The day before his impeachment trial is set to begin, Donald Trump's lawyers are urging the Senate reject the charges against him and are calling the hearings an "illegitimate partisan effort to take him down" by Democrats.
Meanwhile, the prosecution team from the House has filed a stern reply to the president's legal team, following their response to a summons request calling the impeachment articles "constitutionally invalid." House managers replied, calling the president's assertion that he can't be removed from the presidency "chilling" and "dead wrong".
House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, who is on that prosecution team, has warned that the CIA and National Security Agency could be holding on to further key evidence regarding the Ukraine scandal that led to the president's impeachment, ahead of the commencement of the Senate trial on Tuesday.
The results of a CNN poll, released the day before the trial begins, revealed that 51 per cent of Americans support the president's removal, and nearly 70 per cent want witness testimony.
Lawyers preparing to defend Mr Trump took to the talk show circuit on Sunday to argue that he cannot be removed from office on abuse of power grounds, a position dismissed as “absurdist” and “arrant nonsense” by Mr Schiff and fellow leading Democrat Jerrold Nadler, who together have helped build the case against him.
Meanwhile, as Mr Trump prepared to leave for Switzerland to participate in the World Economic Forum, the White House had no scheduled events to recognise Martin Luther King Jr's memorial and birthday, breaking once more from previous administration's tradition of service and volunteering to honour the civil rights leader.
The president instead voiced his support for thousands of gun rights advocates carrying weapons in Virginia in protest of upcoming gun control legislation, while White House advisor Kellyanne Conway argued that Dr King would not support impeachment, which she said has "dragged Americans through the process" of considering the president's removal from office.
On Twitter over the weekend, President Trump continued to attack 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg, revealed a surprise appreciation for Hollywood Golden Age star Cary Grant and tweeted an astonishing claim from Fox News host Mark Levin that: “In the House, the president got less due process than the 9/11 terrorists.”
Follow coverage as it happened:
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Trump lawyers Dershowitz and Ray branded 'absurd' for dismissal of impeachment case
Lawyers preparing to defend Donald Trump at his Senate impeachment trial took to the talk show circuit on Sunday to argue the president could not be removed from office over abuse of power, a position dismissed as “absurdist” and “arrant nonsense” by Democrats Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, their leading opponents.
Alan Derschowitz - a Harvard professor who has previously defended such controversial clients as OJ Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein - made the claim to George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week and on CNN's State of the Union...
...as did federal prosecutor Robert Ray on Fox's Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo:
"Criminal-like conduct is required," insisted Dershowitz, who said he will be making the same argument to the Senate and if it prevails, there will be "no need" to pursue the witness testimony or documents that Democrats are demanding.
But Schiff and Nadler were quick to shoot down his "no crime, no impeachment" approach in no uncertain terms, the pair fresh from leading a trial brief that called Trump's behaviour the "worst nightmare" of the country's founders. In their view, the standard of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is vague and open-ended in the Constitution and meant to encompass abuses of power that aren't necessarily illegal.
The White House is pushing an "absurdist position," Schiff told Stephanopoulos. "That's the argument I suppose you have to make if the facts are so dead set against you."
Nadler, a fellow impeachment prosecutor, called it "arrant nonsense" on Face the Nation and said evidence of Trump's misconduct is overwhelming.
President Trump's Senate impeachment trial over his actions towards Ukraine is due to get underway in earnest on Tuesday when Congress returns to work following the public holiday for Martin Luther King Jr Day. By then, both sides will have submitted briefs and four Democratic presidential candidates will have been forced back to Washington from the early nominating states to join every other senator in silence, sans phones, on the Senate floor.
What they're likely to hear in this extraordinary setting is the House Democrats' impeachment articles that charge Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his pressure on Ukraine for political help. From the White House, the senator-jurors are expected to hear that Trump committed no crime, the impeachment articles are invalid and he's the victim of Democrats who want to overturn his election.
Here's Phil Thomas's report.
President hails China trade deal, claims support from hard-hit farmers and rants about impeachment in Texas
The president himself was in Austin, Texas, yesterday taking a victory lap over his new trade deal with China, thanking attendees at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention for backing his stand-off with the economic superpower despite their being hardest hit by it.
"We did it," Trump said, recalling his campaign promises to improve America's trading relationships with other countries and claiming to have strong support among farmers.
When Trump spoke at the same event last year, he urged America's farmers to continue supporting him even as they suffered financially in the fallout from his trade war with China and a partial shutdown of the federal government. His follow-up speech on Sunday in Austin gave him a chance to make the case to farmers that he kept promises he made as a candidate to improve trade with China and separately with Canada and Mexico.
He thanked farmers for staying "in the fight." "You were always with me," Trump said. "You never even thought of giving up and we got it done." The president is seeking to shore up support among his base ahead of November's election, where this very demographic is likely to be integral.
Trump also announced he is taking steps to protect the water rights of farmers and ranchers by directing the Army Corps of Engineers to immediately withdraw a new water supply rule and allow states to manage water resources based on their own needs and what the agricultural community wants. "Water is the lifeblood of agriculture and we will always protect your water supply," he said.
Trump signed a preliminary trade deal with China at the White House last Wednesday that commits Beijing to boosting its imports of US manufacturing, energy and farm goods by $200bn (£154bn) this year and next. That includes larger purchases of soybeans and other farm goods expected to reach $40bn (£31bn) a year, the US has said, though critics wonder if China can meet the targets. In Austin, Trump described the trade agreement with China as "groundbreaking" and said, "We're going to sell the greatest product you've ever seen."
Also last week, the Senate voted overwhelmingly in favor of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a successor to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The administration designed the new agreement to return some factory production to the United States, mostly automobiles.
Trump said in Austin that US farmers will also benefit under USMCA, which he said will "massively boost exports" for farmers, ranchers, growers from "North to South" and "from sea to shining sea." NAFTA had triggered a surge in trade among the three countries, but Trump and other critics blamed it for US job losses brought about when American factories moved production south of the border to take advantage of low-wage labor in Mexico.
The House passed the US-Mexico-Canada deal in December. Trump said he would sign it after he returns from a trip to Europe this week. In his remarks to farmers, the president claimed his administration is doing things no other administration has ever done.
"And what do I get out of it? I get impeached," he said. "That's what I get. By these radical-left lunatics, I get impeached. But that's OK. The farmers are sticking with Trump."
Additional reporting by AP
Trump renews Twitter attack on Mike Bloomberg and endorses claim he 'got less due process than 9/11 terrorists'
On Twitter over the weekend, President Trump continued to attack 2020 candidate Michael Bloomberg, revealed a surprise appreciation for Hollywood Golden Age star Cary Grant and tweeted an astonishing claim from Fox News host Mark Levin that: “In the House, the president got less due process than the 9/11 terrorists.”
He also claimed to have personally saved The New York Times from bankruptcy, attacked Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig over their damning new book A Very Stable Genius and again made the extraordinary and bogus accusation that the real reason for his impeachment trial was a Democratic ploy to drag Bernie Sanders away from the 2020 campaign trail.
He further suggested that proposals to build a sea wall to shield New York City from Atlantic storms are "costly, foolish and environmentally unfriendly", which is unbelievably rich from this guy, of all people.
Here's Maya Oppenheim on that last slice of lunacy.
Adam Schiff says NSA, CIA withholding Ukraine documents
During his appearance on ABC yesterday, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said he believed the National Security Agency (CIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were withholding key information on Ukraine.
"They appear to be succumbing to pressure from the administration," Adam Schiff told George Stephanopoulos. "The NSA, in particular, is withholding what are potentially relevant documents to our oversight responsibilities on Ukraine but also withholding documents potentially relevant that the senators might want to see during the trial."
Schiff, one of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's lead impeachment managers, added that there are signs that the "CIA may be on the same tragic course" before calling on the intelligence community to "resist" pressure from an administration that fears documents on Ukraine "incriminate" it.
On impeachment, Schiff said he and his peers would be "fighting for a fair trial" and did not rule out calling on Rudy Giuliani Lev Parnas to testify following his run of explosive revelations about the Ukraine plot last week.
Damning Trump, Alan Dershowitz attacks on Ken Starr resurface
As we've seen so many times from Trump in the past, there's always a historic tweet to expose the hypocrisy or otherwise undermine the premise of whatever point he's currently arguing.
And given that the president has been in the public eye for so many decades in his previous guise as purveyor of glitzy Manhattan apartment complexes, there's also often a damning interview clip to go along with it.
That was the case over the weekend, when a vintage MSNBC interview in which he attacked Ken Starr, his new celebrity defence attorney, resurfaced on Twitter over his integral role in the Bill Clinton impeachment of 1999:
But Trump is by no means the only one to attack Starr from his own side.
Politico reports that the aforementioned Dershowitz was also highly critical of the Starr Report in a 1998 book of essays on constitutional matters entitled Sexual McCarthyism.
“Starr is quickly destroying the credibility and integrity that alone justifies having an independent counsel,” Dershowitz wrote in one entry originally composed in May 1996 when Starr was investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton's Whitewater deal.
Even more damningly, he asked in another essay from 1998 on the Monica Lewinksy scandal: “Which is more dangerous to our liberties, a president who may have had a sexual encounter with a willing intern and then tried to cover it up? Or a prosecutor who may have leaked secret grand jury testimony in an effort to get potential witnesses to change that testimony, and who hid his conflict of interest from the court?”
He concluded that piece by writing: "Most Americans correctly believe that the allegations against Kenneth Starr are far more serious, and his alleged misconduct - if it occurred - far more dangerous to our liberties."
This clip of Dershowitz discussing the Clinton impeachment at the time has not aged well either, given his current line of defence.
George Conway mocks 'legal odd couple' defending Trump in Washington Post op-ed
The husband of top White House adviser Kellyanne Conway (something of a hero of the MAGA resistance) wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post yesterday in which he said it was hard to see how either Starr or Derschowitz could help Trump's cause.
Conway expressed some admiration for the former but said that while the latter “may be a genius in some ways,” he is “not necessarily the advocate you want on your side”.
“Judges have told me they find him condescending in manner and tone - not the approach you want before a court consisting of 100 US senators. And he’s wont to make off-the-wall arguments,” Conway wrote, adding: “Dershowitz’s recent assertion that the Supreme Court could order the Senate not to conduct an impeachment trial illustrates the point. Not only is that claim indefensible - it’s also ridiculous.”
“Any litigator will tell you that adding to your legal team on the eve of trial most likely will not produce better lawyering but, rather, chaos. In that sense, at least, Trump will be getting the representation he deserves,” he added.
House Democrats may call new impeachment witnesses if Senate Republicans decline to
“We would be remiss in the House of Representatives not to follow this trail to its conclusion. And [Lev] Parnas has emerged as an important figure in this criminal conspiracy to force or coerce a foreign government to help Trump's re-election campaign.”
So said Georgia Democrat Hank Johnson over the weekend, according to The Hill, apparently opening the door for the lower chamber of Congress to resume its investigative efforts into the Ukraine scandal if Senate Republicans refuse to play ball.
“We're not going to just say, ‘OK, we've disposed of it and now the ball’s in their court and there’s nothing left for us to do.’ I think quite the contrary,” Eliot Engel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee added. “The more we hear, and the more things come out, the more resolute we are to make sure that we're dealing with the truth, and that it’s not being swept under the rug.”
Suprise impeachment manager Jason Crow meanwhile cranked up the pressure on Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell when he told State of the Union yesterday: "If the Ukraine call was perfect, then call the witnesses."
Trump administration mocked for 'woodland camouflage' Space Force uniforms
The Trump administration was roundly mocked over the weekend after unveiling its official Space Force uniforms for the first time, with critics wondering why cadets would need a "woodland" camo pattern in deep space.
The United States badges on its arms also appear to be attached by Velcro rather than sewn on, presumably in case the wearer needs to hastily change allegiance in the event of being conquered by hostile extraterrestrials.
Maya Oppenheim has more on this farce.
Trump's newest Russia adviser 'escorted from White House' amid security investigation
The president's latest Russia expert Andrew Peek was reportedly escorted from the White House over the weekend amid claims of a security-related investigation and has been placed on administrative leave pending an inquiry, according to Axios.
He is the third head of European and Russian affairs at the National Security Council to leave the post in the past year. Peek's two predecessors, Tim Morrison and Fiona Hill, both gave evidence at the impeachment hearings held by the House of Representatives last year.
Phil Thomas has more.
New York Times endorses Elizabeth Warren AND Amy Klobuchar
The editorial board of The NYT has taken the highly unusual step of endorsing both female Democratic candidates for the nomination to take on Trump in 2020: Massachusetts and Minnesota senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
You can read their rationale for the decision below:
The editorial board of The NYT has taken the highly unusual step of endorsing both female Democratic candidates for the nomination to take on Trump in 2020: Massachusetts and Minnesota senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar.
You can read their rationale for the decision below:
Big Get Out vibes about this, unquestionably.
Here's Andy Gregory with more.
Facebook removes 'coordinated' posts backing Rob Hyde over Ukraine plot
Facebook has removed a series of apparently coordinated posts defending Robert Hyde, a Republican candidate for Congress who has been implicated in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump's impeachment.
Last week Lev Parnas, a business associate of Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, said Hyde had claimed to be carrying out surveillance on the then US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The latter was abruptly recalled from her post after apparently getting in the way of a secret scheme by Giuliani, Parnas and others to pressure the Ukrainian president into announcing investigations into Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Hyde, a former US Marine, has denied that he was keeping Yovanovitch under surveillance ahead of her recall, saying his texts were just a joke.
Phil Thomas has more.
Ivanka Trump's own sister-in-law refusing to vote for Trump in 2020
Supermodel Karlie Kloss - Ivanka's sister-in-law by vitrue of her marriage to Jared Kushner's brother Josh - has said not even family loyalties will see her voting Trump in November.
Greg Evans has more for Indy100.
Trump must be removed from office to safeguard 2020 election, Democrats say in impeachment trial brief
The president's removal from office by the Senate is essential for the safeguarding of the 2020 election, preserving the Constitution and protecting national security, according to the impeachment trial brief filed by House Democrats.
Trump abused the powers of his office and “abandoned his oath to faithfully execute the laws and betrayed his public trust” in his dealings with Ukraine, the memorandum stated.
It also argued that Trump’s behaviour in seeking to pressure Kiev to launch an investigation into his political rival was “the worst nightmare” of the framers of the Constitution, a claim Trump stooge Lindsey Graham was out on Fox News Sunday firefighting yesterday and calling "a partisan railroad job".
Here's more on that from Peter Stubley.
Trump promotes bizarre claim that 9/11 attackers were treated better than him
Andy Gregory has more on the president's endorsement of Mark Levin's wildly inflammatory claim about his treatment by House impeachment investigators.
Melania Trump celebrates MLK Day in incredibly bland style
Nothing from the president himself so far today (god help us if he does have a crack at it) but first lady Melania Trump has paid tribute to civil rights hero Dr Martin Luther King Jr on Twitter with this, er, blank holding image...?
This is how it should be done.
Armed militia take to streets of Richmond to protest Democratic gun control measures
There's a pro-gun rally going on in Virginia's capital city this Martin Luther King Day, the streets already lined with alarming looking gun rights bearing arms to protest the state's plans to introduce tighter gun legislation.
Ernest Coverson of Amnesty International USA has already denounced the event, pointing out that at least 23 hate crimes per day in the US are carried out using a lethal weapon.
“When extremists and white supremacists are able to use guns to intimidate and harass marginalised communities, they create a climate of fear and inflict serious harm without even needing to pull the trigger," Coverson comments.
“The vile decision to hold such a rally on a day when our country recognises the life of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr, a peaceful civil rights leader whose life ended in gun violence, is particularly troubling.
“By failing to prevent those who mean harm from having easy access to guns, our government is failing in its responsibility to place people before guns.”
Authorities will be looking to avoid a repeat of the violence that erupted in 2017 in Charlottesville during one of the largest gatherings of white supremacists and other far-right groups in a decade. Attendees brawled with counterprotesters and an avowed white supremacist drove his car into a crowd, killing a woman and injuring dozens more. Law enforcement officials faced scathing criticism for what both the white supremacist groups and anti-racism protesters said was a passive response.
An RV festooned with Trump material and selling Trump merchandise parked in front of the line to the square, but was booted by a police officer shortly after it parked on Monday: "You got two minutes before it's towed. Clock's ticking."
Monday's rally is being organised by an influential grassroots gun-rights group, the Virginia Citizens Defense League. The group holds a yearly rally at the Capitol, typically a low-key event with a few hundred gun enthusiasts listening to speeches from a handful of ambitious Republican lawmakers. But this year, many more are expected to attend. Second Amendment groups have identified the state as a rallying point for the fight against what they see as a national erosion of gun rights.
Chris Riotta is covering it live for us below, incidentally:
Bernie Sanders says gender is 'obstacle' for women in politics following Elizabeth Warren row
Still dwelling on The Row That Will Not Die, the gentleman from Vermont says sexism, racism, homophobia and ageism continue to impact the political process as US voters determine which presidential campaign to support.
Asked in an interview with New Hampshire public radio whether he believes "gender is still an obstacle for female politicians", Bernie - who remains the front-runner ahead of that state's primary on 11 February - said yes, noting that "everybody has their own sets of problems" in terms of voters taking gender, age or sexuality into account.
Here's Alex Woodward with more.
Schiff says new witnesses debate 'critical' ahead of Senate impeachment trial
“I think there will be arguments on witnesses and documents - both are going to be critical,” says Adam Schiff this morning as the Democratic impeachment managers visit the Senate.
Trump backs Virginia gun control protesters
The president hasn't said anything about Martin Luther King Day so far or, say, last night's fatal shooting spree in Kansas but has backed the militia on the streets of Richmond and attempted to intervene in the impeachment trial by bemoaning the Democrats' interest in hearing from his ex-national security adviser John Bolton, who volunteered to appear before the Senate if he is subpoenaed.
He's now attacking Chuck Schumer for asking for "fairness" from the upper chamber, saying he was denied the same in the House (not true: Trump was given every opportunity to participate in the process but refused).
