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

Here's a few choice cuts from Indy Voices on the Donald.

Carli Pierson argues the president's complete lack of understanding of Central America is dangerous.

Eric Lewis meanwhile cautions us not to allow ourselves to become distracted by the entertainment value President Trump provides. 

The Trump administration has announced it will give $5.1m (£3.9m) in family planning funds to a chain of crisis pregnancy centres that oppose abortion and do not offer contraceptives.

The Obria Group, a southern California-based non-profit that describes itself as being "led by God", seeks to take both patients and money away from Planned Parenthood.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which announced the grant on Friday, simultaneously announced it was cutting funds to some Planned Parenthood affiliates. 

Here's our women's correspondent, Maya Oppenheim.

Kellyanne Conway's husband George is trolling president Trump again, this time over a plaque installed on the first completed section of his border wall last October.

Trump is due to visit Calexico in California on Friday to survey the scene of his national emergency, the fifth time he has done so since taking office.

Here’s a little more on those two candidates to be Trump’s “immigration czar”.

First up, Kris Kobach.

He was the secretary of state for Kansas between 2011 and 2019 and last year ran for governor, losing out to Democrat Laura Kelly.

Kobach has become notorious for his hard-line anti-immigration stance, zero-tolerance approach to undocumented migrants and for regularly calling for stronger voter ID laws and even a Muslim registry.

He wrote for Breitbart in 2017 suggesting that immigrants were disproportionately responsible for crime and cited remarks by white supremacist Peter Gemma to make his case. He has also been accused of accepting campaign donations from white nationalist groups.

Fixated on the issue of voter fraud, he purged almost 20,000 registered voters from Kansas’s rolls as secretary of state and secured nine convictions, winning the admiration of the conspiracy-minded President Trump, whom Kobach backed on his demand that Barack Obama release his birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii and not Kenya.

The president appointed him vice-chairman to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to address voter fraud on 11 May 2017, which was duly dissolved on 3 January 2018 after states refused to co-operate with its demands for data.

Kobach has also earned anywhere between $150,000 (£115,000) and $800,000 (£613,000) whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria across small-town America, according to Splinter.

A former mayor of Valley Park, Missouri, Grant Young, described Kobach’s modus operandi to The Kansas City Star and ProPublica as “ambulance chasing.”

“Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time,” Young said of Kobach's methods.

Nice guy!

And then there's Ken Cuccinelli, another failed gubernatorial candidate.

As a Virginia state senator in 2008, he introduced legislation that would have allowed local businesses to fire employees and nullify their unemployment benefits if their spoken English was not up to scratch.

Democratic state Senate leader Richard Saslaw called Cuccinelli’s proposal “the most mean-spirited piece of legislation I have seen in my 30 years down here.”

As Virginia's attorney-general between 2010 and 2014, Cuccinelli issued a legal opinion authorising law enforcement officials to investigate the immigration status of anyone they choose to stop.

He also intervened on university campuses regarding gay rights: "It is my advice that the law and public policy of the Commonwealth of Virginia prohibit a college or university from including 'sexual orientation,' 'gender identity,' 'gender expression,' or like classification, as a protected class within its nondiscrimination policy, absent specific authorisation from the General Assembly."

Virginia Democratic State Senator John Edwards responded to the latter verdict by saying Cuccinelli was "turning back the clock on civil rights in Virginia."

The House Judiciary Committee will prepare subpoenas this week seeking special counsel Robert Mueller's full Russia report as the Justice Department appears likely to miss today's deadline set by Democrats for the report's release. 

The Judiciary panel plans to vote on subpoenas Wednesday, a day after the deadline. The chairmen of several House committees asked for the full, unredacted report last week after attorney-general William Barr released a four-page summary laying out the report's "principal conclusions." Barr said in a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary committees on Friday that a redacted version of the full 300 page report would be released by mid-April, "if not sooner." 

The planned committee vote, announced on Monday morning, would not automatically issue subpoenas but authorise House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler to send them if he decides to do so. 

"As I have made clear, Congress requires the full and complete special counsel report, without redactions, as well as access to the underlying evidence," Nadler said in a statement. "Attorney-General Barr has thus far indicated he will not meet the 2 April deadline set by myself and five other committee chairs, and refused to work with us to provide the full report, without redactions, to Congress." 

The vote comes as Democrats are escalating their battle with the Justice Department over how much of the report they will be able to see - a fight that could eventually end up in court. Democrats have said they will not accept redactions and will almost certainly be unhappy with the amount of information provided by Barr when the department releases the report in the coming weeks. 

The panel will also vote Wednesday to authorise subpoenas related to a number of President Trump's former top advisers, including strategist Steve Bannon, communications director Hope Hicks, chief of staff Reince Priebus, White House counsel Don McGahn and counsel Ann Donaldson. Donaldson served as McGahn's chief of staff before both left the administration. 

The five were key witnesses in Mueller's probe of possible obstruction of justice and were sent document requests by the Judiciary panel last month. Nadler said he is concerned about reports that documents relevant to Mueller's investigation "were sent outside the White House," waiving executive privilege rights that would block document production. 

"To this end, I have asked the committee to authorise me to issue subpoenas, if necessary, to compel the production of documents and testimony," Nadler said.

Nadler sent requests to 81 people connected to Trump's political and personal dealings as he launched a wide-ranging investigation into possible obstruction of justice, public corruption and abuses of power. 

Barr said in the letter Friday that 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 all of that information, even if some of it can't be disclosed to the public. They are citing precedents from previous investigations involving presidents and also information disclosed about the Russia investigation to Republicans last year when they held the House majority. 

If the committee does issue subpoenas, the path forward is uncertain. If the administration decides to fight, lawmakers could ask federal courts to step in and enforce a subpoena - a fight that could, in theory, reach the Supreme Court. Generally such disputes are instead resolved through negotiations. 

The Democrats could also formally ask Mueller to send the Judiciary committee evidence that could be used in possible impeachment proceedings against Trump. But House speaker Nancy Pelosi, backed by the majority of her caucus, has said she's not currently supportive of impeachment. 

Barr wrote in his summary that the special counsel did not find that Trump's campaign "conspired or coordinated" with the Russian government to influence the 2016 presidential election. He said Mueller reached no conclusion on whether Trump obstructed the federal investigation, instead setting out "evidence on both sides" of the question. 

Barr himself went further than Mueller in his summary letter, declaring that Mueller's evidence was insufficient to prove in court that Trump had committed obstruction of justice to hamper the probe. 

Democrats say they want to know much more about both conclusions and they want to see the evidence unfiltered by Barr. 

Republicans have said the Democratic demands are overreach. 

"Judiciary Democrats have escalated from setting arbitrary deadlines to demanding unredacted material that Congress does not, in truth, require and that the law does not allow to be shared outside the Justice Department," said Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary committee. 

Having sown the seeds of outrage last night, the president's up and inspecting his crop.

Haha! "The best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico is President Donald J Trump." I suspect the locals might disagree with that statement.

I think this sums it up nicely.

Here's Trump going after House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler, emerging as another prominent antagonist post-Barr.