A woman who appeared on the Apprentice has claimed she has corroborating evidence to support her claims that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her, according to reports.
Summer Zervos, who is suing Mr Trump for defamation, allegedly has evidence supporting claims that she was assaulted in a hotel room in 2007, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Meanwhile, Senator Lindsey Graham attacked the impeachment investigation into Donald Trump as “un-American” as he announced a Senate resolution that calls on the House to pause the probe until it holds a formal vote on the issue.
Mr Graham told reporters that if Republicans investigated an impeachment of a Democrat, “You’d have beaten the sh** out of us.”
Earlier today, the morning after they stormed into an impeachment witness testimony, Mr Trump thanked House Republicans for “being tough, smart, and understanding in detail the greatest Witch Hunt in American History. It has been going on since long before I even got Elected (the Insurance Policy!). A total Scam!”
Meanwhile, Trump walked back a bizarre claim that his administration is building a border wall in Colorado, a comment he made during an address at a shale gas conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, despite the mountainous state being entirely landlocked. He subsequently attempted to spin as a joke on Twitter as the ridicule rained down.
The president also lied with an anecdote about witnesses being reduced to tears by the sight of him signing an executive order - quickly disproved by video evidence of the event in question - mocked hostile demonstrators and urged his audience to demand he serve a further 16 years in office, treating an official White House event as a campaign rally.
Mr Trump was speaking after an extraordinary day on Capitol Hill in which he announced an agreement with Turkey to make its Syria ceasefire “permanent” in exchange for the lifting of sanctions as a mob of Republican congressmen caused a five-hour delay to the impeachment inquiry by protesting during the deposition of senior State Department official Laura Cooper.
Catch up on events as they happened
Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump has made the bizarre claim that his administration is building a border wall in Colorado during an address at a shale gas conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, despite the mountainous state being entirely landlocked, a gaffe he subsequently attempted to spin as a joke on Twitter as the ridicule rained down.
This was his midnight attempt to downplay the mistake but no one was buying it.
Colorado's Democratic governor Jared Polis wrote "Well this is awkward" on Facebook as CNN's Don Lemon broke up into a fit of hysterical laughter while trying to report the story...
...while Democratic senator Patrick Leahy was just one of many to tweet an amended map (corrections made with the president's trademark Sharpie, a nice touch).
Clark Mindock has a full account of the latest lunacy.
That wasn't the only questionable statement Trump made at the 9th annual Shale Insight Conference from the Steel City's David L Lawrence Convention Center last night.
The president also lied through his teeth with an anecdote about witnesses being reduced to tears by the sight of him signing an executive order - quickly disproved by video evidence of the event in question - mocked hostile demonstrators during an interruption (later proudly tweeting a clip) and urged his audience of energy industry professionals to demand he serve a further 16 years in the Oval Office.
One again, the president flagrantly treated an official White House event as a campaign rally and bemoaned the House's impeachment inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine: "I have witch hunts ever week. I say, what's the witch hunt this week?"
Trump was speaking after an extraordinary day on Capitol Hill in which he announced an agreement with Turkey to make its Syria ceasefire “permanent” in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
“We reserve the right to reimpose crippling sanctions should Turkey fail to honour its obligations,” he said in a live address from the White House's Diplomatic Reception Room, before going on to wash his hands of peacekeeping in the region.
Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand.
The president attempted to spin the news as a triumph at his White House press conference - not unlike David Brent in The Office announcing the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg would incorporate Swindon, only saving his colleagues' own jobs after failing a medical and missing out on a pivotal promotion himself.
It is, of course, anything but a triumph.
It was Trump's decision to withdraw 1,000 US troops for Syria in pursuit of positive headlines - against the advice of his experts and allies and at the encouragement of Recep Tayyip Erdogan - that greenlit Turkey's attack on America's Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group it considers a terror faction.
He should have shored up the diplomatic consequences of his actions before abandoning the SDF, not after the bombs had begun falling, but there you go.
Here's Bel Trew's report.
Even more dramatically, a 30-strong mob of Republican congressmen led by "Florida man" Matt Gaetz and House minority whip Steve Scalise caused a five-hour delay to the impeachment inquiry by protesting during the deposition of senior State Department official Laura Cooper.
The group demanded the release of transcripts of the behind-closed-doors proceedings and denounced the Democratic-led panel's “Soviet-style” investigation of the president, saying it was an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2016 election a year before Americans go to the polls”.
The GOP rabble also brought their mobile phones into the classified briefing room and appeared to be able to tweet from inside, raising security concerns and violating House rules, prompting chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson to call on the seargeant-at-arms Paul Irving to "take action".
Alex Woodward reports from the circus.
Trump called on his Republican colleagues to "get tougher" during a Cabinet meeting on Monday and the ludicrous behaviour of Gaetz, Scalise and company - obstructing a process their fellow Republican committee members were, after all, taking part in - appear to be the fruit of that call to arms.
The president continued to attack on GOP disloyalty last night, branding "Never Trumpers" within the party "human scum".
Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger - a regular Trump critic - quickly hit back, telling Wolf Biltzer on CNN's The Situation Room:
To call anybody human scum is beneath the office of the presidency. You can't say that, right? You're the president. You have different standards.
Alex Woodward has more.
For Indy Voices, Molly Jong-Fast says Gaetz's frat boy antics are about anything but "transparency".
This is a truly incredible line from yesterday.
During a hearing before a federal appeals court in Manhattan over New York district attorney Cy Vance's right to see Trump's tax returns, one of The Donald's personal lawyers, William Consovoy, echoed his boss's famous "Fifth Avenue" boast when he argued that a sitting president should never face criminal charges, even if he had gunned someone down in the street.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to take questions from the House Financial Services Committee.
The Silicon Valley humanoid got well and truly roasted by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he struggled to answer her questions about why the social media giant outsources its fact-checking and allows content from the likes of white supremacist site The Daily Caller to appear unquestioned on its pages.
Clark Mindock has more.
While her father is being laughed over his Colorado wall gaffe, Ivanka Trump also finds herself derided this morning for attempting to take credit for Google's giant leap forward in computer processing, after its engineers developed a quantum processor capable of making calculations it would have taken a conventional computer tens of thousands of years to complete.
California Institute of Technology professor John Preskill has meanwhile argued that the achievement, while impressive, serves little practical purpose and Google's big tech rival IBM argues its own earlier supercomputer, Summit, could have made the calculation in two and a half days, not the multiple decades Google has touted as the norm.
Here's Greg Evans for Indy100.
A new environmental study has shown that air quality in the United States suffered between 2016 and 2018, after seven straight years of improvement beginning during the first months of the Barack Obama administration.
The rise in pollution, which just so happens to coincide with the election of one Donald J Trump, has led to thousands of premature deaths across the country, according to the economists from Carnegie Mellon University, who studied Environmental Protection Agency data to produce their report.
The administration has been hard at work since that fateful night in November 2016 rolling back environmental regulations left, right and centre to promote fossil fuel extraction under a president who considers climate change "a hoax".
It's official America: voting Trump is bad for your health.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two business associates of Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani linked to his hustling operation in Ukraine who were recently arrested on campaign finance violation charges, pleaded not guilty in court yesterday.
Giuliani himself is apparently shopping around for a decent defence lawyer, according to CNN.
The three House committees carrying out the impeachment inquiry are taking the rest of the week off to attend memorial events honouring the late House Oversight Committee chairman and civil rights hero Elijah Cummings.
When matters resume next week, they have closed-door interviews tentatively scheduled with Charles Kupperman, a deputy to national security adviser John Bolton who has since left the White House, on Monday and another with Tim Morrison, the National Security Council's current Russia and Europe director, on Thursday.
If Morrison appears for his interview, he will be the first White House aide to testify while still in the job, defying Trump's insistence his administration would not cooperate with the Adam Schiff-led probe.
Acting Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor told Schiff's team on Tuesday about phone calls he had had with Morrison over the Ukraine affair.
In a detailed opening statement, Taylor said Morrison told him in an August phone call that the "president doesn't want to provide any assistance at all," speaking about the military aid that had already been authorised by Congress.
"That was extremely troubling to me," Taylor said.
Taylor described another call with Morrison in September in which Morrison told him of a conversation another diplomat, Gordon Sondland, had held with a Ukrainian official. Morrison told Taylor that Sondland had told the Ukrainians that the aid money wouldn't come until their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, pursued an investigation into a company linked to former vice president Joe Biden's family.
Those conditions would contradict Trump's own claims that there was no "quid pro quo" for the investigations.
Asked yesterday about how he felt the impeachment inquiry was going, Republican senator John Thune, second only to Mitch McConnell, had this damning assessment to offer:
Following the passing of Cummings, California Democrat Jackie Speir said on Wednesday she would run to replace him as chair of the Oversight Committee, setting her in competition with acting chair Carolyn Maloney of New York.
Cummings will lie in state at the US Capitol on Thursday before his funeral takes place in his native Baltimore on Friday, where Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi will be among the speakers.
Bored of listening to Trump dismiss any press coverage he finds unfavourable as "Fake News" and hammering out contrary Fox clips on Twitter instead of governing?
Me too - but Emily Bloch, president of the Society of Professional Journalists, is even more so.
She's just written an op-ed for Teen Vogue explaining her move to trademark the phrase in order to block the president from using it. Good show.
The House Ethics Committee is investigating California congresswoman Katie Hill over allegations she had an affair with a staffer, which were first circulated by right-wing website RedState.
Here's Chris Riotta with some background if you're late to the drama.
For Indy Voices, Chris Stevenson says the sort of political polarisation we've seen on both sides of the Atlantic in the shape of Trump and Brexit is now a global phenomenon.
Negar Mortazavi says Trump's Turkey ceasefire announcement yesterday saw him claiming a victory in his pledge to curtail American involvement in "endless wars" in the Middle East but the experts say any such triumphalism is premature.
Devin Nunes' Cow remains one of the most committed Trump administration trolling accounts on Twitter and is pretty bang on here.
Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe told Anderson Cooper last night that House Democrats are in possession of a "smoking Howitzer", not just a smoking gun, in their pursuit of Trump's impeachment.
