosch and Zusha Elinson report. And agents for one of the smallest federal agencies are straining to take guns away from thousands of Americans who should have never been able to buy firearms because of criminal convictions or mental health issues. Here is an in-depth look into the background-check system and why things go wrong:
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Trump political adviser Roger Stone has been ordered to explain himself to the federal judge on Thursday, after he posted a photo of the judge with crosshairs next to her head. Mr. Stone said his post had been misinterpreted and wasn’t meant as a threat, reports Aruna Viswanatha.
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Mr. Stone has been free since his January arrest on an indictment obtained by special counsel Robert Mueller. He is awaiting trial on charges of lying to Congress.
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The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a closely watched environmental case from Hawaii, report Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin, and threw out a Texas death sentence for a second time. Oral arguments in the Hawaii case will take place during the court’s next term.
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The new Democratic primary calendar, which increases the clout of states with big minority populations, could benefit former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris and Sen. Cory Booker. (CNN)
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A review of the relevant statutes shows President Trump has clear legal authority to declare a national emergency to expand work on a border wall. (The Federalist)
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A brief video history of the Internet in China shows, among other things, the country had just 0.2 personal computers per 100 people in 1994. (Bloomberg)
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Join WSJ journalists Laura Saunders, Richard Rubin and Geoffrey Rogow for a 30-minute call on how to navigate the tax landscape. Register here.
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This newsletter is a production of the WSJ Washington bureau. Our newsletter editors are Tim Hanrahan, Kate Milani, Troy McCullough and Daniel Nasaw. Send feedback to capitaljournal@wsj.com.
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