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Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric.

As the Department of Education halts protections for student loan borrowers, Obama-era education officials are gearing up to fight their Trump-era counterparts in court.

Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is already facing lawsuits from state attorneys general over rollbacks of protections for students from schools that used illegal practices to encourage students to borrow. A group of former DOE lawyers and policy advisers formed the National Student Legal Defense Network to coordinate with these ongoing efforts and possibly file new suits on behalf of students.

“DeVos and the Trump administration continue to pursue a deregulatory agenda of protections for student loan borrowers and victims of civil rights abuses. They’ve created a real need for nonprofit groups and state prosecutors to step up,” Aaron Ament, a former special counsel at the Education Department and co-founder of the new alliance told the Dayton Daily News.

In April, DeVos appointed a former for-profit college associate dean, Julian Schmoke Jr. of DeVry University, to lead the newly formed Student Aid Enforcement Unit at the Education Department. Just last year DeVry agreed to pay $100 million in a settlement agreement to students the school defrauded by peddling deceptive employment and earnings numbers.

— Taylor Dolven

Remember that time Trump dictated Donald Trump Jr’s statement about his meeting with the Russians over the phone on Air Force One? So does special counsel Robert Mueller III.

And he’s asked the White House to hand over all related documents, including phone records, concerning the crafting of the statement, Politico reported Thursday.

The back-and-forth between father and son occurred in July, while Trump was flying back from the G-20 summit in Germany, and Donald Trump Jr. was facing public allegations of collusion with the Russians back in the United States.

Trump Jr.’s statement initially said the June 2016 meeting was about Russian adoption, though multiple accounts from other attendees as well as emails, released by Trump Jr. himself, contradicted that notion, the Washington Post reported in July.

One of the nation’s most prestigious white shoe law firms is going to need some lawyers of its own, because it too has been caught up in the ever-expanding Russia probe.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, which was commissioned by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to draft a report for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, has been asked by the Justice Department for related documents, the New York Times reported Thursday.

The 2011 report was used to help convict Yanukovych’s political opponent, the former Ukrainian prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, on corruption charges, according to the Times.

Manafort is also the focus of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and whether Moscow interfered in the U.S. presidential election — a topic that seems ripe for discovery as new revelations continue to break in the press. To that end, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that Manafort had also offered “private briefings” on the campaign and the election to a Russian billionaire who was aligned with the Kremlin.

A few weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination, his then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort offered “private briefings” on the 2016 presidential race to a Kremlin-aligned billionaire, the Washington Post reported Wednesday evening.

“If he needs private briefings, we can accommodate,” Manafort emailed an intermediary on July 7, 2016, two weeks before the Republican National Convention. Manafort asked for that message to be relayed to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with ties to Vladimir Putin. The Post reported July 29 of last year that Manafort had managed an investment fund for Deripaska some time before, and the oligarch was suing him, claiming he’d disappeared with $19 million, according to litigation in the Cayman Islands.

There’s no evidence that the promised briefings ever took place, but the offer raises further questions about possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Manafort has been a key focus of the federal government’s investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election and whether members of the Trump’s campaign were involved. The FBI raided Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 26 to seize documents and other materials for the investigation led by special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Ty Cobb, a member of Trump’s legal team, told CNN it would be “shocking” if Manafort “tried to monetize his relationship with the president.” One of Manafort’s selling points to Trump during the campaign was that he would not monetize the relationship. In fact, Manafort told Trump he’d work for free.

— Alex Thompson

How does Donald Trump top a tweet that parodies the deliberate assault of a 69-year-old woman? By blocking a Stage 4 cancer patient.

Remarkably, the U.S. president’s post showing a mock-up of his election rival Hillary Clinton being struck by a drive from a 1-wood is no longer the nadir of his recent Twitter output.

On Wednesday, Laura Packard, a 41-year-old businesswoman and Democratic strategist from Las Vegas, discovered the president had blocked her on the social media site.

Packard has advanced Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and recently tweeted her support for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which the president and the GOP are eager to rescind.

The response from the president?

Packard replied: “Dear @realDonaldTrump you can block me but I’m not going anywhere,” adding that she’d added the snub to her LinkedIn profile.

Trump had earlier tweeted his support for the much-maligned Graham-Cassidy bill, the latest Republican vehicle to strip Americans of healthcare.

In response to Packard, Chelsea Clinton rounded on Trump noting she hadn’t blocked him after he posted the assault video featuring her mother.

Trump has barred myriad Twitter users from viewing his profile, including journalists, celebrities, and just about anyone critical that catches his eye.

A First Amendment group is currently suing the White House, claiming Trump’s Twitter feed is a public forum protected by free speech laws and his use of the block tool violates first amendment rights.

– Paul Vale

The Trump administration can add another state-filed lawsuit to its growing legal battle.

California sued the administration on Wednesday, alleging that President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border would not only violate federal environmental laws, but would also unconstitutionally trample over states’ rights and the separation of powers.

“The Trump administration has once again ignored laws it doesn’t like in order to resuscitate a campaign talking point to build a wall on our southern border,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, said in a statement. “President Trump has yet to pivot from candidate Trump to leader of a nation built on the rule of law. That’s dangerous.”

The lawsuit singles out two sections of the proposed wall as illegal: five miles in San Diego and three in Calexico, California. (The Trump administration hopes to build prototype versions of the wall along the San Diego stretch.) Becerra alleges that when Trump issued an executive order demanding that the Department of Homeland Security build his wall, he relied on a law that no longer exists: a section of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that allows the Homeland Secretary secretary to bypass several environmental laws and build physical barriers along the border.

That section, the lawsuit argues, expired in 2008, because those barriers had to be constructed before December 31, 2008 — which makes Trump’s attempt to use the section unconstitutional. And without its protections, Trump has to abide by various environmental statutes.

Some environmental groups, like the Sierra Club, have made the same argument in previous challenges to the wall.

The Justice Department didn’t immediately reply to VICE News’ request for comment, but when reporters asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions what he thought of California’s lawsuit, Sessions wasn’t concerned.

“The United States government has the control of that border and a responsibility to secure it,” Sessions said.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is now investigating some of President Trump’s most controversial actions taken in office, unnamed White House sources told the New York Times.  It’s a significant detour from the pre-election inquiries the probe was making until now.

Mueller’s office has reportedly requested documents on 13 incidents, including:

• Trump’s dismissal of former national security advisor Michael Fynn — who’s also the target of multiple federal investigations
• Trump’s dismissal of former FBI director James Comey
• a meeting Trump had in the Oval Office with the Sergeys (Lavrov and Kislyak, Russia’s foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S., respectively)  where he expressed his relief at firing Comey.

Ty Cobb, one of Trump’s attorneys (who was overheard discussing the investigation over lunch at a D.C. steakhouse earlier this week) has reportedly told Mueller’s office that the White House will cooperate with the requests but declined to comment further.

“We can’t comment on any specific requests being made or our conversations with the special counsel,’’ he told the Times.

— Gabrielle Bluestone

President Trump might be rich enough to slap his name in gold on buildings throughout the world, but apparently he doesn’t want to use his own money to pay for the army of lawyers he needs to contend with the Russia investigation. Instead, he’s using money donated to his reelection campaign and to the Republican National Committee, Reuters reported Tuesday.

While this isn’t illegal, experts told Reuters, it is unprecedented: Trump would be the first modern U.S. president to use campaign funds to cover the cost of handling a criminal investigation.

The Republican National Committee spent more than $230,000 in August to pay for Trump’s legal fees, CNN reported Tuesday. That money came from its legal defense fund — as opposed to the money set aside to pay for its political operations — and the RNC hasn’t yet decided if it will keep footing Trump’s bills, an RNC official told CNN.

Because Trump filed for reelection the same day he took office, years before any other president, he has access to a campaign fund that, as of June, totals nearly $12 million raised solely from private donors. Privately funded campaigns have more leeway to do what they like with their money than publicly funded ones, and no recent major presidential candidate has run a publicly funded campaign other than Barack Obama.

— Carter Sherman

During its tumultuous first eight months, the Trump administration has been blighted by a succession of bombshell leaks to the media. Now it seems senior White House lawyers are inadvertently briefing reporters in busy Washington eateries.

Ty Cobb, the flamboyantly hirsute White House attorney whose job it is to respond to Russia probe investigators, was overheard “casually and loudly” discussing White House drama in a steakhouse Sunday with Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd.

The restaurant they picked is next door to the New York Times building and, unbeknown to Cobb, Times reporter Ken Vogel was sat at the “next table” eating a tuna nicoise salad.

According to Vogel, Cobb was particularly vocal on his dispute with White House counsel Don McGahn over the handling of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference.

The probe has reportedly led to clashes between Cobb and McGahn, the former pushing for total cooperation in a bid to end the investigation quickly. The latter is concerned such openness might not work out well in the long run.

Cobb told Dowd about a White House lawyer he labeled “a McGahn spy,” and claimed the White House counsel kept “a couple documents locked in a safe” he wanted access to.

Cobb also noted a colleague, whom he blamed for “these earlier leaks,” had “tried to push Jared [Kushner] out”–  referring to the president’s son-in-law.

According to New York Times, McGahn did not take the Cobb’s indiscretion well, “privately erupting” at the lawyer. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly also “reprimanded” Cobb.

On Sunday, Cobb gave a hastily arranged interview to the New York Times praising McGahn. “Whenever we have differences of opinion, we have been able to work them out professionally and reach consensus,” he said.

— David Gilbert