Trump impeachment news: Watergate prosecutor says evidence to remove president at 'tipping point', as John Bolton posts cryptic attack on White House
Trump says he 'wants a trial' in relation to impeachment proceedings against him
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Donald Trump gave a wild, 53-minute long interview with Fox and Friends on Friday morning, attacking the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry and spreading debunked conspiracy theories.
A group of Senate Republicans met Thursday with White House officials to discuss how a potential trial on articles of impeachment of Mr Trump could happen. “Frankly, I want a trial,” the president said during the interview.
The president also used it as an opportunity to complain that ex-Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch never hung his portrait in the US embassy in Kiev.
Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman has meanwhile told Newsweek that Gordon Sondland‘s explosive appearance on Wednesday represented a “tipping point” that will bring about the demise of the Trump presidency.
The comments came as the first daughter, Ivanka Trump, was ridiculed online for attempting to defend her father with a quote from 19th century diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville. The quote she shared said: “A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office.”
As The Week noted, Tocqueville never said this, a judge named John Innes Clark did. Worse still for Ms. Trump, the quote was part of a larger passage explicitly defending the practice of impeaching the president for wrongdoing; Clark called impeachment, with its risk of partisan misuse, “justly though preferable” to leaving the president immune from consequence between elections.
Meanwhile, former National Security Adviser John Bolton made a dramatic return to Twitter following his unexplained hiatus since his resignation in September. Mr Bolton said the White House had blocked access to his account, suggesting the administration is fearful of what he might say. On Friday afternoon he tweeted: “To those who speculated I went into hiding, I’m sorry to disappoint!”
Mr Trump was asked whether he was involved in blocking Mr Bolton’s Twitter account. He replied: “No, of course not, I had a good relationship with John.”
Catch-up on events as they happened
Donald Trump says his administration will soon unveil a plan to combat the soaring prices of prescription drugs in the US -
The Secret Service paid more than a quarter of a million dollars to Donald Trump’s businesses in the first five months of his presidency alone, newly released documents show.
The documents, obtained by Property of the People via a Freedom of Information Act request, a government watchdog group, detail more than 50 payments made by the Secret Service to Trump properties, 40 of which were paid to "Trump National Golf Club".
Mr Trump owns several golf clubs and the document does not indicate at which specific location the money was spent.
Donald Trump has lashed out at former US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch in a rambling phone call to Fox News, complaining that she was slow to hang his portrait in the to Ukrainian embassy, adding: "This was not an angel."
Ms Yovanovitch served the US in Ukraine from August 2016 until May 2019, when Mr Trump ousted her following what she called a "smear campaign" by Mr Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
She told a hearing of the public impeachment inquiry last week that she “had no agenda other than to pursue our stated foreign policy goals” during her tenure - but soon after she started speaking Mr Trump began tweeting about her, claiming "everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad".
On Friday, he doubled-down on his attacks against her, saying: "This ambassador that everybody says is so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy, ok?
"She’s in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it. It look a year-and-a-half, two years for her to get the picture up."
This new report details the many falsities Donald Trump espoused during his morning interview with Fox News:
CNN's Jake Tapper has tweeted insight from an anonymous source who said the White House does not believe the president will actually be impeached:
For a man who craves the spotlight as much as President Donald Trump does, the past two weeks must have been hell.
The 45th president, by many reports the most voracious consumer of television news to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk, has spent the days since November 13 in virtual exile from the airwaves as most networks offered gavel-to-gavel coverage of the fourth impeachment inquiry in American history.
Yes, most of the White House press corps still arrived each day to cover Trump's comings and goings while recording even the most prosaic of his utterances. But for the most part, the man who has become accustomed to being the center of attention since January 20, 2017 was shoved aside in favor of a new cast of characters led by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has become a go-to hate object for Trump and his supporters...
Read the full story from Andrew Feinberg here:
In non-impeachment related news, Donald Trump has spoken about the Hong Kong protests. The president was vague about whether he would sign or veto legislation to back protesters as he tries to strike a trade deal with China.
In the televised interview Trump said he had told President Xi Jinping that crushing the Hong Kong protesters would have "a tremendous negative impact" on efforts to reach an accord to end a 16-month trade war between the US and China.
"If it weren't for me Hong Kong would have been obliterated in 14 minutes," Trump said on Fox and Friends.
Earlier this afternoon, Trump posted a series of tweets about prescription drugs policy. He said he will release a plan to let Florida and other states import prescription medicines to combat high drug prices - while attacking the Democrat-led House for not going far enough in a drug-pricing bill.
Here's the thread:
Ivanka Trump has been ridiculed online for attempting to defend her father with a quote from 19th century diplomat Alexis de Tocqueville.
The quote she shared read: "A decline of public morals in the United States will probably be marked by the abuse of the power of impeachment as a means of crushing political adversaries or ejecting them from office."
As The Week noted, Tocqueville never said this, a judge named John Innes Clark did. Worse still for Ms. Trump, the quote was part of a larger passage explicitly defending the practice of impeaching the president for wrongdoing; Clark called impeachment, with its risk of partisan misuse, "justly though preferable" to leaving the president immune from consequence between elections.
That's all for our live coverage of the Trump administration. Thanks for following along.
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