Trump news live - President says China should investigate the Bidens after accusing Greta Thunberg of being ‘an actress’
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Donald Trump has told reporters at the White House he believes China should investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter for corruption, speaking in blithe defiance of the impeachment inquiry already underway after he asked Ukraine for the same thing on his now-notorious 25 July call with Volodymyr Zelensky.
The president is now jetting out to Florida after a morning on which he attacked teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, clearly still angry after exploding at the White House press corps on Wednesday evening, where he threatened “a lot of litigation against a lot of people”, call Biden Sr “stone-cold crooked” and accused House speaker Nancy Pelosi of handing out subpoenas “like cookies”.
Continuing to spend much of his time raging on Twitter against the “do nothing Democrats”, apparently without stopping to consider the irony, Mr Trump also posted a bizarre video hitting out at the Bidens featuring the Canadian soft rock band Nickelback, which was swiftly taken down by the social media giant for copyright infringement.
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Donald Trump exploded at the White House press corps on Wednesday over the impeachment inquiry, appearing alongside his Finnish counterpart Sauli Niinisto to threaten “a lot of litigation against a lot of people”, call Joe Biden “stone-cold crooked” and accuse House speaker Nancy Pelosi of handing out subpoenas “like cookies”.
It was an extraordinary performance, capped off by Trump berating Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason and ranting about the "corrupt" news media, singling out CNN for particular criticism.
Here's Chris Riotta's report.
Spare a thought for poor old President Niinisto in all of this, who must have found the whole occasion utterly surreal.
"Mr President, you have here a great democracy. Keep it going on," he told Trump at the start of the press conference having already gone viral for his performance at their earlier sitdown when he looked askance at the cameras like Tim in The Office and batted the president's hand away when he attempted to pat him on the knee.
At least he has this magnificent dog to keep him sane.
Continuing to spend much of his time raging on Twitter against the “do nothing Democrats”, apparently without stopping to consider the irony, Trump posted a bizarre video hitting out at the Bidens featuring the Canadian soft rock band Nickleback, which was swiftly taken down by the social media giant for copyright infringement.
Roisin O'Connor has the full story.
In the latest disturbing development at the southern border, it is being reported the administration plans to expand the collection of DNA from migrants who cross into the US and store the data in a huge criminal database run by the FBI.
Currently, quick-fire DNA testing is carried out on families at the US-Mexico border to catch out adults falsely posing as parents, but the new plans are said to be much more extensive and ultimately lead to the creation of an enormous trove of biometrics data, raising privacy concerns and questions about whether people should be compelled to hand over their genetic fingerprint.
Speaking of the border, Trump was forced to angrily deny media reports yesterday that he once wanted to build a moat alongside his US-Mexico wall filled with snakes and crocodiles. Hilariously, he mispelled the word as "Moot", provoking the inevitable deluge of memes on Twitter.
Trump's proposals, which also included shooting asylum seekers in the legs to disable them and electrifying the wall and lining it with intimidating spikes, are recounted in the new book Border Wars by Julie Davis and Michael D Shear.
Whether he got the idea from Wile E Coyote, Dick Dastardly, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin or Dr Evil and his "sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads" remains open to speculation, but one more likely explanation is that it came from TV satirist Stephen Colbert, who joked about the subject with Trump while he was still a candidate on the campaign trail.
Amazingly, another unintended influencer might have been Barack Obama, who apparently said the following about the border on a trip to Mexico in 2011:
We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement. But even though we've answered these concerns, I gotta say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goalposts on us one more time. Maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they'll want alligators in the moat.
Here's Marianne Eloise for Indy100.
State Department inspector general Steve Linick yesterday briefed congressional aides at a behind-closed-doors meeting on Capitol Hill about an apparent plot to the ex-US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.
(Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
According to Linick, a packet of documents containing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Yovanovitch and Hunter Biden, the son of Trump's leading 2020 rival, was sent to secretary of state Mike Pompeo from an unknown source. They were passed on to him on 3 May, a little over two weeks before Yovanovitch was recalled to Washington from Kiev.
Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement:
These documents provide further evidence of a concerted, external effort to conduct a disinformation campaign against a career US ambassador, who has been the subject of baseless attacks, including by the president himself.
Menendez said Pompeo discussed the documents with “at least one of his top aides,” adding that the materials were “distributed at the highest levels of the State Department.”
The three congressional committee chairmen investigating Trump's impeachment - Democrats Adam Schiff, Elijah Cummings and Eliot Engel - said in a statement that the papers “reinforce concern that the president and his allies sought to use the machinery of the State Department to further the president’s personal political interests.”
The mystery around the identity of the sender is interesting indeed.
Demoratic congressman Jamie Raskin emerged from Linick's briefing to say the materials were "amateurish" and, tellingly, that some of the folders featured Trump hotel branding.
Raskin told an excited gaggle of reporters:
The existence of this packet and its curious history raises profoundly troubling questions. Why was Secretary of State Pompeo in possession of this packet of disinformation? Why did he distribute and circulate it? To whom else did he distribute and circulate it?
One suspect is Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, already up to his neck in it, given that he is known to have frequently criticised Yovanovitch and because Pompeo is known to have been sent documents from the White House that “contained notes from interviews that took place at Rudy Giuliani’s NYC office with various Ukrainians about debunked conspiracies related to Ukraine,” according to Politico.
Tired of the Ukraine scandal already? Bored of hearing about who knew what about the Zelensky call? Sick of Trump's relentless tweets?
Never fear. Here's an entirely new anonymous whistleblower complaint to get your teeth into.
Richard Neal, Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, says he is looking to another informant who alleges “inappropriate attempts to influence” one of Trump's tax audits took place.
Neal wrote to treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin on 8 August to declare his panel had received an “unsolicited communication” from a federal employee on 29 July, calling the allegations contained within "credible" and "evidence of possible misconduct".
Lily Puckett has more.
Of the many #Moot memes doing the rounds on Twitter last night after Trump's latest typo, this guy surely wins the day for thoroughness.
Sirena Bergman has a full round-up for Indy100.
His ludicrous Nickelback clip, now removed, has also provoked widespread ridicule.
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