Donald Trump has tweeted an article about a boom in European tourism as a means of continuing his attack on the US Federal Reserve, arguing domestic interest rates are too high and attacking its policy of “ridiculous quantitative tightening”, declaring: “They don’t have a clue!”
This comes after the House Judiciary Committee announced it had struck a deal with the Justice Department to gain access to redacted interview notes from FBI special counsel Robert Mueller, including “first-hand accounts of misconduct” relating to President Trump, in exchange for not immediately pursing a contempt of Congress action against attorney general William Barr.
A full session of the House of Representatives will still vote as planned on Tuesday on a resolution making it easier to sue the administration and potential witnesses if they refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas, as ex-White House counsel Don McGahn did when asked to give testimony before the Judiciary Committee on whether the president attempted to obstruct justice.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump and Joe Biden assailed each other during overlapping visits to Iowa on Tuesday, previewing what the country might get in next year’s election if Mr Biden becomes his party’s nominee.
Even before he left the White House, the president unleashed a series of schoolyard taunts, declaring that “Joe Biden is a dummy.”
Mr Biden quickly retorted that the president is “an existential threat to this country.”
The back-and-forth laid bare the rising political stakes for each, even with Election Day 2020 still about 17 months away. Mr Trump has zeroed in on Mr Biden as a potential threat to his re-election chances and is testing themes to beat him back.
Mr Biden, meanwhile, is campaigning as a front-runner, relishing the one-on-one fight with Mr Trump while making sure he doesn’t ignore the demands of the Democratic primary.
The former vice president hit Mr Trump on the economy — an issue the president often promotes as his chief strength in a time of low unemployment.
“I hope his presence here will be a clarifying event because Iowa farmers have been crushed by his tariffs toward China,” Mr Biden said. “It’s really easy to be tough when someone else absorbs the pain, farmers and manufacturers.”
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The House Judiciary Committee has struck a deal with the Justice Department to gain access to redacted interview notes from FBI special counsel Robert Mueller, including “first-hand accounts of misconduct” relating to Donald Trump, in exchange for not immediately pursing a contempt of Congress action against attorney general William Barr.
A full session of the House of Representatives will still vote as planned on Tuesday on a resolution making it easier to sue the administration and potential witnesses if they refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas, as ex-White House counsel Don McGahn did when asked to give testimony before the Judiciary Committee on whether the president attempted to obstruct justice.
McGahn's refusal was advised by the White House and was part of a campaign by the Trump administration to stonewall investigations into the president by House Democrats in the wake of Barr's determining the report reached a "no collusion" verdict in late March.
McGahn was frequently cited in the 448-page Mueller report, in which its author recorded at least 10 instances in which the president could be said to have obstructed justice, including one in which Trump floated the idea of having Mueller fired, only for McGahn to push back against the idea, therein saving the president from further scandal and probable impeachment.
The Justice Department will continue to cooperate with the committee under their agreement as long as Democrats hold off on their Barr contempt vote, spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.
The vote scheduled on Tuesday will see the Democratic-controlled House consider a measure that would increase pressure on Trump by allowing the Judiciary Committee to sue the administration in federal court if needed over access to the report, effectively empowering it to enforce any further supoenas it might issue.
Chairman Jerrold Nadler said a lawsuit may yet be necessary and added that Tuesday's vote may force McGahn, who resigned in August 2018, to testify.
As part of the Trump camp's vow to fight back against congressional investigations, Barr has said he is required by law not to release evidence obtained from grand jury proceedings and grand jury materials were redacted from the section of the report dealing with Russian interference in the election.
But this was less of a concern for the section of Mueller's report dealing with obstruction, which was based on testimony from voluntary interviews Trump advisers and other witnesses gave to Mueller, rather than grand jury testimony.
Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the agreement indicated the Trump administration was not stonewalling Congress, adding that Democrats should focus on the threat from Russia.
"Democrats are abandoning their duty to confront foreign interference in our elections in favor of drawing out their slanderous campaign against the president," he said.
On Monday, the Judiciary Committee heard from McGahn's historic predecessor, John Dean, former counsel to Richard Nixon, who said the Mueller report was President Trump's version of the “Watergate road map” that brought about the downfall of his former employer.
Dean was accused of orchestrating the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, before turning on his former boss and telling Congress in 1973 that President Nixon had known about it, setting in motion his resignation in disgrace a year later.
Dean told the panel there were parallels between Mueller's investigative report, released in redacted form in mid-April, and the 1974 "road map" in which a special prosecutor laid out the case against Nixon.
"Mueller has provided this committee with a road map," he said.
Dean was accused of orchestrating the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, before turning on his former boss and telling Congress in 1973 that President Nixon had known about it, setting in motion his resignation in disgrace a year later.
Dean told the panel there were parallels between Mueller's investigative report, released in redacted form in mid-April, and the 1974 "road map" in which a special prosecutor laid out the case against Nixon.
"Mueller has provided this committee with a road map," he said.
Dean struck a cool and ironic presence in Washington, patiently recapping storied episodes from Watergate like the Saturday Night Massacre to explain their parallels with the present day and making a fool out of Florida Republican and recently-milkshaked Trump apologist Matt Gaetz when he tried to accuse Dean of running a "cottage industry" profiting off his notoriety.
President Trump was particularly angered by the Democrats calling on John Dean, labelling him a "sleazebag attorney".
He continued his attack before reporters on Monday, saying Dean has been "a loser for many years" and attempting to explain the difference between himself and Nixon.
The Judiciary Committee's temporarily suspended pursuit of Barr and McGahn is not the only contempt resolution under consideration from House Democrats.
Elijah Cummings, Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is also considering holding Barr and commerce secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over their alleged attempts to politicise the 2020 US Census by adding a controversial citizenship question that its late architect, Tom Hofeller, promised would be "advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites".
"Both Secretary Ross and Attorney General Barr are refusing to comply with duly authorised subpoenas from Congress," Cummings said.
"Because they are in contempt of Congress, on Wednesday, the committee will vote to move forward to enforce our bipartisan subpoenas."
Here's more from Andrew Buncombe.
President Trump will visit the crucial 2020 state of Iowa this afternoon to speak on renewable energy in the city of Council Bluffs and attend a Republican party dinner in Des Moines.
Also visiting the sprawling Midwestern farming state and home of Slipknot is his likely challenger Joe Biden, who is currently under fire for suggesting Republicans will be far more willing to work with Democrats once Trump is out of office and their moral compasses are set right.
"With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change,” Biden told a Daily Beast reporter. “Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on a front-runner branded "deluded" by his peers.
Another front in the investigative war between Congress and the president is, of course, the battle for Donald Trump's financial records.
The commander-in-chief asked an appeals court on Monday to overturn a ruling that his longstanding accounting firm Mazars must turn over all documents from before he took office to the aforementioned Democratic-controlled House Oversight Committee.
Lawyers for Trump said in a court filing that a 20 May decision by US district judge Amit Mehta ordering the company to comply with the subpoena was flawed and should be reversed.
Mehta's ruling was the first time a federal court waded into the tussle about how far Congress can go in probing Trump and his business affairs and marked an important victory for House Democrats.
"It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct - past or present - even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry," Mehta said in his ruling.
The House of Representatives' Oversight Committee has said it needs Trump's financial records to examine whether he has conflicts of interest or broke the law by not disentangling himself from his business holdings, as previous presidents did.
Chairman Cummings issued the subpoena to Mazars after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in February that Trump had misrepresented his net worth.
Trump's lawyers said in Monday's filing that the subpoena was invalid because it was never intended to help Congress perform its core constitutional role of making laws.
"The committee admits that the whole point is to discover whether the President may have engaged in illegal conduct," Trump's lawyers said. "It is an effort to investigate alleged legal violations pf power that is vested in the executive, not Congress."
The president's attorneys told the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that if it affirmed Mehta's ruling, it would be endorsing a "limitless" view of the congressional power to investigate.
The Trump Organization, the president's privately owned real estate company, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Trump is suing in his individual capacity and is represented by a private law firm rather than government lawyers from the US Department of Justice.
Mazars has avoided taking a side in the dispute, saying it will comply with its legal obligations.
Despite its unexpected decision to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, William Barr's Justice Department is pressing ahead with its retaliatory review of the origins of the FBI's Russia investigation, promising it will be "broad in scope and multi-faceted".
Intelligence agencies have already been asked to preserve records and make witnesses available, according to a letter sent to Congress on Monday. Quite why anyone should feel compelled to comply given the precedent for stonewalling they've set is beyond me.
Barr said last month that he had directed John Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut and a veteran prosecutor, to determine if law enforcement and intelligence authorities engaged in improper surveillance as they investigated potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election.
"It is now well-established that, in 2016, the US government and others undertook certain intelligence-gathering and investigative steps directed at persons associated with the Trump campaign," said the letter from assistant attorney general Stephen Boyd, the department's top liaison to Congress.
"As the attorney general has stated publicly at congressional hearings and elsewhere, there remain open questions relating to the origins of this counter-intelligence investigation and the US and foreign intelligence activities that took place prior to and during that investigation," the letter said.
The point of the review, Boyd added, "is to more fully understand the efficacy and propriety of those steps" and to answer open questions for the attorney general.
Barr has repeatedly said he believes there was "spying" on the Trump campaign, language President Donald Trump has seized on to support his claims that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was a "witch hunt." Barr has said he doesn't yet know if the "spying" was improper, but he has been unsatisfied with the answers he has received.
He has not elaborated on what specific surveillance he is troubled by. The FBI did obtain a secret warrant in 2016 from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That application was renewed several times.
Durham and his team will be working primarily out of Washington, with the Justice Department making existing office space available for the work, Boyd wrote to Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler.
Though the White House has granted Barr the authority to declassify documents, the Justice Department sought to assuage concerns that he would abuse that power, with Boyd saying the attorney general would prevent from disclosure information that could expose sources and methods or harm US national security interests.
Trump is being laughed at for the tweet below, in which he reveals his ongoing obsession with approval ratings.
Here's Conrad Duncan for Indy100 on the many brutal memes it has been met with.
Remember Don Jr and Eric receiving a hero's welcome in Doonbeg in Ireland last week when they put their card behind the bar?
It turns out they never paid the tab and the owner of the Igoe bar, Caroline Kennedy, was forced to send the bill over to the president's nearby golf resort.
Here's Greg Evans with the full story.
A more serious scandal involving the administration sees transport secretary Elaine Chao, married to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, accused of designating a special liaison to work on granting funding applications to infrastructure projects worth $78m (£62m) in her husband's home state of Kentucky to boost his chance of re-election.
According to Politico, the aide, Todd Inman, is said have advised a commercial port in Owensboro on its application to have roads upgraded in 2017 to ensure its approval, the construction work potentially offering an important and timely boost to the local economy.
"We are now a full-fledged banana republic," commented a disgusted Walter Shaub, a former director of the US Office of Government Ethics.
Here's more from Chris Baynes.
The president is up and tweeting and, surprisingly, he has a book recommendation for you, in amongst the predictable Nadler bashing.
Now Trump is quoting professional good ol' boy Lindsey Graham, the Senate Intelligence Committee chair and South Carolina senator who underwent a road to Damascus conversion to Trumpism after once dismissing him as a "kook" unfit for office.
Unsurprisingly, he's watching Fox and Friends.
He also retweeted this from Bloomberg and then deleted it. But don't worry. We got ourselves a screengrab.
That book he's advertising, by the way, is written by an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization and would cost you a cool $18.89 in hardback on Amazon.
Go for Siege instead. Or Fear by Bob Woodward. Or, you know, Carry on Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. Something better.
Aha, so this is what the president was getting at with that hastily deleted tweet below.
He's using that Bloomberg piece on booming European tourism as a means of continuing his attack on the US Federal Reserve, arguing interest rates are too high and attacking its policy of “ridiculous quantitative tightening”, declaring: “They don’t have a clue!”
This follows the comments he made on Monday during his phone interview with Squawk Box on CNBC.
Here's Trump touting his economic credentials after complaining the other day that he gets "no credit" on the economy.
Speaking of new books, Trump is reportedly open to the idea of Steve Bannon returning as his chief strategist in time for 2020, according to a fresh tome out soon.
In The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington by Alexander Nazaryan, Trump is said to have "almost welcomed" the suggestion when it was put to him by the author.
“I watched Bannon a few times, four or five times over the last six months,” Trump is quoted as saying. “Nobody says anything better about me right now than Bannon… I will say this. Bannon, there is nobody that has been more respectful of the job I’m doing than Steve Bannon.”
The news comes as another book, Siege by Michael Wolff, arrives on bookshelves carrying extensive quotes from the alt-right agitator and former Breitbart editor, not least a line attributed to him suggesting the Trump Organization is "criminal".
Bannon was dismissed by Trump the last time Wolff had a book out in 2017.
His suggestion in Fire & Fury that Trump's beloved daughter Ivanka was "dumb as a brick" and his eldest son Don Jr "treasonous" was enough to convince the president his adviser had "lost his mind".
Which sounds like the ideal qualification to work for this particular president.
Texas Republican senator John Cornyn has broken ranks to criticise Ken Cuccinelli, Trump's appointment as acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), saying that Cuccinelli - a hard-liner on immigration - would be unlikely to win confirmation for the role on a permanent basis.
"He’s made a career of attacking other Republicans and frankly attacking President Trump, so I doubt he’ll have the support to get confirmed," Cornyn said.
Cuccinelli is replacing Lee Francis Cissna, who was forced out as USCIS chief late last month amid a shake-up at the department that was engineered by top White House policy adviser Stephen Miller.
Cuccinelli can serve as acting director for 210 days.
In order to not be confirmed thereafter, he would have to lose four Republicans senators and fail to win over any of the 47 Democrats in the upper chamber, a likely outcome given that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is opposed to his candidacy.
Many actors and Hollywood celebrities have won polite applause by denouncing Donald Trump in recent years, from Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Jim Carrey to "washed up psycho" Bette Midler.
Breaking Bad star Bryon Cranston called out "demagoguery" at the Tony Awards on Sunday and now George Clooney has joined in on the promotional run for his new miniseries adaptation of Joseph Heller's classic anti-war satire Catch-22 (1961).
"We have a 74-year-old president who wishes we were still in the 1950s, which was good if you were a white guy," he said.
"Part of the idea of a Catch-22 is that old white men are making decisions that young people are going to die for. And I think that that is something that we should argue about endlessly…
"And part of the reason you feel these waves of populism coming up is because there’s huge swaths of people that feel like they are fighting against a system that they can’t possibly win."
Apparently speaking directly to the Fox hosts on his TV, Trump has tweeted another thread on the Mexico trade deal. He really does not like the negative reaction it's had does he?
However, the fact that he says that the "biggest part of the deal has not yet been revealed" is unlikely to help matters. It is believed there will be a "safe third country" agreement where migrants will have to submit asylum claims in Mexico rather than with US authorities.
Mexico has said that such an agreement still needs to be negotiated and that its government needs time to implement other policies to see what effect they have first.
