After weeks of negotiation, the Department of Justice has agreed to turn over to lawmakers key documentary evidence collected by special counsel Robert Mueller, the House Judiciary Committee announced Monday.The DOJ's newfound willingness to furnish documents appears to be the product of an agreement between the Trump administration and Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler, who announced Monday that he will not hold attorney general William Barr in contempt, as he previously threatened.“I am pleased to announce that the Department of Justice has agreed to begin complying with our committee's subpoena by opening Robert Mueller's most important files to us, providing us with key evidence that the special counsel used to assess whether the President and others obstructed justice or were engaged in other misconduct,” Nadler said. “All members of the Judiciary Committee — Democrats and Republicans alike — will be able to view them. These documents will allow us to perform our Constitutional duties and decide how to respond to the allegations laid out against the President by the Special Counsel.”The House moved to hold Barr in contempt after he refused to turn over Mueller's full unredacted report due to constraints imposed on him by federal law. While he has agreed to relent in pushing for Barr to be held in contempt, Nadler reserved the right to impose further sanctions “if important information is held back.”While the House will still not be given access to Mueller's full unredacted report, they will now receive a cache of documents, including FBI witness interview summaries, contemporaneous notes, and memos cited in the report. The documents are expected to further their probe into the numerous instances in which Trump attempted to obstruct or otherwise influence Mueller's probe.The agreement was announced hours before the Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin its first round of hearings on Mueller's investigation and the president's attempts to obstruct it. Since the Trump administration has blocked key witnesses, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn, from testifying, Democrats have resorted to calling John Dean, who served as White House counsel to Richard Nixon, as their first witness.

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California governor Gavin Newsom has finalized a deal with the state's Democrat-controlled legislature to provide full health benefits to low-income illegal immigrants under the age of 26.Newsom's office released an outline of the state's 2020 budget Sunday night that calls for $98 million in new annual spending to make some 90,000 previously uninsured illegal immigrants eligible for the state's Medicaid program, according to the Sacramento Bee.The new spending will be offset by a fine on uninsured Californians similar to the “individual mandate” imposed at the federal level under Obamacare and subsequently reversed by the Trump administration.Cynthia Buiza, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, celebrated the expansion of health benefits for younger illegal immigrants but lamented the exclusion of elderly illegal immigrants.“For California’s immigrant communities, today’s budget deal is bittersweet,” Buiza said in a statement. “The exclusion of undocumented elders from the same health care their U.S. citizen neighbors are eligible for means beloved community members will suffer and die from treatable conditions. And the exclusion of many immigrants from the Earned Income Tax Credit will perpetuate the crisis of economic inequality in our state.”The provision of health care to young illegal immigrants represents a compromise between Newsom and Democrats in the legislature who have long demanded that the budget include funds to provide benefits to all California residents regardless of immigration status.The budget, which must still pass a final vote in the legislature in the coming weeks, includes a total $213 billion in annual spending, which California Democrats believe they are well-positioned to cover considering this year's budget surplus.“The budget agreement we’re finalizing tonight builds on the strong budget proposal of the governor, while adding significant legislative priorities,” said Democratic state senator Holly Mitchell, who leads the Joint Legislative Budget Committee. “The budget agreement maintains our agreement to responsible budgeting, which includes the largest reserves in history — over $20 billion — finally paying off the remaining wall of debt from the Great Recession and making supplemental pension payments.”Roughly 40 percent of the nation's illegal immigrants reside in California and that number is rising as record numbers of asylum-seekers continue to arrive at the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego each day. In 2018, half of all births in California were paid for by the state's Medicaid program, Medi-Cal, and 30 percent of those babies were born to mothers in the country illegally.