Trump news: Pelosi says Barr committed ‘crimes’ as house votes to force president to keep US in Paris climate agreement

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

Donald Trump's attorney general William Barr will not appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday as scheduled after enduring a torrid time before Democratic senators on Wednesday regarding his handling of the Mueller report.

“He’s trying to blackmail the committee... The administration cannot dictate the terms of our hearing in our hearing room,” said chairman Jerrold Nadler after Barr refused to be interviewed by lawyers in addition to committee members as part of the House hearing and declined to a handover a full, unredacted copy of the FBI special counsel’s 448-page dossier on Russian election hacking.

Barr was put to the sword by senators on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, who accused him of acting as President Trump’s human shield by shutting down possible obstruction of justice charges and called for his resignation after the existence of a letter written to him by Robert Mueller appeared to suggest he had lied to Congress during a previous appearance on 10 April.

Speaking after watching his Senate counterparts tear into Barr, Nadler had this to say:

Here's Andrew Buncombe and Clark Mindock.

If you missed Barr's four-hour appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, oh boy.

Despite the gathering being chaired by Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham, who opened proceedings by admitting with a smirk that he hadn't actually read the full Mueller report and launching into the saga of Hillary Clinton's emails, Barr found himself cornered by wolves.

The attorney general attempted to defend his four-page memo of 24 March, saying he was merely attempting to report the special counsel's verdict rather than shape the narrative, blaming the media for whipping up excitement and attempting to join Graham in turning the conversation back towards the origins of the FBI counter-intelligence probe by examining the Justice Department under Barack Obama.

But the Democrats were having none of it.

Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut was devastating here:

Hawaii's Mazie Hirono even more so:

But it was perhaps Barr's own hesitation over questions relating to seemingly elementary matters of ethics from the likes of Chris Coons of Delaware and 2020 presidential hopeful Kamala Harris that were most damning of all.

The attorney general, sweating and exhausted, was also frequently reduced to some fairly extreme hair-splitting in defence of the report's account of the president ordering his adviser Don McGahn to fire Robert Mueller (McGahn declined, potentially saving Trump's hide in the process).

Texas Republican Ted Cruz spoke for his party when he whined Barr was being given "the Kavanaugh treatment" but Barr can have few serious complaints even if he did call it "mind-bendingly bizarre" that he was there at all.

He knew what he was getting into when he took the job.

Afterwards the likes of Nadler and Blumenthal told the press Barr had to go.

But what about President Trump?

"He did a fantastic job today, I'm told. I got to see some of it. He did a fantastic job," he told Fox Business in a phone interview with Trish Regan, going on to accuse Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker (all potential 2020 presidential contenders) of "ranting and raving like lunatics".

"You have three of them running against me and they're up there ranting and raving like lunatics, frankly, and they're running, and how is that fair?" Trump said.

"So you have Bill Barr, highly respected, great attorney general, and he's got to take the abuse from people that are running for office,"

Harris is "probably very nasty", the president added, given that she - and Booker - had called for Barr to resign.

Trump also defended Barr's decision not to appear before the House Judiciary today, saying he believes "they want to treat him differently than they have anybody else."

"For many, many years, they've never done it this way where they're bringing in outside counsel or something, you know, you elect people they're supposed to be able to do their own talking," he said. 

You can tell the president is relaxed about it all because he spent his evening frantically retweeting clips from Fox, Judicial Watch and his son Eric in his favour.

President Trump's defeated 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, still the subject of many a Republican conspiracy theory, appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show last night and had plenty to say about Barr.

Here's Ahmed Baba for Indy Voices on why yesterday's hearing leaves William Barr without a stitch of credibility left.

Away from yesterday's sideshow on Capitol Hill, a new poll from Politico/Morning Consult suggests almost half of American voters believe President Trump's Twitter habit could cost him the 2020 election.

Forty-six percent of respondents said that they believe Trump's wild tweets - used to slam rivals, celebrities and foreign governments and even invent policy on the hoof - could cost him at the ballot box while 70 percent agreed he spends too much time on Twitter. Just 1 percent felt he tweets too little.

I wonder why so many believe the president's social media habit could be a liability?

In case you missed it amid all the Barr excitement, the White House yesterday requested a further $4.5bn (£3.4bn) from Congress to address the "crisis" at the southwestern border as it grapples with a surge of Central American migrant families seeking refuge in the US.

Most of the money requested would be used to increase shelter capacity and care for the migrant families who have been fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials said they would likely run out of money without the extra cash.

“DHS projects it will exhaust resources well before the end of the fiscal year,” read the administration’s formal request letter to Congress.

The request is just the latest in a flurry of efforts by the administration to cope with what it calls a “crisis” that officials say has overwhelmed federal resources and capacity. President Trump has railed against aides and Congress for failing to do more to address the situation, but has also made clear he believes his hard line on immigration was key to his 2016 victory and intends to continue to hammer the issue to motivate his base heading into his 2020 re-election campaign.

It also comes a day after a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy in the care of US Health and Human Services died after falling ill with a fever and chills. His death is under investigation. Two other children died in Customs and Border Protection custody late last year.

The 2019 fiscal year budget already contained $415m (£318m) for humanitarian assistance at the border, including $28m (£21m) in medical care, senior administration officials said on Wednesday.

But the White House now wants an extra $3.3bn (£2.5bn) to increase shelter capacity for unaccompanied migrant children and for the feeding and care of families, plus transportation and processing centres.

Of the new request, $1.1bn (£842m) would go toward operational support, including personnel expenses, detention beds, transportation and investigative work on smuggling. The remaining $178m (£136m) would be used for mission support, including technology upgrades.

It’s unclear, however, if Congress will approve the extra funding.

Getting Democrats and Republicans to agree on how to address the border situation has been a challenge, especially on the heels of the longest government shutdown in history over Trump’s demand for border wall funding. Trump eventually declared a national emergency declaration to circumvent Congress to get the funding elsewhere.

Senior administration officials, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorised to discuss the request by name, insisted the new money would not be used for border barriers and said the funds were different from those Trump has sought to access through his declaration of a national emergency.

The number of families and children arriving alone at the border is now outpacing the number of single adults, putting new strains on the immigration system. The US is on track to have as many as 1m cross this year, the highest number since the early 2000s, when most of those crossing were single men from Mexico looking for work.

Border stations were not constructed to handle such a large volume of children and families, and they have been pushed to the breaking point.

US Customs and Border Protection encountered 50,036 unaccompanied children during the last budget year, and so far this budget year there have been 35,898 children. Their average length of stay in a government shelter is 66 days, up from 59 during fiscal year 2018 and 40 in 2016′s fiscal year.

Customs and Border Protection on Tuesday encountered its largest group to date: 424 people, comprised mostly of children and families, in rural New Mexico.

Acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan said on Tuesday before a House subcommittee that his department was running out of money amid the spike and said officials would be submitting a supplemental request, but didn’t say for how much.

In a letter to House speaker Nancy Pelosi, Russell Vought, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the crisis was overwhelming the ability of the federal government to respond.

“The situation becomes more dire every day,” he wrote.

The official request also said the Department of Health and Human Services, which manages the care of migrant children who arrive alone or who are separated from their parents by DHS under certain circumstances, will exhaust its resources by June. The funding request includes $2.8bn (£2.1bn) to increase shelter capacity to about 23,600 total beds for unaccompanied children.

House Appropriations Committee chairwoman Nita Lowey, a New York Democrat, said her team would take a thorough look at the request, but blamed Trump’s administration for contributing to the crisis.

“As a country, we must do more to meet the needs of migrants - especially children and families - who are arriving in increasing numbers,” she said. “However, the Trump administration appears to want much of this $4.5bn (£3.4bn) emergency supplemental request to double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies.”

House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee chairwoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (Democrat-California), also weighed in, saying she would assess the administration’s funding request, while “fighting for policies that will keep our country secure while treating migrants fairly and humanely, and addressing the root causes of migration.”