Donald Trump‘s former adviser Hope Hicks appeared before the House Judiciary Committee as Democrats hoped to question her on the obstruction of justice counts recorded in the Mueller report, despite the White House invoking executive privilege in a bid to block her testimony and stonewall the investigation.
The president has tweeted angrily about the hearing taking place behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, writing: “Why aren’t the Dems looking at the 33,000 Emails that Hillary and her lawyer deleted and acid washed AFTER GETTING A SUBPOENA FROM CONGRESS? That is real Obstruction that the Dems want no part of because their hearings are RIGGED and a disgrace to our Country!”
Last night, Mr Trump kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida, tearing into his enemies in Washington and pledging to combat “criminal aliens” in a wild address at the 20,000-capacity Amway Center packed with his most ardent supporters.
Less than an hour into Ms Hicks’ interview on Wednesday, frustrated Democrats taking breaks from the meeting said she and her lawyer were following White House orders to stay quiet about her time working for Mr Trump.
She was answering some questions about her time on the campaign, however, the lawmakers said.
“She’s objecting to stuff that’s already in the public record,” said California Democrat Karen Bass. “It’s pretty ridiculous.”
Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, called her answers “a farce.” Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, tweeted about the interview and wrote that Ms Hicks refused to answer even innocuous questions such as whether she had previously testified before Congress.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler declined to comment on the substance of the interview so far, saying “all I’ll say is Ms Hicks is answering questions put to her and the interview continues.”
Republicans had a different perspective, saying she was cooperative and that the interview was a waste of time. The top Republican on the panel, Doug Collins, said they were “simply talking about things that are already out there in public or getting the same answers over and over.”
It was so far unclear whether Democrats would take Ms Hicks or the administration to court to challenge the claim of immunity. In a letter Tuesday to Mr Nadler, White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote that Mr Trump had directed Ms Hicks not to answer questions “relating to the time of her service as a senior adviser to the president.”
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Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida, on Tuesday night, tearing into his Democratic opponents and pledging to combat “criminal aliens” in a wild address to his most ardent supporters.
Addressing a 20,000-strong crowd, Trump complained he had been "under assault from the very first day" of his presidency by a "fake news media" and "illegal witch hunt" that had tried to keep him and his supporters down.
“This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people will lose an election, refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart,” he said, gloating over the outcome of the Mueller report and ignoring his own flagrant disregard for the institutions of governance.
On his enemies in the House of Representatives, his attack was particularly vicious, not to say deranged.
Trump painted a disturbing picture of what life would look like if he loses in 2020, accusing his critics of "un-American conduct" and telling the crowd that Democrats "want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it."
"A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream," he said.
With staggering chutzpah and a liberating lack of self-awareness, Trump claimed his MAGA movement is about reclaiming power "from a permanent political class that enriched itself at your expense".
On policy, the president promised to cure cancer and AIDs and to “lay the foundations” for a US-led Mars landing, taking credit for historic lows in unemployment and a renewable energy boom (despite backing fossil fuel extraction) while rounding on his enemies in the press as the packed Amway Center chanted “CNN sucks!”
On immigration, he said, ominously: "Wait until you see some of the things you are going to be hearing about over the next few months. Our country should be a sanctuary for law-abiding citizens, not for criminal aliens."
Trump told his fans he personally had redesigned the US-Mexico border wall under construction to keep out illegal immigrants: “It’s stronger, bigger, better and cheaper”.
The president also renewed his attack on defeated 2016 rival Hillary Clinton - whose very name brought fresh howls of "Lock her up!" - hinting darkly that attorney general William Barr could still prosecute her over her failure to use secure government communication channels to carry out official business while serving as secretary of state.
"If you want to know how the system is rigged, just compared how they came after us for three years with everything they had compared to the free pass they gave to Hillary and her aides after they set an illegal server, destroyed evidence, deleted an acid washed 33,000 emails, exposed classified information, and turned the State Department into a pay-for-play cash machine," Trump said. "33,000 emails deleted!"
Extraordinarily, even by his standards, the president also accused his predecessor, Barack Obama, of colluding against him with Russian president Vladimir Putin.
It was, all told, a crazy, crazy night in Orlando.
Our own Clark Mindock was there. Here's his eye-witness account.
Trump's cancer cure claim was particularly odd given that one of his warm-up acts - his eldest son, Don Jr - had just mocked Democratic 2020 frontrunner Joe Biden for promising the same thing to voters in Iowa.
Vice president Mike Pence and first lady Melania Trump also spoke at the Amway, with the irony of the crowd cheering on a Slovenian immigrant representing an administration determined to placed closed borders at the heart of the 2020 agenda apparently lost on them.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's assessment of Trump's performance and what it has to tell us about how he intends to play his hand moving forward.
The scene inside the Amway was pretty extraordinary, it has to be said. Whatever your political affiliations, this gentleman at the top's outfit is killer.
In amongst the hysteria, this woman thought she spotted at least one crowd member heiling Trump with a Nazi salute.
The Proud Boys, an alt-right white supremacist group, were certainly in town, spoiling for a fight with protesters.
Trump supporters unable to get tickets for the main event could watch it at a nearby fringe event called 45 Fest, a downtown fan park with big screens to watch the speech, hot dogs for sale and entertainment by a Texas bar band named The Guzzlers.
Here's a flavour of the atmosphere on the ground.
Just look at this garbage.
Clark Mindock spoke to Trump loyalists attending yesterday's rally and braved the sea of red caps and merchandise stands to get their take on why they believe a billionaire businessman best represents their interests.
There was also a significant counter-demonstration held at the city's Stonewall Bar to oppose the president, with a mariachi band, drag queens and a giant Trump Baby blimp.
Before Trump left for Orlando on Tuesday, the president had a surprise announcement: the resignation of his acting secretary of defence Patrick Shanahan, who withdrew his nomination for the post on a permanent basis before he could be confirmed.
Trump said he would be replaced by Mark Esper, secretary of the army, but insisted it was not a firing.
"It is unfortunate that a painful and deeply personal family situation from long ago is being dredged up and painted in an incomplete and therefore misleading way in the course of this process," Shanahan said in a statement.
"I believe my continuing in the confirmation process would force my three children to relive a traumatic chapter in our family's life and reopen wounds we have worked years to heal. Ultimately, their safety and well-being is my highest priority."
The US has not had a permanent secretary of defence since January following the resignation of James Mattis in opposition to the withdrawal of US troops from Syria after President Trump rather over-confidently declared the Islamist extremists of Isis had been defeated.
"This Shanahan fiasco shows what a shambles, what a mess" the administration's national security policy is," Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said yesterday.
President Trump has refused to apologise for saying the Central Park Five should be executed in 1989, 17 years after they were exonerated with DNA evidence.
The president was asked about the case on Tuesday, in light of Ava DuVernay’s four-part Netflix series recounting their story, When They See Us.
As one of New York's most prominent citizens at the time, Trump famously took out full-page adverts in the city's daily newspapers at the time calling for the death penalty to be reintroduced for Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise, five black and Latino teenagers who were convicted of attacking 28-year-old white female jogger Trisha Meili after she was raped and beaten almost to death while out for a run on 19 April 1989.
Authorities vacated their convictions in 2002, after convicted murderer and serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the attack and said he had committed it alone. DNA evidence backed up his confession.
Authorities vacated their convictions in 2002, after convicted murderer and serial rapist Matias Reyes confessed to the attack and said he had committed it alone. DNA evidence backed up his confession.
“You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt,” Trump said on Tuesday before setting out for Orlando.
Clémence Michallon has more.
Ex-Trump spokesman Hope Hicks is due to appear before the House Judiciary Committee today behind closed doors but the White House has once again asserted its executive privilege to prevent her from discussing her time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
This bars chairman Jerrold Nadler from questioning her on possible instances of obstruction of justice arising from the Mueller report, which threatens to render the whole exercise somewhat toothless.
The committee is reportedly planning to engage in an “on-the-spot” negotiations over whether particular questions can be answered.
Some more madness from Orlando.
Trump's spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain (she's married to Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain, fact fans) used her introductory prayer at the Amway to call out the "demonic networks" aligned against President Trump.
"Let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus," this preacher of the "prosperity gospel" told the assembled masses.
"I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy."
Today marks precisely 100 days since the White House last held a formal press briefing and - with the departure of Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced last week - that looks unlikely to change anytime soon.
Here's Chris Stevenson on how Trump's preference for informal chats with reporters on the South Lawn while podiums (quite literally) gather dust might have fatally undermined this important role for ever.
Trump has yet to tweet so far today but offered these choice selections from his performance in Orlando, calling the Democrats "extreme" and "depraved" over border security and accusing them of "moral cowardice" over their refusal to endorse his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
UN investigator Agnes Callamard says she has found "credible evidence" that Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, an ally of the White House, was behind the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and urged sanctions against the kingdom's de facto ruler until he comes clean about his role in the killing of his fellow citizen.
Callamard's 101-page report after a months-long probe commissioned by the UN High Commission for Human Rights concluded that Khashoggi "has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state Saudi Arabia is responsible under international human rights law." It includes new details about the final days and moments of Khashoggi's life, but does not reveal the still-unknown whereabouts of his body.
Here's a reminder of the White House's official stance on the matter...
...And here's Borzou Daraghi's report on this latest development.
The Trump administration is close to completing one of its biggest rollbacks of environmental rules, replacing a landmark Obama-era effort to wean the nation's electrical grid off coal-fired power plants and their climate-damaging pollution.
The final Trump administration replacement rule, expected as soon as this week, instead would give individual states wide discretion to decide whether to require limited efficiency upgrades at individual coal-fired power plants.
Joseph Goffman, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official under Barack Obama, said he feared that the Trump administration was trying to set a legal precedent that the Clean Air Act gives the federal government "next to no authority to do anything" about climate-changing emissions from the country's power grid. The Obama rule, adopted in 2015, sought to reshape the country's power system by encouraging utilities to rely less on dirtier-burning coal-fired power plants and more on electricity from natural gas, solar, wind and other lower or no-carbon sources.
Burning of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and heat is the main human source of heat-trapping carbon emissions.
Supporters of the revised rule say the Obama-era plan overstepped the EPA's authority.
"This action is re-calibrating EPA so it aligns with being the agency to protect public health and the environment in a way that respects the limits of the law," said Mandy Gunasekara, a former senior official at the EPA who helped write the replacement rule. She now runs a nonprofit, Energy45, that supports President Trump's energy initiatives.
"The Clean Power Plan was designed largely to put coal out of business," Gunasekara said. Trump's overhaul is meant to let states "figure out what is best for their mission in terms of meeting modern environmental standards" and providing affordable energy, she said.
Democrats and environmentalists say the Trump administration has repeatedly sought to use the power of government to protect the sagging US coal industry from competition against cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas and solar and wind power while ignoring scientific warnings about climate change.
With coal miners at his side, Trump signed an order in March 2017 directing the EPA to scrap the Obama rule. It was one of the first acts of his presidency.
His pledge to roll back regulation for the coal industry helped cement support from owners and workers in the coal industry, and others. Despite his promise, market forces have frustrated Trump's efforts. Competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable fuel has continued a years-long trend driving US coal plant closings to near-record levels last year, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
The final rule is expected to closely follow the draft released in August.
By encouraging utilities to consider spending money to upgrade aging coal plants, environmental groups argue, the Trump rule could prompt the companies to run existing coal plants harder and longer rather than retiring them.
"It's a rule to increase emissions because it's a rule to extend the life of coal plants," said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force. "You invest in updating an old coal plant, it makes it more economic" to run it more to pay off that investment.
An Associated Press analysis Tuesday of federal air data showed US progress on cleaning the air may be stagnating after decades of improvement. There were 15 per cent more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980.
Trump has repeatedly claimed just the opposite, saying earlier this month in Ireland: "We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it's gotten better since I'm president."
Along with an initiative requiring tougher mileage standards for cars and light trucks, the Clean Power Plan was one of Obama's two legacy efforts to slow climate change. The Trump administration also is proposing to roll back the Obama-era mileage standards, with a final rule expected shortly. Environmental groups promise court challenges to both rollbacks.
Trump has rejected scientific warnings on climate change, including a report this year from scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies noting that global warming from fossil fuels "presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life."
EPA's own regulatory analysis last year estimated that Trump's replacement ACE rule would kill an extra 300 to 1,500 people each year by 2030, owing to additional air pollution from the power grid.
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds support for Trump's impeachment rising among Democrats.
Sixty-seven per cent are now in favour, an eight per cent rise on April, which the pollster attributed to the outrage caused by the president's admission he would take dirt on a rival if it were offered by a foreign power.
"I think maybe you do both," Trump said when he was asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos whether he would call the FBI or listen if Russia, China or another foreign government reached out.
"I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening," he continued. "It’s not an interference. They have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI."
Acting ICE director Mark Morgan has has hit back at Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she compared President Trump's border detention centres to Nazi concentration camps during an Instagram live stream.
Here's Lily Puckett's report on the original controversy.
In Moscow, a senior politician has called for Donald Trump and his time to push for a deal with Pyongyang to stop an increase in tensions in the region over North Korea's nuclear programme.
"There is no doubt that if the State Department fails to convince Pyongyang of the seriousness of its intentions to improve relations with the North Koreans, then in 2020 we will have an escalation of the situation on the Korean Peninsula," said the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, Alexander Venediktov, according to the RIA news agency.
