Our live coverage has ended. Check out the wide-ranging speech President Donald Trump gave to a receptive crowd at CPAC or follow our coverage from earlier by reading further.
President Trump defended his decision to declare a national emergency by invoking how past US presidents have used the emergency power.
“Many emergency declarations have been used to protect people in faraway nations and distant lands,” the President told the audience at CPAC on Saturday. “Now we are protecting finally our people.”
While Trump admitted that even some in the Republican Party had pushed back against his decision, he cited his usual rhetoric of an “invasion” at the southern border as justification.
“We are being invaded,” Trump said. “We’re being invaded by drugs, by people, by criminals, and we have to stop it.”
The President also acknowledged some Republicans’ fears that the move could set a precedent that could potentially be used against them by Democrats in the future.
“They’re going to do that anyway folks,” Trump argued. “The best way to stop that is to make sure that I win the election.”
He also added that through his immigration policies, he was trying to do the work that Congress couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
“Our laws are so crazy,” Trump said, “But one by one we’re finding ways. You know they call them loopholes, a lot of our laws are loopholes. Well, I’m trying to get loopholes to get around the loopholes because our Congress can’t act. They just can’t act.”
President Donald Trump said the US has learned a lot over the last couple of days after the abrupt end of his summit with Kim Jong Un and said again, “I had to walk, because every once in a while, you have to walk.”
He said North Korea had said it was “willing to do much less on the sanction front. But you see, that’s not what happened there. So already I think we’re negotiating.”
Amid the controversy following President Trump saying he took Kim’s word regarding former prisoner Otto Warmbier who died after he came back to the US, Trump said “I’m in such a horrible position. Because in one way I have to negotiate. In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs. Warmbier. And I love Otto. And it’s a very, very delicate balance.”
On Friday, Warmbier’s parents released a statement following Trump’s words that he took Kim at his word that he did not know about Warmbier’s treatment in a North Korean prison.
Trump said later Friday his words were “misinterpreted” and that he did hold North Korea responsible for Otto’s death just days after he was returned to the US.
President Donald Trump pushed back against possible obstruction of justice accusations he could be facing for firing former FBI Director James Comey in May 2017.
His comments came as he was criticizing former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his recusal in the Russia investigation.
“The attorney general recuses himself and I don’t fire him. No obstruction. That’s the other thing – If you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use Article Two, it is called obstruction. But only for Trump, for nobody else,” Trump said, referring to the special counsel’s investigation into whether Trump’s removal of Comey was a possible obstruction of justice.
Two days after ousting Comey, Trump told NBC News that he was considering this “Russia thing” before he fired Comey.
President Donald Trump spoke for 2 hours, 2 minutes and 17 seconds in front of a packed ballroom at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday. It was the longest speech of his presidency.
President Donald Trump says he’ll be signing an executive order requiring colleges and universities to support free speech.
“If they want our dollars and we give them by the billions,” Trump said, “they’ve got to allow people to speak.”
The President brought a young man named Hayden Williams on stage to join him at CPAC when he made the announcement. Williams, a conservative activist, was punched on the campus of the University of California Berkeley last month.
“Ladies and gentlemen, he took a hard punch in the face for all of us,” the President said.
He didn’t offer any more details on the order.
From CNN’s Nikki Carvajal
President Trump said Saturday that all of the territory of the ISIS caliphate in Syria has been taken back, despite previously saying something similar just days ago.
“As of today or tomorrow, we will have 100% of the caliphate defeated,” the President told CPAC.
He said his generals told him it would take two years for them to be defeated, but he said that would take too long.
The President said that on his trip to Iraq, he spoke with troops on the ground who told him the mission could be completed more quickly if they attacked from more locations.
“If you gave us permission, we could hit them from the back, from the side, from the base that you’re on right now. They won’t know what the hell hit them. They won’t know what the hell hit them, sir,” Trump said a general named Raisin told him.
During a stopover in Alaska on Thursday, the President said 100% of the caliphate had been taken. An official of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces disputed that statement, saying that the fight is ongoing and that they were surprised by Trump’s statement.
On Friday, the SDF began a ground operation to clear civilians from Baghouz in Syria, the last piece of territory under ISIS’ control.
CNN’s Holmes Lybrand is fact-checking some of the topics being discussed at CPAC, including abortion, opioids, the Trump tax cut, and the claim that those supporting the Green New Deal want to kill cows.
He’s updating as the conference continues.
President Donald Trump has gone after special counsel Robert Mueller extensively, even mocking former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ southern accent when recalling Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the investigation.
“Robert Mueller never received a vote,” Trump said. “The person that appointed Robert Mueller never received a vote.”
“So the attorney general is weak and ineffective and he doesn’t do what he should’ve done,” Trump said.
He recounted a conversation with first lady Melania Trump he said he had just before he removed former FBI Director James Comey, in which he predicted the firing would be bipartisan because many Democrats had criticized Comey.
Trump had earlier called the investigations into him “bullshit” and said congressional committees are only shifting to scrutinize his business dealings because, he claimed, the forthcoming Mueller report will not confirm collusion.
Trump hit on three key issues early on during his CPAC speech – and took a shot at House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff, calling him ‘Shifty Schiff”:
The Green New Deal: “I encourage it, I think it’s really something that they should promote, they should work hard on. It’s something our country needs desperately, they have to go out and get it, but I’ll take the other side of the argument only because I’m mandated to. But they should stay with that argument, never change. No planes, no energy, when the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric … Is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television.”
Asking Russia to get Hillary Clinton’s emails: “If you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with audience, if you’re on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people in an arena, and if you say something like, ‘Russia, please if you can, get us Hillary Clinton’s emails! Please, Russia, please! Please get us the emails, please!’”
The crowd then broke into a chant of “Lock her up!”
“So everybody’s having a good time,” he continued. “I’m laughing, we’re all having fun, and then that fake CNN and others say, ‘he asked Russia to go get the emails.’”
House Democrats’ Russian investigation: Republican Reps. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan “fight so hard on this witch hunt, this phony deal that they put together, this phony thing that now looks like it’s dying. So they don’t have anything with Russia, there is no collusion. So now they go and morph into, let’s inspect every deal he’s ever done. We’re going to go into his finances, we’re going to check his deals…These people are sick. I saw little Shifty Schiff yesterday, it’s the first time. We went into a meeting and he said, ‘we’re going to look into his finances.’ I said, ‘where did that come from?’ You always talked about Russia, collusion with Russia, the collusion delusion.”
Last year’s CPAC represented the GOP’s full embrace of President Trump.
Trump had gone off-script, discarding prepared remarks he deemed “sort of boring,” and touted the success of his administration’s first year.
He also addressed other issues like immigration – at the time, senators had spent months trying to negotiate a compromise for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy, multiple deals had failed to pass, and tempers were fraying. At the CPAC speech, Trump lit into Democrats as “totally unresponsive” and “really crazed.”
Trump had also called for teachers to be armed in schools in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Florida, which occurred the week before the conference.
An armed teacher, Trump claimed, would have “shot the hell” out of the Florida killer.
Coincidentally, the President had also announced new sanctions on North Korea at CPAC 2018. One year and two summits later, the sanctions may again come up at CPAC 2019.
Trump walked away from the Hanoi summit empty-handed last week after refusing to lift the sanctions.
Watch Trump’s comments at CPAC 2018:
President Trump is heading to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the end of a whirlwind week, both in Washington and abroad.
Here’s what happened this week:
As this all unfolded, the 2020 presidential race loomed in the background. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced his presidential bid on Friday, launching a campaign that will make combating climate change a central point.
Beto O’Rourke said this week that he has made a decision about his political future, and will announce it “soon” – and signs increasingly point to him running for president. Former Vice President Joe Biden also revealed that his family is on board with a 2020 run and he’s “very close” to making a decision.
Apart from President Trump, this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) lineup has several other recognizable names.
Here’s who else will be speaking or has spoken already:
A number of House Representatives and senators will also be present, including Sens. Mike Lee and Marsha Blackburn, and Reps. Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Devin Nunes.
Speakers so far have touched on issues like the North Korea nuclear talks, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and the 2020 presidential elections, as well as more traditional conservative themes such as foreign policy and religion.
President Donald Trump is speaking this weekend at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held this year from Feb. 27 to March 2 at National Harbor, Maryland.
The conference, launched in 1973, is hosted by the American Conservative Union (ACU) and invites a range of activists, political leaders, and other prominent conservative figures.
The schedule is full of evening receptions, panel discussions, workshops, and an Activist Boot Camp.
