Associated Press
WASHINGTON: The Latest on President-elect Donald Trump (all times EST):
12:15 p.m.
The head of Boeing says “great progress” has been made in negotiations with President-elect Donald Trump to settle on a new price tag for the Air Force One program.
Trump last month blasted the proposed cost to replace the aging fleet of presidential aircraft. He met with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenberg last month and again Tuesday in Trump Tower.
Muilenerg said they were working to “to refine requirements for Air Force One, to streamline the process, to streamline certain features” and “all of that will lead to a better airplane at a lower cost.”
He said Trump “is doing a good job as an agent of business” and added that more conversations would be forthcoming, though he did not set a timeline on settling on a final price tag.
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10:15 a.m.
The Presidential Inaugural Committee says Donald Trump will be sworn in as president Friday using two Bibles — his own and the Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his first inauguration. The oath of office will be administered by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Committee chairman Tom Barrack says Trump “is humbled to place his hand on Bibles that hold special meaning both to his family and to our country.”
Trump’s Bible was presented to him by his mother upon his graduation from Sunday Church Primary School at First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, Queens, on June 12, 1955. The Bible is a revised standard version published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in New York in 1953 and is embossed with Trump’s name on the lower portion of the front cover.
The Lincoln Bible was purchased by William Thomas Carroll, clerk of the Supreme Court, and is bound in burgundy velvet with a gold-washed white metal rim along the edges of the covers. After Lincoln’s first inauguration in 1861, it was next used for President Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 and again in 2013.
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8:39 a.m.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is accusing the Obama administration of trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump by spreading fake allegations.
Putin, speaking at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday, described a dossier on Trump as part of efforts by the Obama administration to “undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect” despite his “convincing” victory.
Putin dismissed as “fake” the dossier’s unverified allegations about Trump’s sexual activities at a Moscow hotel. He added that people who ordered it are “worse than prostitutes.”
Trump has rejected the allegations as “fake news” and “phony stuff.”
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8:10 a.m.
Donald Trump is shrugging off polls that show him with low approval ratings.
The president-elect tweeted early Tuesday, “The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.”
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3:49 a.m.
A son of Martin Luther King Jr. says Donald Trump is talking unity.
Martin Luther King III said the president-elect spoke in a private meeting Sunday of representing all Americans. King III said he believes “that’s his intent.”
Trump met with King’s son on the holiday marking the life of the assassinated civil rights icon, just days after the president-elect had gone on Twitter to strike back fiercely at Lewis for questioning the legitimacy of the billionaire businessman’s election as president. Lewis and the elder King were among the Big Six civil rights leaders of the 1960s.