Trump rails against asylum seekers and Mexico as Congress prepares to subpoena Mueller report
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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.
'WITCH HUNT!' Trump cashes in on Mueller report with merchandise range
Show all 6The 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.
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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.
Reminder 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.
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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