Trump news: President launches foul-mouthed rant about impeachment as he adds Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz to his legal team
Controversial legal team to mount defence of president as Senate trial begins
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Your support makes all the difference.As the Senate prepares to hold its third presidential impeachment trial in US history, the defence team for Donald Trump was revealed to include Ken Starr, Robert Ray, Alan Dershowitz and Pam Bondi.
Mr Starr led the investigation into Bill Clinton in the late 1990s while Dershowitz has defended such controversial public figures as OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.
During the Clinton impeachment, then-private citizen Trump called Mr Starr a "freak" and a "lunatic" in his pursuit of impeaching then-president Clinton, who Mr Trump supported at the time.
As the Senate swore in chief justice John Roberts on Thursday to preside over the trial, Mr Trump responded angrily from the Oval Office, declaring he had been impeached for “absolutely no reason”.
The president has also continued to deny knowing Lev Parnas, the business associate of his attorney Rudy Giuliani who is the latest to come forward with evidence against him, placing renewed pressure on the likes of Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and ex-Energy Secretary Rick Perry to reveal what they know about the Kiev plot.
But the president enjoyed a sympathetic Republican audience as he celebrated college football champions from LSU on Friday, when he joked about his impeachment while citing a strong economy and well-funded military before flying to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend.
He told the team: "They're trying t impeach the son of a b****. Can you believe that? We got the greatest economy we ever had ... We got the greatest military. We rebuilt it. We took out those terrorists like your football team would've taken out those terrorists, right?"
Follow live coverage as it happened:
Trump suggests his impeachment trial actually a Democratic plot against Bernie Sanders
While all that excitement was going on, Trump was tweeting again and appeared to be suggesting the true purpose of his impeachment trial was not to prosecute wrongdoing over Ukraine but really to lure Vermont senator Bernie Sanders away from the campaign trail in Iowa at the crucial moment to clear the way for a Joe Biden victory, which is deeply and utterly insane.
Meanwhile, Kellyanne Conway has been out talking to the press, smugly assuring the world Trump will not only be acquitted but re-elected.
Republican congresswoman already selling 'liberal hack' merchandise after snubbing reporter
Yesterday, Arizona GOP senator Martha McSally refused to answer questions from CNN reporter Manu Raju on impeachment, telling him he is a "liberal hack".
It's already a T-shirt, less than 24 hours later.
My god, the pursuit of the almighty dollar really knows no bounds does it?
Here's Chris Riotta on the original incident.
Lara Trump mocks Joe Biden's stutter
The president's daughter-in-law, one of the faces of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign, has mocked Joe Biden for stuttering after the former vice president opened up along the campaign trail about overcoming his speech impediment.
The 37-year-old senior adviser made the controversial comments during a “Women for Trump” event in Iowa on Thursday, telling a crowd of supporters: “I feel kind of sad for Joe Biden, and you know that’s when it’s not going well for him, right?”
“I’m supposed to want him to fail at every turn,” she added, “but every time he’s on stage and they turn to him I’m like, ‘Joe, can you get it out? Let’s get the words out, Joe.’”
Chris Riotta reports.
Ken Starr: The man who wanted to lock Hillary up long before Trump did
So what do we know about this Trump defence team?
Ken Starr was notorious for his obsessive pursuit of the Clintons in the late 1990s and has said publicly that he does not believe the president has a case to answer on Ukraine, making him an obvious choice for Team Trump, both for his experience and as a provocation.
Starr made his hatred of the Clintons clear in his book Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation, published in 2018, in which the prosecutor angrily recalled being tempted to charge Hillary Clinton with perjury in 1995 after she said she "did not remember" more than 100 times over the course of three hours of questioning about the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vince Foster.
"This suggested outright mendacity," he wrote. "To be sure, human memory is notoriously fallible, but her strained performance struck us as preposterous."
"The American people saw through Starr's obsessive pursuit of President Clinton and will see through his attempt to rewrite history to vindicate his own sullied reputation," countered Clinton attorney David Kendall in The Daily Mail upon the book's publication.
The Bill Clinton impeachment case of 1998 of course revolved around White House intern Monica Lewinsky. She said of Starr, "[he] turned my 24-year-old life into a living hell in his effort to investigate and prosecute [the president]", even interviewing her ex-boyfriends and White House janitors in pursuit of dirt on the commander-in-chief with little concern for her wellbeing.
The woman forever known for her affair with Clinton gave an interview to Vanity Fair in 2018 in which she described a chance encounter with Starr in a Manhattan restaurant years later. It was the first time she'd ever met him in person and she found him to be "creepy", she recalled.
"Ken Starr asked me several times if I was 'doing OK' A stranger might have surmised from his tone that he had actually worried about me over the years. His demeanour, almost pastoral, was somewhere between avuncular and creepy. He kept touching my arm and elbow, which made me uncomfortable," she said, admitting she was only able to carry out the conversation have completed years of therapy after her ordeal in the public eye.
As for Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law professor was forced to dismiss as as "a complete and total lie" allegations of sexual assault levied at him by a woman who claimed she was kept as a sex slave by the late billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein, a man whom Trump himself denied knowing but praised in New York magazine in 2002 and was later filmed socialising with at a Florida party.
Here is Dershowitz attempting to clear his name on Fox, badly:
And Pam Bondi? Well, she's in Lev Parnas's MAGA selfie collection just like pretty much everyone else and was accused of backing out of an effort to prosecute Trump University for fraud while serving as Florida's AG in 2013, only to then reportedly accept a re-election campaign donation of $25,000 (£19,000) from one Donald J Trump himself.
Mike Pompeo: I have an 'obligation' to investigate Yovanovitch threats
Days after reports revealed the White House may have threatened a former US ambassador to Ukraine, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo broke his silence on the issue and said he has an "obligation" to investigate.
Secretary Pompeo and other members of the administration have been quiet about the documents obtained by Congress through Lev Parnas, an associate of Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani. The documents expose that former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch — who Mr Trump wanted to oust from the role, and who later testified about his meddling in the country during his impeachment investigation — was under surveillance and possibly threatened before she was told to leave her post last spring.
In a statement to an Indianapolis radio host, Mr Pompeo said: "I suspect that much of what's been reported will ultimately prove wrong, but our obligation, my obligation as Secretary of State, is to make sure that we evaluate, investigate. Any time there is someone who posits that there may have been a risk to one of our officers, we'll obviously do that."
Ms Yovanovitch was likely seen as a threat to the administration's attempts to force Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, for dirt on Mr Trump's political opponents ahead of 2020 elections. That threat is at the heart of his impeachment, heading to trial next week.
Yesterday, White House advisor Kellyanne Conway refused to answer whether Mr Parnas was lying in his statements to Congress and tried to undermine his credibility, despite his frequent appearances alongside Mr Trump and his allies.
Trump: 'You got a good president now, even though they're trying to impeach the son of a b****'
Donald Trump relished in his appearance at this morning's coronation of LSU at the White House following their win against the Clemson Tigers in Monday's national college championship game.
As the Senate prepares to hold an impeachment trial for a sitting president for the third time in history, Mr Trump told the team: "You got a good [president] now — even though they're trying to impeach the son of a b****! Can you believe that? We got the greatest economy we ever had, Joe. We got the greatest military. We rebuilt it. We took out those terrorists like your football team would've taken out those terrorists, right?"
LSU quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow also presented Mr Trump with a No. 45 LSU jersey with "Trump" on the back.
Book reveals Trump's tantrums and inability to focus in front of top generals
An excerpt from A Very Stable Genius illustrates a meeting with Donald Trump's top brass six months into the administration inside "The Tank" with his joint chiefs of staff. While they tried to give him a "tutorial" of US foreign policy to help curb his dangerous impulses, the president got distracted, frustrated out of an apparent boredom, insisted countries with military bases pay the US rent, and called US military who fought in Afghanistan "losers" fighting a "loser war" despite having avoided the military draft while the US draft lottery system affected thousands of men during the Vietnam War.
As he left the meeting in the middle of a tantrum, he called his top brass a "bunch of dopes and babies".
The meeting led then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to call the president a "f****** moron", which was later reported by NBC News. He was fired a few months later.
The book from the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker will be released next week.
'We are looking at it': Trump administration may seek changes to anti-bribery rules
The Trump administration is reportedly looking to change a 50-year-old law that makes it illegal for US companies to bribe foreign officials.
According to an excerpt from a new book from two Washington Post reporters, the president said: “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas ... We’re going to change that.”
Meanwhile, here's video of Donald Trump calling Ken Starr, who joined his defence team ahead of the president's impeachment trial, a "lunatic" and a "disaster."
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