Trump news - LIVE: White House refuses to rule out Manafort pardon as Pelosi suggests impeachment 'too divisive'

Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders gave her first briefing in 42 days yesterday and faced a barrage of difficult questions from the assembled correspondents.

MSNBC reporter Hallie Jackson pressed Ms Sanders to state: "Yes or no, does the president truly believe that Democrats hate Jews?"

Predictably, she refused to give an explicit answer to a question born from the president's remarks made on the South Lawn on Friday morning before he set out for Alabama to the effect that the opposition were "an anti-Israel, an anti-Jewish party". Mr Trump was seemingly seeking to capitalise on divisions within the Democrats exposed by congresswoman Ilhan Omar's comments about what she regards as the undue influence of Israeli lobbyists in Washington.

This answer on why President Trump had not condemned Republican representative Steve King of Iowa for his praise of white supremacists also left something to be desired:

Perhaps of greater consequence, Ms Sanders also refused to say that Mr Trump would not grant a presidential pardon to his ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort, sentenced to 47 months in prison by a court in Virginia last week for bank and tax fraud, crimes uncovered by Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

He is due for further sentencing in Washington on Wednesday over a second case in which he plead guilty to conspiracy against the US and obstruction of justice through witness-tampering.

“The president has made his position on that clear – he’ll make a decision when he’s ready,” Ms Sanders said on the pardoning question.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, also overseeing the case of Trump campaign consultant Roger Stone, could give Manafort an additional 10 years behind bars.

Ms Sanders was also confronted with a difficult question about Michael Cohen and the president's "hush money" payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Asked why the president had reimbursed his former lawyer with a cheque for $35,000 (£26,500) written in office and whether he had done so as part of "a conspiracy to conceal campaign-finance violations", the press secretary answered: "The president has been clear that there wasn’t campaign-finance violations."

"So you’re saying that the president didn‘t know about these violations?" the reporter countered.

"Again, I would refer you back to the president’s comments, that’s not something I’m a part of, and I would refer you to the president’s outside counsel [Rudy Giuliani] beyond his comments," she deflected.

"Does the White House deny that the president is Individual 1?" the reporter persisted.

"Again I am not going to comment on an ongoing case that’s not something I would be a part of here at the White House. What I can tell you is that the president has stated his position and made it clear," Ms Sanders answered before quickly departing the podium.

With the slew of congressional investigations into the president's affairs still simmering in the background and Robert Mueller's Russia report set to land on the desk of attorney-general William Barr any day now, Donald Trump is continuing to feel the heat.

But yesterday House speaker Nancy Pelosi disappointed many of the president's opponents when she told The Washington Post impeachment was something he shouldn't have to worry about.

“I’m not for impeachment. This is news. I’m going to give you some news right now because I haven’t said this to any press person before", she said. 

"But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

That last line... ooof.

Donald Trump's new 2020 budget request - including an $8.6bn (£6.6bn) provision for the construction of his US-Mexico border wall, a $3bn (£2.3bn) increase on his last estimate for the job - was lambasted by the opposition when it was unveiled yesterday.

"A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First" sees the White House proposing $2.7trn (£2trn) in spending cuts for the year beginning 1 October, a reduction of 5 percent across all non-defence agencies as military funding is boosted to $750bn (£577bn). It also contains a $32.5bn (£24.6bn) pledge towards beefing up border security and $478m (£362m) to hire 1,750 Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

During the recent 35-day government shutdown, the president demanded $5.7bn (£4.4bn) to build his wall but the Democrats stood firm and refused the request, prompting Mr Trump to yield, sign a spending bill pledging just $1.4bn (£1.1bn) towards the project and then declare a national emergency on the "crisis" of illegal immigration at the southern border.

This allowed him to invoke emergency powers and reallocate as much as $8.1bn (£6.2bn) in federal funding without consulting Congress, a move that has already been the subject of a resolution of disapproval in the House of Representatives and which will face a vote in the Senate this week. Taken together, the president appears to be seeking access to a whopping $16.7bn (£12.8bn) for the construction of the wall, although it is highly unlikely he'll ever get his hands on anything like that amount.

Vermont senator and 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was particularly scathing about the new budget plan: "The Trump budget is breathtaking in its degree of cruelty and filled with broken promises.

"This is a budget for the military industrial complex, for corporate CEOs, for Wall Street and for the billionaire class. It is dead on arrival. We don’t need billions of dollars for a wall that no one wants. We need a budget that works for all Americans, not just Donald Trump and his billionaire friends at Mar-a-Lago."

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was not much kinder: "The Trump administration’s latest budget proposal is a gut-punch to the American middle class and a handout to the wealthiest few and powerful special interests that would worsen income inequality. Its proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and social security, as well as numerous other middle-class programmes, are devastating, but not surprising."

Here's Andrew Buncombe.

Mr Trump's Twitter account was quieter than usual yesterday but he did take to social media to pressure Republican senators not to humour that disapproval resolution over his national emergency declaration when it reaches the upper chamber.

The resolution opposing the measure sailed through the Democrat-controlled House 245-182 and four Republican senators - Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul and Thom Tillis - have already said they will support it.

He also, of course, continued to rage about the widespread mockery of his "Tim Apple" gaffe last week. Let it go Don...

Nigel Farage (remember him?) told Donald Trump he should back a no-deal Brexit when the pair met in Washington earlier this month.

That's all we need.

A new book claims Ivanka Trump insisted, "My dad's not racist; he didn't mean any of it", over his comments on there having been "violence on many sides" at the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 at which anti-fascist protester Heather Heyer was run over and killed by neo-Nazis.

Kushner Inc by journalist Vicky Ward recounts the story of Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner's rise to power.

The US is withdrawing all of its diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, secretary of state Mike Pompeo has announced, as the South American nation remains mired  in blackout, a phenomenon branded an "electric coup" staged by Washington by incumbent president Nicolas Maduro.

 His opponent, self-declared president Juan Guaido, has called for further street demonstrations to oust Mr Maduro.

Senior Democratic congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky has disagreed with Nancy Pelosi's remarks about impeaching Donald Trump.

"To me it's not a question of 'whether,' it's a question of 'when,' and probably right now is not the right time, but I think at some point it's going to be inevitable," he told CNN's OutFront with Erin Burnett.