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
Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
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.
All the president's lawyers: The team fighting Trump's impeachment
Show all 6
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:
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Trump rages as Senate impeachment trial commences
As the Senate swore in chief justice John Roberts on Thursday to preside over only the third presidential impeachment trial in American history, Donald Trump responded angrily from the Oval Office, declaring he had been impeached for “absolutely no reason”.
“It’s a complete hoax. The whole thing with Ukraine. So you have a perfect phone call – it was actually two phone calls, you people don’t report that. They were both perfect calls. In fact probably among the nicest calls I’ve ever made to foreign leaders,” Trump insisted, referring to his attempts to extort a domestic political favour from the Eastern European country’s new president Volodymyr Zelensky last July.
Trump was speaking from behind the Resolute Desk with a face like thunder at an event to announce his new guidance on constitutional prayer in public schools (a further overture to the Christian right by bolstering religious freedoms at the expense of secular interests) but his mind was clearly on the pomp and ceremony underway in the upper chamber of Congress across Capitol Hill, as this subsequent all-caps tweet makes clear:
Here's Clark Mindock with a full report on the day's events.
President, Mike Pence again deny knowing Lev Parnas
The president also used his Q&A with White House reporters to continue 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.
"I don't even know who this man is, other than I guess he attended fundraisers so I take a picture with him," he said. "I take thousands and thousand of pictures with people all the time. Thousands during the course of a year."
"I don't know him at all. Don't know what he's about. Don't know where he comes from. Know nothing about him. I can only tell you this thing is a big hoax... Perhaps he's a fine man, perhaps he's not."
Pence said the same thing on a campaign stop in Tampa, Florida, declaring: “I don’t know the guy.”
The veep also said that Parnas's insistence that he had known about the plot to pressure Zelensky into announcing an anti-corruption investigation into Joe Biden was "completely false".
Parnas told MSNBC journalist Rachel Maddow in an interview broadcast on Wednesday night that Pence had pulled out of attending Zelensky's inauguration in Kiev last May a day after the Giuliani crony had appealed to the the Ukrainian president on Trump's behalf.
The trouble with such denials is that Parnas has a selfie with almost everyone in the Trump administration - and his lawyer Joseph Bondy is not afraid to share them.
Parnas says Trump World 'like a cult', admits fear of Justice Department as pressure grows on Mike Pompeo
There were further Lev Parnas revelations last night as both Maddow and Anderson Cooper on CNN ran more of their interviews with the Giuliani associate, who, you will recall, was arrested for campaign finance violations with his business partner Igor Fruman last October.
He told Maddow that Rick Perry had been in the know about the Ukraine plot the all the way and that he personally believed Biden had done nothing wrong:
Speaking of his involvement in Trump World more generally, Parnas told MSNBC: "It was like being in a cult. When they say organised crime - I don’t think Trump is like organised crime, I think he’s like a cult leader.
"Right now the scary part… and what people don’t understand, is there’s a lot of Republicans that would go against him. The difference between why Trump is so powerful now - he wasn’t as powerful in ‘16 and ‘17, he became that powerful when he got [attorney general] William Barr.
"People are scared. Am I scared? Yes. I think I’m more scared of our Justice Department than these criminals right now. Because the scariest part is getting locked in some room and being treated as an animal when you’ve done nothing wrong. And that’s the tool they’re using. Because they’re trying to scare me into not talking… My wife is scared, my kids are nervous."
Talking to Cooper, Parnas said that, during a conversation at Trump's Washington hotel early last year, he had told the the president that the former US ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch had been telling others that she believed Trump would be impeached, causing the president to react angrily.
"In the conversation, the subject of Ukraine was brought up. And I told the president that our opinion that [Yovanovitch] is badmouthing him, and that she said that he's gonna get impeached, something like that. I don't know if that's word for word," Parnas said.
"His reaction was, he looked at me, like, got very angry, and basically turned around to [former White House aide] John DeStefano, and said, 'Fire her. Get rid of her.'"
These latest damning insights come after Parnas's text messages and notes, handed over to House Democrats earlier this week, indictated Yovanovitch had been placed under surveilance by Giuliani's team, prompting the former envoy to demand an investigation be carried out and Ukraine to oblige.
All of which means her former boss at the State Department, Mike Pompeo, has an awful lot of questions to answer.
Here's Andy Gregory's report.
Eleven US troops injured in Iran missile attack despite Pentagon claim of no casualties
US military news site Defense One reported overnight that, contrary to Trump administration claims to the contrary, 11 American soldiers were injured in the Iranian missile strike on the al-Asad air base in Iraq on 8 January, as Tehran retaliated against the killing of its top general Qassem Soleimani in an American drone strike on Baghdad International Airport five days earlier.
With the world on the bring of war one week into the new year, Trump memorably tweeted "All is well!" and claimed it was a case of "So far, so good!" on the casualty front...
...this was later backed up by secretary of defence Mark Esper and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley, who said there had been "no friendly casualties" in the attacks.
But, according to Defense One, 11 were hurt and evacuated to military hospitals in Kuwait and Landstuhl, Germany, to be treated "for traumatic brain injury and to undergo further evaluation" this week.
A statement issued yesterday by spokesman Colonel Myles Caggins of US military command in Baghdad read: “As previously stated, while no US service members were killed in the 8 January Iranian attack on al-Asad air base, several were treated for concussion symptoms from the blast and are still being assessed.
“Out of an abundance of caution, some service members were transported from al-Asad Air Base, Iraq, to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, others were sent to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, for follow-on screening.
"When deemed fit for duty, the service members are expected to return to Iraq following screening. The health and welfare of our personnel is a top priority and we will not discuss any individual’s medical status."
Another defence official told the site: "As a standard procedure, all personnel in the vicinity of a blast are screened for traumatic brain injury, and if deemed appropriate, are transported to a higher level of care. At this time, eight individuals have been transported to Landstuhl, and three have been transported to Camp Arifjan,” said the official.
Had the casualties been revealed last week, Trump would surely have found it much harder to justify de-escalating a conflict he had so recklessly started.
Here's Kate Ng's report.
FBI investigators raid Robert Hyde's home and office
The Feds visited the home and offices of Connecticut congressional candidate and Trump donor Robert Hyde yesterday after the Parnas communications revealed his murky involvement in the effort to spy on Marie Yovanovitch.
Agents were seen at Hyde's home in Weatogue, Connecticut, early on Thursday morning before going to his business in nearby Avon. Hyde runs both his landscaping company and his campaign headquarters from that office.
Parnas told Maddow Hyde was "drunk all the time" and did not pose a threat to the ambassador, characterising him as a MAGA fantasist known for his erratic behaviour (apparently once suffering a psychotic episode at Trump's Miami Doral resort).
Like Parnas, Hyde has posed for innumerable selfies with everybody's who's anybody in Trumplandia and clearly has connections, despite the likes of Eric Trump and Kellyanne Conway seeking to distance themselves from him this week.
'Teacher of the year' knelt during national anthem at college football playoff to protest Trump
The president attended the 2020 college football championship game in New Orleans between Louisana State University (LSU) and Clemson University on Monday night, where he received a warm reception from the crowd at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and met Hollywood actor Vince Vaughn (opposition to which Fox cooked up into a ludicrous and unfounded "liberal outrage" furore).
One person also there who was much less pleased to see him was Minnesota educator Kelly Holstine, recently named "teacher of the year", who knelt like Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem in protest at Trump and in support of the oppressed. Holstine has also rejected an invitation to the White House for an Oval Office ceremony to receive her honour from education secretary Betsy DeVos.
Here's Alex Woodward's story on an overlooked gesture, as Trump prepares host the victorious LSU Tigers at the White House today.
'I've spoken to women who were destroyed by Trump. The Marie Yovanovitch rumors don't surprise me'
For Indy Voices, Molly Jong-Fast says the Lev Parnas message dump exposes a pattern of behaviour routinely enacted by the Trump administration when it needs to bring down unruly women in power.
'The trade deals Trump made this week should have sealed the deal for him in 2020. But they won't'
Also for Voices, Jay Caruso argues that the president's latest round of dealmaking should have been a major win for him in spite of his impeachment but reminds us that no one knows better how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory better than The Donald.
Chuck Schumer to force vote on new impeachment witnesses when Senate trial reconvenes on Tuesday
Now that Nancy Pelosi has chosen her seven impeachment managers and they have delivered the articles to the Senate, the trial stage of Trump's impeachment is officially underway.
So what happens next?
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said yesterday he intends to force a vote on hearing new witnesses when Congress returns from a three-day weekend on Tuesday. The current plan takes that thorny question into consideration only after the House managers and Trump's legal defence team have presented their competing cases.
"We expect that we will have votes on these witnesses on Tuesday but can't be sure until we see the resolution that McConnell has put together," he said, laying into his arch-enemy Mitch McConnell for not sharing the text of the trial's procedures with the opposition.
"It's amazing that at this moment we still haven't seen it," he said.
The witnesses the Democrats are believed to want to hear from are: ex-national security adviser John Bolton, White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, his aide Robert Blair and Office of Management and Budget official Michael Duffey.
For their part, the conspiracy-minded Republicans backing Trump have their eyes on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and the CIA whistleblower, whose identity has (just about) been kept secret so far.
Senate Democrat Richard Blumenthal yesterday made a passionate case for fresh witnesses in light of the Lev Parnas revelations and the US Government Accountability Office's ruling yesterday that the administration's decision to withhold congressionally-approved military aid from Ukraine was illegal.
Here's Andrew Feinberg's explainer on what we're in for here.
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies