Trump news: Congress votes to subpoena full Mueller report from attorney-general, as senior Republicans turn on president's 'catastrophic' border closure plan
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The House Judiciary Committee approved subpoenas Wednesday for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full Russia report as Democrats pressure the Justice Department to release the document without redactions.
The committee voted 24-17 to give Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler permission to issue subpoenas to the Justice Department for the final report, its exhibits and any underlying evidence or materials prepared for the investigation.
Mr Nadler has not yet said if he’ll send the subpoenas, which would be the first step in a potentially long fight with the Justice Department over the materials.
The Judiciary panel also voted Wednesday to authorise subpoenas related to five of Donald Trump’s former top advisers, stepping up a separate, wide-ranging investigation into Trump and his personal and political dealings.
The vote further escalates the Democrats’ battle with the Justice Department over how much of the report they will be able to see, a fight that could eventually head to court if the two sides can’t settle their differences through negotiation. Democrats have said they will not accept redactions and want to see the evidence unfiltered by Mr Barr.
In the letter last week, Mr Barr said 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 access to all of that information, even if some of it can’t be disclosed to the public. Nadler said he will give Mr Barr time to change his mind on redactions, but if they cannot reach an agreement they will issue the subpoenas “in very short order.” He also said he is prepared to go to court to get the grand jury information.
Mr Trump is meanwhile being urged not to follow through on his threat to close the US border with Mexico as senior Republicans warn of the cost of prioritising security over trade and scramble for alternatives to tackling the illegal immigration “crisis”.
“Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing,” said Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday, a quote the president has since attacked The New York Times for publishing on Twitter.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load.
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
President Trump repeated his threat to close the US border with Mexico yesterday, telling reporters attending a Q&A he held alongside Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg that he priorities security over trade.
Urging Mexico to do more to tackle the "crisis" of illegal immigration on its side of the fence, the president said: "Let's see if they keep it done. Now, if they don't, or if we don't make a deal with Congress, the border's going to be closed, 100 percent."
He also said that he might only close "large sections of the border" and "not all of it", a significant climb-down, adding his posturing was "the only way we're getting a response."
But senior Republicans are a good deal less keen on the idea than the president, economists warning the measure would block 15,000 trucks and $1.6bn (£1.2bn) in goods crossing the border every day.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday: "Closing down the border would have potentially catastrophic economic impact on our country and I would hope we would not be doing that sort of thing."
Officials across the Trump administration are meanwhile understood to be exploring half-measures that might satisfy the president's urge for drastic action, like stopping only foot traffic at certain crossings, rather than going through with a full shutdown.
Later on Tuesday, homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held an emergency call with Cabinet members and White House aides, reportedly declaring, "We are going to treat it as if we have been hit by a Category 5 hurricane."
Nielsen was creating an emergency operations centre and named US Border Patrol official Manny Padilla as an operational crisis coordinator to manage the response from within the different immigration agencies at the Department of Homeland Security. Padilla is a 30-year Border Patrol veteran and was recently the head of the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Texas.
His job will be different from that of the immigration or "border czar" that Trump is apparently considering appointing.
White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow in turn told CNBC he's been looking at alternatives to shutting the border, including potentially keeping truck lanes open.
"We are looking at different options, particularly if you can keep those freight lanes, the truck lanes, open," he said. As for the hundreds of thousands of tourists and workers who cross the border legally, Kudlow said, "that may be difficult."
Earlier on Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders had told reporters that, while, "Eventually, it may be that it's the best decision that we close the border," the president was "not working on a specific timeline" and all options remained on the table.
The Council of Economic Advisers, she said, was conducting a number of studies on the impact, and "working with the president to give him those options."
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in an appearance on MSNBC that closing only certain entry ports, or parts of all of them, could be among the steps short of closing the entire border.
It was a shift from Trump's threat late last week to seal the whole border, and quickly. "I am not kidding around," he said then, exasperated by the swelling numbers of migrants, thousands of whom were being released into the US because border officials had no space for them.
Arrests along the southern border have skyrocketed in recent months and border agents were on track to make 100,000 arrests or denials of entry in March, a 12-year high. More than half of those are families with children, who require extra care.
With southern border facilities near a breaking point, US officials are busing many migrants hundreds of miles inland and dropping them off at bus stations and churches. Trump has mocked and vowed to end that "catch and release" practice but overwhelmed authorities saw no choice.
Responding to Trump's threats, Nielsen rushed home late on Monday night from Europe, where she was attending G7 security meetings and intended to fly to the border mid-week to assess the impact of changes already made, including reassigning some 2,000 border officers assigned to check vehicles to deal with migrant crowds and new efforts to return more asylum seekers to Mexico as they wait out their case.
Officials were hoping to have as many as 300 asylum seekers returned to Mexico per day by the end of the week near Calexico and El Paso in Texas and San Ysidro in California. Right now, only 60 per day are returned.
Nielsen has also requested volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress seeking more money and detention space and broader authority to deport families faster. The request was met with disdain by Democrats.
Even absent the extraordinary step of sealing a national border, delays at border stations have been mounting due to the personnel reassignments, Homeland Security officials said. When the Otay Mesa, California, entry port closed for the night Monday, 150 trucks were still waiting to get into the US.
Shutting certain border stations or parts of them would not be unprecedented. Over the Thanksgiving holiday last year, Trump claimed he'd already "closed the border" after officials briefly closed the northbound lanes at San Ysidro, California, for several hours in the early morning to bolster security because of concerns about a potential influx of migrant caravan members.
Mexican officials announced on Monday they'd pulled 338 Central American migrants - 181 adults and 157 children - off five passenger buses in a southern state that borders Guatemala, and said they had detained 15 possible smugglers on immigration law violations. But that was not unusual for Mexico, which has for years been cracking down on migration.
In 2014 then-President Enrique Pena Nieto launched a programme that was described as ensuring orderly migration but in practice resulted in making it much more difficult for Central Americans to transit.
The House Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Wednesday to subpoena FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's full report and underlying evidence from his investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
If the motion passes, it would be a marked escalation of congressional pressure on the Trump administration to hand over all that Mueller documented during his 22-month probe, including grand jury evidence.
Congressmen were expected to vote along party lines to authorise the panel's Democratic chairman, Jerrold Nadler, to subpoena Mueller's material, as well as documents and testimony from five former Trump aides, including one-time political adviser Steve Bannon and ex-White House counsel Don McGahn.
The committee's focus shifted to subpoenas when it became clear that attorney-general William Barr would ignore a Democratic demand for him to turn over the full report by 2 April. Barr has pledged to share a redacted copy of the nearly 400-page report with Congress and the public by mid-April, if not sooner.
Democrats, who hold a seven-seat majority on the 41-member Judiciary Committee, fear that Barr could use redactions to suppress evidence of potential misconduct by Trump and his campaign that could be vital to their congressional oversight agenda.
Barr's 24 March summary of the Mueller report said the special counsel did not establish that Trump campaign officials conspired with Russia during the presidential election but also did not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice. Barr also said Mueller's team had not found enough proof to warrant bringing obstruction charges against the president.
Trump has long denied any collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice. Moscow says it did not try to interfere in the election, even though US intelligence agencies concluded that it secretly trying to sway US voters in Trump's favour.
A subpoena would open up a new legal front against the Trump administration by Democrats who won control of the House in last year's congressional elections. But it is not clear if the Justice Department would simply hand over all the documents they now seek. The department could ignore the subpoena, running the risk of being held in contempt of Congress and prepare for a lengthy battle in the courts.
Democrats have pledged to fight all the way to the US Supreme Court to enforce a subpoena and obtain the full report.
"We need that report turned over. Look at every prior case of independent counsel and special counsel, they've turned over the entire report within a day or two," said Representative Jamie Raskin, a House Judiciary Democrat. "What's taking place here is a sharp break from precedent."
It was not clear when Nadler might start issuing subpoenas, if authorised to do so.
Trump yesterday took a dig at Jerrold Nadler and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, one of the president's strongest critics in Congress about the Russia investigation.
Republicans contend that Barr is being transparent under Justice Department regulations adopted after former President Bill Clinton's impeachment in the 1990s, which allow the attorney-general to be circumspect in what he releases. They also contend that Democrats are seeking grand jury material that federal law precludes the Justice Department from sharing.
"It's unfortunate that a body meant to uphold the law has grown so desperate that it's patently misrepresenting the law," Representative Doug Collins, the committee's top Republican, said this week.
The committee was due to meet to consider the subpoena resolution after Nadler and five other Democratic House oversight committee chairs wrote to Barr, giving him one last chance to produce an unredacted Mueller report.
In addition to McGahn and Bannon, the committee was expected to authorise subpoenas for former White House communications director Hope Hicks, former chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House deputy counsel Ann Donaldson.
The five former Trump aides were among 81 people, agencies and other entities that received document requests on 4 March as part of the committee's obstruction and corruption investigation of Trump and his associates.
All of which is weighty stuff but, frankly, not as entertaining as the president's frequent gaffes in his Q&A with Stoltenberg.
His failure to pronounce the word "origins" was weird enough...
...But his claim that his father was born in Germany and not, er, New York City was even more bizarre.
He was surely thinking of his roguish grandfather, Frederick Drumpf, but it's an extraordinary point to be confused about.
He managed to top even these eccentric errors later in the day when he attended the National Republican Congressional Committee Spring Dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington and claimed windmills give you cancer.
It's not even 10am and I already need a lie down in a darkened room.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on the "oranges of the investigation".
And here's Chris Riotta on that extraordinary mix-up regarding Fred Trump, the fourth time it has cropped up.
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