Trump news: President's alleged business ties to IRGC stir controversy after he brands group a terrorist organisation
Read along for our coverage as the president cleaned house on Monday
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
Donald Trump has labelled Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organisation in an unprecedented move that could have lasting consequences for the United States.
The president declared for the first time in history that another government entity was a terror group, potentially making it more difficult for American diplomats and other officials working in the region.
The move arrives a day after the president accepted of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, with whom he has repeatedly clashed over his administration’s more hardline immigration policies, as he seeks more drastic action to address the “crisis” at the US southern border.
Ms Nielsen's departure on Sunday was followed by the resignation of Randolph Alles, who was in charge of the Secret Service but had apparently fallen out of Mr Trump's good graces weeks ago.
Those two resignations were expected to be followed by more departures in the Department of Homeland Security in the days or weeks to come as a part of a phase that some in the media have begun to call a purge.
Criminals who worked for Trump
Show all 5Also in the news was Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who made eight criminal referrals to the attorney-general, William Barr, over the leaking of Mr Trump’s phone calls with ex-Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto and national security adviser Michael Flynn’s calls to a Russian ambassador.
Coming up this week, attorney general William Barr is slated to testify before both the House and the Senate on his department's budget for the coming year.
But, that testimony is likely to veer of track a bit as democrats grill him about the contents of the Mueller report, which he received last month.
Mr Barr as pledged to send the report to Congress in the coming weeks, but it remains to be seen just how much of the report might be redacted.
Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load
Ooof. Best line on this madness so far. Even if was delivered by a man standing on a street corner in the dark.
Bernie's also been at it.
More from Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer's forthcoming new book A Hill to Die On.
Former House speaker Paul Ryan allegedly told Republicans they should feel free to part ways with Donald Trump in October 2016 following the emergence of the Access Hollywood tape.
You remember that one, right? That's the clip published by The Washington Post a month before the election in which the future president of the United States told interviewer Billy Bush on the subject of women: "I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything."
"I am not going to defend Donald Trump," Ryan said, according to the new book. "Not now, not in the future."
At the time, his office said in a statement: "Women are to be championed and revered, not objectified. I hope Mr Trump treats this situation with the seriousness it deserves and works to demonstrate to the country that he has greater respect for women than this clip suggests."
According to Sherman and Palmer, the president later accosted Ryan at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington and said: "That thing really rattled you... I get you. You're just a Boy Scout. You're also kind of religious, aren’t you?"
Ryan replied that he was a devout Catholic and agreed, "Yes, I take that stuff very seriously."
Pete Buttigieg impressed again on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday with fresh attacks on support for Donald Trump among evangelical Christians.
"It’s something that really frustrates me because the hypocrisy is unbelievable," he told host Chuck Todd.
"Here you have somebody who not only acts in a way that is not consistent with anything that I hear in scripture or in church, where it’s about lifting up the least among us and taking care of strangers, which is another word for immigrants, and making sure that you’re focusing your effort on the poor.
"But also personally how you’re supposed to conduct yourself," he added, saying that Trump's daily conduct is at odds with a religion that calls for "humbling yourself before others."
But he was only getting started.
"Even on the version of Christianity that you hear from the religious right, which is about sexual ethics, I can’t believe that somebody who was caught writing hush money checks to adult-film actresses is somebody they should be lifting up as the kind of person you want to be leading this nation," Buttigieg said.
Openly gay and married, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, had a message for vice-president Mike Pence when he spoke later on Sunday at the LGBTQ Victory Fund's annual brunch:
Here's the Democratic Party's response to Kirstjen Nielsen's departure. They've not been kind.
This is a timely reminder of Trump cabinet disarray in the wake of the resignation of Kirstjen Nielsen.
For the record, Patrick Shanahan is only the acting secretary of defence.
Jim Mattis resigned on New Year's Eve over the plan to withdraw all US troops from Syria following the "defeat" of Isis, leaving America's old Kurdish allies in the region vulnerable to a resurgence in Islamic extremism and possible attacks from Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey.
Shanahan at defence and now McAleenan at homeland security join David Bernhardt (secretary of the interior), Jonathan Cohen (UN ambassador) and Mick Mulvaney (chief of staff) in being only "acting" occupants of their respective roles.
Here's the view on Nielsen from the Fox and Friends sofa.
For a more measured take, here's CNN's Joe Johns.
Opponents of the long-stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline have asked a federal court to declare that Donald Trump acted illegally when he issued a new permit for the project in a bid to get around an earlier court ruling.
In November 2018, US district judge Brian Morris ruled that the Trump administration did not fully consider potential oil spills and other impacts when it approved the pipeline in 2017.
Trump's new permit, issued last week, is intended to circumvent that ruling and kick-start the proposal to ship crude oil from the tar sands of western Canada to US refineries.
The president is up and quoting a right-wing journalist on the "collusion delusion".
What else is new?
And again.
Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee who last week moved to subpoena the Mueller report from attorney-general William Barr, is absolutely entitled to see it, as are the American taxpayers who paid for it.
Questions are again being asked about the president's mental health in the wake of his recent run of wild gaffes, according to The Huffington Post.
Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale, cites the Tim Apple episode, Trump misremembering his own father's birthplace and his pronunciation of "origins" as "oranges" as evidence of his suffering from "cognitive slippage".
"There is no question he needs an examination," says Professor Lee.
"I think he’s suffering from pre-dementia. And it’s only getting worse," adds John Gartner, a clinical psychologist from New York City.
"He has been getting worse in the last few months... [In the past] he not only spoke in complete sentences, he spoke in complete paragraphs."
Gartner added out that one of the symptoms of narcissism is repeated lying: "Donald Trump is the most documented liar in human history."
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies