Donald Trump could still face impeachment proceedings as the House Judiciary Committee prepares to demand attorney general William Barr release the full Mueller report into the president's ties to Russia, as the latter looked set to miss the 2 April deadline for its publication.
Chairman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat, will ask his team to vote on a resolution to issue subpoenas on Wednesday, as reports emerge the Trump administration defied official advice in giving high-level security clearances to the president’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
President Trump has meanwhile raged on Twitter against the amount of aid given to Puerto Rico since it was hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017, attacking the island’s “incompetent and corrupt” politicians and declaring, “the place is a mess – nothing works”. He is also pushing forward once again with an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which is more commonly known as Obamacare.
Mr Barr has said that he plans on delivering the Mueller report to Congress by mid-April, but has signalled that the document could be heavily redacted in spite of his promise to be transparent with the report.
And, anticipating that Mr Barr would not deliver the report on Tuesday, activists groups are preparing protests for later in the week to try and set focus on the attorney general's handling of the report.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday, testimony got fiery in Congress over Mr Kushner's security clearance, with representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comparing giving the Trump family security clearances to transmitting America's nuclear codes via Instagram direct messages.
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump's administration defied official advice in giving high-level security clearances to the president’s daughter and son-in-law, a White House whistleblower has said.
Security adviser Tricia Newbold wrote to the House Oversight Committee to say Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were among dozens of officials granted privileged access even though experts had recommended it be withheld over concerns about the nominees' backgrounds, ties to foreign powers or possible conflicts of interest.
She said President Donald Trump's former White House personnel security director, Carl Kline, personally overruled her judgments in the cases of two senior officials.
When Newbold tried to raise her concerns up the chain of command, she was at first ignored and then suspended without pay after being accused of not following policy regarding the scanning of PDF files. Hmmm.
"I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security," a letter from committee chairman Elijah Cummings to White House lawyer Pat Cipollone quoted Newbold as saying.
"I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office.
"I'm terrified of going back," she is quoted as saying in the letter.
Cummings said Newbold, "has come forward at great personal risk to warn Congress—and the nation—about the grave security risks she has been witnessing first-hand over the past two years."
"She has informed the Committee that during the Trump administration, she and other career officials adjudicated denials of dozens of applications for security clearances that were later overturned."
Cummings said he planned to subpoena Kline and warned that more subpoenas would be issued if the White House did not provide requested documents.
Here's Harry Cockburn with the full story.
Cummings' move was met with criticism by a member of his own committee, however.
Republican Jim Jordan issued a statement calling the letter a "partisan attack" that was "an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants".
"The process by which this matter has so far progressed has been anything but fair," he said.
"The interview of Ms Newbold was conducted on a Saturday morning at 8.30am and Republicans on the committee were not informed of the interview's topic or witness until 3.30pm the day before, leaving little to no time to prepare."
President Trump has meanwhile resumed his attack on Puerto Rico regarding the amount of aid given to the island since Hurricane Maria in 2017.
Apparently disputing whether the island he even constituted a "place", the Donald's late-night tirade laid into local politicians as "incompetent" and "corrupt" and the mayor of San Jose, Carmen Yulin Cruz, as "crazed".
Annoyed at the deployment of US funds, the president argued the money could have been better spent helping farmers on the mainland.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis to unpick the latest rant.
With President Trump's threat to close the US-Mexico border hanging in the air, politicians, business leaders and economists have come forward to warn of the dire economic consequences of doing so.
Shuttering the border would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping, they say.
"Let's hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools' joke," said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia yesterday.
He said Trump's threat would be the "height of folly," noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6bn (£1.2bn) in goods cross the border every day.
"If trade were interrupted, US producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and US exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market," he said.
Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point.
Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the US Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict "severe economic harm."
Millennials should be especially concerned. The affect on supplies of avocados, America's favourite health food, would be disastrous. Not that President Trump would care. He prefers a Big Mac.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration said yesterday as many as 2,000 US inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned.
That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border.
That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border.
Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers.
Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system.
"The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it," Nielsen said.
In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico.
Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children.
In addition to threatening to shut down the southern border, President Trump is understood to be considering bringing on a "border" or "immigration czar" to co-ordinate immigration policy across various federal agencies.
Trump is weighing at least two potential candidates for the post: former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach and former Virginia attorney-general Ken Cuccinelli.
Kobach and Cuccinelli are far-right conservatives with strong views on immigration. Cuccinelli was seen at the White House on Monday.
Yesterday ex-FBI director James Comey hinted on Twitter he was considering running for the presidency in 2020 to avenge his sacking by Donald Trump in May 2017.
The post recalled his cod-poetic response to the Barr letter, when he posted a shot of himself wandering around a redwood forest staring up at the trees with the caption, "So many questions".
Not particularly surprisingly, his latest turned out to be an April Fool's Day prank.
Here's Chris Riotta on a lost soul.
Here's a nice little stat to mark the president passing the 800-day mark in the Oval Office: he currently averages 22 lies or inaccuracies per day.
Imagine that. One lie has been enough to sink an entire administration in the past but Trump is such a runaway train of wild rhetoric and insinuation he keeps on getting away with it - his opponents simply can't keep up.
More on White House whistleblower Tricia Newbold, who yesterday returned to work for the Trump administration as usual, just days after denouncing her employers to the House Oversight Committee.
One can only imagine how awkward that was.
Here's a few choice cuts from Indy Voices on the Donald.
Carli Pierson argues the president's complete lack of understanding of Central America is dangerous.
Eric Lewis meanwhile cautions us not to allow ourselves to become distracted by the entertainment value President Trump provides.
The Trump administration has announced it will give $5.1m (£3.9m) in family planning funds to a chain of crisis pregnancy centres that oppose abortion and do not offer contraceptives.
The Obria Group, a southern California-based non-profit that describes itself as being "led by God", seeks to take both patients and money away from Planned Parenthood.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which announced the grant on Friday, simultaneously announced it was cutting funds to some Planned Parenthood affiliates.
Here's our women's correspondent, Maya Oppenheim.
Kellyanne Conway's husband George is trolling president Trump again, this time over a plaque installed on the first completed section of his border wall last October.
Trump is due to visit Calexico in California on Friday to survey the scene of his national emergency, the fifth time he has done so since taking office.
Here’s a little more on those two candidates to be Trump’s “immigration czar”.
First up, Kris Kobach.
He was the secretary of state for Kansas between 2011 and 2019 and last year ran for governor, losing out to Democrat Laura Kelly.
Kobach has become notorious for his hard-line anti-immigration stance, zero-tolerance approach to undocumented migrants and for regularly calling for stronger voter ID laws and even a Muslim registry.
He wrote for Breitbart in 2017 suggesting that immigrants were disproportionately responsible for crime and cited remarks by white supremacist Peter Gemma to make his case. He has also been accused of accepting campaign donations from white nationalist groups.
Fixated on the issue of voter fraud, he purged almost 20,000 registered voters from Kansas’s rolls as secretary of state and secured nine convictions, winning the admiration of the conspiracy-minded President Trump, whom Kobach backed on his demand that Barack Obama release his birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii and not Kenya.
The president appointed him vice-chairman to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to address voter fraud on 11 May 2017, which was duly dissolved on 3 January 2018 after states refused to co-operate with its demands for data.
Kobach has also earned anywhere between $150,000 (£115,000) and $800,000 (£613,000) whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria across small-town America, according to Splinter.
A former mayor of Valley Park, Missouri, Grant Young, described Kobach’s modus operandi to The Kansas City Star and ProPublica as “ambulance chasing.”
“Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time,” Young said of Kobach's methods.
Nice guy!
And then there's Ken Cuccinelli, another failed gubernatorial candidate.
As a Virginia state senator in 2008, he introduced legislation that would have allowed local businesses to fire employees and nullify their unemployment benefits if their spoken English was not up to scratch.
Democratic state Senate leader Richard Saslaw called Cuccinelli’s proposal “the most mean-spirited piece of legislation I have seen in my 30 years down here.”
As Virginia's attorney-general between 2010 and 2014, Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion authorising law enforcement officials to investigate the immigration status of anyone they choose to stop.
He also intervened on university campuses regarding gay rights: "It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' 'gender expression,' or like classification, as a protected class within its nondiscrimination policy, absent specific authorisation from the General Assembly."
Virginia Democratic State Senator John Edwards responded to the latter verdict by saying Cuccinelli was "turning back the clock on civil rights in Virginia."
The House Judiciary Committee will prepare subpoenas this week seeking special counsel Robert Mueller's full Russia report as the Justice Department appears likely to miss today's deadline set by Democrats for the report's release.
The Judiciary panel plans to vote on subpoenas Wednesday, a day after the deadline. The chairmen of several House committees asked for the full, unredacted report last week after attorney-general William Barr released a four-page summary laying out the report's "principal conclusions." Barr said in a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees on Friday that a redacted version of the full 300 page report would be released by mid-April, "if not sooner."
The planned committee vote, announced on Monday morning, would not automatically issue subpoenas but authorise House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler to send them if he decides to do so.
"As I have made clear, Congress requires the full and complete special counsel report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence," Nadler said in a statement. "Attorney-General Barr has thus far indicated he will not meet the 2 April deadline set by myself and five other committee chairs, and refused to work with us to provide the full report, without redactions, to Congress."
The vote comes as Democrats are escalating their battle with the Justice Department over how much of the report they will be able to see - a fight that could eventually end up in court. Democrats have said they will not accept redactions and will almost certainly be unhappy with the amount of information provided by Barr when the department releases the report in the coming weeks.
The panel will also vote Wednesday to authorise subpoenas related to a number of President Trump's former top advisers, including strategist Steve Bannon, communications director Hope Hicks, chief of staff Reince Priebus, White House counsel Don McGahn and counsel Ann Donaldson. Donaldson served as McGahn's chief of staff before both left the administration.
The five were key witnesses in Mueller's probe of possible obstruction of justice and were sent document requests by the Judiciary panel last month. Nadler said he is concerned about reports that documents relevant to Mueller's investigation "were sent outside the White House," waiving executive privilege rights that would block document production.
"To this end, I have asked the committee to authorise me to issue subpoenas, if necessary, to compel the production of documents and testimony," Nadler said.
Nadler sent requests to 81 people connected to Trump's political and personal dealings as he launched a wide-ranging investigation into possible obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power.
Barr said in the letter Friday that he is scrubbing the report to avoid disclosing any grand jury information or classified material, in addition to portions of the report that pertain to ongoing investigations or that "would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties."
Democrats say they want all of that information, even if some of it can't be disclosed to the public. They are citing precedents from previous investigations involving presidents and also information disclosed about the Russia investigation to Republicans last year when they held the House majority.
If the committee does issue subpoenas, the path forward is uncertain. If the administration decides to fight, lawmakers could ask federal courts to step in and enforce a subpoena - a fight that could, in theory, reach the Supreme Court. Generally such disputes are instead resolved through negotiations.
The Democrats could also formally ask Mueller to send the Judiciary committee evidence that could be used in possible impeachment proceedings against Trump. But House speaker Nancy Pelosi, backed by the majority of her caucus, has said she's not currently supportive of impeachment.
Barr wrote in his summary that the special counsel did not find that Trump's campaign "conspired or coordinated" with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. He said Mueller reached no conclusion on whether Trump obstructed the federal investigation, instead setting out "evidence on both sides" of the question.
Barr himself went further than Mueller in his summary letter, declaring that Mueller's evidence was insufficient to prove in court that Trump had committed obstruction of justice to hamper the probe.
Democrats say they want to know much more about both conclusions and they want to see the evidence unfiltered by Barr.
Republicans have said the Democratic demands are overreach.
"Judiciary Democrats have escalated from setting arbitrary deadlines to demanding unredacted material that Congress does not, in truth, require and that the law does not allow to be shared outside the Justice Department," said Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary committee.
Having sown the seeds of outrage last night, the president's up and inspecting his crop.
Haha! "The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J Trump." I suspect the locals might disagree with that statement.
I think this sums it up nicely.
Here's Trump going after House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, emerging as another prominent antagonist post-Barr.
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