Trump news: Kamala Harris leads calls for Barr to quit for interfering in sentencing of president's friend
Justice Department employees join push for attorney general's resignation after Roger Stone sentencing fallout
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Donald Trump returned to Washington on Sunday night after opening the Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Florida to attend the wedding of his senior aide Stephen Miller, held at the president’s own Trump International Hotel in DC in disregard of ongoing concerns about violations of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause.
More than 2,000 former Justice Department employees have meanwhile called for his attorney general, William Barr, to step down after it became clear he had intervened to push for a more lenient prison sentence for Republican political operative and Trump ally Roger Stone.
The call follows a letter signed by nine US senators — including presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — demanding his resignation. California Senator Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor who grilled the attorney general following the Mueller investigation, also renewed her call for Mr Barr to step down.
An open letter signed by a growing list of former staffers at the Justice Department said they "stand for the proposition that political interference in the conduct of a criminal prosecution is anathema to the Department's core mission and to its sacred obligation to ensure equal justice under the law".
"And yet, President Trump and Attorney General Barr have openly and repeatedly flouted this fundamental principle", the post says. "Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies."
Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves
Show all 29Donald Ayer, the former deputy US Attorney General under George HW Bush, eviscerated Mr Barr's legal doctrine in a stunning column for The Atlantic, saying that "Bill Barr's America is not a place that anyone, including Trump voters, should want to go. It is a banana republic where all are subject to the whims of a dictatorial president and his henchmen."
Meanwhile, the president has remained largely offline on Presidents' Day (other than to celebrate his presidency) while his rival Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor running for the Democratic presidential nomination, is criticised for his past statements on women and stop and frisk. The president's advisor Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News to slam the candidate while defending the president for similar statements and behaviours.
The president has otherwise been belatedly defending his US-Mexico border wall after footage went viral of a section of it being blown down in strong winds two weeks ago, with Mr Trump now insisting this was the fault of wet concrete and not shoddy workmanship or cheap materials.
Follow live coverage as it happened:
Michael Bloomberg trails Bernie Sanders and other Democratic candidates in string of 2020 polls
Here's Jon Sharman with the latest on the race for the nomination to take on Trump in November.
Over the weekend, Joe Biden called on Bernie to take responsibility for his supporters' "vicious, malicious" behaviour after they threatened members of Nevada's Culinary Workers Union online for not supporting their man’s Medicare for All proposal.
“He may not be responsible for it, but he has some accountability,” Biden said on NBC's Meet the Press. “If any of my supporters did that, I’d disown them. Flat disown them.”
The front-runner meanwhile picked up the endorsement of ex-New York mayor Bill de Blaio and was accosted by a topless animal rights protester in Carson City, Nevada...
...as Pete Buttigieg hit back at conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh for suggesting America is not ready for a gay president.
"I love my husband. I’m faithful to my husband. Onstage we usually just go for a hug," Mayor Pete said on CNN's State of the Union.
"I love him very much. I'm not going to take lectures on family values from the likes of Rush Limbaugh."
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar meanwhile announced she has made an impressive $12m (£9.2m) in fundraising since she unexpectedly secured third place in last week's New Hampshire primary.
Republican senator pushes coronavirus conspiracy theory
Arkansas GOP representative and Trump ally Tom Cotton has been telling Maria Bartiromo on Fox News the coronavirus could be a Chinese biochemical weapon gone wrong - a suggestion as unfounded as it is implicitly racist but worth dwelling on here as an indicator of the sort of toxic contagion being spread around the Trumpist right-wing media ecosystem.
Twitter users offer up Trump movie parodies
#ReplaceMovieTitleWithTrump was trending on Twitter earlier.
A few highlights for your delectation...
Trump’s golf trips costing US taxpayers equivalent of 334 years of his presidential salary
Darren Richman crunches the numbers on the commander-in-chief's expensive habit, which the American public are paying through the nose for.
Trump glories in Daytona trip
In the last hour, Trump has been retweeting pictures and clips from yesterday's NASCAR jaunt as though it were a North Korean rally and wishing the nation a happy (if mispelled) Presidents' Day.
Trump's claim black poverty has been 'reversed' doesn't hold up
Here's John T Bennett to dig into the president's wildly optimistic recent claims about African American poverty rates. Unsurprisingly, the data doesn't support his conclusions.
Michael Bloomberg joins Joe Biden's attack on Bernie Sanders supporters
Fresh from brawling with Trump on Twitter last week, the New York billionaire is following up on the former vice president's attack on "Bernie Bros" and their aggressive messaging online.
Trump spending Presidents' Day griping about impeachment
The commander-in-chief has no official engagements today but is still spending his Presidents' Day indoors griping about the House Democrats making him only the third in American history to get impeached.
Here's a little more on someone who was far better at the job than the current incumbent.
Trump fan brutally ridiculed after posing for pictures with 'Keanu Reeves'
A Trump supporter named Bill Montanaray in a Confederate flag jacket is being ridiculed on Reddit for posing for pictures at the Timonium Bike Show in Baltimore, Maryland, last weekend with a man he assumed to be Hollywood star Keanu Reeves.
That man was very much not Reeves but the MAGA loon apparently didn't look twice, cheeringly brandishing Keep America Great signage and uploading the resulting snaps onto Facebook.
The lookalike, actually an antique motorcycle restorer named Nick German, was not happy.
Darren Richman has more on a ludicrous misunderstanding for Indy100.
Obama calls out Trump's attack on global elites: 'C'mon man!'
This shot of a suburban yard sign is doing the rounds on Twitter and deserves a wider audience for the sheer Trumpland mania it encapsulates.
Couldn't even keep it together for one commandment...
For balance, here's Obama telling it like it is.
There's a lot of love for the 44th president out there today, not least from House impeachment manager Hakeem Jeffries.
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