United States

As Trump continued to argue that the country faced a border crisis involving an influx of illegal drugs and an invasion of “bad people,” Democrats countered that the construction of a wall would be an overly expensive ineffective solution to the immigration problem. Instead, they proposed that the budget include $1.6 billion for border fencing, cameras, and technology to aid immigration control. As some 800,000 federal employees went without paychecks, negotiations dragged on fruitlessly. Trump eventually downgraded his demand for the wall to a concrete and steel “barrier” and offered a three-year extension for individuals living in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in exchange for wall funding, but Democrats refused to discuss the wall until the government was reopened. In the meantime, Pelosi took steps to prevent Trump from delivering the State of the Union address in the Capitol, scheduled for January 29, 2019. With opinion polling indicating that more Americans blamed Trump for the shutdown than blamed the Democrats, the president relented on January 25, ending the shutdown after 35 days. On February 14 both houses of Congress adopted a budget package negotiated by a special bipartisan committee that included $1.375 billion for 55 miles (88 km) of new border fences and another $1.7 billion for additional border security. The next day Trump controversially declared a national emergency to address the “security crisis” on the country’s southern border and sought to divert $6.7 billion from military construction, counternarcotics operations, and Department of the Treasury asset forfeiture funds for wall building.

Sessions’s resignation, choosing a new attorney general, and the ongoing Mueller investigation

In the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections, Sessions resigned as attorney general at the request of Trump, who remained frustrated by Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation. Trump’s appointment of Matthew G. Whitaker, who had been critical of the special counsel’s investigation, as interim attorney general was widely criticized by Democrats. In February 2019 the Senate confirmed William Barr as attorney general, a position he had also held in the administration of Pres. George H.W. Bush. Barr, too, had earlier been critical of the special counsel’s investigation.

By early March 2019, 34 individuals and three companies had been criminally charged as a result of the Mueller investigation, including Manafort, who was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison after being convicted on charges that included mortgage fraud, foreign lobbying, and witness tampering. In addition to Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, others who were indicted included Rick Gates, who worked with Manafort and was a senior aide on Trump’s inauguration committee, and Roger Stone, a longtime friend and adviser of Trump. Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pled guilty to lying to Congress and to charges related to his involvement in paying hush money to two women who alleged that Trump had sex with them. Having cooperated with investigators but still facing a prison term of three years, Cohen gave high-profile televised testimony to Congress in February about his involvement with Trump, painting a broadly disparaging portrait of his former boss as a liar but offering no direct evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates in the Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 election.

The Mueller report