John Dean says Mueller report is Donald Trump's 'Watergate road map'
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Donald Trump has tweeted an article about a boom in European tourism as a means of continuing his attack on the US Federal Reserve, arguing domestic interest rates are too high and attacking its policy of “ridiculous quantitative tightening”, declaring: “They don’t have a clue!”
This comes after the House Judiciary Committee announced it had 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 President 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.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump and Joe Biden assailed each other during overlapping visits to Iowa on Tuesday, previewing what the country might get in next year’s election if Mr Biden becomes his party’s nominee.
Even before he left the White House, the president unleashed a series of schoolyard taunts, declaring that “Joe Biden is a dummy.”
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Mr Biden quickly retorted that the president is “an existential threat to this country.”
The back-and-forth laid bare the rising political stakes for each, even with Election Day 2020 still about 17 months away. Mr Trump has zeroed in on Mr Biden as a potential threat to his re-election chances and is testing themes to beat him back.
Mr Biden, meanwhile, is campaigning as a front-runner, relishing the one-on-one fight with Mr Trump while making sure he doesn’t ignore the demands of the Democratic primary.
The former vice president hit Mr Trump on the economy — an issue the president often promotes as his chief strength in a time of low unemployment.
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“I hope his presence here will be a clarifying event because Iowa farmers have been crushed by his tariffs toward China,” Mr Biden said. “It’s really easy to be tough when someone else absorbs the pain, farmers and manufacturers.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load
Here's video of Donald Trump seemingly claiming he is holding a secret agreement - condensed to one page - between the US and Mexico that successfully led to him calling off his tariffs:
Looks like the sunlight helped viewers make out what was featured on that piece of paper Donald Trump was claiming to be a secretive agreement between the US and Mexico earlier today:
Democrats in the House have voted to take two top Trump administration to court to force them to provide material related to Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
In a vote on party lines - 229-191 - the House of Representatives adopted a resolution to take attorney general William Barr and former White House counsel Don McGahn to court to enforce subpoenas.
The vote also gives authority to the chairs of six House committees, to go to court to seek to enforce future subpoenas without the need for a full vote in the entire chamber.
Ten environmental groups are suing the administration of Donald Trump for its rollback of Obama-era offshore drilling protections, which were put in place to increase safety after the deadly Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.
In the lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the green groups charge that the White House altered offshore drilling regulations that required increased safety monitoring to ensure that another incident like that 2010 blast did not reoccur.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler has released the following statement after the House passed a resolution allowing Congress to take William Barr and Donald McGahn to court to enforce its subpoenas:
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