In The Past 24 Hours Or So

Your Daily Dose of Trump and His Administration News

• A federal judge in Texas blocked the Trump administration from using billions of dollars in Pentagon funds for the construction of the border wall. The ruling is a setback for the administration, which has sought to shore up money for the President’s signature campaign promise of a border wall, and marks yet another high-profile blow the courts have dealt Trump of late on key issues

• Attorney General Barr claims the FBI acted in ‘bad faith’ on Russia investigation, despite inspector general report’s findings to the contrary. The 434-page report rebutted conservatives’ accusations that top FBI officials were driven by political bias to illegally spy on Trump advisers as part of the probe into Russian election interference, but it also found broad and ‘serious performance failures’ requiring major changes.

• News that Christopher Steele knew Ivanka Trump personally, and had discussed working together on foreign business projects, seriously undercuts the claims of the US president and his supporters that the former MI6 officer was motivated by malice when compiling his explosive Russiagate dossier. The Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz found that the FBI considered Mr Steele himself credible, but gathered evidence in 2017 indicating that some of Mr Steele’s reports were not reliable. However, the inspector general also concluded that Mr Steele’s information played no role in the opening of the FBI investigation exploring Mr Trump and Russia in July 2016.

• After weeks of blaming Democrats for delaying President Trump’s renegotiated trade deal with Canada and Mexico, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would delay it further.

• At rally in Pennsylvania, Trump repeats disproven claim that his campaign was spied upon, then called FBI investigators “scum.”

• As part of the settlement regarding Trump’s misuse of funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, Eric, Don Jr., and Ivanka were ordered to undergo mandatory training “to ensure they do not engage in similar misconduct in the future.”

• The president paid $2 million in damages for misusing charitable funds “to buy portraits of himself, pay off his businesses’ legal obligations & help his 2016 campaign.”

• A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to toss out a lawsuit over missing notes documenting President Donald Trump’s face-to-face meetings with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.  American Oversight and Democracy Forward, a pair of left-leaning nonpartisan watchdog groups, sued Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the archivist of the United States in June over the missing notes. The groups charge that Pompeo violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Trump to reportedly confiscate meeting notes prepared by State Department employees and for failing to preserve them.

• U.S. prosecutors asked a judge to return Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani indicted on campaign finance charges, to jail for lying about his income and concealing a $1 million payment he got from Russia in September, a month before he was charged.

• James Littlefair, who worked as an advance staffer for Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, resigned earlier this month after his mother pleaded guilty in the national “Varsity Blues” college admissions scandal. Karen Littlefair was charged Monday with one count of wire fraud conspiracy. She had agreed in November to plead guilty to the charge.  Federal prosecutors say Karen Littlefair paid college admissions consultant William “Rick” Singer $9,000 so that an employee of Singer’s would take four online classes for her son at Georgetown University and Arizona State University between 2017 and 2018.

• Donald Trump, Jr. used a seven-day hunting trip to Mongolia he purchased during a National Rifle Association charity auction before his father was elected to the White House to allegedly kill a rare sheep that’s been declared an endangered species.