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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A longtime US diplomat who served as Trump's special envoy for Ukraine will tell his story to congressional committee staff on Thursday as part of the Democratic-led impeachment probe of the president.
Kurt Volker resigned as special representative for Ukraine negotiations on Friday, the day after the public release of a whistleblower complaint that described him as trying to "contain the damage" from efforts by the aforementioned Rudy Giuliani to press Ukraine to investigate Democrats.
(Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty)
Volker's meeting with the committee follows Trump's day of rage when he railed at journalists, resorted to the use of an expletive on Twitter (below) and called the probe "a hoax and a fraud" while nevertheless pledging to cooperate.
Democratic lawmakers had said earlier on Wednesday they were prepared to subpoena White House records about Trump's 25 July telephone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
On Thursday, staff from the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Oversight committees will conduct a transcribed interview with Volker. The 54-year-old, who is also a former US ambassador to NATO, is appearing voluntarily. The briefing will take place behind closed doors, the first of a series of events in the probe, none of them public, scheduled within the 10 days. More are expected.
Late on Wednesday, Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, criticised the session with Volker, saying that Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans were not being given equal representation or the chance to question him.
He also expressed concern that Eliot Engel, the Democratic House Foreign Affairs chairman, had ceded oversight of US foreign policy to the Intelligence Committee because that panel, he said, would lead the questioning of Volker.
An Intelligence Committee aide countered that the panel's staff would conduct the interview because Pelosi had designated it as the lead committee in the impeachment inquiry. Intelligence Committee investigators have been working with the Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees, "both of which will have equal Majority and Minority representation," the aide said in an email.
On Friday, Intelligence Community inspector general Michael Atkinson will testify at an Intelligence Committee hearing. Marie Yovanovitch, who now appears to have been the victim of anonymous smears, will meet with committee staff on 11 October.
Trump is up early, still furious and calling teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg "an actress", sounding very much like toxic InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
He of course previously mocked her passionate recent speech at the UN with the following sarcastic sneer, which the Swede duly added to her Twitter bio - exactly the sort of witty, dryly understated response Trump himself would not be capable of.
These are his other tweets so far this morning, keeping the conspiracy fires burning and gloating over the US's latest trade victory over the EU.
Here's a useful explanation of the former...
...and here's our story on the latter.
Clearly desperate to steer attention away from his own troubles, Trump also posted this in the middle of all that bile.
Biden actually told a rally crowd in Reno, Nevada, last night: "I'm not going anywhere. You're not going to destroy me. And you're not going to destroy my family. I don't care how much money you spend or how dirty the attacks get."
The Nickelback video and now this appear to be the president's response.
Aside from bullying 16-year-olds, the president of the United States is hoping to restore his good moot (sorry, "mood") by going to his favourite state of Florida today, making his first public engagement since the impeachment inquiry broke last week.
The president is due to visit The Villages, a sprawling retirement hub about an hour north of Orlando that is a must-stop for Republican candidates. The president plans to announce an executive order to protect Medicare during his visit on Thursday and to address an invitation-only group.
Support for Trump is holding firm in Florida, the largest swing state in the 2020 election with 29 electoral votes that are crucial for the president's re-election.
Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican Party of Florida sent out a fundraising email in which it promised to put all donations into a newly established "Presidential Protection Fund." Chairman Joe Gruters, a state senator who served as co-chair of Trump's 2016 Florida campaign, said response to the email has been "great," but he said he didn't know how much money had been raised.
"When I served in Congress, I fought back against the Democrats' witch hunts every single day," DeSantis wrote in the email. "I REFUSED to let them overturn the 2016 election and erase your vote from history. Now that Democrats are officially moving to impeach our duly elected president, my duty to protect him isn't over. I want the President to know that we have his back in this fight 100 per cent."
DeSantis credits Trump for helping him win office in November and it was the president who appointed Peter O'Rourke, a candidate the governor backed, as the new executive director of the state Republican party after several months of instability.
More than 120,000 people live in The Villages, which is 55 per cent Republican. The community is mostly located in Sumter County, which supported Trump with 68 per cent of the vote in 2016, compared to 49 per cent statewide. The White House hand-picked each of the approximately 1,000 guests from a list provided to them by local GOP elected officials and party leaders, said county party chairman John Temple.
Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who ran Obama's 2008 Florida campaign and was a top Florida adviser for Obama's 2012 re-election, said it makes sense for Trump to visit The Villages during the impeachment inquiry.
"It's very hard to see a scenario where he would lose Florida and win the presidency," Schale said. "He's going to a friendly crowd. There aren't going to be any detractors."
Thursday will mark Trump's ninth visit to Florida this year. Most of his trips have been to his Mar-a-Lago resort, but he's also had rallies in Orlando and Panama City Beach, official visits to Miami to address Venezuelan expatriates and Lake Okeechobee to tour a waterways project. Florida is by far Trump's preferred state for rallies before appreciative crowds: He's held seven there since taking office - far more than in any other state.
In contrast to harsh criticism of the impeachment inquiry from many Florida Republicans, senator Marco Rubio has taken a more measured approach on the issue.
Rubio told Fox News on Wednesday that he doesn't think Trump should have brought up Biden with the Ukraine government, but on Twitter he said there shouldn't be a rush to judgment.
Fellow Republican Rick Scott was more pointed in his remarks, ridiculing Democrats for focusing on the inquiry instead of other issues facing the country.
"The Democrats, if Trump changes shoes, that must be an impeachable offence," Scott said on Fox News last week. "I mean, every day it's just, 'Impeach him!'"
AP
The man who couldn't name his favourite Bible passage is giving book recommendations again.
Aides to vice president Mike Pence are busy defending his role in the Ukraine controversy as The Washington Post reports a senior aide to the veep was listening in on the Zelensky call along with Pompeo.
Trump reportedly told Pence to cancel his plans to attend the inauguration of Ukraine's new president earlier this year after initially pushing for him to go. But aides to Pence dispute that, blaming logistics for the decision.
Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, noted that Ukraine's parliament formally set the date of Volodymyr Zelensky's inauguration just a week before it took place.
The aides also said that Pence has never mentioned Joe Biden in the repeated conversations he has had with Zelenskiy.
The men met on 1 September in Warsaw, Poland, where The Post says Pence warned the Ukrainian president the US would be withholding the $400m (£325m) in military aid over concerns the country was not doing enough to combat corruption.
Former officials told the newspaper that Zelensky would probably have interpreted the vice president’s reference to corruption as “code” for the Biden allegations.
“The president consistently raised concerns about corruption and the lack of burden sharing by European partners, so having run on an anti-corruption campaign, Zelensky was receptive to those messages,” Short told The Post. “The vice president, as your reporting says, reported back to the president after the meeting and the aid was released.”
Pence told Fox News's Sean Hannity last week his talks with Zelensky “were all based upon proper considerations of how we support Ukraine, how we support their effort to end an era of corruption in their government and advance the interest of their sovereignty.”
“[Trump] mentioned Vice President Biden and his son [to Zelensky] in the context of us wanting to see honest government. That’s exactly what the American taxpayer would expect,” Pence told Hannity.
For Indy Voices, Michael Arceneaux says Obama foresaw the mad cruelty of the Trump administration coming.
Also for Voices, Alec Sears argues 2020 candidate Kamala Harris made a mistake in calling for Trump to be suspended from Twitter.
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