Trump-Mueller report: President retreats to Mar-a-Lago as Democrats issue subpoenas and talk impeachment
Document paints damning picture of a White House torn apart by lies and mistrust
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Your support makes all the difference.Donald Trump has flown to his private resort in Florida for the Easter holiday, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill issue subpoenas and discuss impeachment proceedings in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
The president exploded on Twitter the morning after the report’s release to the public, calling statements included in the nearly 450-page document “bulls**t.”
“Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue,” he tweeted Friday. “Watch out for people that take so-called ‘notes,’ when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the ‘Report’ about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad).”
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Chairman has suggested the possibility of impeaching Donald Trump in the wake of the explosive Mueller report.
“A lot of people keep asking about the question of impeachment. We may very well come to that very soon,” Elijah Cummings said in an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
He added, “But right now, let’s make sure we understand what Mueller was doing, understand what [Attorney General William] Barr was doing, and see the report in an unredacted form, and all of the underlying documents.”
Mr Mueller laid out multiple episodes in which the president directed others to influence or curtail the Russia investigation after the special counsel’s appointment in May 2017.
The report says those efforts “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests”.
The attorney general said on Thursday a version of the report with fewer redactions will be made available to a small group of lawmakers.
He said all redactions would be removed from that version of the report except those relating to grand-jury information.
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Here's footage of Anderson Cooper's extraordinary interview with White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, who continues to claim Donald Trump does not lie, despite multiple instances of lying being laid out in the Mueller report.
Cooper eventually, exasperated, brings the segment to an apparently premature close.
Donald Trump yesterday tweeted a Game of Thrones-themed poster, claiming it was not 'Game Over' after the Mueller report cleared him of conspiring with Russia.
Now, HBO has responded to the tweet, with a spokesperson saying it would "prefer our intellectual property not be used for political purposes".
Two Democratic-led Congressional committees have issued subpoenas to nine major banks as part of their investigations into Donald Trump’s finances, according to the latest reports.
Those banks include Deutsche Bank, which was previously reported to have received subpoenas from lawmakers surrounding the president’s financial records, and at least eight others, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Read more...
Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the House judiciary committee, said his reading of the report shows that Donald Trump "almost certainly obstructed justice" and it was only his staff intervened to prevent certain actions.
"We have a very serious situation on our hands," he said. "It's an awesome and solemn responsibility that Congress has now to try to deal with the crisis that's contained in this report."
Rashida Tlaib, a freshman Democratic congresswoman, has filed an impeachment resolution against the president, which has won support from influential Democratic colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The impeachment resolution is also supported by congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who has born the brunt of relentless attacks from the president in recent weeks.
Another key takeaway from Robert Mueller's completed report:
Trump’s campaign ‘expected’ help from Russia but nobody conspired
The report concludes that Russia definitely interfered in the 2016 election, but there was no conspiring between those on Trump’s team and people connected to Russia – despite a number of “links” between individuals.
Here is what the report says: “[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Opinion: For months Donald Trump and his White House staff appeared to be losing the information game over the Mueller Report.
At times last year not a week seemed to go by without a former member of Trump’s election team or those close to him facing indictments, guilty pleas or court cases as part of the probe or its connected investigations. It only seemed a matter of time, amid regular angry tweets about the probe from the president, before the president found himself in hot water.
But the Justice Department, and by extension the White House, has been able to take back control of the narrative in a way that seemed extremely unlikely a few weeks ago.
Read more...
Here's a key portion of Robert Mueller's report - on page 157 - in which investigators explain Donald Trump's acts which "were capable of exerting undue influence" over the investigation.
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