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

A more serious scandal involving the administration sees transport secretary Elaine Chao, married to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, accused of designating a special liaison to work on granting funding applications to infrastructure projects worth $78m (£62m) in her husband's home state of Kentucky to boost his chance of re-election.

According to Politico, the aide, Todd Inman, is said have advised a commercial port in Owensboro on its application to have roads upgraded in 2017 to ensure its approval, the construction work potentially offering an important and timely boost to the local economy.

"We are now a full-fledged banana republic," commented a disgusted Walter Shaub, a former director of the US Office of Government Ethics.

Here's more from Chris Baynes.

The president is up and tweeting and, surprisingly, he has a book recommendation for you, in amongst the predictable Nadler bashing.

Now Trump is quoting professional good ol' boy Lindsey Graham, the Senate Intelligence Committee chair and South Carolina senator who underwent a road to Damascus conversion to Trumpism after once dismissing him as a "kook" unfit for office.

Unsurprisingly, he's watching Fox and Friends.

He also retweeted this from Bloomberg and then deleted it. But don't worry. We got ourselves a screengrab.

That book he's advertising, by the way, is written by an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization and would cost you a cool $18.89 in hardback on Amazon. 

Go for Siege instead. Or Fear by Bob Woodward. Or, you know, Carry on Jeeves by PG Wodehouse. Something better.

Aha, so this is what the president was getting at with that hastily deleted tweet below.

He's using that Bloomberg piece on booming European tourism as a means of continuing his attack on the US Federal Reserve, arguing interest rates are too high and attacking its policy of “ridiculous quantitative tightening”, declaring: “They don’t have a clue!”

This follows the comments he made on Monday during his phone interview with Squawk Box on CNBC.

Here's Trump touting his economic credentials after complaining the other day that he gets "no credit" on the economy.

Speaking of new books, Trump is reportedly open to the idea of Steve Bannon returning as his chief strategist in time for 2020, according to a fresh tome out soon.

In The Best People: Trump's Cabinet and the Siege on Washington by Alexander Nazaryan, Trump is said to have "almost welcomed" the suggestion when it was put to him by the author.

“I watched Bannon a few times, four or five times over the last six months,” Trump is quoted as saying. “Nobody says anything better about me right now than Bannon… I will say this. Bannon, there is nobody that has been more respectful of the job I’m doing than Steve Bannon.”

The news comes as another book, Siege by Michael Wolff, arrives on bookshelves carrying extensive quotes from the alt-right agitator and former Breitbart editor, not least a line attributed to him suggesting the Trump Organization is "criminal".

Bannon was dismissed by Trump the last time Wolff had a book out in 2017.

His suggestion in Fire & Fury that Trump's beloved daughter Ivanka was "dumb as a brick" and his eldest son Don Jr "treasonous" was enough to convince the president his adviser had "lost his mind".

Which sounds like the ideal qualification to work for this particular president.

Texas Republican senator John Cornyn has broken ranks to criticise Ken Cuccinelli, Trump's appointment as acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), saying that Cuccinelli - a hard-liner on immigration - would be unlikely to win confirmation for the role on a permanent basis.

"He’s made a career of attacking other Republicans and frankly attacking President Trump, so I doubt he’ll have the support to get confirmed," Cornyn said.

Cuccinelli is replacing Lee Francis Cissna, who was forced out as USCIS chief late last month amid a shake-up at the department that was engineered by top White House policy adviser Stephen Miller.

Cuccinelli can serve as acting director for 210 days.

In order to not be confirmed thereafter, he would have to lose four Republicans senators and fail to win over any of the 47 Democrats in the upper chamber, a likely outcome given that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is opposed to his candidacy.

Many actors and Hollywood celebrities have won polite applause by denouncing Donald Trump in recent years, from Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro and Jim Carrey to "washed up psycho" Bette Midler.

Breaking Bad star Bryon Cranston called out "demagoguery" at the Tony Awards on Sunday and now George Clooney has joined in on the promotional run for his new miniseries adaptation of Joseph Heller's classic anti-war satire Catch-22 (1961). 

"We have a 74-year-old president who wishes we were still in the 1950s, which was good if you were a white guy," he said.

"Part of the idea of a Catch-22 is that old white men are making decisions that young people are going to die for. And I think that that is something that we should argue about endlessly…

"And part of the reason you feel these waves of populism coming up is because there’s huge swaths of people that feel like they are fighting against a system that they can’t possibly win."

Apparently speaking directly to the Fox hosts on his TV, Trump has tweeted another thread on the Mexico trade deal. He really does not like the negative reaction it's had does he?

However, the fact that he says that the "biggest part of the deal has not yet been revealed" is unlikely to help matters. It is believed there will be a "safe third country" agreement where migrants will have to submit asylum claims in Mexico rather than with US authorities.

Mexico has said that such an agreement still needs to be negotiated and that its government needs time to implement other policies to see what effect they have first.