U.S.
President-elect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was keeping an open mind on
whether to pull out of a landmark international accord to fight climate change,
in a
softening of his stance toward global warming.
Trump told the
New York Times in an interview that he thinks there is "some
connectivity" between human activity and global warming, despite
previously describing climate change as a hoax.
A source on
Trump's transition team told Reuters earlier this month that the New York
businessman was seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from the 2015
Paris Agreement to combat climate change.
But asked on
Tuesday whether the United States would withdraw from the accord, the
Republican said: “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to
it."
A U.S.
withdrawal from the pact, agreed to by almost 200 countries, would set back
international efforts to limit rising temperatures that have been linked to the
extinctions of animals and plants, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels. .
Trump, who
takes office on Jan. 20, also said he was thinking about climate change and
American competitiveness and "how much it will cost our companies,” he
said, according to a tweet by a Times reporter in the interview.
Two people
advising Trump’s transition team on energy and environment issues said they
were caught off guard by his remarks.
A shift on
global warming is the latest sign Trump might be backing away from some of his
campaign rhetoric as life in the Oval Office approaches.
Trump has said
he might have to build a fence, rather than a wall, in some areas of the
U.S.-Mexican border to stop illegal immigration, tweaking one of his signature
campaign promises.
Also in
Tuesday's interview, he showed little appetite for pressing investigations of
his Democratic rival in the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t want
to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t. She went through a lot and suffered
greatly in many different ways," he told reporters, editors and other
newspaper officials at the Times headquarters in Manhattan.
But Trump said
"no" when asked if he would rule out investigating Clinton over her
family's charitable foundation or her use of a private email server while she
was U.S. secretary of state during President Barack Obama's first term.
If Trump does
abandon his campaign vow to appoint a special prosecutor for Clinton, it will
be a reversal of a position he mentioned almost daily on the campaign trail,
when he dubbed his rival "Crooked Hillary," and crowds at his rallies
often chanted: "Lock her up."
His comments
to the Times about Clinton angered some of his strongest conservative
supporters.
Breitbart
News, the outlet once led by Trump's chief strategist, Steve Bannon, published
a story on Tuesday under the headline, "Broken Promise: Trump 'Doesn't
Wish to Pursue' Clinton email charges."
The FBI
investigated Clinton's email practices, concluding in July that her actions
were careless but that there were no grounds for bringing charges.
The Clinton
Foundation charity has also been scrutinized for donations it received, but
there has been no evidence that foreign donors obtained favors from the State
Department while Clinton headed it.
BUSINESSMAN
AND PRESIDENT
Trump, a real
estate developer who has never held public office, brushed off fears over
conflicts of interest between his job as president and his family's businesses.
"The
law's totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of
interest," he told the New York Times. My company's so unimportant to me
relative to what I'm doing," Trump said.
Conflict-of-interest
rules for executive branch employees do not apply to the president, but Trump
will be bound by bribery laws, disclosure requirements and a section of the
U.S. Constitution that prohibits elected officials from taking gifts from
foreign governments, according to Republican and Democratic ethics lawyers.
"There
may be specific laws that don’t apply to the president, but the president is
not above the law," said Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota, a
former associate counsel to Republican President George W. Bush.
"Do we
really want to run our government where you have the president, the leader of
the United States and the free world, saying: 'I'm going to do the bare minimum
to squeak by?'" asked Norman Eisen, a former top ethics lawyer in Obama's
White House.
Trump's
businesswoman daughter Ivanka joined her father's telephone call with Argentine
President Mauricio Macri earlier this month and attended a meeting with
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, raising questions of possible conflicts of
interest.
When asked
whether House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans in
Congress would consider his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, Trump boasted
he was popular with the party's leaders on Capitol Hill.
“Right now,
they’re in love with me," he said.
Since his Nov.
8 election victory, Trump has been meeting with prospective candidates for top
positions in his administration.
Ben Carson, a
former Republican presidential hopeful who dropped out of the 2016 race and
backed Trump, has been offered the post of secretary of housing and urban
development, Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams said.
Carson, a
retired surgeon who met with Trump on Tuesday, will think about it over the
Thanksgiving holiday, Williams said.
Trump arrived
in Florida on Tuesday evening to spend Thursday's holiday at his Mar-a-Lago
estate in Palm Beach.
REUTERS
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