House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler is planning a vote on Wednesday on a motion to subpoena special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on ties between Donald Trump and Russia and demand testimony from at least four former top Trump aides.
The report is still under review by attorney-general William Barr but Mr Nadler has lost patience and hopes to issue him with a “hurry up” notice and call up Mr Trump’s ex-chief strategist Steve Bannon, former director of strategic communications Hope Hicks, ex-White House Counsel Don McGahn and former chief of staff Reince Priebus to appear before his committee.
President Trump has meanwhile repeated his threat to shutdown the US border with Mexico in protest at what he regards as America’s neighbour’s failure to tackle northbound illegal immigration and called on the Democrats to help fix asylum “loopholes”.
Mr Mueller's report was delivered to the Justice Department a week and a half ago, marking an end to a nearly two year investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The attorney general's office then sent a letter to Congress just two days later, detailing in broad strokes the findings of the investigation. Mr Barr wrote in that letter that the Mueller probe found no evidence of collusion or conspiracy between the Russian efforts and the Trump campaign. Mr Barr then noted that the Mueller probe did not make a judgement on whether Mr Trump had committed obstruction of justice — and the attorney general said that he had determined that charges were not warranted.
The information in the letter has been celebrated by Mr Trump, who has insisted repeatedly during the first two years of his campaign that he and his campaign had not colluded with the Russian meddling.
The Mueller report did, however, note that dozens of Russian individuals or groups were involved in an effort to sway the election for Mr Trump.
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
The Trump administration doubled down on its threat to shut the US's southern border with Mexico on Sunday, a day after the State Department cut aid to three Central American countries that President Trump accused of deliberately sending migrants to the States.
Trump himself tweeted the following last night:
This followed a series of tweets on the subject on Friday...
...And on Saturday.
Faced with a surge of asylum seekers from Central American countries who travel through Mexico, Trump said on Friday there was a "good likelihood" he would close the border this coming week if Mexico does not stop unauthorised immigrants from reaching the US.
Without providing evidence, he also accused the nations of having "set up" migrant caravans and sending them north. The president last raised the issue of refugee convoys ahead of November's midterms, when he spread unsubstantiated claims to demonise a group crossing Mexico from Honduras to ensure border security led the national political agenda as voters headed for the ballot box.
Speaking to ABC's This Week show, White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said the president had few other options in the absence of any support from Democrats for more border security or legislative action to change the immigration law.
"Faced with those limitations, the president will do everything he can. If closing the ports of entry means that, that's exactly what he intends to do," Mulvaney said. "We need border security and we're going to do the best we can with what we have."
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway told Fox News Sunday that the situation at the border was at "melting point" and said the president was serious in his threat. "It certainly is not a bluff. You can take the president seriously."
Neither Trump aide offered any specific details or timeline for the potential border shutdown, however.
Here's Mulvaney on ABC's This Week and CNN's State of the Union yesterday.
At a rally on the border in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke denounced Trump's immigration policies as the politics of "fear and division."
Trump has repeatedly said during his two years in office that he would close the US border with Mexico. His latest threat had workers and students who frequently cross the border worried about the potential disruption to their lives.
Closing the border could disrupt millions of legal crossings and billions of dollars in trade.
Mexico is the largest importer of US exports of refined fuels like diesel and gasoline, some of which moves by rail. It is unclear if rail terminals would be affected by closures.
"It would have a widespread and dramatic impact on our markets almost immediately," said an executive at a company that ships products by rail to Mexico, citing its dependence on US natural gas, propane, gasoline and ultra-low-sulphur diesel fuel.
On Saturday, the State Department cut US aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras - a move Democrats warned would only worsen the situation.
"What we need to do is focus on what's happening in Central America, where three countries are disassembling before our eyes and people are desperately coming to the United States. The president's cutting off aid to these countries will not solve that problem," Senate minority whip Dick Durbin told NBC's Meet the Press.
Durbin also cast doubt on the viability of shutting the border, describing the threat as "totally unrealistic."
Here's Greg Evans for Indy100 on Fox News's description of the above three nations as "three Mexican countries", the president's favourite channel apparently having little better grasp of regional geography than the man himself.
Pope Francis has added his voice to the criticism of Donald Trump's latest move.
"Builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build," he said during a visit to Morocco.
The Arab League has also come together to condemn President Trump, this time over his decision to defy the international community and recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
On the other side of the fence, former vice-president Joe Biden has been forced to deny allegations of inappropriate contact with a Democratic activist.
Biden, 76, is widely believed to be considering a 2020 presidential run, has been accused by Lucy Flores of approaching her from behind, putting his hands on her shoulders, smelling her hair and kissing her on the back of the head at a campaign rally in 2014.
She told MSBC's Kasie Hunt over the weekend the alleged act was "an invasion of my personal space" and “a clear invasion of my bodily autonomy.”
Here's why the Trump administration and senior Republicans have made House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff its new hate figure since William Barr's assessment of the Mueller report was published eight days ago (remember, we're still waiting for the real thing).
The Trump camp is even selling crass T-shirts mocking "Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff" on its website to raise funds for 2020, yours for just $28 (£21).
Trump's crackdown on immigration has led to his own former driver and security guard, Zoltan Tamas, locked up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) correctional facility in Crawfordville, Florida, for the last six months.
The Romanian migrant, who worked at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter has been unable to see his wife and eight-year-old daughter, the latter suffering from congenital heart disease.
Applying for US citizenship in 2016, Tamas was found to have been convicted of car insurance fraud during his youth in Europe and is currently scheduled for deportation. His wife claims the crime was committed by a friend using Tamas's name and is fighting the case.
Letters of support from high-profile businesspeople and his former bosses have so far not helped Tamas win leniency.
Good news, of a sort, for the UK.
US national security adviser John Bolton says Britain will be "top of the queue" for US trade deals after Brexit. We're saved!
Here's Zamira Rahim.
Donald Trump has issued a new permit for the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline that critics say will devastate local communities and prove disastrous for the environment.
The TransCanada pipeline is intended to transport crude oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to the US Gulf Coast via Montana and Nebraska but has been the subject of long-running protests from climate activists.
The permit comes despite the project being blocked in November by a federal court judge, saying the government had not sufficiently planned for oil spills.
Here's our science correspondent Josh Gabbatiss.
Mick Mulvaney had this to say about the Mueller report on CNN yesterday and the "morality" of Trump's alleged ties to Russia.
The FBI special counsel wrote that his findings were "not an exoneration" of the president, even though he found no evidence of collusion to hack the 2016 election, leaving it up to the attorney-general, William Barr, to rule on whether the president had obstructed justice. Barr moved quickly to drop the matter.
A new poll over the weekend indicates the William Barr letter on the Mueller report has had little impact on Donald Trump's approval rating with the American public, which, the psephologists conclude, means the people are waiting for the release of the full 400-page doorstop before passing judgement and have not been swayed by the administration's jubilant response to the attorney-general's initial executive summary.
Here's two more for your consideration.
After losing in Congress, President Donald Trump is counting on the courts to kill off "Obamacare." But some cases are going against him and time is not on his side as he tries to score a big win for his re-election campaign.
Two federal judges in Washington, DC, last week blocked parts of Trump's healthcare agenda: work requirements for some low-income people on Medicaid and new small business health plans that don't have to provide full benefits required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
But in the biggest case, a federal judge in Texas ruled last December that the ACA is unconstitutional and should be struck down in its entirety. That ruling is now on appeal. At the urging of the White House, the Justice Department said last week it will support the Texas judge's position and argue that all of "Obamacare" must go.
A problem for Trump is that the litigation could take months to resolve - or longer - and there's no guarantee he'll get the outcomes he wants before the 2020 election.
In the Texas case, Trump could lose by winning.
If former President Barack Obama's health law is struck down entirely, Congress would face an impossible task: pass a comprehensive health overhaul to replace it that both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Trump can agree to. The failed attempt to repeal "Obamacare" in 2017 proved to be toxic for congressional Republicans in last year's midterm elections and they are in no mood to repeat it.
"The ACA now is nine years old and it would be incredibly disruptive to uproot the whole thing," said Thomas Barker, an attorney who served as a lawyer at the federal Health and Human Services department under George W Bush. "It seems to me that you can resolve this issue more narrowly than by striking down the ACA."
"Right now, it's losing in court," Donald Trump asserted on Friday, referring to the Texas case against "Obamacare."
The case "probably ends up in the Supreme Court," he continued. "But we're doing something that is going to be much less expensive than Obamacare for the people... and we're going to have (protections for) pre-existing conditions and will have a much lower deductible. So, and I've been saying that, the Republicans are going to end up being the party of healthcare."
There's no sign that his administration has a comprehensive healthcare plan and there doesn't seem to be a consensus among Republicans in Congress.
Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders warns "thousands will literally die" if the Trump administration goes ahead with its assault on Obamacare.
Here's Andrew Buncombe.
Bernie Sanders says 'thousands of people will literally die' if Donald Trump scraps Obamacare
Vermont senator says he would slash cost of medicines if elected presidentReminder that sportswriter Rick Reilly's new book, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, hits the shelves soon and contains testimony from Samuel L Jackson, Alice Cooper and boxer Oscar De La Hoya, among others, suggesting the president cheats at his favourite pastime, among other revelations.
Don Jr gave an interview to far-right conspiracy theory site TruNews at his father's rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last Thursday.
His spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, said the president's son had been buttonholed by reporters while waiting to speak with Sean Hannity of Fox. "Unfortunately, he did not have an opportunity to run a full FBI background check on each and every one," she said.
The site is known for trading in paranoid rumours about surreptitious government takeovers by deep state lizardmen and talk of secret death squads carrying out mass shootings.
His spokeswoman, Amanda Miller, said the president's son had been buttonholed by reporters while waiting to speak with Sean Hannity of Fox. "Unfortunately, he did not have an opportunity to run a full FBI background check on each and every one," she said.
The site is known for trading in paranoid rumours about surreptitious government takeovers by deep state lizardmen and talk of secret death squads carrying out mass shootings.
Another sinister presence at the Grand Rapids rally was a number of Trump supporters wearing QAnon T-shirts.
For the uninitiated, QAnon is a conspiracy theory spread online that suggests prominent Democrats are part of an evil cult that practices devil worship and paedophilia.
Adherents believe Trump and Robert Mueller will one day release a "Storm" of indictments to scoop up their political enemies and dispatch them to Guantanamo Bay or death row, the "truth" brought before them by "Q", a shadowy agent at the heart of the Trump administration.
Here's NBC's Ben Collins surveying the scene in Michigan on Thursday afternoon.
Democratic rising star Pete Buttigieg says he's surpassing all fundraising expectations as his campaign continues to gather momentum.
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