WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President-elect Donald Trump (all times EST):
10:55 a.m.
President-elect Donald Trump wants Wall Street lawyer Jay Clayton to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Trump says in a statement that Clayton is “a highly talented expert on many aspects of financial and regulatory law.” Trump says his nominee will work to ensure that financial institutions “can thrive and create jobs while playing by the rules at the same time.”
The Senate must OK the nomination of Clayton, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.
Clayton is the latest Trump pick with deep ties to Wall Street — having represented Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Barclays Capital Inc.
Trump says he wants to undo many regulations that he says have “stifled investment” in Americans businesses.
Clayton says he’ll “carefully monitor” the financial sector and set policies that encourages companies to create jobs.
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9:30 a.m.
Donald Trump is warning Republicans against letting Democrats escape blame for problems with President Barack Obama’s health care law.
The president-elect is making his views known in a series of new tweets and he’s taking aim at the Senate’s Democratic leader, New York’s Chuck Schumer — a top defender of the health overhaul.
Trump has this advice for fellow Republicans: “Don’t let the Schumer clowns out of this web.” And Trump says “massive increases” in health costs will occur this year “and Dems are to blame for the mess.”
Trump also says the law “will fall of its own weight — be careful.”
Trump’s tweeting comes as the new GOP-led Congress begins initial steps toward dismantling Obama’s law.
Obama is holding a Capitol Hill strategy session with congressional Democrats about how to combat the Republican effort. Vice President-elect Mike Pence is meeting separately with GOP lawmakers
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7:24 a.m.
President-elect Donald Trump is suggesting the Democratic National Committee’s carelessness led to the hack that roiled the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Why was the DNC so careless?” Trump tweeted early Wednesday. He was referring to the hacking last year of the committee’s private email traffic, including emails of John Podesta, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton. Trump said WikiLeaks founder “Julian Assange said ‘a 14-year-old could have hacked Podesta’…Also said Russians did not give him the info!”
Assange has said his source for the emails WikiLeaks released was not a state, but that left open the prospect that he acquired it from a third party. The U.S. intelligence community, along with numerous Republicans and Democrats, allege that Russia did the hacking.
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3:45 a.m.
President-elect Donald Trump is raising new questions about the nation’s intelligence community, tweeting fresh criticism at the same people who will help inform his most sensitive decisions once he takes office.
Trump charged Tuesday on Twitter, without evidence, that the timing of an upcoming intelligence briefing on suspected Russian interference in the 2016 election had been delayed. “Perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” he wrote, using quote marks around the word “intelligence.”
Trump’s tweet, in line with repeated criticism of his nation’s intelligence leaders, caused confusion among intelligence officials, who said there was no delay in the briefing schedule.
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