Donald Trump has said he “doesn’t remember” a compromising call he allegedly had with Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, which top diplomat Bill Taylor raised at the House impeachment inquiry on Wednesday, saying a member of his staff had overheard Mr Trump asking Mr Sondland about “the investigations”.
House investigators heard from Mr Taylor and State Department official George Kent yesterday, with both men describing the administration’s “irregular” dealings with Ukraine as the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his allies pushed for an anti-corruption probe into domestic political rival Joe Biden.
Republican counsel Steve Castor was ridiculed for his part in proceedings.
While the president entertained Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the White House and said he was not following the drama unfold, a federal appeals court in DC cleared the path for Congress to pursue Mr Trump’s tax records, setting up a potential Supreme Court battle.
On Thursday, the president petitioned the Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from federal prosecutors.
The news arrived as he boarded Air Force One for yet another rally in Louisiana to boost support for a Republican running against the state's Democratic governor.
The upcoming legal battle will likely test the limits of Mr Trump's presidential powers.
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President 'doesn't remember' Sondland call raised at impeachment hearing
Donald Trump has said he “doesn’t remember” a compromising call allegedly made by Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the EU, that acting Ukraine ambassador Bill Taylor raised at the House impeachment inquiry on Wednesday, saying a member of his staff overheard Mr Trump asking about “the investigations”.
Trump gave the response during a joint press conference with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the East Room with the House hearings still ongoing in the Longworth House Office Building.
This was the moment Taylor dropped his bombshell revelation about Sondland's call to Trump from a Kiev restaurant, which he said had been brought to his attention since his earlier appearance before the panel behind closed-doors.
After the marathon hearing, House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff stressed the significance of the development.
Senior diplomats spell out Ukraine irregularities in dramatic day on Capitol Hill
The testimony House investigators heard yesterday from Taylor and bowtied State Department official George Kent saw both men describing the administration’s “irregular” dealings with the Eastern European nation as the president’s personally lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his allies pushed for an anti-corruption probe into Mr Trump’s domestic political rival Joe Biden.
Here are some of the key exchanges with Taylor and Kent, which saw them make the case that Trump cared more about embarrasing Biden than the lives of the Ukrainians whom the American military aid approved by Congress was intended to save.
This moment - in which Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, especially drafted in for the occasion, was brutally owned by Democrat Peter Welch of Vermont - was truly special.
Taylor and Kent gently making a fool of Republican counsel Steve Castor, having already batted away Trumpland conspiracy theories from raking Republican Devin Nunes, was also a total joy.
Here's Andrew Buncombe with six key takeaways from a dramatic day.
'History in the making'
There were long queues to get into yesterday's hearing - with drag queen Pissi Myles among the throng, brandishing a selfie stick - as well as a press melee inside that left Texas Republican Louie Gohmert grumbling that he couldn't even see Taylor and Kent's faces over the bundle of photographers and journalists.
Our man Andrew Feinberg was there to soak up the chaos.
Trump 'too busy' to follow impeachment hearing, blasts out 30 retweets denouncing proceedings
Trump himself insisted he was not following proceedings yesterday - despite retweeting some 30 attacks from friendly GOP members, his social media director Dan Scavino and the White House denouncing the Democratic-led inquiry.
"It's a witch hunt, it's a hoax, I'm too busy to watch it," Trump told reporters during his presser with Erdogan. "There's nothing there. I see they're using lawyers that are television lawyers. They took some guys off television. You know, I'm not surprised to see it because Schiff can't do his own questions."
The strategy from his inner circle appeared to be to dismiss the inquiry as "boring".
Here's Clark Mindock on the GOP reaction.
George Conway slams Republicans: 'If Barack Obama had done this, they’d be out for blood and they’d be right'
On TV, Kellyanne Conway's anti-Trump husband George was invited on to MSNBC as a pundit to introduce proceedings, making a rare media appearance to criticise the president.
He did not disappoint, slamming Trump personally as well as Republican hypocrisy and desperation in seeking to defend him.
"If he’d just shut up about it and not tweeted 'witch hunt' 600 times there wouldn’t have been a whole volume two of the Mueller investigation," he told Nicolle Wallace.
Court clears Congress to go after eight years of Trump tax returns
Trump must obey a House Oversight and Reform Committee subponea and release eight years' worth of tax returns, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has ruled.
Judges on Wednesday again denied the president's bid to stop his accounting firm Mazars LLP from releasing the financial records to House Democrats. Jay Sekulow, Trump's lawyer, said the president would appeal and take the fight to the US Supreme Court.
The eight-three vote brings the opposition closer to shedding light on Trump's business interests and how he built his fortune.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis's report.
Trump insists he and Erdogan are 'very good friends' during White House visit
The president was working hard yesterday to insist relations between the US and Turkey are friendly a month on from his having to hastily agree a ceasefire after Ankara reacted to his decision to pull American troops out of northern Syria by bombing their Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an entirely forseeable outcome given that the Turks are well known to consider the SDF a terror cause.
Trump even went so far as to claim Erdogan "has a great relationship with the Kurds", which is one way of putting it I suppose.
Extraordinarily, he also said the US would be "keeping", rather than safeguarding, Syria's oil assets, which would be a war crime.
Negar Mortazavi has this report.
Erdogan reveals he gave back Trump's 'tough guy' letter
The Turkish president also revealed yesterday that he gave back Trump's letter of 9 October in which the latter implored him not to be a "tough guy" or a "fool" and make enemies for himself on the world stage by pursuing the Kurds.
He was previously reported to have thrown the message in the bin.
Trump did not respond to the declaration.
Here's Alex Woodward's report.
President up early to resume attack on impeachment inquiry
Trump is out of bed and quoting Texas Republican John Ratcliffe on the impeachment inquiry.
Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw as Trump's pick to replace Dan Coats as director of national intelligence in July after it became clear he would endure a rocky nomination hearing due to his chronic lack of qualifications for the role.
New acting Homeland Security secretary named
Lost amid the excitement on Capitol Hill yesterday, the US got itself a new acting Homeland Security secretary: Chad Wolf.
After passing his Senate confirmation hearing on a vote of 54-41, Wolf becomes the fifth person to lead the third biggest department of the federal government under Trump, succeeding Kevin McAleenan, who in turn was covering after Kirstjen Nielsen was ousted.
(Alex Brandon/AP)
Wolf was third choice after immigration hardliners Mark Morgan and Ken Cuccinelli - acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services chief respectively - neither of whom proved to be eligible.
Cuccinelli, who thinks Emma Lazarus's poem for the Statue of Liberty ought to be rewritten, has been made acting deputy Homeland Security head under Wolf.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is not enthused.
Deval Patrick confirms entry to Democratic 2020 field
Former Massacusetts governor Deval Patrick has officially announced his late-entry 2020 presidential campaign, thrusting him into an already crowded field of Democratic candidates less than three months before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.
This is pretty brutal on poor old Cory Booker.
Republican senator says GOP don't have votes to dismiss articles of impeachment
Texas senator John Cornyn says his Republican peers in the Senate do not have the necessary votes to throw out articles of impeachment should they ultimately be voted through by the House.
Cornyn, an adviser to the Senate Republican leadership, believes it will be difficult for his side to ensure the 51 votes it would need, holding just 53 seats in the upper chamber, leaving little margin for disagreement.
(Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
“There’s some people talking about trying to stop the bill, dismiss charges basically as soon as they get over here. I think that’s not going to happen. That would require 51 votes,” Cornyn told reporters on Wednesday.
“I think it would be hard to find 51 votes to cut the case off before the evidence is presented,” he added.
Convicting Trump in any impeachment trial would require 67 votes in the Senate or a two-thirds majority of those present, a move that would require the votes of as many as 20 Republican senators turning against the president.
Lindsey Graham demands release of whistleblower's identity
Key Trump's ally Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was on Sean Hannity's show on Fox last night to say he will not accept any such impeachment trial in the Senate without having the identity of the mystery CIA whistleblower whose complaint sparked the inquiry revealed beforehand.
He says Trump deserves the right to meet his accuser - an obvious distraction tactic given the crystal clear facts of the quid pro quo Zelensky call, which will not change no matter who first reported them.
Graham was also busy yesterday blocking a resolution in the Senate that had been passed 404-11 in the House condemning the Armenian genocide, having first met with Trump and Erdogan
Graham said lawmakers should not "sugarcoat history or try to rewrite it" on the notorious mass killing of an estimated 1.5m ethnic Armenians that took place during the First World War at the hands of Ottoman Turks after they were exiled from eastern Anatolia.
"I just met with President Erdogan and President Trump about the problems we face in Syria by the military incursion by Turkey. I do hope that Turkey and Armenia can come together and deal with this problem," he told the Senate floor.
Republican congressman tweets hidden Epstein conspiracy theory
Arizona Republican Paul Gosar has been promoting the conspiracy theory that billionnaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein did not die by his own hand in jail in July but was in fact murdered, the first letter of his last 23 tweets spelling out "Epstein didn't kill himself".
The sequence ends with this:
Alex Woodward reports.
'USA is where the action is'
Trump is back to a more positive mode of campaign: cheering the stock market and taking credit for the apparent health of the economy.
'At the first public impeachment hearing, Bill Taylor gave a damning testimony - and Republicans floundered'
For Indy Voices, Ahmed Baba reflects on yesterday's events on Capitol Hill.
Donald Trump has nothing listed on his schedule until 2:00pm local time when he participates in a working visit with the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Oval Office.
He’s leaving Washington at 4:30 to Louisiana for a Keep America Great rally scheduled at 7:00pm.
The president will then return to the White House by 12:30am, according to his schedule.
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, the acting commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection, Mark Morgan, will hold a press briefing at 10:30am.
Stay tuned throughout the day for live updates as the come in.
Donald Trump has tweeted a message celebrating the latest job numbers released by Walmart, with a dig at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell -
The president now appears to be quoting statements from Fox Business defending him over yesterday's public impeachment hearings:
