White House says Trump is not advocating for a shutdown
After President Trump said he would be willing to shut down the government should Congress be unable to reach a combination funding and immigration deal, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that the Trump administration hopes to avoid a shutdown.
When asked Tuesday afternoon if the president was advocating for a shutdown, Sanders said that he's "encouraging people to do their jobs."
"The president is encouraging them to get a deal on the budget as he's laid out-- a two year, a long term budget deal that actually helps our military instead of doing these short term deals," Sanders said. "That's what he's advocated all along."
Sanders later clarified that the White House expects funding and immigration bills to pass as separate measures.
"The president isn't looking for this but if the Democrat party is going to continue to threaten a shutdown because they won't include responsible immigration reforms including fixing MS-13 loopholes and other issues, then the president welcomes that fight," she said. "It's a fight we won last time and it's one we're very confident that we would win again.
Sanders said that the Trump administration hopes to fix the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) "problem" and blamed its existence on the obama administration. She said that the president reserves the right to potentially extend DACA beyond the March 5 deadline, but that he aims to resolve the issue before then.
The White House press secretary also said during the briefing that the president has reviewed the memo authored by House Intel Democrats that rebuts the Republican memo released last week, and he met with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein about the memo Monday.
"The President has seen the memo," Sanders told reporters. "He met with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, within the last hour to discuss some of the differences between the two memos. And we are undergoing the exact same process that we did with the previous memo, in which it will go through a full and thorough legal and national security review. We're in the middle of that process. When that's completed, the President will be given a thorough briefing on the findings of the different organizations and stakeholders that are involved, and will make a determination at that time."
She went on to say that the review would take several days to finish, as it did for the GOP memo, and after the review was finished, "we'll make a determination at that point" on releasing the memo.
