Trump news: Impeachment poll reveals soaring public support for president’s removal during TV hearings, as damning Ukraine scandal details emerge
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Your support makes all the difference.The House Intelligence Committee’s televised hearings this month inspired a steady increase in public support for the impeachment of Donald Trump over the Ukraine scandal, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests.
That new poll came just before fresh accusations that have rocked the Trump administration on an entirely new set of circumstances beyond impeachment — this time the accusation from three women that EU ambassador Gordon Sondland had retaliated against them after they turned down his unwanted sexual advances, which included alleged forced kissing and exposing himself.
The accusations were detailed by a joint report from ProPublica and Portland Monthly, and were denied by the Seattle hotelier. Even so, they make him the latest high profile Trump ally to be accused of sexual misconduct after the likes of Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and the president himself.
Meanwhile, as the House Judiciary Committee announced its plans for the next stage of the inquiry and invited the president to attend, The New York Times reported Mr Trump knew about the CIA whistleblower’s initial complaint when he finally released the withheld $391m (£302m) military assistance to Kiev, a tactic that prompted two White House budget officials to resign in protest, according to the latest published witness transcript.
Before that, president Trump gave his latest 2020 campaign rally in Florida on Tuesday night, denouncing the investigation into his quid pro quo call with Volodymyr Zelensky as “bull****” and encouraging his supporters to chant the word in defiance.
On Wednesday, he spent some of his day tweeting about the day’s events, including a photoshopped image with his face on top of the much younger, much fitter Rocky Balboa’s body.
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From Max Burns:
"President Trump is trying his best to wash his hands of Rudy Giuliani’s lethal radioactivity. Unfortunately for Trump, Giuliani is a fellow expert in the fairweather friendships of high-level politics. How Giuliani responds to Trump’s latest incitement will determine whether the White House survives the gathering impeachment storm.
Read more about the president's "last-ditch attempt to cut off the cancerous limb that is Giuliani’s ineptitude":
Meanwhile, the Brothers Trump are under fire again for their grim family vacation photos.
After the president had signed a law making animal cruelty a felony, Mia Farrow reminded the president about his sons' lethal safari.
The New York Times got a sneak peek of an anticipated report from the Justice Department’s inspector general — coming to a not-so-surprising conclusion:
The IG says it did not find any evidence that the FBI spied on the president's campaign in 2016, contradicting claims made by the the president and his supporters, who argued that the FBI had informants inside his campaign and that former president Barack Obama was tapping his phones.
Report: Trump admin knew it couldn't track children separated at the border, but anticipated separating thousands more anyway
An internal watchdog at the Department of Homeland Security found that the Trump administration anticipated separating 26,000 children from their families if the "zero tolerance" border policy had continued — despite the agency knowing it didn't have any way to track and eventually reunite those children with their families.
An inspector general report released on Wednesday found that Customs and Border Protection officials estimated the agency would separate 26,000 children by the end of September. The policy ran from May through June before the president was pressured to end it at the end of June.
The Trump administration had previously only estimated 2,800 children, but the report found that number had to me amended to 3,014 because there was no technology in place to track the children that had been separated.
NBC News has more:
The president's company reported conflicting occupancy rates for his signature building Trump Tower, according to the latest report from ProPublica's ongoing deep dive into Mr Trump's business.
According to documents, "the occupancy rate of the Trump Tower’s commercial space was listed, over three consecutive years, as 11, 16 and 16 percentage points higher in filings to a lender than in reports to city tax officials."
Michael Cohen had previously testified that this was common practice for the Trumps, which is fraud.
Read more here:
Three women have now accused Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU and hotelier, of sexual misconduct, according to a joint report from Propublica and Portland Monthly. And, some say they experienced retaliation.
The accusations come shortly after Mr Sondland participated in the high profile impeachment hearings of Mr Trump, detailing his understanding of the efforts to force Ukraine to investigate the the Biden's and the 2016 election.
In response to the investigation, Mr Sondland released the following statement, which can be read in full here:
"In decades of my career in business and civic affairs, my conduct can be affirmed by hundreds of employees and colleagues with whom I have worked in countless circumstances. These untrue claims of unwanted touching and kissing are concocted and, I believe, coordinated for political purposes. They have no basis in fact, and I categorically deny them.”
William Ruckelshaus dies at the age of 87
Former head of EPA and deputy attorney general William Ruckelshaus has died.
Chosen by Richard Nixon to take on the role of first head of US Environmental Protection Agency, Ruckelshaus was fired for defying the president in the Watergate scandal.
The American attorney died at the age of 87 at his home in Seattle, according to his daughter Mary Ruckelshaus.
Here's our full breaking news story on the allegations against US ambassador Gordon Sondland:
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