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Ron Stephens, 49, of Troy, Mich., looks on during a bowling game at 5 Star Lanes on Wednesday in neighboring Sterling Heights. (Sean Proctor for The Washington Post)
STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. — On a busy weeknight at the 5 Star Lanes bowling alley in this Detroit suburb that voted heavily for President Trump, there was little excitement about the Republican plan to cut taxes.
A 60-year-old retiree bowling with a group of girlfriends said she’s tired of the middle class having to pay more so the wealthy can become even wealthier. A few lanes away, a middle-aged woman with frizzy gray hair said that the more she hears about the plan, the more she hates it. And a group of young guys in matching shirts said they didn’t even know the proposal was in the works, although they seemed skeptical that their taxes would ever go down in a meaningful way.
Ron Stephens, a 49-year-old Republican who works in purchasing for the auto industry and wrote in Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for president, said he doesn’t expect to benefit under the proposal. Any gains he might make thanks to a tax cut would probably be washed out by changes to other deductions that he usually takes, he said.
And don’t get him started on cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, as the Senate bill passed early Saturday does.
[Senate GOP tax bill passes in major victory for Trump, Republicans]
“Why are you going to lower their taxes?” Stephens said, naming some wealthy auto-titan families as examples as he waited for his turn to bowl Wednesday night. “The level of lifestyle that they have versus everyone else — why do they need that? It’s not that big of an impact for them, but for someone making $30,000 a year? That would have a huge impact on them.”
Here in the Detroit suburbs and across the country, many voters say they view the Republican tax plan as a giveaway for the rich that will benefit only a small number of people in the long run. Trump and prominent members of his party promise that the cuts will spur economic growth — leading to more jobs and better pay — but many voters say they are skeptical that will actually happen.
Polls consistently show that more Americans oppose the tax plan than support it — including, most recently, a Quinnipiac survey in November that showed that for every two people who disapproved of the plan, only one supported it. That poll found that fewer than 1 in 6 Americans expect their taxes to be reduced, while more than twice that many expect their taxes to go up. When it comes to just Republicans, a third expect to personally get a tax cut.
And although Republican leaders have hoped that passing the package will help their chances in the midterm elections next year, polls have also found that their proposals are far less popular than those introduced during George W. Bush’s administration. In October, a CBS News poll found that 70 percent of Americans didn’t think the tax bill should even be a top priority.
At the bowling alley, there was some support. Jeff Johnson, 58, said he expects that most middle-class families will see a cut of some sort, but he is most excited to see the corporate tax reduced, which he says will greatly help small businesses in Michigan. For years, Johnson ran his own company making commercial signs. He now works for a larger company that does the same thing.
“People always point to the rich, rich, rich — but that’s a small number of people. It’s mostly mom-and-pops,” said Johnson, a Trump supporter who shared a pitcher of beer with friends as they played.
Jeff Johnson, 58, of Sterling Heights sends a bowling ball down the lane. (Sean Proctor for The Washington Post)
A few miles away at Art and Jake’s Sports Bar, two business partners were practically giddy at the idea of the corporate tax rate going down. Jeff Hinsperger and Mark Matheson own the World Class Equipment Co. in Shelby, which builds robots to work in automobile manufacturing plants. Both voted for Trump.
Business has been booming — although they said they have struggled to get the financing needed to do all the job requests they receive. With more cash from paying less in taxes, they said, the company could finance more on its own, allowing them to hire more employees and invest in even more equipment.
“Everyone thinks business owners are greedy,” Matheson said. “We’re not. We’re the ones with everything at risk.”
Sitting across the bar that night were two other businessmen who were in town for work — one from Indianapolis, the other from Tennessee. Both were longtime Republicans. Neither of them expects to benefit from the tax cuts, and they’re skeptical that cuts for corporations will really trickle down to them. Both scoffed when asked whether members of Congress or the president care about the middle class.
Jeff Hinsperger and Mark Matheson own the World Class Equipment Co. in Shelby, Mich. They say they expect to use the GOP’s corporate tax cut to hire more workers and buy more equipment. (Sean Proctor for The Washington Post)
Many interviewed in Michigan last week said the tax plan seems aimed at further dividing the wealthy from everyone else.
“They’re not looking out for the middle class,” said Andrew Stewart, 30, a former hair stylist who works as a restaurant server while he’s studying to become an occupational therapist. “The separation between the middle class and the upper class, it’s growing, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. . . . It’s easier to control people when they’re under your thumb.”
Stewart supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for president in the primaries and believes Sanders was robbed of the Democratic nomination. He voted in the general election for Jill Stein of the Green Party, which he doesn’t regret — although he disapproves of how Trump is running the country.
“I feel completely unrepresented,” he said, while studying at a local Starbucks. “I don’t feel like I’m represented at all. It’s just a sad time in American history.”
Lee Johnson, a 63-year-old from Flint who is retired from working for the school district there, said that if the middle class really stood to benefit from this tax plan, Republicans wouldn’t have worked behind closed doors and rushed to pass it. Johnson voted for Hillary Clinton for president, although he considered her “the lesser of two evils.”
As Johnson has watched interviews with Republican lawmakers, he said, he has noticed that they can’t answer this simple question: “Is this going to help the middle class?”
“I don’t even get upset anymore, because they’re not going to listen,” said Johnson, who traveled to Sterling Heights on Wednesday to do some Christmas shopping at Lakeside Mall. “They don’t care. There’s nothing else to say. They just don’t care.”
Getting lunch in the mall food court that afternoon was Mike Papastamatis, a 33-year-old dentist who is a partner in a local practice and expects his tax rate to fall about 10 points if the “pass-through” deduction is increased. While that will benefit him, he said the practice is fully staffed right now and there’s no need to expand.
Mike Papastamatis of Shelby, Mich., said that tax cuts will save his dentistry practice money but that he’s fully staffed and has no need to expand. (Sean Proctor for The Washington Post)
And it bothers him that his employees and some of his relatives won’t benefit in the same way and could even be hurt. His parents were longtime employees at the local General Motors plant, and his mother recently asked him how the tax plan would help her.
“I said, ‘I don’t think it’s going to help,’ ” said Papastamatis, a father of two young daughters who is an independent. “For the middle class, who they’re always talking about helping, it doesn’t seem to help.”
A couple of miles away at Nicky D’s Coney Island restaurant, Patrick Colley finished up lunch. The 59-year-old Teamster, who hauls cars, said he’s excited to finally see lawmakers talking about tax cuts for the middle class and to have a president who he says understands guys like him. He expects to benefit, although he isn’t sure by how much, and he hopes younger workers making much less than him are able to benefit even more.
But he worries that “there’s too much gray about the wealthy” in this tax plan.
In some ways, he thinks cutting the corporate tax rate will help small businesses — such as an automotive tool company owned by one of his friends who had to move some of his work overseas and is eager to bring it back to the United States. Changes such as that could snowball and help the economy, he said, but he’s not convinced that major corporations such as the one he works for will pass along the benefits to their employees, because they “are in the ‘not caring’ mode.”
He’s frustrated that the wealthy get so many advantages, such as access to the best health insurance and tax breaks not available to everyone.
“It’s depressing, you know? It’s depressing. I pay like 30 percent [in taxes], and I’m a regular guy. It’s not fair. And a millionaire pays like 12 percent,” he said. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all.”
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President Trump’s personal lawyer said on Sunday that the president knew in late January that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had probably given FBI agents the same inaccurate account he provided to Vice President Pence about a call with the Russian ambassador.
Trump lawyer John Dowd said the information was passed to Trump by White House counsel Donald McGahn, who had been warned about Flynn’s statement to the vice president by a senior Justice Department official. The vice president said publicly at the time that Flynn had told him he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian diplomat — a statement disproved by a U.S. intelligence intercept of a phone call between Flynn and then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Trump was aware of the issue a couple of weeks before a conversation with then-FBI Director James B. Comey in which Comey said the president asked him if he could be lenient while investigating Flynn, whom Trump had just fired for misleading Pence about the nature of his conversations with the Russian.
According to notes kept by Comey, Trump asked if he could see “his way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” Trump fired Comey in May.
In a pre-dawn tweet Sunday, Trump issued a fresh rebuttal to Comey, writing: “I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn. Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!” The tweet was part of a running commentary from Trump that began Saturday, a day after Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and indicated he would cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is probing Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Trump’s Saturday tweets had stoked controversy, as he wrote that “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI.” Previously, the White House had cited only the false statements to Pence as a rationale for dismissing Flynn.
Dowd confirmed Sunday that he had drafted the tweet for Trump and acknowledged that it was sloppily worded. He said it was inaccurate to say the president was told that Flynn had lied to the FBI. Dowd said Sunday that Trump knew only what acting attorney general Sally Yates had told the White House counsel: that Flynn’s accounts to the agents interviewing him were the same as those Flynn gave Pence, and “that the [Justice] Department was not accusing him of lying.”
People familiar with Yates’ account say she never discussed any part of the FBI investigation with the White House.
Dowd played down the significance of Trump’s tweet, saying he did not intend to make news and declared, “I’m out of the tweeting business.”
[Graphic: Here’s what we know so far about Team Trump’s ties to Russian interests]
But several legal experts said the tweet, and some of Dowd’s comments about what the president may have known, could increase the president’s legal exposure.
If Trump knew that Flynn might not have been accurate with the FBI, it could provide motivation for any alleged effort to obstruct justice, said Barak Cohen, a former federal prosecutor who does white-collar defense work at Perkins Coie law firm. “It bolsters the intent for committing obstruction,” he said.
Even if Dowd wrote the tweet, Cohen said, “if President Trump sends it, then Trump has adopted it. It’s his statement. . . . The bottom line is the tweet is still bad for Trump — it makes things worse for him.”
A person close to the White House involved in the case termed the Saturday tweet “a screw-up of historic proportions” that has “caused enormous consternation in the White House.”
The person, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said that White House officials quickly realized the tweet could significantly assist Mueller if he chooses to pursue an obstruction case. The development sparked particular concern because others around Trump weren’t certain that Trump knew Flynn had made a false statement to the FBI at the time he fired him, the person added.
Democrats were quick to pounce on the development during appearances on Sunday morning’s public affairs shows.
In an interview, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said it looked to her that “what we’re beginning to see is the putting together of a case of obstruction of justice.”
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said she based her assessment on the indictment of Flynn on Friday and three other Trump associates previously, as well as the “hyper-frenetic attitude of the White House: the comments every day, the continual tweets.”
“And I see it, most importantly, in what happened with the firing of Director Comey, and it is my belief that that is directly because [Comey] did not agree to lift the cloud of the Russia investigation,” Feinstein said. “That’s obstruction of justice.”
Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump should have taken action against Flynn sooner if he knew his then-national security adviser had lied to the FBI.
“Well, if he knew that then, why didn’t he act on it earlier?” Warner said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It raises a whole series of additional questions.”
Flynn, who had been one of Trump’s closest and most trusted aides during the campaign and transition, admitted lying to the FBI about pre-inauguration communications with Kislyak, regarding efforts to blunt the Obama administration’s Russia sanctions and a U.N. resolution on Israel — potential violations of a rarely enforced law.
Dowd told The Post that Trump knew generally that Flynn’s account to the FBI and Pence were similar because of a conversation with McGahn on or about Jan. 26. Dowd said McGahn relayed what he had learned from Yates.
According to Dowd, Yates told McGahn on Jan. 26, in a meeting she requested, that Flynn appeared to have misled Pence about the nature of his call with Kislyak and that could compromise him, Dowd said. Yates also indicated that the FBI had interviewed Flynn on Jan. 24 about his contacts with Kislyak, Dowd said.
Dowd said Yates did not say that Flynn misled the FBI but suggested that Flynn had given FBI agents “the same story he gave the vice president.”
“For some reason, the [Justice] Department didn’t want to make an accusation of lying,” Dowd said. “The agents thought Flynn was confused.”
Past descriptions of those events by Yates and others are at odds with Dowd’s account.
According to several current and former law enforcement officials who spoke to The Post in February, Yates told McGahn that Flynn had discussed sanctions against Russia in his phone calls with Kislyak, was compromised because he had lied about this to the vice president, and could be vulnerable to blackmail, according to the officials.
She also told McGahn that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI two days before, the officials said. When McGahn asked her how he did in the interview, Yates did not respond, according to the officials who spoke to The Post. She later testified the same thing at a Senate hearing in May.
“Mr. McGahn asked me how he did, and I declined to give him an answer to that,” Yates said at the hearing.
Yates did tell McGahn that she was concerned about Flynn’s underlying conduct — the calls with the Russian ambassador and the fact that he was not telling the truth to the vice president, according to officials who spoke to The Post in February.
Yates offered to show McGahn the underlying evidence regarding the phone calls, and she said the FBI could pull the material together for him to see, the officials said.
McGahn was told Jan. 30 that the material was ready for his review, the officials said. On that night, Trump fired Yates over her refusal to defend his travel ban.
A person familiar with McGahn’s account says the White House counsel did not give Trump any indication in January that Flynn had violated the law in his FBI interview or tell the president that he believed Flynn was under criminal investigation.
When Yates met with McGahn on Jan. 26, it is McGahn’s account that she told him that Flynn had been interviewed by the FBI but that she declined to characterize the interview. She also would not say whether Flynn was under investigation, according to the person familiar with McGahn’s thinking.
That person said McGahn also recalls that Yates added that Flynn had told the FBI something similar to what he had told Pence, based on Pence’s public comments about the issue at the time.
According to the person familiar with his thinking, McGahn informed the president of those facts and told him that if Yates was accurately describing the content of Flynn’s contact with Kislyak, then Flynn should be fired.
People familiar with Yates’s version of events dispute that she characterized what Flynn told the FBI in any way.
A former senior administration official said Sunday that there was no widespread discussion in the White House of Flynn having lied to the FBI.
“There was never a meeting I was in when someone said, ‘Oh, Flynn lied to the FBI; we have to deal with it,’” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “It was, ‘We don’t know if he’s telling the truth or not.’ And then, ‘Okay, he’s not telling us the truth.’”
As controversy built Sunday about Trump’s actions, he sought to focus attention on news that Peter Strzok — the former top FBI official assigned to Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election — was taken off that job this summer after his bosses discovered that he and another member of Mueller’s team had exchanged politically charged texts disparaging Trump and supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Strzok was also a key player in the investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server, which ended without charges against her.
“Report: ‘ANTI-TRUMP FBI AGENT LED CLINTON EMAIL PROBE’ Now it all starts to make sense!” Trump wrote. He also criticized the FBI and promised to bring it back to “greatness” under his administration.
“After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History!” Trump wrote on Twitter. “But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.”
Sari Horwitz, Rosalind S. Helderman and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
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