Trump news: Congress could formally demand impeachment evidence from Mueller report as release deadline looms

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

Donald Trump's administration defied official advice in giving high-level security clearances to the president’s daughter and son-in-law, a White House whistleblower has said.

Security adviser Tricia Newbold wrote to the House Oversight Committee to say Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were among dozens of officials granted privileged access even though experts had recommended it be withheld over concerns about the nominees' backgrounds, ties to foreign powers or possible conflicts of interest.

She said President Donald Trump's former White House personnel security director, Carl Kline, personally overruled her judgments in the cases of two senior officials.

When Newbold tried to raise her concerns up the chain of command, she was at first ignored and then suspended without pay after being accused of not following policy regarding the scanning of PDF files. Hmmm.

"I would not be doing a service to myself, my country, or my children if I sat back knowing that the issues that we have could impact national security," a letter from committee chairman Elijah Cummings to White House lawyer Pat Cipollone quoted Newbold as saying.

"I feel that right now this is my last hope to really bring the integrity back into our office.

"I'm terrified of going back," she is quoted as saying in the letter.

Cummings said Newbold, "has come forward at great personal risk to warn Congress—and the nation—about the grave security risks she has been witnessing first-hand over the past two years."

"She has informed the Committee that during the Trump administration, she and other career officials adjudicated denials of dozens of applications for security clearances that were later overturned."

Cummings said he planned to subpoena Kline and warned that more subpoenas would be issued if the White House did not provide requested documents.

Here's Harry Cockburn with the full story.

Cummings' move was met with criticism by a member of his own committee, however.

Republican Jim Jordan issued a statement calling the letter a "partisan attack" that was "an excuse to go fishing through the personal files of dedicated public servants".

"The process by which this matter has so far progressed has been anything but fair," he said.

"The interview of Ms Newbold was conducted on a Saturday morning at 8.30am and Republicans on the committee were not informed of the interview's topic or witness until 3.30pm the day before, leaving little to no time to prepare."

President Trump has meanwhile resumed his attack on Puerto Rico regarding the amount of aid given to the island since Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Apparently disputing whether the island he even constituted a "place", the Donald's late-night tirade laid into local politicians as "incompetent" and "corrupt" and the mayor of San Jose, Carmen Yulin Cruz, as "crazed".

Annoyed at the deployment of US funds, the president argued the money could have been better spent helping farmers on the mainland.

Here's Tom Embury-Dennis to unpick the latest rant.

With President Trump's threat to close the US-Mexico border hanging in the air, politicians, business leaders and economists have come forward to warn of the dire economic consequences of doing so.

Shuttering the border would block incoming shipments of fruits and vegetables, TVs, medical devices and other products and cut off people who commute to their jobs or school or come across to go shopping, they say.

"Let's hope the threat is nothing but a bad April Fools' joke," said economist Dan Griswold at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia yesterday.

He said Trump's threat would be the "height of folly," noting that an average of 15,000 trucks and $1.6bn (£1.2bn) in goods cross the border every day. 

"If trade were interrupted, US producers would suffer crippling disruptions of their supply chains, American families would see prices spike for food and cars, and US exporters would be cut off from their third-largest market," he said. 

Trump brought up the possibility of closing ports of entry along the southern border Friday and revisited it in tweets over the weekend because of a surge of Central Americans migrants who are seeking asylum. Trump administration officials have said the influx is straining the immigration system to the breaking point.

Elected leaders from border communities stretching from San Diego to cities across Texas warned that havoc would ensue on both sides of the international boundary if the ports were closed. They were joined by the US Chamber of Commerce, which said such a step would inflict "severe economic harm." 

Millennials should be especially concerned. The affect on supplies of avocados, America's favourite health food, would be disastrous. Not that President Trump would care. He prefers a Big Mac.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration said yesterday as many as 2,000 US inspectors who screen cargo and vehicles at ports of entry along the Mexican border may be reassigned to help handle the surge of migrants. Currently, about 750 inspectors are being reassigned. 

That, too, could slow the movement of trucks and people across the border. 

Instead of ensuring the flow of goods across the border, the inspectors are being put to work processing migrants, taking their applications for asylum and transporting them to holding centers. 

Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the reassignments are necessary to help manage the huge influx that is overloading the system. 

"The crisis at our border is worsening, and DHS will do everything in its power to end it," Nielsen said. 

In addition to reassigning inspectors, Nielsen has asked for volunteers from non-immigration agencies within her department and sent a letter to Congress requesting resources and broader authority to deport families faster. The administration is also ramping up efforts to return asylum seekers to Mexico. 

Apprehensions all along the southern border have soared in recent months, with border agents on track to make 100,000 arrests and denials of entry there in March, more than half of them families with children.

In addition to threatening to shut down the southern border, President Trump is understood to be considering bringing on a "border" or "immigration czar" to co-ordinate immigration policy across various federal agencies. 

Trump is weighing at least two potential candidates for the post: former Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach and former Virginia attorney-general Ken Cuccinelli.

Kobach and Cuccinelli are far-right conservatives with strong views on immigration. Cuccinelli was seen at the White House on Monday. 

Yesterday ex-FBI director James Comey hinted on Twitter he was considering running for the presidency in 2020 to avenge his sacking by Donald Trump in May 2017.

  The post recalled his cod-poetic response to the Barr letter, when he posted a shot of himself wandering around a redwood forest staring up at the trees with the caption, "So many questions".

Not particularly surprisingly, his latest turned out to be an April Fool's Day prank.

Here's Chris Riotta on a lost soul.

Here's a nice little stat to mark the president passing the 800-day mark in the Oval Office: he currently averages 22 lies or inaccuracies per day.

Imagine that. One lie has been enough to sink an entire administration in the past but Trump is such a runaway train of wild rhetoric and insinuation he keeps on getting away with it - his opponents simply can't keep up.

More on White House whistleblower Tricia Newbold, who yesterday returned to work for the Trump administration as usual, just days after denouncing her employers to the House Oversight Committee.

One can only imagine how awkward that was.