The Trump administration is pushing forward on plans for two major oil pipelines in the U.S., projects that sparked nationwide demonstrations and legal fights under President Obama.

President Trump signed documents inviting the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline to resubmit a proposal for the project, which the Obama administration rejected in 2015, and instructing the Army to expedite the review and approval process for the section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that hasn't been built.

"We're going to renegotiate some of the terms, and if they'd like, we'll see if they can get the pipeline built," Trump said of the Keystone XL pipeline.

"This not a done deal," Bill McKibben of the group 350.org, which has lobbied against pipelines for years, said in a statement. He called the pipelines "unwise and immoral" because they contribute to climate change.

At the top of President Donald Trump's agenda for his discussion with congressional leaders Monday night: relitigating the campaign, including saying "illegals" voting deprived him of a victory in the popular vote.



The claim of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump argued in late November, has been widely debunked.

Two sources confirmed to NBC News that Trump spent about the first 10 minutes of his bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders at the White House talking about the campaign and about how 3 million to 5 million "illegals" voted in the election, causing him to lose the popular vote.

On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.

In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.

Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

According to one account, Reynolds had been contacted by the White House and given a phone number to call. When he dialed it, he was told to hold for the president.

For Trump, who sees himself and his achievements in superlative terms, the inauguration’s crowd size has been a source of grievance that he appears unable to put behind him. It is a measure of his fixation on the issue that he would devote part of his first morning in office to it — and that he would take out his frustrations on an acting Park Service director.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Thursday called off his trip to Washington scheduled for next week, after Trump moved forward with his plan for a long-promised border wall and needled his southern neighbor about forcing Mexico to pay for it.

But the U.S. president tried to one-up the Mexican leader by insisting the decision not to meet was mutual.

“I’ve said many times that the American people will not pay for the wall. And I’ve made that clear to the government of Mexico,” Trump said in remarks to congressional Republicans’ retreat in Philadelphia. “To that end, the president of Mexico and myself have agreed to cancel our planned meeting scheduled for next week. Unless Mexico is going to treat the United States fairly, with respect, such a meeting would be fruitless and I want to go a different route. We have no choice.”

The president’s statement that the decision to cancel had been mutual came hours after Peña Nieto announced it had been his decision to call off the White House trip. “This morning we told the White House we won't attend next Tuesday's meeting with @potus,” Peña Nieto wrote in a series of tweets. “Mexico reiterates its will to work with the US to achieve agreements for both of us.”

The cancellation represented a stunning rebuke to Trump from a crucial neighbor whose leader is often one of the first to meet with or speak with a new U.S. president. Mexico’s seemingly deteriorating relationship with the United States underpins millions of American jobs as well as cooperation on everything from immigration and national security to counter-narcotics.

Trump, who has shown no sign of tempering his campaign's tough talk against Mexico or a hardline immigration policy now that he is sitting in the Oval Office, continues to approach foreign policy with the flamboyant negotiating tactics he honed in real and made-for-TV boardrooms. Now, however, the consequences are far greater and could reverberate well beyond Mexico.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he is only in the early stages of considering whether to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia, as British Prime Minister Theresa May, other foreign officials and U.S. lawmakers cautioned that such a move would be premature.

With Trump expected to speak by phone on Saturday with Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time since taking power a week ago, speculation has been rife that he is close to lifting sanctions imposed by then-President Barack Obama over Moscow's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula in 2014.

Such a move would likely cause consternation among European allies as well as many in the U.S. Congress who are also troubled by Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war and by U.S. intelligence agencies' finding that Moscow meddled in the U.S. election campaign.

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A long-time Putin critic, U.S. Senator John McCain, who like Trump is a Republican, urged Trump not to lift the sanctions, saying that he should "reject such a reckless course."

"If he does not, I will work with my colleagues to codify sanctions against Russia into law," said McCain, a long-time Putin critic.

House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, the top U.S. elected Republican, told Politico of the sanctions that "I think they should stay."

Former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, now an adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, urged caution against reversing sanctions without winning concessions from Moscow, saying that, "easing sanctions will only embolden Russia’s aggression in the region, putting the security interests of Ukraine and the United States in jeopardy."

Donald Trump relied on conservative media sources to make his explosive claim that former President Barack Obama had the then-candidate’s phones tapped during the 2016 election campaign, according to a person familiar with the situation.

A spokesman for Obama said Trump’s claims were “simply false,” and lawmakers urged Trump, if he had evidence of a wiretap, to make it public or at least disclose it to Congress.

The president, who regularly has access to classified information and intelligence briefings, relied on Breitbart News for his information about the alleged wiretap, according to the person.

Breitbart, the media outlet previously run by White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, published a story Friday outlining actions supposedly taken by the Obama administration to monitor Trump Tower in New York during the campaign. The story, which claimed the moves were aimed at undermining Trump’s candidacy, referenced commentary on Thursday by radio host Mark Levin that made similar claims.