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Pope Francis “has criticized the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the Mexican border, saying populism is not the answer to the world’s immigration problems,” Reuters reports.

“Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is working with White House lawyers to draft an executive action that will end the Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant families at the border,” Politico reports.

“The action will direct the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together and will instruct the Department of Defense to help house the families because many of the detention centers are at capacity, the source said.”

“President Trump is expected to sign the action, the source added.”

“The White House said Friday that President Trump supports House legislation that closely tracks his priorities on border security and limiting legal immigration, walking back comments he made on national television rejecting the GOP bill,” the Washington Post reports.

“The reversal came after hours of confusion on Capitol Hill, where Trump’s words roiled an already fragile internal debate between conservative and moderate Republicans in the House who have beeen trying to find an immigration compromise after months of false starts.”

People close to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) have told the White House that the ailing Arizona lawmaker does not want President Trump to attend his funeral and would like Vice President Mike Pence to come instead, NBC News reports.

Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush plan to be eulogists at McCain’s funeral.

Manhattan federal prosecutors seized as many as 16 cell phones when the FBI raided the home, office and hotel room of President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, the New York Post reports.

President Trump said on Friday he had ordered strikes on Syrian targets, seeking to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack near Damascus that killed more than 40 people, the New York Times reports.

Mr. Trump said Britain and France had joined the United States in the strikes.

Said Trump: “These are not the actions of a man. They are crimes of a monster instead.”

“Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.”

—Retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, quoted by BuzzFeed, explaining to friends why he quit his job as a Fox News analyst.

President Trump must face a defamation lawsuit by a former contestant on his reality TV show “The Apprentice” after a Manhattan judge ruled in a first-of-its kind decision that he could not claim immunity through his job as the nation’s commander-in-chief, the New York Post.

President Trump said that he spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his recent election victory and said that the two would likely get together in the not too distant future, ABC News reports.

Said Trump: “We had a very good call.”

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels underwent a polygraph exam in 2011 about her relationship with Donald Trump, and the examiner found there was a more than 99 percent probability she told the truth when she said they had unprotected sex in 2006, according to a copy of the report obtained by NBC News.

President Trump’s lawyer “called on the Justice Department to immediately shut down the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, in the wake of the firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe,” the Washington Post reports.

“Attorney John Dowd said in a statement that the investigation, now led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, was fatally flawed early on and ‘corrupted’ by political bias.”

Said Dowd: “I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe’s boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier.”

Larry Kudlow has accepted the job from President Trump to head the White House’s National Economic Council, the Washington Post reports.

“President Trump’s personal attorney used his Trump Organization email while arranging to transfer money into an account at a Manhattan bank before he wired $130,000 to adult film star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence,” NBC News reports.

“The lawyer, Michael Cohen, also regularly used the same email account during 2016 negotiations with the actress — whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford — before she signed a nondisclosure agreement.”

North Korea has invited President Donald Trump to meet their leader Kim Jong Un.

David Brooks: “The best indicator we have so far is the example of Italy since the reign of Silvio Berlusconi. And the main lesson there is that once the norms of acceptable behavior are violated and once the institutions of government are weakened, it is very hard to re-establish them. Instead, you get this cycle of ever more extreme behavior, as politicians compete to be the most radical outsider. The political center collapses, the normal left/right political categories cease to apply and you see the rise of strange new political groups that are crazier than anything you could have imagined before.”

“If America follows the Italian example, by 2025 we’ll look back at Trump nostalgically as some sort of beacon of relative normalcy. And by the way, if America follows the Italian example, Trump will never go away.”