“President Trump appears to be moving — unhappily — closer to signing a bipartisan agreement that provides only a fraction of the money he demanded for a border wall,” CNN reports.

“But in conversations with allies over the past days, he has griped that Republican negotiators were outplayed by their Democratic counterparts, securing a border funding number far smaller than Trump has spent the last two months demanding.”

“In public, Trump has remained gracious about the GOP effort… But privately, Trump has cast the GOP’s dealmaking efforts as inadequate and wondered why he, an experienced dealmaker, wasn’t consulted at more regular intervals as the two sides haggled over an agreement.”

“Andrew McCabe, the former deputy F.B.I. director, said in an interview aired on Thursday that top Justice Department officials were so alarmed by President Trump’s decision in May 2017 to fire James Comey, the bureau’s director, that they discussed whether to recruit cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office,” the New York Times reports.

“The concerns about the president’s actions also prompted Mr. McCabe to order the bureau’s team investigating Russia’s election interference to expand their scope to also investigate whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice by firing Mr. Comey. They also were to examine if he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.”

After the interview aired, Trump ripped McCabe on Twitter, calling him “a disgrace to the FBI and a disgrace to our Country.”

A new Fox News poll finds that nearly half of Republicans, 45%, believe that God wanted Donald Trump to be president, with another 18% indicating that they weren’t sure.

“More than half of white evangelical Protestants — 55% — said that God endorsed Trump. Only 3 in 10 evangelicals said categorically that they didn’t think Trump had God’s explicit support in the election.”

First Read: “So we went from Democrats once offering $25 billion for a border wall in exchange for protection for DACA recipients … to Dem leaders offering Trump $1.3 billion for border fencing … to a floated compromise of $2.5 billion during the shutdown … to a final deal of $1.375 billion for fencing.”

“For all the (valid) grief that Barack Obama got for his negotiating skills, how is this not substantially worse?”

“As a real-estate negotiator, Trump would apply maximum pressure to wear down the opposition. That tactic works when the stakes are low. But when the stakes are high – and the other side has almost the same power in the negotiations – it doesn’t work as well.”

“When it comes to this fight over the border wall/fencing/barriers, Trump lost. And he lost badly.”

New York Times: “In pursuit of a wall, President Trump ran into one.”

“Soon after speaking to President Trump about the firing of his boss James Comey, Andrew McCabe, who became the bureau’s acting director, began obstruction of justice and counterintelligence investigations involving the president and his ties to Russia. In his first television interview since his own firing, McCabe tells 60 Minutes he wanted those inquiries to be documented and underway so they would be difficult to quash without raising scrutiny.”

Said McCabe: “I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion. That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”

The Atlantic runs an excerpt from McCabe’s new book, The Threat.