Canada

They are looking for a bigger reset after U.S.-Canada relations had sunk to their lowest level in decades.

OTTAWA — After months of tension and insults in their trade war, President Donald Trump tried out a new role with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: peacemaker.

Several sources familiar with a Monday call between the two leaders described the president dominating the conversation with an almost uninterrupted burst of enthusiasm, speaking for the vast majority of a 15-minute call about how amazing, how perfect things would be now.

Story Continued Below

“It was extremely positive,” said one Canadian official. Other witnesses described the prime minister struggling to squeeze some words in, amid the president’s extended peace declaration.

The themes of that big, beautiful call across the northern border have emerged in public view, with Trump suddenly describing the countries as a regional trading block, ready to take on the world together.

What a difference a week makes.

With a historic trade deal in hand, Trump and Trudeau are looking for a bigger reset after U.S.-Canada relations had sunk to their lowest level in decades. U.S. and Canadian officials are starting to consider a post-NAFTA agenda, with possible projects near and far: space cooperation, global trade reform, border modernization and regulatory streamlining.

It won’t be easy to convince Canadians that their leaders should make nice with Trump. Some polls put Trump’s approval in Canada under 20 percent, and the trade deal still requires approval by Congress.

“Trump has the worst popularity numbers for an American president among Canadians that I have ever seen,” said Canadian pollster Darrell Bricker. “The negative reaction is visceral and total. The idea that there’s even a place to start a conversation based on where he is an extremely optimistic read. The best he can hope for is that there are a couple of issues where his interests are closely aligned enough with Canada’s that the reaction isn’t as intense. That’s as good as it gets.”

POLITICO interviewed five officials directly involved in the trade negotiations, and they paint a picture of a painful experience, followed by a new, more diplomatic side of the usually combative Trump White House once the deal was done. Descriptions of the closed-door conversations were provided to POLITICO by multiple sources, granted anonymity so they could freely discuss private negotiations.

For months, Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of Foreign Affairs, gave the Americans fits.

The U.S. team fumed that Canada’s foreign minister was either playing them, or playing out of her depth. One notable blowup came weeks ago when the U.S. team was convinced it was two short items away from a deal.

Freeland raised a couple more, then some more, and, with the Americans losing patience, they demanded to know just how many items were on this list.

Twelve, Freeland replied.

Deputy U.S. trade czar C.J. Mahoney finally snapped. Why, he groused, was she talking about saving the whales, instead of saving NAFTA?

The reason the world’s largest mammal had surfaced in the tiniest fine print of NAFTA was that Freeland raised a concern about marine conservation.

The Canadians say there’s a reason for this. The reason is the Americans wanted the negotiations over, they say, and the Canadians weren’t done.

The U.S. had closed out a deal with Mexico before Labor Day in the hope of using it to squeeze Canada into signing the document.

So when the Americans insisted they were at the end, the Canadians would reply, no, actually there’s still online duty-free shopping to work out.

Canada thought Mexico had agreed to some poor conditions, including the tax-and-duty rules for online shopping. Freeland hinted at this in her media appearances between rounds where she repeatedly alluded to Mexican “concessions.”

In the end, Canada got some revisions to the rules for online cross-border shopping.

“It is true this frustrated the Americans,” one Canadian official said. “But that’s why it took four weeks. It was complicated.”

The official insisted that Canada wasn’t trying to delay the deal to death.

“If we were playing for time we wouldn’t have been camped out in Washington every week,” he said.

“We would have said, ‘Sorry, we’re busy, we can’t make it.’”

There were also little digs at Trump from the Canadian lead, which didn’t help the atmosphere in the room.

Freeland has given speeches in Canada, and in Washington, casting the smaller northern country as a protector of the liberal international order as the southern superpower loses its way.

In an airing of the grievances during a press conference last week, Trump made clear he was no fan of Freeland, either: “We don’t like their representative very much.”

America’s ambassador to Canada happened to be hosting a goodwill event for Ottawa-based journalists at the moment of Trump’s tirade, and it turned the conversation.

While Trump and Trudeau are enjoying a diplomatic detente after this week’s trade agreement, both sides are well aware the mood could turn very quickly — especially if Trump decides to insult his northern counterpart.

One administration official outside the White House recently told POLITICO about hearing people in his department allude to Trudeau as “Obama Lite.”

In Canada, that’s half a compliment.

Trump’s predecessor was so popular in Ottawa that a coffee shop he once visited has transformed into a shrine to him, and when he spoke to Canada’s House of Commons in 2016, Canada’s elected parliamentarians repeatedly chanted, “Four more years.”

One longtime analyst of the relationship says there are ample areas for cooperation. But he has doubts the bonhomie will last.

Duties are still hitting Canadian lumber, there are still tariffs on steel and aluminum, and the political challenges of managing the relationship with Trump have not disappeared, said Christopher Sands of Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Canadian Studies.

“The key is not Trump’s approval [in Canada] but Trudeau’s and the fact that there is a Canadian election in 12 months,” Sands said.

“[The] USMCA [trade agreement] denies Trudeau the chance to run against Trump, and we might not have congressional approval of the deal by next October so it could be dangerous to do so … Trump’s sunshine for Trudeau is not likely to last, and can change suddenly as we know.”

Congress

Fair or not, there are heightened expectations to side with Christine Blasey Ford.

It’s no surprise that Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are prime targets of the campaign to defeat Brett Kavanaugh, given their moderate bearings and general support for abortion rights.

But the pressure on the GOP duo is even heavier for the simple fact that they’re women.

Story Continued Below

There are heightened expectations on both sides of the Supreme Court battle that Collins and Murkowski may be more prone to believe Christine Blasey Ford because of their shared experiences as women. And because of that, the two are facing appeals, both overt and subtle, to their gender.

Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh said last week that the duo have “a tough call to make in your world” on Kavanaugh, adding: “The pressures here are to be loyal to gender.” On the other side of the political spectrum, the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America wrote in September that Collins and Murkowski “owe it to women in America to examine all the evidence before them” and reject the high court nominee.

Interviews with more than a half-dozen of the pair’s female Democratic colleagues confirmed a sense that Collins and Murkowski are under a particularly harsh grind as arbiters of Ford and other accusers’ sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh. It’s an unfair, but inescapable, standard, several of them said.

“I’m sure they feel that pressure, and I’m sure that the world is putting that pressure on them,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York said of Collins and Murkowski in an interview. “Because they expect more from women.”

But Gillibrand, a potential presidential candidate in 2020 who faced political blowback for calling on former Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) to resign after he was accused of sexual misconduct, offered a caveat when it comes to the role of Collins and Murkowski in the Supreme Court fight.

“I don’t think it is their responsibility to be the only beacons of virtue,” Gillibrand said. “I expect that from all U.S. senators, and I expect it from our Republican male colleagues as well.”

“It happens around here, and I don’t understand why … certain issues are designated as women’s issues,” added Sen. Kamala Harris of California. “So, then, are there also men’s issues? Where are we going with this? We’re all leaders for the entire country.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire said that “I do” sense that Collins and Murkowski are under particular duress because of what she called a “gender disparity.”

“One of the reasons it’s important to have women at the table, regardless of what their political party is, is because women’s experiences are different than men’s,” Shaheen said in an interview. “I think we’re seeing differences in the way senators are being treated and the way they’re being viewed in terms of this issue.”

Collins herself acknowledged this week that she senses Democratic lobbying efforts leaning heavily on her and Murkowski, though she didn’t tie them specifically to their gender. “I mean, every senator has an equal vote,” Collins said, describing the campaign to sway her against Kavanaugh as “horrendous” as she recalled one caller threatening to rape a female aide if the senator voted yes.

Murkowski, who won her 2010 reelection bid as a write-in candidate after losing to a tea party challenger in the GOP primary, told Alaska Public Radio last week that the Kavanaugh debate has become “a national conversation about women who’ve become victims and their ability to tell their story.”

Murkowski also answered affirmatively when the radio station asked whether she herself has had “#MeToo moments,” though she declined to elaborate. She told reporters on Wednesday that she’s “taking everything into account” as she weighs how she’ll vote on the 53-year-old appeals court judge.

Privately, Republicans believe that she and Collins are paying more attention to the FBI report that was expected to reach the Senate as soon as Wednesday night than any activist efforts. The third publicly undecided Republican, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, had a tense encounter in an elevator with female protesters against Kavanaugh before leading the call for a new FBI inquiry and later told grass-roots demonstrators they could “join me in an elevator anytime.”

In the meantime, some of the biggest critics of President Donald Trump’s high court pick are urging more of Collins and Murkowski’s male colleagues to join them in scrutinizing the claims against Kavanaugh as well as his defiant testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. Kavanaugh apologized during that hearing after challenging Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) for asking him about whether he had blacked out from drinking, an exchange that Gillibrand said was “deeply troubling” and showed the judge getting rattled by female questioners.

“The questions raised about Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the United States Supreme Court should give every senator pause, regardless of whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, males or females,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in an interview.

Collins has faced arguably more pressure than Murkowski due to her looming reelection in 2020; the Alaska senator isn’t set to face voters again until 2022. Flake is also receiving a torrent of activist attention from the left given his plans to retire from Congress after this year.

Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who’s more conservative than Collins or Murkowski but has previously indicated openness to preserving Roe v. Wade, joined Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) on the target list of a $1 million-plus ad buy from the ACLU in its push against Kavanaugh. But otherwise, Capito has not been targeted nearly as much.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said this week that “sure, I do” have sympathy for the the unusual amount of attention being paid to Collins and Murkowski.

“There’s a lot of pressure on every woman,” Feinstein said. “The fact is that these are big problems, and they are also very smart women. I think they’re well able to handle it. And we’ll see what the [FBI] reports produce.”

Burgess Everett contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump is unlikely to pay a legal or financial price even if new allegations of extensive tax dodging by him and his family are borne out.

Multiple factors could offer Trump a shield, not the least of which is time: The questionable practices outlined in a New York Times report happened so long ago that a case would be difficult to make today, especially given statutes of limitations.

Story Continued Below

“It’s certainly possible, although the age of these transactions raises some questions about whether any of it will be collectible,” said Beth Shapiro Kaufman, a former Treasury Department tax official who is now president of the law firm Caplin & Drysdale.

Nonetheless, New York state officials are probing the tax practices of Trump and his family following the report. The Department of Taxation and Finance, which is responsible for investigating tax fraud, can collect fines and penalties and also refer criminal actions to the attorney general’s office.

The White House has denounced the Times report, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders calling it “a misleading attack against the Trump family by the failing New York Times.”

Statutes of limitations raise barriers to criminal liability for the numerous schemes the Times said Trump and his family undertook in the 1990s to save millions of dollars in taxes, including avoiding gift taxes and taking allegedly inappropriate write-offs. The government would have to demonstrate fraud to escape statutes of limitations.

The Times bluntly accused Trump of “instances of outright fraud,” but prosecutors face a high standard to prove that.

Proving criminal fraud would be “exceedingly unlikely,” said Mark Matthews, a former IRS deputy commissioner who was responsible for the agency’s Criminal Investigation Division who is also at Caplin & Drysdale now.

While conspiracies can continue for years, Trump would need to have committed “a constant pattern of overt acts and obstruction-like behavior up until much closer to the present,” Matthews said.

It’s not as hard to reach back to prove civil fraud. But there are limits on that, too. If Trump inherited undervalued assets, as the Times report alleged, he wouldn’t be liable for underpayment of gift taxes because the tax liability falls on the donor — his father, Fred Trump, who died in 1999.

“If taxes were not paid, it was by the president’s father, now long dead,” said Harvard Law School visiting professor Howard Abrams.

The Times investigation — based on thousands of documents the newspaper had obtained, including more than 200 tax returns filed by Fred Trump — says Donald Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father, and that Trump and his siblings helped their parents dodge taxes by setting up a “sham corporation,” taking improper tax deductions, undervaluing their real estate holdings and other dubious measures.

IRS officials previously examined Fred Trump’s estate, as well as that of his wife, Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s mother. Adjustments were made and the cases were closed, and it is difficult to reopen them.

Undervaluation charges can be hard to prove given that wealthy taxpayers hire lawyers and other professionals who are expert in tax law and just how far it can be pushed. Good faith reliance on professional advice is a viable defense, assuming there was no collusion or true intent to undervalue property.

“To the extent that they did rely in good faith on competent advisers, provided full and accurate information to those advisers in order to get opinions or advice, and then acted in accordance with that advice, the taxpayers would have a viable reliance defense,” said Caroline Ciraolo, former acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Tax Division and now a partner with Kostelanetz & Fink.

The allegations in the Times report also expose IRS limitations in grasping how the money flowed. It’s easy to set up corporations and move money between them to escape detection, said Michael Sullivan, a former IRS agent and a founder of Fresh Start Tax LLC.

“That’s what people rely on, the IRS not connecting the dots,” he said.

It’s difficult to say what other revelations may come out about Trump’s taxes. He has broken with decades of precedent by refusing to release his tax returns, but Democrats are vowing to get their hands on them if they take over the House in the midterm elections.

Marie J. French and Quint Forgey contributed to this report.