Trump news: President admits he has not even read Mueller report, as key aide branded a 'scumbag'

All this and we haven't even gotten around to US attorney-general William Barr.

He spoke to the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Justice Department's budget yesterday and will today appear before that body's Senate counterpart.

As with members of the House on Tuesday, senators are expected to be much more interested in when they might see the 400-page Mueller report than the budget. Barr told the House that he expects to release a redacted version "within a week." 

Justice Department officials are scouring the report to remove grand jury information and details relating to pending investigations, among other materials. Democrats have escalated criticism over Barr's handling of the document and say they will not accept any redactions. The House Judiciary Committee has approved - but not yet sent - subpoenas for the report and top Democrats have said they are willing to take the battle to court. 

At the House hearing, Barr bluntly defended himself, arguing that portions of the document need to be redacted to comply with the law. He said he's open to eventually releasing some of the redacted material after consulting with congressional leaders, but he drew a line at releasing grand jury material, which would require court approval. He said Democrats are "free to go to court" themselves and ask for the grand jury information. 

Barr wouldn't discuss the substance of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's findings but did explain some of his process for receiving and reviewing the report and what to expect when it is released: He said the redactions will be color-coded and accompanied by notes explaining the decision to withhold information. 

"This process is going along very well and my original timetable of being able to release this by mid-April stands," Barr said. 

Democrats said they were concerned that a four-page summary letter of the report's main conclusions Barr released last month portrayed the investigation's findings in an overly favorable way for President Trump. The letter said that Mueller did not find a criminal conspiracy between Russia and Trump associates around the time of the 2016 election and that Barr did not believe the evidence in the report was sufficient to prove the president had obstructed justice. 

Barr said "the letter speaks for itself" and revealed that he gave Mueller an opportunity to review the letter, but he declined. 

Republicans defended Barr, with Alabama congressman Robert Aderholt comparing Democrats' questions to theories surrounding President John F Kennedy's 1963 assassination. "So many of the questions here today have gone toward a grassy knoll conspiracy theory," Aderholt said. 

Also on Barr, Bloomberg reports this morning that the attorney-general has assembled a team to review decision-making within the FBI, an investigation that will include actions taken to probe ties between the Trump camp and the Kremlin under Robert Mueller.

Republicans like Trump loyalist Lindsey Graham have been calling for a retaliatory examination of the "Witch Hunt" and anti-Trump bias at the heart of the Justice Department since Barr's letter to Congress declared the special counsel had reached a "no collusion" verdict.

“I am reviewing the conduct of the investigation and trying to get my arms around all the aspects of the counterintelligence investigation that was conducted during the summer of 2016,” Barr told the House Appropriations panel yesterday.

“Once we put the Mueller report to bed, once Barr comes to the committee and takes questions about his findings and his actions, and we get to see the Mueller report, consistent with law, then we are going to turn to finding out how this got off the rails,” Graham said in an interview with Fox News on 28 March.

US conservatives have long believed that leaked text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and lawyer Lisa Page revealed a shady deep state plot in place to thwart the election of Donald Trump in 2016, with the Mueller investigation its inevitable outcome.

Among the many concerns surrounding Trump's decision to rid himself of Kirstjen Nielsen is the rise and rise of senior aide Stephen Miller, a 33-year-old hard-line anti-immigration zealot.

The host of MSNBC's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough, has an interesting tale to tell about President Trump leaping to the lad's defence, the president apparently calling the presenter to try and stop him criticising the hard-right policy wonk: “You’re hurting this poor young kid, you’re killing him every day.”

Here's Chris Baynes's report.

Democratic rising star Ilhan Omar yesterday denounced Miller as a "white nationalist".

The remark of course provoked hysteria and the inevitable presidential retweet of a condemnatory clip from Fox.

To which Omar responded:

And she wasn't finished there.

Representative Omar found a supporter on her original point in the shape of Georgia Democrat, romance novelist and rumoured Joe Biden running mate Stacey Abrams.

Speaking of up-and-coming Democrats, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was generously praised by former secretary of state John Kerry yesterday.

Given the news of the Trump administration's renewed assault on the environment today, he might have a point.

Back to the subject of white nationalism, Congress played host to a truly astonishing moment yesterday when the House Judiciary Committee held a panel on hate crimes and the spread of extremist rhetoric online.

California congressman Ted Lieu stole the show by playing an audio clip of alt-right commentator Candace Owens, sat before him, addressing an audience on the career of a certain well-known Nazi dictator: "If Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, OK, fine.

"The problem is that he wanted - he had dreams outside of Germany," Owens was heard to say in a recording taken from a conference in London late last year.

"He wanted to globalise. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. That's not, to me, that's not nationalism. In thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don't really have an issue with nationalism. I really don't. I think that it's OK."

Owens, indignant and humiliated to hear her words repeated away from a sympathetic audience, complained that Lieu was taking her out of context.

"I think it's pretty apparent that Mr Lieu believes that black people are stupid and will not pursue the full clip in its entirety. He purposefully presented an extracted clip," she said, in remarks later praised on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr.

Lieu asked Eileen Hershenov, senior vice president of policy at the Anti-Defamation League: "When people try to legitimise Adolf Hitler, does that feed into white nationalist ideology?"

She agreed that it did.

Here's a reminder of another eventful evening on Twitter for President Trump from Tom Embury-Dennis.

A little background on the president's jaunt to Texas today.

William Barr told Congress yesterday he tried to use as many of Robert Mueller's own words as he could in his four-page summary of the man's 400-page report.

According to CNN's John Avlon, he included  just 101 of Mueller's words, a total that includes the title and a footnote. That's 0.1 per cent of the content available to him.

Karen Pence, wife of vice-president Mike Pence, has gone after popular Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg on Fox Radio.

"I think in our country we need to understand you shouldn’t be attacked for what your religious beliefs are and I think kids need to learn that at a young age that this is OK, what faith people have; we don’t attack them for their faith," she said.

Buttigieg, a native of Indiana like Mike Pence, has repeatedly called out the veep for his support of anti-LGBT+ legislation and his "hypocrisy" as a devout Christian in standing by Donald Trump and the "porn star presidency".

The candidate said on Sunday that coming out had brought him "closer to God", adding: "And that’s the thing I wish the Mike Pences of the world would understand. If you’ve got a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me. Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator."