Mick Mulvaney Says Latest Meeting on Shutdown ‘Did Not Make Much Progress’

Vice President Mike Pence and several other administration officials met with congressional leaders today in the latest meeting about ending the government shutdown. Per acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, they didn’t really make much progress.

Mulvaney spoke to Jake Tapper for tomorrow’s State of the Union, and in an excerpt released this afternoon, Tapper brought up President Donald Trump‘s $5.6 billion request and asked, “Is there any give in the $5.6 billion in terms of whether or not it has to be for a wall or whether it can be for more generally border security?”

Mulvaney said this in response:

“I think the president said for a long time that it’s $5.6 billion for border security including the wall. We recognize that things like technology and border crossings are important. But certainly a barrier is important. We didn’t make much progress at the meeting, which was surprising to me. I thought we had come in to talk about terms that we could agree on. Place where’s we all agreed we should be spending more time, more attention, things we could do to improve our border security. And yet the opening line from one of the lead Democrat negotiators was that they were that they were not there to talk about any agreement. They were actually, in my mind, there to stall. And we did not make much progress.”

A few minutes after the clip aired on CNN, the President tweeted that there was “not much headway made today”:

V.P. Mike Pence and team just left the White House. Briefed me on their meeting with the Schumer/Pelosi representatives. Not much headway made today. Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2019

You can watch above, via CNN. The full interviews on State of the Union tomorrow.

[image via screengrab]