Trump news: President fumes over Hillary Clinton’s emails in Twitter rant, as ex-aide Hope Hicks testifies before Congress

Ex-Trump spokesman Hope Hicks is due to appear before the House Judiciary Committee today behind closed doors but the White House has once again asserted its executive privilege to prevent her from discussing her time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This bars chairman Jerrold Nadler from questioning her on possible instances of obstruction of justice arising from the Mueller report, which threatens to render the whole exercise somewhat toothless.

The committee is reportedly planning to engage in an “on-the-spot” negotiations over whether particular questions can be answered.

Some more madness from Orlando.

Trump's spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain (she's married to Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain, fact fans) used her introductory prayer at the Amway to call out the "demonic networks" aligned against President Trump.

"Let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus," this preacher of the "prosperity gospel" told the assembled masses.

"I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy." 

Today marks precisely 100 days since the White House last held a formal press briefing and - with the departure of Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced last week - that looks unlikely to change anytime soon.

Here's Chris Stevenson on how Trump's preference for informal chats with reporters on the South Lawn while podiums (quite literally) gather dust might have fatally undermined this important role for ever.

Trump has yet to tweet so far today but offered these choice selections from his performance in Orlando, calling the Democrats "extreme" and "depraved" over border security and accusing them of "moral cowardice" over their refusal to endorse his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

UN investigator Agnes Callamard says she has found "credible evidence" that Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, an ally of the White House, was behind the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and urged sanctions against the kingdom's de facto ruler until he comes clean about his role in the killing of his fellow citizen. 

Callamard's 101-page report after a months-long probe commissioned by the UN High Commission for Human Rights concluded that Khashoggi "has been the victim of a deliberate, premeditated execution, an extrajudicial killing for which the state Saudi Arabia is responsible under international human rights law." It includes new details about the final days and moments of Khashoggi's life, but does not reveal the still-unknown whereabouts of his body. 

Here's a reminder of the White House's official stance on the matter...

...And here's Borzou Daraghi's report on this latest development.

The Trump administration is close to completing one of its biggest rollbacks of environmental rules, replacing a landmark Obama-era effort to wean the nation's electrical grid off coal-fired power plants and their climate-damaging pollution. 

The final Trump administration replacement rule, expected as soon as this week, instead would give individual states wide discretion to decide whether to require limited efficiency upgrades at individual coal-fired power plants. 

Joseph Goffman, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official under Barack Obama, said he feared that the Trump administration was trying to set a legal precedent that the Clean Air Act gives the federal government "next to no authority to do anything" about climate-changing emissions from the country's power grid. The Obama rule, adopted in 2015, sought to reshape the country's power system by encouraging utilities to rely less on dirtier-burning coal-fired power plants and more on electricity from natural gas, solar, wind and other lower or no-carbon sources. 

Burning of fossil fuels for electricity, transportation and heat is the main human source of heat-trapping carbon emissions. 

Supporters of the revised rule say the Obama-era plan overstepped the EPA's authority. 

"This action is re-calibrating EPA so it aligns with being the agency to protect public health and the environment in a way that respects the limits of the law," said Mandy Gunasekara, a former senior official at the EPA who helped write the replacement rule. She now runs a nonprofit, Energy45, that supports President Trump's energy initiatives. 

"The Clean Power Plan was designed largely to put coal out of business," Gunasekara said. Trump's overhaul is meant to let states "figure out what is best for their mission in terms of meeting modern environmental standards" and providing affordable energy, she said. 

Democrats and environmentalists say the Trump administration has repeatedly sought to use the power of government to protect the sagging US coal industry from competition against cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas and solar and wind power while ignoring scientific warnings about climate change.

With coal miners at his side, Trump signed an order in March 2017 directing the EPA to scrap the Obama rule. It was one of the first acts of his presidency. 

His pledge to roll back regulation for the coal industry helped cement support from owners and workers in the coal industry, and others. Despite his promise, market forces have frustrated Trump's efforts. Competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable fuel has continued a years-long trend driving US coal plant closings to near-record levels last year, according to the US Energy Information Administration. 

The final rule is expected to closely follow the draft released in August. 

By encouraging utilities to consider spending money to upgrade aging coal plants, environmental groups argue, the Trump rule could prompt the companies to run existing coal plants harder and longer rather than retiring them. 

"It's a rule to increase emissions because it's a rule to extend the life of coal plants," said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force. "You invest in updating an old coal plant, it makes it more economic" to run it more to pay off that investment. 

An Associated Press analysis Tuesday of federal air data showed US progress on cleaning the air may be stagnating after decades of improvement. There were 15 per cent more days with unhealthy air in America both last year and the year before than there were on average from 2013 through 2016, the four years when America had its fewest number of those days since at least 1980. 

Trump has repeatedly claimed just the opposite, saying earlier this month in Ireland: "We have the cleanest air in the world, in the United States, and it's gotten better since I'm president." 

Along with an initiative requiring tougher mileage standards for cars and light trucks, the Clean Power Plan was one of Obama's two legacy efforts to slow climate change. The Trump administration also is proposing to roll back the Obama-era mileage standards, with a final rule expected shortly. Environmental groups promise court challenges to both rollbacks. 

Trump has rejected scientific warnings on climate change, including a report this year from scientists at more than a dozen federal agencies noting that global warming from fossil fuels "presents growing challenges to human health and quality of life." 

EPA's own regulatory analysis last year estimated that Trump's replacement ACE rule would kill an extra 300 to 1,500 people each year by 2030, owing to additional air pollution from the power grid. 

A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds support for Trump's impeachment rising among Democrats.

Sixty-seven per cent are now in favour, an eight per cent rise on April, which the pollster attributed to the outrage caused by the president's admission he would take dirt on a rival if it were offered by a foreign power.

"I think maybe you do both," Trump said when he was asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos whether he would call the FBI or listen if Russia, China or another foreign government reached out.

"I think you might want to listen. There’s nothing wrong with listening," he continued. "It’s not an interference. They have information. I think I’d take it. If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI."

Acting ICE director Mark Morgan has has hit back at Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after she compared President Trump's border detention centres to Nazi concentration camps during an Instagram live stream.

  Here's Lily Puckett's report on the original controversy.

In Moscow, a senior politician has called for Donald Trump and his time to push for a deal with Pyongyang to stop an increase in tensions in the region over North Korea's nuclear programme.

"There is no doubt that if the State Department fails to convince Pyongyang of the seriousness of its intentions to improve relations with the North Koreans, then in 2020 we will have an escalation of the situation on the Korean Peninsula," said the deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, Alexander Venediktov, according to the RIA news agency.