“Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney first learned about the U.S. military raid against ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi after the operation was already underway,” NBC News reports.

“Mulvaney was at home in South Carolina when President Trump wrote on Twitter Saturday night that ‘Something very big has just happened!’ He was briefed on the raid that night.”

“The extraordinary move by Trump to leave his chief of staff out of the most significant U.S. military operation against the world’s most wanted terrorist since the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011 marks a major blow to Mulvaney, suggesting that he’s increasingly sidelined inside the White House.”

A source familiar with President Trump’s thinking told CNN that “after watching media coverage this weekend about Mick Mulvaney’s Thursday news conference and performance attempting to clean it up, the President has grown increasingly frustrated with his acting chief of staff’s ability to properly communicate the White House’s impeachment strategy.”

“Trump has voraciously consumed news coverage about Mulvaney and has become more agitated… Specifically, the President is concerned, according to the source, that Mulvaney is not transitioning enough to the role he is in now — helping to lead the impeachment inquiry defense from the West Wing.”

A source close to President Trump tells CNN the president was not pleased with acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s press briefing and his acknowledgment on Thursday of a quid pro quo.

Said the source: “He was not happy.”

President Trump denied that his chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was acting on his orders when Mulvaney reportedly directed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to pressure a federal agency to rebuke scientists who had contradicted Trump’s hurricane claims, Politico reports.

Said Trump: “No, I never did that — I never did that.”

He added: “When they talk about the hurricane and when they talk about Florida and Alabama, that is just fake news. Right from the beginning, it was a fake story.”

Washington Post: “Mulvaney spends considerably less time with Trump than his two previous chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly. And the president has sometimes kept him out of the loop when making contentious foreign policy decisions, advisers say. At a recent donor retreat in Chicago, Mulvaney told attendees that he does not seek to control the president’s tweeting, time or family.”

“Instead, Mulvaney has focused much of his energy on creating a new White House power center revolving around the long-dormant Domestic Policy Council and encompassing broad swaths of the administration. One White House official described Mulvaney as ‘building an empire for the right wing.’ He has helped install more than a dozen ideologically aligned advisers in the West Wing since his December hiring. Cabinet members are pressed weekly on what regulations they can strip from the books and have been told their performance will be judged on how many they remove. Policy and spending decisions are now made by the White House and dictated to Cabinet agencies, instead of vice versa.”

“The nomination on Tuesday of Halil Suleyman ‘Sul’ Ozerden to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals offers the latest glimpse of how acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney is exercising his power inside the White House — in this instance, pushing a nominee whose views rankled some of the president’s most important supporters,” Politico reports.

“Mulvaney, who was a groomsman in Ozerden’s 2003 wedding, supported the 53-year-old district court judge’s nomination long before he joined the White House this winter.”

Bloomberg Law: “Upon arriving at the West Wing in January, Mulvaney instituted a formalized system for settling regulatory policy and timeline disputes between White House assistants and Acosta’s top aides, said people with direct knowledge of the process. Conflicts are elevated to Mulvaney for a final decision.”

“Acosta and his staff have been losing these decisions so often that they’ve stopped bothering to appeal.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, acting White House chief of staff “cheerfully extolled his relationship with Trump, joking that he’d gained 10 pounds since becoming chief.”

Said Mulvaney: “I eat more with the president now. He eats hamburgers all the time.”

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney issued a statement saying he didn’t recall instructing aides to keep discussions about election security off President Trump’s radar, after the New York Times reported Mulvaney said the topic “should be kept below his level,” Politico reports.

Said Mulvaney: “I don’t recall anything along those lines happening in any meeting.”

New York Times: “Mulvaney’s careful campaign of deconstruction offers a case study in the Trump administration’s approach to transforming Washington, one in which strategic neglect and bureaucratic self-sabotage create versions of agencies that seem to run contrary to their basic premises. According to one person who speaks with Mulvaney often, his smooth subdual of the C.F.P.B. was part of his pitch to Trump for his promotion to White House chief of staff — long one of the most powerful jobs in Washington.”

“Mulvaney’s slow-rolling attack on the bureau’s enforcement and regulatory powers wasn’t just one of the Trump era’s most emblematic assaults on the so-called administrative state. It was also, in part, an audition.”

Jonathan Swan: “The plan — which acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney and policy staff are developing, and which is in its early stages — would have Trump sign a series of executive orders on issues including education, drug pricing, the opioid epidemic and veterans affairs. Aides say the moves would appeal to Democrats and Republicans.”

“White House officials have already drafted some of these executive orders, and the White House Counsel’s office has started vetting them. Officials familiar with the planning say they think most Americans will back them, as was the case with criminal justice reform.”

“White House officials have been tight-lipped about the content of the orders, so it’s way too early to say if they will be substantive or just political theater.”

White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told Fox News that he expects to know who leaked three months of President Trump‘s daily schedule by as early as the end of this week. But that doesn’t mean anybody will be fired.

Said Mulvaney: “When we find that person or persons, and it’s likely to be a career staffer, you’re going learn a lot about how hard it is to fire federal workers.”