Trump news: House votes to take Barr and McGahn to court, as president launches bizarre tirade over European tourism

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

The House Judiciary Committee has struck a deal with the Justice Department to gain access to redacted interview notes from FBI special counsel Robert Mueller, including “first-hand accounts of misconduct” relating to Donald Trump, in exchange for not immediately pursing a contempt of Congress action against attorney general William Barr.

A full session of the House of Representatives will still vote as planned on Tuesday on a resolution making it easier to sue the administration and potential witnesses if they refuse to comply with congressional subpoenas, as ex-White House counsel Don McGahn did when asked to give testimony before the Judiciary Committee on whether the president attempted to obstruct justice.

McGahn's refusal was advised by the White House and was part of a campaign by the Trump administration to stonewall investigations into the president by House Democrats in the wake of Barr's determining the report reached a "no collusion" verdict in late March.

McGahn was frequently cited in the 448-page Mueller report, in which its author recorded at least 10 instances in which the president could be said to have obstructed justice, including one in which Trump floated the idea of having Mueller fired, only for McGahn to push back against the idea, therein saving the president from further scandal and probable impeachment.

The Justice Department will continue to cooperate with the committee under their agreement as long as Democrats hold off on their Barr contempt vote, spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.

The vote scheduled on Tuesday will see the Democratic-controlled House consider a measure that would increase pressure on Trump by allowing the Judiciary Committee to sue the administration in federal court if needed over access to the report, effectively empowering it to enforce any further supoenas it might issue.

Chairman Jerrold Nadler said a lawsuit may yet be necessary and added that Tuesday's vote may force McGahn, who resigned in August 2018, to testify.

As part of the Trump camp's vow to fight back against congressional investigations, Barr has said he is required by law not to release evidence obtained from grand jury proceedings and grand jury materials were redacted from the section of the report dealing with Russian interference in the election.

But this was less of a concern for the section of Mueller's report dealing with obstruction, which was based on testimony from voluntary interviews Trump advisers and other witnesses gave to Mueller, rather than grand jury testimony.

Representative Doug Collins, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said the agreement indicated the Trump administration was not stonewalling Congress, adding that Democrats should focus on the threat from Russia.

"Democrats are abandoning their duty to confront foreign interference in our elections in favor of drawing out their slanderous campaign against the president," he said.

On Monday, the Judiciary Committee heard from McGahn's historic predecessor, John Dean, former counsel to Richard Nixon, who said the Mueller report was President Trump's version of the “Watergate road map” that brought about the downfall of his former employer.

Dean was accused of orchestrating the cover-up of the Watergate scandal, before turning on his former boss and telling Congress in 1973 that President Nixon had known about it, setting in motion his resignation in disgrace a year later.

Dean told the panel there were parallels between Mueller's investigative report, released in redacted form in mid-April, and the 1974 "road map" in which a special prosecutor laid out the case against Nixon.

"Mueller has provided this committee with a road map," he said.

Dean struck a cool and ironic presence in Washington, patiently recapping storied episodes from Watergate like the Saturday Night Massacre to explain their parallels with the present day and making a fool out of Florida Republican and recently-milkshaked Trump apologist Matt Gaetz when he tried to accuse Dean of running a "cottage industry" profiting off his notoriety.

President Trump was particularly angered by the Democrats calling on John Dean, labelling him a "sleazebag attorney".

He continued his attack before reporters on Monday, saying Dean has been "a loser for many years" and attempting to explain the difference between himself and Nixon.

The Judiciary Committee's temporarily suspended pursuit of Barr and McGahn is not the only contempt resolution under consideration from House Democrats.

Elijah Cummings, Democratic chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is also considering holding Barr and commerce secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt over their alleged attempts to politicise the 2020 US Census by adding a controversial citizenship question that its late architect, Tom Hofeller, promised would be "advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites".

"Both Secretary Ross and Attorney General Barr are refusing to comply with duly authorised subpoenas from Congress," Cummings said.

"Because they are in contempt of Congress, on Wednesday, the committee will vote to move forward to enforce our bipartisan subpoenas."

Here's more from Andrew Buncombe.

President Trump will visit the crucial 2020 state of Iowa this afternoon to speak on renewable energy in the city of Council Bluffs and attend a Republican party dinner in Des Moines.

Also visiting the sprawling Midwestern farming state and home of Slipknot is his likely challenger Joe Biden, who is currently under fire for suggesting Republicans will be far more willing to work with Democrats once Trump is out of office and their moral compasses are set right.

"With Trump gone you’re going to begin to see things change,” Biden told a Daily Beast reporter. “Because these folks know better. They know this isn’t what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on a front-runner branded "deluded" by his peers.

Another front in the investigative war between Congress and the president is, of course, the battle for Donald Trump's financial records.

The commander-in-chief asked an appeals court on Monday to overturn a ruling that his longstanding accounting firm Mazars must turn over all documents from before he took office to the aforementioned Democratic-controlled House Oversight Committee.

Lawyers for Trump said in a court filing that a 20 May decision by US district judge Amit Mehta ordering the company to comply with the subpoena was flawed and should be reversed.

Mehta's ruling was the first time a federal court waded into the tussle about how far Congress can go in probing Trump and his business affairs and marked an important victory for House Democrats.

"It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct - past or present - even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry," Mehta said in his ruling.

The House of Representatives' Oversight Committee has said it needs Trump's financial records to examine whether he has conflicts of interest or broke the law by not disentangling himself from his business holdings, as previous presidents did.

Chairman Cummings issued the subpoena to Mazars after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in February that Trump had misrepresented his net worth.

Trump's lawyers said in Monday's filing that the subpoena was invalid because it was never intended to help Congress perform its core constitutional role of making laws.

"The committee admits that the whole point is to discover whether the President may have engaged in illegal conduct," Trump's lawyers said. "It is an effort to investigate alleged legal violations pf power that is vested in the executive, not Congress."

The president's attorneys told the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit that if it affirmed Mehta's ruling, it would be endorsing a "limitless" view of the congressional power to investigate.

The Trump Organization, the president's privately owned real estate company, is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. Trump is suing in his individual capacity and is represented by a private law firm rather than government lawyers from the US Department of Justice.

Mazars has avoided taking a side in the dispute, saying it will comply with its legal obligations.

Despite its unexpected decision to cooperate with the House Judiciary Committee, William Barr's Justice Department is pressing ahead with its retaliatory review of the origins of the FBI's Russia investigation, promising it will be "broad in scope and multi-faceted".

Intelligence agencies have already been asked to preserve records and make witnesses available, according to a letter sent to Congress on Monday. Quite why anyone should feel compelled to comply given the precedent for stonewalling they've set is beyond me.

Barr said last month that he had directed John Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut and a veteran prosecutor, to determine if law enforcement and intelligence authorities engaged in improper surveillance as they investigated potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election. 

"It is now well-established that, in 2016, the US government and others undertook certain intelligence-gathering and investigative steps directed at persons associated with the Trump campaign," said the letter from assistant attorney general Stephen Boyd, the department's top liaison to Congress. 

"As the attorney general has stated publicly at congressional hearings and elsewhere, there remain open questions relating to the origins of this counter-intelligence investigation and the US and foreign intelligence activities that took place prior to and during that investigation," the letter said. 

The point of the review, Boyd added, "is to more fully understand the efficacy and propriety of those steps" and to answer open questions for the attorney general. 

Barr has repeatedly said he believes there was "spying" on the Trump campaign, language President Donald Trump has seized on to support his claims that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was a "witch hunt." Barr has said he doesn't yet know if the "spying" was improper, but he has been unsatisfied with the answers he has received. 

He has not elaborated on what specific surveillance he is troubled by. The FBI did obtain a secret warrant in 2016 from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor the communications of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. That application was renewed several times. 

Durham and his team will be working primarily out of Washington, with the Justice Department making existing office space available for the work, Boyd wrote to Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler. 

Though the White House has granted Barr the authority to declassify documents, the Justice Department sought to assuage concerns that he would abuse that power, with Boyd saying the attorney general would prevent from disclosure information that could expose sources and methods or harm US national security interests. 

Trump is being laughed at for the tweet below, in which he reveals his ongoing obsession with approval ratings.

Here's Conrad Duncan for Indy100 on the many brutal memes it has been met with.

Remember Don Jr and Eric receiving a hero's welcome in Doonbeg in Ireland last week when they put their card behind the bar?

It turns out they never paid the tab and the owner of the Igoe bar, Caroline Kennedy, was forced to send the bill over to the president's nearby golf resort.

Here's Greg Evans with the full story.