Trump news: Attorney General interrogated by Congress over 'unanswered questions' in Mueller report, as Republicans round on president over 'mess'

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

Senior Republicans have rounded on Donald Trump over the state of the Department of Homeland Security after Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out on Sunday.

Nielsen endured a torrid relationship with Donald Trump after taking the job in December 2017. He would reportedly "regularly berate" her in the early hours of the morning over illegal immigration statistics, border security being an issue he felt was of core importance to his support base, hence his determination to get a US-Mexico border wall built at any cost and his invoking emergency powers of office to get it done.

Nielsen had reluctantly supported some of the administration's more hard-line policies towards asylum seekers and will go down in history as the official who cruelly separated migrant children from their families at the border.

In leaving office, she becomes the sixteenth member of the Trump hierarchy to be dismissed a little over 800 days into the president's tenure. Her temporary replacement, Kevin McAleenan, becomes the fifth person to hold a cabinet position at present in an "acting" capacity only. Donald Trump does not currently have a permanent chief of staff or secretary of defence.

"It’s a mess," Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas said. "Strikes me as just a frustration of not being able to solve a problem. Honestly, it wasn’t Secretary Nielsen’s fault. It wasn’t for lack of effort on her part. I don’t know if there’s anybody who’s going to be able to do more."

“I thought that Nielsen was doing a fantastic job,” added Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “I would love to see some continuity. I think that’s important.”

Veteran Senator Chuck Grassley, who last week branded Trump "idiotic" over his claim the noise from windmills cause cancer, expressed his concerns that further departmental departures would follow, naming US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Lee Francis Cissna and Kathy Nuebel Kovarik as likely heads to roll.

"I heard that they are on the list to be fired," Grassley said. "They are doing in an intellectual-like way what the president wants to accomplish. So no, they should not go."

Here's Chris Baynes's report

Other major concerns causing disquiet include the ever-growing influence behind the scenes of Stephen Miller, a 33-year-old senior policy aide known for his hard-line anti-immigration stance (despite his mother’s family having emigrated to the US from Belarus in the early 20th century to escape antisemitic pogroms).

Senator Grassley told CNN's Seung Min Kim: “I think it would be hard for him to demonstrate he’s accomplished anything for the president.”

Here's an introduction to this extraordinarily heartless figure, described by one of his own colleagues to Vanity Fair as, "A twisted guy... He's Waffen-SS".

Republicans are also concerned about Donald Trump reportedly encouraging agents working at the US-Mexico border to deny asylum seekers entry, an action that would have violated US law.

The idea was suggested by the president at a White House meeting on 21 March at which Nielsen, Jared Kushner, White House lawyer Pat Cipollone and advisers Dan Scavino and Mercedes Schlapp were all present.

He also ordered Nielsen to close the border by the Texas town of El Paso but was eventually talked down after "ranting and raving", according to CNN.

"We’re full, our system’s full, our country’s full - can’t come in!” Trump told the crowd during his visit to a border wall construction site in Calexico, California, on Friday.

He reportedly took the opportunity to tell border agents to defy the objections of judges on the matter.

The agents apparently waited for the president to depart before turning to their superiors for guidance.

Here's Zamira Rahim's report.

Even constitutional conservatives are alarmed by the president's seeming impatience with and indifference to the rule of law.

But the legal establishment is fighting back.

US district judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco yesterday wrote a 27-page ruling blocking the Trump administration from requiring asylum seekers to return to Mexico as they await court hearings in the US. 

Judge Seeborg ruled that current US law does not authorise the Department of Homeland Security to enact the Migrant Protection Protocols, announced by the outgoing Nielsen in December 2018.

He said the US had no right to return asylum seekers "to places where they face undue risk to their lives or freedom".

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other advocacy groups on behalf of 11 asylum seekers from Central America. 

"The court strongly rejected the Trump administration's unprecedented and illegal policy of forcing asylum seekers to return to Mexico without hearing their claims," said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.

"Try as it may, the Trump administration cannot simply ignore our laws in order to accomplish its goal of preventing people from seeking asylum in the United States."

The government can now appeal the ruling but the push-back is no less significant for that and is unlikely to endear the president towards California, a blue state that remains one of the most niggling thorns in his side.

Here's the president's spin on it, with "spin" being the operative word.

A matter of somewhat less consequence but which is still pretty revealing about precisely what we're dealing with here: two new presidential nicknames have emerged.

Donald Trump reportedly calls House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler "Fat Jerry" and newly-sacked Secret Service director Randolph Alles "Dumbo" due to his large ears. Neither especially original, it has to be said.

Here's your semi-regular reminder that first lady Melania Trump made an anti-bullying agenda her cause celebre while married to a man who appears to confuse infantile playground abuse with statecraft.

Trump nicknames actually have their own Wikipedia entry but here's a rundown of the many cruel names the commander-in-chief and "leader of the free world" has for his enemies.

Sloppy Steve Bannon

Crazy Joe Biden

Da Nang Dick (Senator Richard Blumenthal)

Low Energy Jeb (Jeb Bush)

Mister Rodgers (Dan Coats, director of national intelligence)

Crooked Hillary Clinton

Leakin' James Comey

Lyin' Ted Cruz

Horseface (Stormy Daniels)

Jeff Flakey

Rocket Man (Kim Jong-un)

High Tax, High Crime Nancy Pelosi

Adam "Pencil-Neck" Schiff

Mr Magoo (Jeff Sessions)

Pochahontas (Elizabeth Warren)

Here's Clark Mindock on the firing of Randolph Alles.

Here's a full report on the dismissal of Randolph Alles, a man who had fallen out of favour with the president even before the security breach at Mar-a-Lago, which the agency effectively blamed on Trump’s own employees.

Speaking of those failings at Mar-a-Lago...

US attorney-general William Barr is due to make his first appearance before Congress since his confirmation hearings today.

Although he's sitting down before the House Appropriations Subcommittee to discuss the Justice Department's budget, it's unlikely the assembled members of Congress will allow the opportunity to ask him about the Mueller report to pass them by.

Despite the recent inappropriate touching allegations against him - crudely mocked by President Trump through the sharing of an alt-right meme - Joe Biden is seeing a groundswell of support among Democrats keen to see him run in 2020.

Should he declare his intention to run after all, Biden would race ahead of the likes of Bernie Sanders, Beto O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg.

Here's Samuel Osborne's report.