Investigators working for FBI special counsel Robert Mueller say attorney general William Barr has misrepresented just how damaging their report really is to Donald Trump, according to reports.
Mr Barr’s four-page letter to Congress summarising its contents last month stated Mr Mueller had reached a “no collusion” conclusion regarding the president’s relationship with Russia, but stopped short of exonerating him on obstruction of justice charges.
In response to that limitd discllosure, the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena the full, unredacted 400-page report from Mr Barr on Wednesday after he missed their deadline for it to be handed over, while the House Ways and Means Committee has formally demanded that the Treasury Department release Mr Trump's income tax returns.
The report is currently being combed over by Justice Department officials, who are determining how much of the documented or classified.
Some reports have indicated that there is classified material — like grand jury information, or information related to ongoing investigations — on most if not all of the pages. Those would need to be redacted for security reasons.
The report has already sparked protests across the US, with demonstrations planned for Thursday night in Washington outside of the White House and in New York.
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Investigators working for FBI special counsel Robert Mueller say attorney-general William Barr has misrepresented just how damaging their report really is to Donald Trump, according to The New York Times.
Barr’s four-page letter to Congress summarising its contents on 24 March stated Mueller had reached a “no collusion” verdict regarding the president’s relationship with Russia, but stopped short of exonerating him on obstruction of justice charges. Mueller left that up to Barr and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, who duly did so.
Mueller's team, which included 19 lawyers and roughly 40 FBI agents, analysts and other professional staff, say their 22-month investigation yielded more "alarming and significant" findings than Barr acknowledged.
Jerrold Nadler's House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena the full, unredacted 400-page report from Barr on Wednesday after he missed their 2 April deadline for its publication.
"I'll rely on the attorney general to make decisions," Trump said at the White House on Tuesday.
"But I will tell you, anything that is given to them [the Democrats] will never be good enough. You could give them more documents than they've ever seen, and it would never be good enough."
While publicly stating his enthusiasm for the report's release, Trump has clearly been annoyed by the efforts of Nadler and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff to prise the report and its underlying documents, witness interviews and memos from the Justice Department.
The president and his supporters celebrated Barr's summary of the Mueller report as a "complete and total exoneration", ignoring the attorney-general's inclusion of a line from Mueller himself explicitly stating it was "not an exoneration".
Here's Harry Cockburn's report.
The Democrat-dominated House of Representatives is continuing to exhaust all possibilities in its bid to exert pressure on the president.
In the latest twist, the powerful House Ways and Means Committee under chairman Richard Neal has written to the Internal Revenue Service formally requesting a copy of the president's tax returns.
It's how they brought down Al Capone, after all.
Trump is the only president since Gerald Ford in 1976 not to offer up his accounts for scrutiny, leading many to assume he has something to hide. Yesterday, he repeated his claim he cannot make his returns public because he is under audit.
"We are under audit, despite what people said, and working that out – I’m always under audit, it seems, but I’ve been under audit for many years because the numbers are big, and I guess when you have a name, you’re audited," Trump told reporters at the White House, never missing an opportunity to boast.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.
The House Oversight Committee has also been after the president, interviewing White House security adviser turned whistleblower Tricia Newbold over the weekend about her complaint that concerns were ignored in the granting of top-level security clearance to 25 members of the Trump inner circle.
The Washington Post now reports that President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was "Senior White House Official 1", the figure denied clearance as a result of anxiety about his exposure to foreign influence, personal conduct and private business interests.
The verdict of intelligence experts was duly overruled by Carl Kline, who ran the White House personnel security office at the time, on the orders of the Trump administration.
The committee's chairman Elijah Cummings outlined Newbold's allegations in a memo on Monday.
The arrest of a Chinese woman at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday has exposed porous security at the President's Florida resort and escalating tensions between Secret Service agents and the resort’s staff members.
Yujing Zhang, 32, was picked up with four cellphones, a hard drive, a laptop and a malware-infected USB stick.
Trump makes frequent trips to his private golf resort, at a cost of $3.4m (£2.6m) to US taxpayers each time.
Here's Sarah Harvard on Kris Kobach - understood to be in contention to be President Trump's new "border czar" - and his worrying suggestion asylum seekers should be held in "camps".
Trump mocked Democratic Party darling AOC at a Republican dinner on Tuesday night, calling her "a young bartender".
Big mistake.
"The last guy who underestimated me lost," she told Newsweek in response. "That’s all I gotta say about that."
Here's Adam Forrest on the president's comments.
Another day, another new book on its way to the printers ready to embarrass President Trump.
Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer's A Hill To Die On contains a number of juicy anecdotes, if the excerpts currently being serialised in The Washington Post are anything to go by.
The best so far is this revelation: when challenged by Republican congressman Bill Posey to stop the "tweets and whining about crowd size" at his inauguration, Trump responded with the immortal question: "Who the f*** are you?"
This is also very funny on Steve Bannon.
Here's a couple of other interesting titbits from A Hill To Die On.
Joe Biden has been another recent target of the president's mockery.
The 76-year-old former vice-president, considering a presidential run in 2020, has been hit by accusations of inappropriate conduct towards women. He has since posted a mobile phone video on Twitter apologising for his behaviour.
"Social norms have begun to change," he says. "They've shifted. And the boundaries of protecting personal space have been reset. And I get it. I get it. I hear what they are saying. I understand."
Here's Andrew Buncombe on the president's jokes at Biden's expense.
Utah Republican Chris Stewart has announced the formation of an "anti-socialism caucus" within the House of Representatives to push back against the influence of left-leaning Democratic idealists like AOC and Ilhan Omar.
"This caucus will defend individual liberty & free markets and highlight the dark history of socialism,” he said in a tweet.
The dark history of socialism is clearly on the party's mind. Only last month, Republicans were warned by former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka at CPAC that Joseph Stalin was after their all-American hamburgers.
Here's Zamira Rahim's report.
'Anti-socialism' group formed in Congress, Republicans announce
Caucus formed after wave of progressives elected to House of RepresentativesGorka was wrong about the Soviet Union's attitude to hamburgers, incidentally.
Don Jr is getting flack this morning for posting this spectacularly tasteless video of Joe Biden acting inappropriately with himself from an alt-right meme account.
Here's Jerrold Nadler with an update on the House Judiciary Committee's decision on Wednesday to issue a subpoena to William Barr to retrieve the Mueller report.
His Republican counterpart in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, wants the chance to speak to Barr himself and is apparently not interested in the paper trail.
The Washington Post has a few details of the structure of the Mueller report this morning.
Here's journalist Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times on CNN's New Day, elaborating on the newspaper's report on "simmering frustrations" within the Mueller camp over William Barr
Actor John Lithgow appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night to promote a new book of poems for children about Donald Trump, entitled Dumpty.
Lithgow gave a reading of the Seussian final poem in the book, "Afterward", and it's well worth your time. Here's an extract.
The report was at hand and Dumpty was manic
Awash in a flood of distemper and panic.
At lush Mar-a-Lago, his Florida lair,
He braced for Bob Mueller, his ruthless Javert.
His heart skipped a beat when, from distant DC,
Came a call from Bill Barr, his conniving AG.
Dumpty lurched from his bed with a ponderous groan
And with trembling fingers he picked up the phone.
"Good news!" Barr exclaimed. "We’re home free!"
"It’s a wash!"
"The report’s a big nothing that’s easy to quash!"
Thus began Barr’s campaign to covertly impede it
Since he, only he, was entitled to read it.
Veteran Iowa senator Chuck Grassley has branded President Trump's suggestion that the noise from windmills causes cancer "idiotic".
It's hard to disagree with the 86-year-old Republican and lifelong farmer, who added: "I wish his staff would tell him I'm the father and now the grandfather of wind energy tax credits. I don't think he knows it, or I don't think he'd make those comments that aren't quite appropriate."
Another man who has lost all patience with the president's ludicrous assault on environmental causes is our own Chris Riotta, who takes his draconian energy policies to task below.
Imagine this being your very first thought of the morning, as the sunlight streams in through the curtains and you sit up in bed with a stifled yawn and a stretch. Unreal.
