A federal judge has cast doubt that US courts would intervene to limit Congress's ability to investigate Donald Trump saying that it would be highly unusual for such an intervention, as the first case over House Democrats' subpoenas for evidence was heard on Tuesday.
Judge Amit Mehta with the US District Court for the District of Columbia was in charge of that Tuesday hearing, which concerned whether House Democrats can obtain financial records held by an accounting firm representing the president. In their arguments, the case quickly centred around the American government's separation of powers.
“Am I right there isn't a single Supreme Court case or appellate case since 1880 that has found a congressional subpoena overstepped its bounds?” Mr Mehta, who will not issue a ruling until next week, asked Mr Trump's lawyer during questioning. “I agree there are outer limits, but it's not clear to me what they are.”
The court battle over those financial documents came as other controversies in Washington continued to smoulder. Before those arguments were heard, it was reported the Trump administration planned to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents round up and arrest thousands of Central American migrant families in cities across the US last month, as a brutal show of force before it was blocked by ex-Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and former ICE director Ron Vitiello.
Mr Trump also oversaw an escalating trade war with China on Tuesday, after the president imposed further tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese imports.
On the 2020 campaign trail, a new poll has meanwhile put both of the leading Democratic presidential challengers, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, ahead of Trump in hypothetical 2020 matchups, with either man projected to beat him by an eight percent margin at the ballot box.
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Donald Trump planned to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents round up and arrest thousands of Central American migrant families in 10 cities across the US last month as a brutal show of force, according to The Washington Post.
Kirstjen Nielsen – then-secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – and ICE director Ron Vitiello both objected before being forced out of office. The pair "instinctively thought it was bad policy and that the proposal was less than half-baked," a DHS official said.
According to the newspaper, the administration wanted to target the crush of families that had crossed the US-Mexico border after the president's failed "zero tolerance" prosecution push in early 2018. The ultimate purpose was apparently to send a message that the United States was going to get tough by swiftly moving to detain and deport recent immigrants - including families with children.
The sprawling operation included an effort to fast-track immigration court cases, The Post says, allowing the government to obtain deportation orders against those who did not show for their hearings - officials said 90 percent of those targeted were found deportable in their absence. The subsequent arrests would have required coordinated raids against parents with children in their homes and neighbuorhoods.
But Vitiello and Nielsen blocked the measure, expressing concern about a lack of preparation by ICE agents, the likelihood of public outrage and worries that the undertaking would divert resources away from the border.
Senior Trump adviser Stephen Miller (who else?) and ICE deputy director Matthew Albence were reportedly especially keen on the idea, eager to execute dramatic, high-profile mass arrests that they believed would help deter the growing influx of families.
The plan, which "remains under consideration", would have initially targeted 2,500 people, rising to 10,000, and have taken place in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, among other large cities.
"The proposal was nowhere near ready for prime time," the anonymous DHS official said, explaining Nielsen and Vitiello's objections.
"There was concern that it was being hastily put together, would be ineffective, and might actually backfire by misdirecting resources away from critical border emergency response operations."
Melissa Mark-Viverito, president of the Latino Victory Project, summarised the whole affair accordingly: "The level of depravity in terms of this administration has no bounds. It's just insane. It's inhumane. There is no sense of the understanding what the implications are for the greater society. There is no consideration that these families are making positive economic contributions to these cities. It is about fear-mongering to the nth degree."
Here's Samuel Osborne's report.
A new Emerson poll has meanwhile put both of the leading Democratic presidential challengers, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, ahead of Trump in 2020, with either man projected to beat him by a comprehensive eight percent margin at the ballot box.
Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris would all beat him to the White House, according to the survey of voters.
No wonder Trump is so keen to go after "Sleepy Joe" and "Crazy Bernie".
The New York Times meanwhile reports this morning that Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr had no choice but to issue a subpoena last week to Donald Trump Jr - to the consternation of his Republican colleagues, who branded him a turncoat - after the president's eldest son twice agreed to sit before his panel on a voluntary basis, only to then back out.
He was expected to appear for interviews in both March and April but failed to do so, resulting in the first subpoena issued to a member of the Trump family.
The committee is seeking to "tie up loose ends" in its investigation into possible election interference into 2016 (independent of the Mueller report) and needs to hear from Don Jr regarding the meeting he held at Trump Tower in Manhattan on 9 June 2016, in which a group of influential Russians allegedly offered the Trump campaign team "dirt" on rival Hillary Clinton. Junior, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort are known to have been at the gathering with at least five other people, including Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Among those Republicans backing Don Jr's right not appear before the committee - along with the likes of Thom Tillis, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz - is zealous Trump convert Lindsey Graham, who suggests he pleads the Fifth Amendment.
“You’d have to be an idiot as a lawyer to put your client back into this circus, a complete idiot,” Graham told reporters.
Burr's committee took a renewed interest in Trump Jr after his father's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, told the House Oversight Committee in February he had briefed Trump Jr approximately 10 times about a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow before the presidential election. This contradicted his own statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 that he was only "peripherally aware" of the proposal.
In the wake of the Mueller report, the Trump administration is pressing ahead with its revenge mission to examine the origins of the Russia investigation within the Justice Department.
Attorney general William Barr (booo!) has appointed a US attorney to determine if intelligence collection involving the Trump campaign in 2016 was "lawful and appropriate".
Barr has appointed John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to conduct the inquiry.
Durham's appointment comes about a month after Barr told members of Congress he believed "spying did occur" on the Trump campaign in 2016. He later said he didn't mean anything pejorative and was gathering a team to look into the origins of the special counsel's investigation.
Barr provided no details about what "spying" may have taken place but appeared to be alluding to a surveillance warrant the FBI obtained on a former Trump associate, Carter Page, and the FBI's use of an informant while the bureau was investigating former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos.
Trump and his supporters have seized on both to accuse the Justice Department and the FBI of unlawfully spying on his campaign.
Ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame has this to say of Barr's stance on the matter:
The inquiry, which will focus on whether the government's methods to collect intelligence relating to the Trump campaign were lawful and appropriate, is separate from an investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general. The agency's watchdog is also examining the Russia probe's origins and Barr has said he expects the watchdog report to be done in May or June.
Congressional Republicans have also indicated they intend to examine how the investigation that shadowed Trump's presidency for nearly two years began and whether there are any legal concerns.
The recently concluded investigation from special counsel Robert Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between the campaign and the Kremlin to tip the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Durham is a career prosecutor who was nominated for his post as US attorney in Connecticut by Trump. He has previously investigated law enforcement corruption, the destruction of CIA videotapes and the Boston FBI office's relationship with mobsters.
In nominating him, the White House said Durham and other nominees for US attorney jobs share Trump's vision for "making America safe again."
Durham was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in 2018. At the time, Connecticut's two Democratic senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, called Durham a "fierce, fair prosecutor" who knows how to try tough cases.
In addition to conducting the inquiry, Durham will continue to serve as the chief federal prosecutor in Connecticut.
Trump yesterday met with far-right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban at the White House to talk trade, energy and national security.
Trump of coursed praised his fellow anti-immigrant populist as "highly respected".
Orban was an early Trump advocate in 2016 and is known for building a razor wire fence at Hungary’s southern border to stop refugees travelling from Serbia and Croatia during the peak of the refugee crisis.
Last week David Cornstein, the US ambassador to Hungary, suggested Trump's was envious of Orban's "illiberal democracy".
Orban was an early Trump advocate in 2016 and is known for building a razor wire fence at Hungary’s southern border to stop refugees travelling from Serbia and Croatia during the peak of the refugee crisis.
Last week David Cornstein, the US ambassador to Hungary, suggested Trump's was envious of Orban's "illiberal democracy".
He also had these remarks for the White House press corps.
Here's Elizabeth Anora for Indy Voices on Trump's decidedly problematic praise for Orban.
With the US and China apparently no nearer to resolving their trade dispute, Beijing has retaliated as promised by increasing tariffs on $60bn (£46bn) of American goods, an increase of 10 percent to 20-25 percent on items from alcohol and clothing to liquefied natural gas.
Trump - the billionaire business genius who lost a whopping $1.17bn (£897m) in the 1980s - started the fight by increasing tariffs on more than 6,000 Chinese consumer goods to 25 percent or $200bn (£153bn).
He has since engaged in angry rhetoric against China on Twitter, saying it "loves ripping off America", apparently not appeased by the "beautiful" letter Xi Jinping sent him last week to soothe matters.
Here's his latest:
Elsewhere on Twitter on Monday, Trump attacked Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib accusing her of "tremendous hatred of Israel and the Jewish people", just as he previously went after her colleague, Ilhan Omar, on similar grounds.
More surprisingly (for this administration, that is), he made a belated attempt to talk up his laughable environmental credentials.
Remember, this is a man who considers global warming a "hoax", withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris accords, has attempted to revive domestic fossil fuel production and roll back regulations, mocked the Democrats' Green New Deal and even appointed a former oil industry lobbyist, David Bernhardt, to be his secretary of the interior.
Perhaps he'd seen Bill Nye the Science Guy's message for him on climate change.
This is interesting. The Kremlin is embarrassing Trump by denying his claim he would meet with Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the upcoming G20 summit in Osaka, Japan.
Trump said on Monday he would meet Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping at the G20.
"We have noted the statement," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call, saying such statements had been made before, but that there had been no talks about such a meeting let alone an agreement about one.
Peskov noted that the last planned meeting between Putin and Trump had been cancelled at Washington's initiative.
Worried there weren't enough Democrats running for president in 2020? Never fear.
Montana governor Steve Bullock becomes at least the 23rd to step forward. I'm genuinely losing count here.
Adam Schiff, Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday to tell George Stephanopoulos that fining Trump administration officials for stonewalling Congress over subpoenas and deadlines might be the answer to stopping the tactic.
The idea appears to have spooked White House aides, who would rather abandon the president's protections than face hefty financial penalties.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis with more.
The Kraken has awoken and is once more laying into China.
At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, acting defence secretary Patrick Shanahan (now nominated for the job full-time) presented an updated military plan that envisioned sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack US forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons.
The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national security adviser, who previously pushed for conflict with Tehran under George W Bush. The similarities with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 were there for all to see and ominous indeed.
“We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake,” the president said on Monday.
Secretary of state Mike Pompeo is meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin this week and will discuss growing tensions in the Middle East.
The intrepid Clark Mindock is following one of the most prominent Democratic 2020 challengers, Elizabeth Warren, in Pennsylvania as she seeks to pick up votes from pack leader Joe Biden in his own backyard.
Here's his report from Philadelphia.
President Trump appears to have succeeded in reviving his disingenuous antisemitism attack on the Democrats by going after Rashida Tlaib after the Michigan congresswoman made some undeniably very ill-advised remarks about Israel.
"There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors - Palestinians - who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out," Tlaib said on Yahoo News’s Skullduggery podcast.
"I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time," she continued before saying she loves "the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that [safe haven], in many ways."
Never a man to miss a political opportunity, the president was quick to capitalise:
After being severely criticised by other leading Republicans, Tlaib responded:
Now Ilhan Omar has come to her colleague's aid by attacking Republican rival Liz Cheney:
Here's a reminder of how the whole mess started from Chris Riotta.
Enough already.
A federal court will today, for the first time, step into the intensifying clash between the US House of Representatives and President Trump, who is stonewalling multiple probes led by House Democrats of himself and his businesses.
US district judge Amit Mehta in Washington will hear oral arguments on whether Mazars, Trump's long-time accounting firm, must comply with a House Oversight Committee subpoena seeking financial records for Trump and his company.
In an aggressive response to congressional oversight, Trump is refusing to cooperate with any of the probes. Their targets range from his tax returns and policy decisions to his Washington hotel and his children's security clearances.
The House Oversight Committee claims sweeping investigative power and says 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.
Lawyers for Trump and the Trump Organization, his company, last month filed a lawsuit to block the committee's subpoena, saying it exceeded Congress' constitutional limits.
Trump's lawyers argued that Congress is on a quest to "turn up something that Democrats can use as a political tool against the president now and in the 2020 election".
On Monday, the president's attorneys objected to Mehta's plan to fast-track the lawsuit by holding a trial on Tuesday, saying that would deny Trump a "full and fair" hearing.
Either way, Mehta will likely issue a written decision at a later date, although he may indicate on Tuesday how he intends to rule. Whatever the outcome, his ruling will almost certainly be appealed to a higher court.
Mehta was appointed in 2014 by Barack Obama, who was investigated almost non-stop by Republicans in Congress during his two terms in office.
Mazars has avoided taking sides in the dispute and said it will "comply with all legal obligations."
Trump's challenge of the Mazars subpoena was his first effort to quash the multiple House inquiries. He has also sued over subpoenas for his financial records sent to Deutsche Bank and Capital One.
Some legal experts have said Trump's lawsuits are unlikely to succeed. They said Congress has broad power to issue subpoenas, so long as documents requested can help it legislate, and that courts are reluctant to second-guess its motivations.
Some Democratic Party leaders have argued that Trump's stonewalling represents a "constitutional crisis" and could force them to begin impeachment proceedings to remove him from office, even though such an effort would likely fail in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Here's an update on how the markets are responding to the ongoing US-China trade tensions.
