Trump impeachment news: President claims no president has ever done as much as him 'for religion' as he escalates Christian magazine attacks
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As Donald Trump reels from Wednesday’s House vote making him only the third American president to be impeached, a Washington Post reporter has claimed he overheard a White House staffer wishing colleagues a “Merry Impeachmas”, suggesting the president’s inner circle is not as united as he likes to insist.
Mr Trump has meanwhile taken to Twitter to denounce the influential religious periodical Christianity Today, founded by legendary evangelist Billy Graham, after it called for his ousting and criticised his “profoundly immoral” conduct. “I won’t be reading ET again!” he frothed, offering a memorable typo.
The president has also been attracting criticism from his fellow Republicans after attacking Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell and suggesting her late husband is looking on from hell during his midweek rally in Battle Creek, Michigan, with Oklahoma’s Tom Cole branding his remarks “extraordinarily inappropriate”.
As Mr Trump prepared to sign a series of spending bills to avoid a government shutdown and to approve 2020 defence budgets, among other budgetary concerns, reports revealed that the White House had threatened a presidential veto for the measures if they included language that mandated any aid earmarked for Ukraine be "released quickly" to that country.
The president is accused of withholding aid to Ukraine in a bid to pressure Kiev to investigate his political opponents, an abuse of power at the heart of his impeachment on Wednesday.
Democrats intended to prevent that aid freeze from happening again by including the language in the proposal, but administration officials threatened a veto for the $1.4 trillion spending bill.
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Billy Graham's son disowns Christianity Today editorial
On Twitter, the Trump War Room account has posted a quote from Franklin Graham, son of celebrated American pastor Billy Graham, disowning the editorial in Christianity Today that so incensed the president.
Who is the Supreme Court judge who will preside over Trump's Senate impeachment trial?
US chief justice John Roberts is poised to serve a highly visible though largely ceremonial role in Trump's Senate impeachment trial next month. But it is in his day job on the Supreme Court that the mild-mannered jurist could have a bigger impact on Trump's presidency.
Roberts, 64, is set to preside over the trial in which the 100 senators will serve as jurors to decide whether to convict the president and remove him from office, an unlikely result considering Trump's fellow Republicans control the chamber and a two-thirds majority is needed to oust him. While the senators - not Roberts - set the rules for the trial and determine its outcome, he is positioned to play a central role in deciding significant cases now before the nine-member court that will directly impact Trump.
It is in the marble-lined corridors of the Supreme Court across the street from the US Capitol, hidden from the television cameras, where Roberts wields real power.
The justices will hear arguments and rule by the end of June - in the heat of the 2020 presidential race - on Trump's bid to keep details of his finances secret after lower courts ordered that his accounting firm and two banks turn over records to congressional investigators and a New York City prosecutor. Roberts is considered the ideological centre of a court with a five-four conservative majority. As such, he could very well represent the decisive vote. Roberts is known for his cautious approach to major cases, sometimes disappointing fellow conservatives. The court's rulings in the financial records cases could set precedents consequential not only for Trump but for other presidents for decades to come.
With Democratic House lawmakers and a Democratic prosecutor in New York issuing subpoenas for his financial records, the businessman-turned-politician has argued for broad presidential immunity. Rulings in Trump's favour could handcuff Congress and prosecutors in investigating any sitting president. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump has refused to disclose his tax returns.
The impeachment trial promises to be uncomfortable for Roberts, who prefers to fly under the radar even while he has steered the court in a rightward direction since being appointed as chief justice in 2005 by George W Bush.
"My sense is that the chief doesn't want to make himself the story," said Sarah Binder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank.
(Jim Young/Reuters)
Those who know Roberts, including former law clerks, have said he will take his trial role seriously and, as a history buff, is likely reading up on the previous impeachment trials of presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, both of whom were acquitted. His job is to keep the trial on track, though Roberts could be called upon to rule on whether certain witnesses should appear. Senators could reverse him if a majority disagrees with any ruling he makes. In Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial, then-chief justice William Rehnquist had "relatively little to do," said Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis who was one of Rehnquist's law clerks at the time.
"I think Chief Justice Roberts is likely to approach his role... the way he has approached his judicial career to date: doing his best to be impartial, doing his best to preserve the dignity of his judicial office," Richards added.
Roberts has not spoken publicly about his impending role. During a rare public appearance in New York in September, he appeared concerned about Washington's hyperpartisan politics. "When you live in a polarised political environment, people tend to see everything in those terms. That's not how we at the court function," Roberts said.
Roberts has the reputation as a traditional conservative and strong defender of the Supreme Court's institutional independence. Roberts, raised in Indiana and educated at Harvard Law School, served in Ronald Reagan's administration in the 1980s and was appointed first to a federal appeals court and later to the Supreme Court by Bush.
He is often viewed as an incrementalist in his judicial philosophy, mindful that the Supreme Court risks its legitimacy if its conservative majority is seen as moving too aggressively to the right in its rulings.
He has voted consistently with his fellow conservatives -against gay and abortion rights and for expanded religious liberty and gun rights. But in 2012, Roberts sided with the court's liberal bloc and cast the deciding vote to uphold the healthcare law dubbed Obamacare, signed by Barack Obama in 2010 and reviled by conservatives.
In June, Roberts joined the liberal justices and cast the deciding vote in a 5-4 ruling blocking Trump from adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census that critics said was intended to deter immigrants from taking part in the decennial population count. Roberts publicly differed with Trump in November 2018, taking the rare step of issuing a statement defending the federal judiciary after the president lashed out at judges who had ruled against him.
An independent judiciary, Roberts said, "is something we should all be thankful for."
Reuters
Trump getting his Space Force by signing off on 2020 National Defense Authorisation Act
As we saw in his tweet earlier, Trump is celebrating the launch of Space Force today, the first new military service in more than 70 years.
In signing the 2020 National Defense Authorisation Act that includes Space Force, Trump can claim a victory for one of his top national security priorities just two days after being impeached by the House. It is part of a $1.4trn (£1.1trn) government spending package - including the Pentagon's budget - that provides a steady stream of financing for Trump's US-Mexico border fence and reverses unpopular and unworkable automatic spending cuts to defence and domestic programmes.
Space Force has been a reliable applause line at Trump's political rallies, but for the military it's seen more soberly as an affirmation of the need to more effectively organise for the defence of US interests in space - especially satellites used for navigation and communication. Space Force is not designed or intended to put combat troops in space.
Space has become increasingly important to the US economy and to everyday life. The Global Positioning System, for example, provides navigation services to the military as well as civilians. Its constellation of about two dozen orbiting satellites is operated by the 50th Space Wing from an operations centre at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado.
In a report last February, the Pentagon asserted that China and Russia have embarked on major efforts to develop technologies that could allow them to disrupt or destroy American and allied satellites in a crisis or conflict. "The United States faces serious and growing challenges to its freedom to operate in space," it said.
When he publicly directed the Pentagon in June 2018 to begin working toward a Space Force, Trump spoke of the military space mission as part of a broader vision. "My administration is reclaiming America's heritage as the world's greatest space-faring nation," he said. "When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space."
Trump got his Space Force, which many Democrats opposed. But it is not in the "separate but equal" design he wanted. Instead of being its own military department, like the Navy, Army and Air Force, the Space Force will be administered by the secretary of the Air Force. The law requires that the four-star general who will lead Space Force, with the title of Chief of Space Operations, will be a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but not in Space Force's first year. That leader is likely to be Air Force general John W Raymond, the commander of US Space Command.
NASA's Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft launches from complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station today (Reuters)
Space Force is the first new military service since the Air Force was spun off from the Army in 1947. Space Force will be the provider of forces to US Space Command, a separate organization established earlier this year as the overseer of the military's space operations.
The division of responsibilities and assets between Space Force and Space Command has not been fully worked out.
Space Force will be tiny, compared to its sister services. It will initially have about 200 people and a first-year budget of $40m (£31m). The military's largest service, the Army, has about 480,00 active-duty soldiers and a budget of about $181bn (£139bn). The Pentagon spends about $14bn (£10.7bn) a year on space operations, most of which is in the Air Force budget.
Kaitlyn Johnson, a space policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, sees the creation of Space Force as an important move but doubts it will prove as momentous as Trump administration officials suggest. Vice president Mike Pence has touted Space Force as "the next great chapter in the history of our armed forces." Defence secretary Mark Esper earlier this week called this an "epic moment" in recent American military history.
Johnson says Democrats' opposition to making Space Force a separate branch of the military means it could be curtailed or even dissolved if a Democrat wins the White House next November. "I think that's a legitimate concern" for Space Force advocates, she said. "Just because it's written into law doesn't mean it can't be unwritten," Johnson continued, adding, "Because of the politics that have started to surround the Space Force, I worry that that could damage its impact before it even has time to sort itself out" within the wider military bureaucracy."
Some in Congress had been advocating for a Space Force before Trump entered the White House, but his push for legislation gave the proposal greater momentum. Trump's first defence secretary, Jim Mattis, was initially cool to the idea, arguing against adding new layers of potentially expensive bureaucracy. Mattis' successor, Esper, has been supportive of Space Force.
In September he said it will "allow us to develop a cadre of warriors who are appropriately organised, trained and equipped to deter aggression and, if necessary, to fight and win in space." He added, "The next big fight may very well start in space, and the United States military must be ready."
AP
Trump speaks to Xi Jinping, ready to resolve self-inflicted China trade war
The president says he has spoken to his Chinese counterpart this morning and is set to agree the signing of their new trade deal soon (as trailed by treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin yesterday) after a year of tariff tensions, economic threats and bluster.
He also says they discussed North Korea, which has resumed missile testing after finding Trump's friendship a waste of time. No word yet on that "Christmas present" Kim Jong-un was threatening to send to the commander-in-chief.
Bill Barr says attorney's report on FBI won't be ready 'for quite a few months' as representatives call for his resignation
Trump's attorney general William Barr has said the man he appointed to turn in his own report into the origins of the FBI's 2016 Russia investigation, Connecticut state attorney John Durham, will not be ready to do so "for quite a few months".
“He is moving very diligently,” the attorney general told Fox News's Martha MacCallum in an interview. “Just based on my general knowledge of the things that he is looking at or has to look at in the future,” he explained, “I would not think that he would be in a position for quite a few months.”
Barr was unhappy with the outcome of Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz's report into the same subject, which was published on 9 December and exonerated the Obama-era bureau over allegations of liberal bias against the Trump campaign.
Eleven members of Congress, six from the House Judiciary Committee, have meanwhile signed a letter to Barr demanding both he and Durham resign. "Merry Christmas ya filthy animal..."
Tulsi Gabbard lying low after controversial impeachment vote
The Hawaii congresswoman, an increasingly rogue presence among the 2020 presidential field, cancelled a media session in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday after causing an outcry when she was the only member of the House to answer "present" on Trump's impeachment, rather than "yes" or "no".
She explained herself in a Twitter video shortly after the vote but that didn't stop #TulsiCoward trending shortly afterwards.
Here's Hannah Selinger for Indy Voices on an extraordinary publicity stunt that appears to have backfired on a candidate Hillary Clinton notoriously described as a "favourite of the Russians" on a podcast.
Nutter endorses Michael Bloomberg
I'm going to be honest, I just wanted to write that headline.
The Nutter in question, since you insist, is former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter.
“Mike Bloomberg is my kind of leader,” the Pennsylvania politician says. “He cares about the drug crisis, gun violence, the environment and access to high-quality healthcare for all Americans.”
He is reportedly being tipped to serve as national political chair for Bloomberg’s still-developing but extremely well funded campaign, according to Politico.
(Jeff Kowalsky/AFP/Getty)
Donald Trump's former press secretary shows some remorse
Though not for her role in the first few years of the Trump presidency, and the slow roll of attacks on press access in the White House.
Bloomberg is flaunting the debates
The former mayor of New York City is self-funding his campaign, which means he has no legitimate way of making it onto the debate stage given the hundreds of thousands of donors required.
He says he's not phased:
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