Donald Trump was roundly booed as he attended Game 5 of baseball’s World Series in DC on Sunday, with fans of the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros chanting “Lock him up!” as “Veterans for Impeachment” signs were held aloft by spectators, prompting the president to leave the stadium early.
On Saturday, Mr Trump had triumphantly announced the death of Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a US-led raid that saw him cornered in a dead-end tunnel in Syria, the president assuring the world the terrorist had died “crying and screaming”.
When leading Democrats Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer demanded to know why Congress had not been briefed on the operation in advance at a time when the White House’s approach to foreign policy is already under intense scrutiny, vice president Mike Pence squirmed and struggled to answer the question on Fox News.
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A top aide to Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, who sat in on the phone call with Ukraine that’s now at the heart of an impeachment inquiry, declined to testify before Congress on Monday.
An attorney for Charles Kupperman, the deputy to ex-National Security Adviser John Bolton, said he could not testify before House committees investigating the president after the White House ordered him not to appear before Congress, citing executive privilege.
Mr Kupperman was subpoenaed by the Democratic-led committees to discuss the phone call in which Mr Trump urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into one of his political rivals, Joe Biden, as well as the origins of the Russian investigation. A whistleblower complaint alleged the White House withheld crucial financial aid to the country while pressing Ukraine to conduct the probes.
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Adam Schiff said during a Monday morning press conference that “each time the White House steps in front of Congress getting documents” and witness interviews, “they will be building a very powerful case” of obstruction against Donald Trump.
“They are merely building an obstruction case against the president,” the House Intelligence chairman said. He also condemned Republicans continuing to defend the president, saying: “Where is their duty to this institution, where is their duty to the Constitution, where is their respect to the rule of law?”
The president hinted he may release footage of the raid after describing it as “something really amazing to see”.
Donald Trump described watching the death of Islamic State leader Bakr al-Baghdadi “as though you were watching a movie” over the weekend, providing key details of the secretive raid during a press conference.
Donald Trump said he was considering releasing footage of the US-led raid over the weekend responsible for the reported death of Bakr al-Baghdadi, a major leader of the Islamic State.
“We're thinking about it,” the president told reporters on Monday morning. “We may. The question was, am I considering releasing video footage of the raid. And we may take certain parts of it and release it, yes.”
It probably makes me a little uncomfortable to hear a president talking that way, but, again, Baghdadi was the inspirational leader for an Isis network across the world from Africa to South East Asia.If you can take a little of the glamour off him, if you can make him less inspirational, then there’s a value to that for all of these folks who are on their computers or in these networks looking to attack.
We were going to notify them last night, but we decided not to do that because Washington leaks like I’ve never seen before. There’s no country in the world that leaks like we do, and Washington is a leaking machine.
I told my people we will not notify them until our great people are out - not just in but out.
I wanted to make sure this was kept secret. I don't want to have men lost and women. I don’t want to have people lost. A leak could have caused the death of all of them.”
They came from France, they came from Germany, they came from the UK. They came from a lot of countries.
And I actually said to them, if you don’t take them, I’m going to drop them right on your border and you can have fun capturing them again.
They use the Internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump.
But they use the Internet incredibly well, and what they’ve done with the Internet and through recruiting and everything.
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