A recent Harvard University graduate who is the first so-called Dreamer to receive a Rhodes scholarship will attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address as a guest of a New York congresswoman. 

Democratic Rep. Grace Meng said she invited Jin Park to attend Trump’s address Tuesday in the hope of bringing more attention to his plight and that of thousands of other young immigrants. 

The 22-year-old Queens resident told The Associated Press he might not be allowed back in the country if he attends the University of Oxford in England this fall.

Park is a native of South Korea and has Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, which protects him from deportation. But Trump has rescinded overseas travel benefits for DACA holders as he seeks to end the Obama-era program.
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President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would let the Justice Department decide how to handle the special counsel’s report on an investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow.

Republican Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, William Barr, said at his confirmation hearing this month he would allow Robert Mueller to complete the probe and pledged to make as many details of the findings public as he can.

Asked in an interview with the Daily Caller conservative website whether he would make the decision on whether to release the Mueller report, Trump said “they’ll have to make their decision within the Justice Department.”

Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said on Monday that Mueller’s probe is “close to being completed.”

Trump told the Daily Caller he has not spoken to Whitaker about whether the investigation is nearing its conclusion.

Whitaker’s comments were the first time a top government official with knowledge of the investigation has publicly said it is in the final stages.

Democrats worry that Trump’s administration may try to undercut the investigation, which has clouded Trump’s two years in office and has been a frequent target of the president and his allies. So far, the investigation has ensnared 34 people.

Russia rejects the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Moscow ran an operation to hack Democratic Party computers and spread disinformation to undermine candidate Hillary Clinton and the American electoral process.

The president dismisses the probe as a political witch hunt and denies collusion with Russia.

Mueller’s office most recently indicted a long-time Trump confidant, Republican political operative Roger Stone, on charges of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress. He has pleaded not guilty.

Others in Trump’s orbit charged by prosecutors include former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, his former campaign deputy, Richard Gates, and his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn and former lawyer Michael Cohen.
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The Republican chairman of the U.S. Senate judiciary panel Wednesday requested a briefing from the FBI on the arrest of Roger Stone, a longtime associate of President Donald Trump, in an inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

Senator Lindsey Graham said he was concerned about the number of agents involved, tactics employed and the timing of Stone’s arrest Friday in Florida. Graham asked for the briefing no later than Feb. 5.

A video of Stone’s arrest broadcast on CNN showed an FBI team taking him away from his Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home in the dark just before 6 a.m. and Stone surrendering without any issue.

“Although I am sure these tactics would be standard procedure for the arrest of a violent offender, I have questions regarding their necessity in this case,” Graham wrote in the letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

The top Republican on the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, Representative Doug Collins, expressed similar concerns in a letter to Wray.

Collins asked Wray for answers by Feb. 13 to a series of questions, including whether Wray was aware of what Collins called the FBI’s “immense show of force” during the raid.

“Given the nature of the charges in Stone’s indictment, many believe the FBI used an excessive amount of force during his arrest,” Collins wrote.

Some law enforcement experts said in the aftermath that when a person has not agreed to give themselves up to authorities voluntarily, such procedures were standard.

Trump, in an interview with the conservative website Daily Caller on Wednesday, said Stone’s arrest was a “very, very disappointing scene” and he would “think about” asking the FBI to review its policies.

“When you have 29 people and you have armored vehicles, and you had all of the other – you know, many people know Roger, and Roger is not a person that they would have to worry about from that standpoint,” Trump said.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Prosecutors accuse Stone, a self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” and longtime Republican operative, of obstruction, witness tampering, and lying to Congress. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating U.S. allegations that Russia meddled in the election and whether members of the campaign of then-Republican candidate Trump coordinated with Moscow officials. So far, the investigation has ensnared 34 people. Moscow denies interference and Trump dismisses the probe as a political witch hunt.
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U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation to limit the president’s power to levy import tariffs for national security reasons. The bills face an uncertain future but underscore bipartisan concerns on Capitol Hill over the rising costs of the Trump administration’s trade policies.

The United States in 2018 slapped duties on aluminum and steel from other countries, drawing criticism from lawmakers who support free trade and complaints of rising supply chain costs across business sectors.

Two bipartisan groups of lawmakers Wednesday introduced legislation known as the Bicameral Congressional Trade Authority Act in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

The bills would require Trump to have congressional approval before taking trade actions like tariffs and quotas under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. The law currently allows the president to impose such tariffs without approval from Capitol Hill.

“The imposition of these taxes, under the false pretense of national security (Section 232), is weakening our economy, threatening American jobs, and eroding our credibility with other nations,” said Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, co-sponsor of the Senate bill.

Toomey led a similar push last year that did not go to a vote.

It is unclear that Congress would consider taking up such legislation now. Still, the bills underscore mounting pressure from lawmakers to address concerns over tariffs, especially those on Canada and Mexico as lawmakers prepare to vote on a new North American trade deal agreed to late last year.

​Republican Chuck Grassley from Iowa, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, earlier pressed the Trump administration to lift tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and Mexico before Congress begins considering legislation to implement the new pact.

Numerous business and agricultural groups have come out in support of the United States-Mexico-Canada agreement, but have said its benefits will be limited so long as the U.S. tariffs and retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico remain in place.

Companies are able to request exemptions from the steel and aluminum tariffs, but the process has been plagued by delays and uncertainty.

“Virginia consumers and industries like craft beer and agriculture are hurting because of the president’s steel and aluminum tariffs,” said Democratic Senator Mark Warner, co-sponsor of the Senate legislation. “This bill would roll them back.”

Republicans Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Darin LaHood of Illinois and Democrats Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Jimmy Panetta of California introduced the House legislation.
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The indictment of President Donald Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone has raised new questions about just what special counsel Robert Mueller has uncovered during his 20-month investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.

One question is whether the indictment gets Mueller’s prosecutors any closer to the heart of the investigation: determining whether there was any “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The intelligence community concluded after the election that Russian government operatives furnished the activist group WikiLeaks with reams of private emails purloined from Hillary Clinton and other Democrats in 2016. But Mueller has yet to prove that Stone or any other Trump campaign associates served as conduits or facilitators in the theft and dissemination of the damaging emails.

Another question raised by the Stone indictment is whether the charges against the presidential confidant represent a real breakthrough in the investigation or just another case of Trump allies getting caught lying to investigators or members of Congress 

To Trump allies, Stone’s indictment on charges of lying to Congress and other “procedural” offenses epitomizes an investigation gone amok, a politically motivated “witch hunt” to ensnare otherwise innocent associates of the president.

To his critics, the charges show how the Trump campaign used Stone as a witting conduit to WikiLeaks as the anti-secrecy website dumped tens of thousands of embarrassing emails and other documents aimed at hurting Clinton’s electoral prospects.

Stone, a (former U.S. President) Richard Nixon hero worshipper and an informal adviser to Trump for the past 40 years, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in federal court to seven criminal counts. 

On its surface, the indictment does not allege any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. Instead, it accuses Stone of making false statements, obstruction of a legal proceeding and witness tampering – charges that are related mostly to Stone’s congressional testimony in 2017 about his contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.

In his brief appearance before a federal judge in Washington, D.C., Stone said little. But since his pre-dawn arrest in Florida last Friday, the self-described “dirty trickster” has spoken in several TV interviews, insisting he did nothing illegal or out of the ordinary for a gung-ho political operative.

“That’s what I engaged in. It’s called politics and they haven’t criminalized it, at least not yet,” Stone said Sunday on ABC News. 

“All I did was take publicly available information and try to hype it to get it as much attention as possible, because I had a tip, the information was politically significant and that it would come in October,” Stone said.

Stone caused a stir during the campaign by hyping the WikiLeaks email dumps and insinuating advance knowledge of their release. 

The indictment against him alleges that Stone maintained much closer than previously-known ties with the Trump campaign even after he left it in mid-2015. Through much of 2016, according to the indictment, Stone remained in regular contact with senior Trump campaign officials as they sought to learn about the WikiLeaks email releases. 

After the website published an initial batch of Democratic emails, “a senior Trump campaign official” – believed to be either former campaign chairman Paul Manafort or former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates – was “directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had about the Clinton campaign, according to the indictment.

In October 2016, just before WikiLeaks published emails hacked from the account of Clinton’s campaign chairman, Stone received an email from a “high ranking Trump campaign official” – identified in press accounts as ousted Trump strategist Steve Bannon – asking about the “status of future releases” by WikiLeaks.

Stone replied that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had a “serious security concern” but that the site would release “a load every week going forward.”

Bennett Gershman, a professor at Pace Law School in New York who closely follows the Mueller investigation, said the indictment paints Stone as a “conduit” between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.

​“It gets the investigation closer to the inner workings of the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia,” Gershman said.

Trump has denied any advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks email dumps. Stone has said he never discussed them with Trump during or after the campaign.

While the indictment doesn’t’ charge any conspiracy between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks or Russia, that charge may come later, Gershman said. How much later is only a guess. Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said Monday that the special counsel investigation was “close to being completed.” 

“This is a preliminary charge that will become much more significant later on,” Gershman said.

Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor now a law professor at George Washington University, said the special counsel would have charged Stone with conspiracy had he thought Stone’s contacts with WikiLeaks were illegal.

“I think the fact that the special counsel didn’t charge that conspiracy might be a bit of a sign that maybe the evidence of a broader criminal conspiracy isn’t’ there, at least not yet,” Eliason said. 

Stone’s actions may have been “deplorable” but not illegal, he said. 

“You can call that colluding, working together, sharing information but there is not necessarily an underlying crime involved there,” Eliason said.

Paul Rosenzweig, another former federal prosecutor, said there appears to be more to the indictment than meets the eye. 

“I think there are some hints here of more information about interactions with the Russians that do continue to build a case for illegal coordination between trump camp and Russia,” Rosenzweig, now a senior fellow at the R Street in Washington, said.
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U.S. intelligence chiefs are sounding alarms about an ever more perilous future for the United States, one in which the country is in danger of seeing its influence wane, its allies waiver and key adversaries team up to erode norms that once kept the country safe and the world more stable.

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, along with the leaders of five other top intelligence agencies, delivered the grim assessment Tuesday, unveiling their annual worldwide threats report for lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Coats described the challenges facing the U.S. as a “toxic mix,” combing the exploits of the “big four” — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — and of non-state actors such as terrorists and criminal networks, and factors such as rapidly advancing technology, climate change and migration.

WATCH: Worldwide threats

​”It is increasingly a challenge to prioritize which threats are of greatest importance,” Coats said, sharing testimony that often and repeatedly contradicted past assertions by U.S. President Donald Trump.

“We face significant changes in the domestic and global environment that has resulted in an increasingly complex and uncertain world and we must be ready. We must be ready,” he added.

Driving many of the concerns, according to intelligence officials, is a growing alliance between Russia and China competing against the U.S. not just for military and technological superiority, but for global influence.

​Russia-China nexus

“China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s,” the report warns.

That relationship is only likely to strengthen as both Moscow and Beijing attempt to take advantage of what they see as a growing U.S. unilateralism, it added.

Officials say that is already playing out in Europe where both countries find openings, as traditional U.S. allies question Washington’s role and consider new partnerships.

The threat assessment, while not mentioning the Trump administration’s focus on “America First” policies or its repeated criticism of alliances like NATO, cautions that many of these U.S. allies are already “seeking greater independence from Washington in response to their perceptions of changing U.S. policies on security and trade.”

At the same time, China and Russia appear to be benefiting from different approaches.

Beijing is trying to win influence by selling would-be partners “a distinctly Chinese fusion of strongman autocracy and a form of Western-style capitalism as a development model and implicit alternative to democratic values and institutions,” Coats said.

In contrast, Coats warned Russia is using weapons sales, private security firms and energy deals with some success across the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia.

​North Korea

The intelligence chiefs also broke with Trump over North Korea less than a month after the president touted what he called an “incredible” meeting with North Korean nuclear envoy Kim Yong Chol.

“We have made a lot of progress, as far as denuclearization is concerned,” Trump said at the time.

But Coats is skeptical that Pyongyang will ever give up its entire nuclear arsenal, pointing to “activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization.”

CIA Director Gina Haspel also said that despite indications North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “is trying to navigate a path toward some kind of better future,” his calculations on the need for nuclear weapons do not seem to have changed.

“The regime is committed to developing a long-range nuclear armed missile that would pose a direct threat to the United States,” she told lawmakers.

And while North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test in more than a year, Defense Intelligence Agency Director Gen. Robert Ashley likewise warned there is no reason to relax.

“They showed a capability to have an ICBM function,” Ashley said, pointing to older missile tests. “The capabilities and threat that existed a year ago are still there.”

​Islamic State

The U.S. intelligence community also expressed caution about the president’s willingness to declare the demise of the Islamic State terror group.

The IS caliphate, Coats said, has been defeated, reduced to just a “couple of little villages” in Syria. But he said underestimating the group’s resolve would be a mistake.

“ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria,” Coats said, using an acronym for the group.

“ISIS will continue to be a threat to the United States, and we’re going to have to continue … to keep our eyes on that and our interest in the realization that this terrorism threat is going to continue for some time.”

​Iran nuclear deal

U.S. intelligence analysts also appear to split with Trump over Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons.

“At the moment, technically, they are in compliance,” Haspel said of the 2015 deal between Iran and world powers meant to prevent Tehran from pursuing nuclear weapons.

The U.S. withdrew from the agreement last May, after Trump decried it as “defective to its core,” arguing that it would allow Iran to get economic relief and still have a path to nuclear weapons.

But for now, U.S. intelligence officials say Tehran is at least a year away from being able to produce a nuclear warhead, though they caution that with new U.S. and European sanctions, their willingness to stick with the agreement may be waning.

“We do see them debating amongst themselves as they’ve failed to realize the economic benefits they hoped for from the deal,” Haspel added.

At the same time, Coats said intelligence analysts expect Iran to put greater pressure on the U.S. in the Middle East, with Iranian-backed Shia militias likely to pose a growing threat to U.S. troops in Iraq.

​Cyber

Coats and the other intelligence chiefs warned lawmakers that Russia, China, North Korea and Iran would continue to pressure the U.S. in cyberspace.

“We expect these actors and others to rely more and more on cyber capabilities when seeking to gain political, economic and military advantages over the United States and its allies and partners,” he told lawmakers Tuesday.

Coats said despite successful efforts to protect “the integrity of the 2018 midterm elections,” the intelligence agencies expected Russia, China, Iran and others to target the 2020 U.S. presidential elections.

“We expect them to refine their capabilities and add new tactics as they learn from each other’s experiences and efforts in previous elections,” he said.

​Venezuela

Coats called the situation in Venezuela, where the U.S. has officially recognized Venezuelan legislative leader Juan Guaido as the country president, “tenuous.”

In an effort to support Guaido and constrain Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, the U.S. on Monday slapped sanctions on the country’s state-run oil company.

But Coats said he expects Cuba, Russia and China “to prop up the Maduro regime’s security or financing,” and that the deciding factor could be the country’s military.

“The influence of the military on that decision … probably is key to what direction we might go in,” he said.

​U.S. border

Despite the heavy focus from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security on the need for a border wall, the intelligence chiefs made no direct mention of threats along the southern U.S. border with Mexico.

Coats said he expected Mexico would “pursue cooperation with the United States as it tries to reduce violence and address socioeconomic issues, but authorities still do not have the capability to fully address the reduction, the flow and trafficking of the drug cartels.”

Coats also warned that high crime rates and economic problems “will continue to spur U.S.-bound migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”

The Worldwide Threat Assessment report also warned of increased migration pressures worldwide due to a combination of a slowing global economy and climate change.
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President Donald Trump is dismissing — and potentially bolstering sales — of a new tell-all book by a former White House aide, calling it “made-up stories and fiction.”

The book by Cliff Sims, called Team of Vipers, is the latest in a series of insider accounts by journalists and former Trump staffers that paint an unflattering picture of life in the West Wing. In it, Sims engages in score-settling with former internal rivals, fingers other administration officials as “leakers,” and casts the president as disloyal to his staff.

Trump, in a Tuesday morning tweet, dismissed Sims as a “low level staffer” who had written “yet another boring book.”

“He pretended to be an insider when in fact he was nothing more than a gofer,” said Trump, who claimed Sims had signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Indeed, Michael Glassner, chief operating officer of Trump’s re-election campaign, tweeted that the campaign was preparing to file suit against Sims for violating the agreement. Trump and his associates have a habit of announcing legal action and not following through.

Sims was read Trump’s tweet during an appearance on CNN and said he knew a mean tweet was a possibility.

Sims’ book was officially released Tuesday, the same day as another behind-the-scenes account of Trump’s team by former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, an informal Trump adviser and longtime friend. The book, titled Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, paints a sympathetic picture of a president who has been ill-served by what he describes as a “revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”

Christie, who challenged Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 but endorsed Trump after dropping out, oversaw Trump’s transition team until he was fired shortly after the November election, allegedly at the urging of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser. Christie, during his tenure as a federal prosecutor, sent Kushner’s father — businessman Charles Kushner — to prison after winning his conviction on tax evasion and other crimes.

In his account, Christie paints unflattering portraits of a number of former Trump aides, including former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, whom he describes as “a fraud, a nobody, and a liar.” He also rails against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, panning him as a “walking car crash” and “train wreck from beginning to end.”

Sims began rolling out his book Monday with a media blitz that included an appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America and a sit-down with late-night TV host Stephen Colbert of CBS.

Christie was due to visit with Colbert on Tuesday.
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Russia and China pose the biggest espionage and cyber attack threats to the United States and are more aligned than they have been in decades, the leader of the U.S. intelligence community told U.S. senators on Tuesday.

While the two countries seek to expand their global reach, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said, some American allies are pulling away from Washington in reaction to changing U.S. policies on security and trade.

“China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways – to steal information, to influence our citizens, or to disrupt critical infrastructure,” Coats said.

“Moscow’s relationship with Beijing is closer than it’s been in many decades,” Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee’s annual hearing on worldwide threats, where he testified with the director of the CIA, FBI and other top intelligence officials.

He also said some U.S. allies are seeking more independence, responding to their perceptions of changing policies on security and trade and “are becoming more open” to new partnerships. “The post-World War Two international system is coming under increasing strain amid continuing cyber and WMD proliferation threats, competition in space and regional conflicts,” Coats said, using the acronym for weapons of mass destruction.

Election security

Coats also said U.S. adversaries likely are already looking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election, refining their capabilities and adding new tactics.

He said Russia’s social media efforts will continue to focus on aggravating social and racial tensions, undermining trust in authorities and criticizing politicians perceived to be anti-Russia.

Senator Mark Warner, the panel’s top Democrat, said in his opening statement that he was particularly concerned about Russia’s use of social media “to amplify divisions in our society and to influence our democratic processes” and the threat from China in the technology arena.

The United States on Monday announced criminal charges against China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, escalating a fight with the world’s biggest telecommunications equipment maker and coming days before trade talks between Washington and Beijing.

“Especially concerning have been the efforts of big Chinese tech companies — which are beholden to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) — to acquire sensitive technology, replicate it, and undermine the market share of U.S. firms with the help of the Chinese state,” Warner said.

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday charged Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran by doing business with Tehran through a subsidiary it tried to hide and that was reported on by Reuters in 2012.

“China is going to be a major competitor of ours in every way that there is,” said Republican Senator Jim Risch, an intelligence committee member who is also chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday accepted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to deliver his State of the Union address in the House chamber on Feb. 5. The speech comes as Trump faces an uphill battle to secure funding for his border wall, as well as a special investigation on Russian election meddling, and lawsuits alleging that his businesses violate anti-bribery laws. White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone pleaded not guilty Tuesday to seven charges linked to the release of damaging hacked emails about Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in the midst of the presidential campaign.

The 66-year-old Stone, arrested last week at his Florida home in a pre-dawn FBI raid, was arraigned in a federal court in Washington on five counts of lying to Congress about his role in the WikiLeaks release of the emails, and single counts of witness tampering and obstructing a congressional investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Stone has vocally asserted his innocence in recent days but said nothing as he left court.

Some onlookers outside court chanted, “Lock him up,” and carried signs calling him a “dirty traitor.” But supporters nearby said he did nothing wrong and held up photos of him.

Unlike most defendants in U.S. criminal cases, Stone since his arrest has made the rounds of television news shows, to belittle the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and special counsel Robert Mueller, who brought the charges against him.

On his Instagram account, Stone, a long-time self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” whose hero is Richard Nixon, the disgraced U.S. president from the early 1970s, depicted Mueller in a cartoonish-image as a butler holding a tray with a hamburger roll, but with no meat in between.

The charges against Stone do not allege that he coordinated with Russia or with WikiLeaks on the release of the hacked emails, which U.S. authorities say were stolen from Democrats by Russian agents.

Stone told ABC news on Sunday that all he “did was take publicly available information and try to hype it” to disparage Clinton in support of Trump’s campaign.

The charging documents against Stone say that at one point, a senior Trump campaign official “was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases and what other damaging information” WikiLeaks had about Clinton, but does not disclose who gave the order to find out information from Stone.

Mueller probe

Stone’s arraignment occurred a half day after Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker said on Monday that he thinks Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with Trump’s campaign will finish soon.

“The investigation is, I think, close to being completed, and I hope that we can get the report from Director Mueller as soon as possible,” Whitaker said at a news conference in Washington.

Whitaker has been the acting attorney general since November when Trump ousted Jeff Sessions from the position. Trump had repeatedly complained about Sessions removing himself from oversight of the Russia probe, and Whitaker declined to recuse himself, despite calls that he should, based on his past criticism of Mueller’s investigation.

William Barr, a former U.S. attorney general, is awaiting a confirmation vote on his nomination to again take over the Justice Department. During his confirmation hearings, he pledged, without citing specifics, that he would publicly release as much of Mueller’s eventual report as possible.

So far, Mueller’s investigation has resulted in guilty pleas or convictions of five key figures in Trump’s orbit, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, campaign aide Rick Gates, foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, one-time national security adviser Michael Flynn and former personal attorney Michael Cohen.

Papadopoulos served a short jail term, while Cohen has been sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to surrender himself in early March.  Manafort, Gates and Flynn are awaiting sentencing.
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