Donald Trump has said the decision on whether to evacuate residents of Florida to protect them from Hurricane Dorian, would be made on Sunday after meeting with officials.
As he left the White House for the presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland, he said members of the federal emergency management agency (FEMA) would be joining him to monitor events.
Forecasters have said the storm could hit Florida on Monday or Tuesday with devastating force.
The president said he had spoken to Republican senator Rick Scott and claimed “tremendous work” was taking place in Florida to mitigate damage.
Meanwhile, Florida governor Ron DeSantis urged residents to closely monitor Hurricane Dorian as it approached the state’s east coast.
Mr DeSantis pointed out during a Friday evening briefing, that no one had accurately predicted the final path of Hurricane Irma three days before it made its US landfall in 2017. Dorian is expected hit Florida late Monday or early Tuesday.
The National Hurricane Centre is predicting landfall near the center of the state, but no evacuations have been ordered yet.
Mr DeSantis said residents need to comply when mandatory evacuations take effect.
Mr DeSantis said: “There is a danger to your life if you remain in these evacuation zones.”
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Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.
Donald Trump has abandoned plans to visit Poland this weekend to observe Second World War commemoration services in order to oversee the federal response to Hurricane Dorian as the storm barrels towards Florida, with his own beloved Mar-a-Lago golf resort reportedly at risk.
The Tampa Bay Times reports the storm could become a Category 4 hurricane by the time it reaches the Florida coast, where it is expected to make landfall by the town of Melbourne, some 115 miles north of the president's favourite glitzy clubhouse.
On Thursday, Trump warned the coming weather front would be "an absolute monster" after it grazed Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, averting the disaster many feared would be a repeat of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in September 2017.
But not everyone is treating the matter so gravely. Former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell tweeted this.
Andrew Buncombe has the latest as the Sunshine State battens down the hatches.
The president's personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, has meanwhile abruptly resigned amid reports she leaked private details about the Trump family and operations in the Oval Office during an off-the-record dinner with reporters.
Westerhout's indiscreet disclosures are understood to have been made to members of the press staying at hotels near Bedminster, New Jersey, during in the president’s recent working vacation.
The New York Times reports that the PA, a former Republican National Committee aide who also worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, was so upset over Trump’s victory that she cried on election night in 2016 but has nevertheless served him since day one of his administration, overcoming the initial suspicions of those around her that she could not be trusted.
Trump officially introduced his US Space Command project at the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, making the worrying declaration that outer space is “the next war-fighting domain” and raising eyebrows with the sluggishness of his delivery from the podium.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.
The president's latest campaign video has been causing something of a stir online.
The animated swinging bull's testicles are one thing...
...but his use of a white supremacist lion logo at the end quite another.
The red, white and blue lion surrounded by stars might look harmless enough but, the trouble is, it was originally used by VDare, an anti-immigration Southern Poverty Law Center-designated “hate group”, according to Mediaite.
You may remember them from the outcry last week when a Justice Department morning news briefing was sent out to immigration judges accidentally (?) including one of their posts containing esoteric antisemitic language.
The lion symbol has a long association with fascism, as Trump ought to know since he's such a fan of Italian despot Benito Mussolini.
Here's Lowenna Waters with more.
A Justice Department investigation into ex-FBI director James Comey’s handling of memos written during meetings with Trump yesterday found the ex-bureau chief had violated its policies.
Despite concluding Comey had broken the rules when he instructed a friend to share his memos with the media, the report by inspector general Michael Horowitz found his notes “did not contain any classified information”, saving him from prosecution.
Comey responded accordingly yesterday, alluding to Trump less than subtly:
Only for the president to lay into one of his bitterest political enemies, whom he fired in May 2017.
Here's Chris Riotta's report.
The latest nefarious environmental manoeuvre by the administration is to revoke Obama-era regulations designed to prevent hazardous methane leaks from oil and gas drilling operations, a move that has surprised even the fossil fuel industry.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, said the proposed rule change was to follow Trump’s directions to remove "unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens from the oil and gas industry”.
This comes in the same week the US government pushed to overturn a 2001 law banning logging in the world’s largest temperate forest in Alaska.
The president considers himself "an environmentalist", you will recall.
Harry Cockburn has more.
The Trump administration is also considering blocking $250m (£205m) in military assistance to Ukraine, a move being seen as its latest attempt to pander to Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Lily Puckett reports.
Trump has ramped up his attacks on Fox News in recent weeks, flirting with election disaster by risking alienating one of his key propaganda voices with a particularly vitriolic series of tweets on Tuesday.
"We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!" he frothed.
The latest Fox man to hit back is host Neil Cavuto.
"Well I think the president watches Fox," Cavuto said after reading out the angry tweets. "I also think he is getting sick of Fox. Which is weird because I think he gets pretty fair coverage at Fox."
"First of all Mr President," he continued, "We don't work for you. I don't work for you. My job is to cover you, not fawn over you or rip you. Just report on you."
"It is called being fair and balanced Mr President. Yet it is fair to say you're not a fan when that balance includes stuff you don't like to hear or facts you don't like to have questioned."
Cavuto listed various outrageous remarks, controversies and double standards associated with the president and said: "These aren't fake items, they're real items and you really said them.
"Fake is when it's wrong Mr President, not when it's unpleasant," he continued, adding that Trump is not entitled to his own version of the truth.
"You're right to say the media isn't fair to you. That they're more inclined to report the bad than anything good about you. So it is no surprise you're frustrated that more aren't in line with you," he said. "That everyone at Fox might not be in lockstep with you. You might even think that those who are work for you. They don't. I don't."
"Hard as it is to fathom, Mr President, just because you're the leader of the free world, doesn't entitle you to a free pass, just a free press. Goodnight," he continued.
Sirena Bergman has more on the fallout from the president's raving.
The president's eldest son, Don Jr, is not having a good time of it at the moment.
This cruel tweet about Vermont senator and 2020 challenger Bernie Sandersinvited brutal mockery from Twitter, of which the below is a fine example.
Worse, he was deeply humiliated when a campaign event he spoke at in Pikeville, Kentucky, in support of Republican governor Matt Bevin was extremely poorly atttended, so much so in fact that audience members were asked to move their chairs closer to the stage.
Trump Jr was introduced on stage by his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle who did at least offer a genuinely funny line when she likened the Democratic 2020 field to "the Star Wars bar scene", which is good, you have to admit.
Greg Evans has more.
New York's Rockwell County Republican Party is in trouble over a campaign video widely deemed to be antisemitic, warning of a "Jewish takeover" of upstate towns and villages.
Space Command is literally just a ploy to sell campaign T-shirts to the easily impressed isn't it?
The Democrat-led House Ways and Means Committee yesterday suffered a setback after a judge refused to fast-track a congressional lawsuit seeking to force the disclosure of Trump's federal tax returns, saying it was a complicated and important matter that should not be rushed.
US district judge Trevor McFadden in Washington said in a written order that under US law, there was "only a narrow set of cases that must skip to the front of the line" and that the committee had not shown its lawsuit was one of them. McFadden said that while he was not prejudging the case, Trump's defenses "seem unlikely to be so trivial as to justify a rush to the merits of the case."
In a 20 August filing, the House Ways and Means panel said that "time is of the essence" in resolving the case it brought last month seeking to compel the Treasury Department to hand over years of the president's individual and business federal tax returns.
In the filing, lawyers for the committee said the current Congress would end on 3 January 2021 and that a prompt resolution of issues in the case was needed to give the committee enough time to investigate Trump's tax returns and pass any legislation in response.
Justice Department attorneys, in co-ordination with Trump's personal lawyers, had proposed a staged approach to hearing arguments in the case that drew objections from the House panel's legal team.
The committee filed the lawsuit after Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin defied congressional subpoenas seeking the returns, despite a federal law that says the department "shall furnish" such records on request.
The lawsuit began what is widely expected to be a lengthy legal battle likely to end in the US Supreme Court.
The Justice Department said in an advisory legal opinion in June that the committee lacked a "legitimate legislative purpose" in seeking Trump's tax returns and that Mnuchin therefore did not violate the law by refusing to provide them.
One of Trump's personal lawyers, Jay Sekulow, called the committee's efforts "presidential harassment" last month.
Before Trump, modern US presidential candidates customarily disclosed their tax returns during their campaigns.
Ways and Means is one of half a dozen House committees conducting investigations involving Trump and his administration but the White House is refusing to cooperate with most of them, setting up several legal battles unfolding in the courts.
Reuters
Trump's acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services director Ken Cuccinelli - last heard from rewriting the enscription on the Statue of Liberty - has been on CNN attempting to justify an administration policy change that means the children of American diplomats and members of the armed forces born overseas are no longer automatically granted US citizenship.
It was incredibly underwhelming.
Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden has been forced to defend his faulty description of a tale of military heroism and his interactions with the service members who carried it out.
The "essence" of his recollection is correct, the former vice president told a South Carolina newspaper on Thursday after a Washington Post story detailed how an emotional anecdote Biden told recently while campaigning in New Hampshire contained inaccuracies.
Biden's telling appeared to conflate multiple events, yielding a single story of himself as vice president pinning a Silver Star on a US Navy captain in the Konar province of Afghanistan for his efforts trying to save another service member. In his latest telling of a story he's varied over several years, according to The Post, Biden got most of the details wrong: There's no military record of that specific ceremony and Biden's records as a senator show he traveled to Konar when he was Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman and before he was vice president.
Biden and his aides countered that the anecdote's fundamental point - that as vice president he once formally recognised the valor of a heartbroken solider who didn't want the recognition because his fellow solider ultimately lost his life - is true.
"The central point is it was absolutely accurate what I said," Biden told The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston, South Carolina, hours after The Post published its story. "He refused the medal. I put it on him, he said: 'Don't do that to me, sir. He died. He died."'
Indeed, The Post account quoted staff sergeant Chad Workman recalling that he received a Bronze Star from Biden at Forward Operating Base Airborne in Wardak province, Afghanistan, on 11 January 2011. Workman confirmed Biden's account, adding that Biden treated him with empathy.
The accounts represent a growing conundrum for Democrats. Their 2020 pack-leader is hinging his campaign on the propositions that Trump is a serial liar and a fundamental threat to the nation and that Biden, a 76-year-old veteran of US politics and world affairs, offers his party the best hope of victory.
But Biden is also repeatedly subjected to media scrutiny, social media derision and quiet grumbling from his rivals over his penchant for verbal missteps, a cacophony that fosters questions about whether he is indeed the best Democrat to send into a general election campaign against Trump.
Biden rejected those questions, telling The Post and Courier they are "ridiculous."
Veteran Democratic strategist David Axelrod said the episode speaks to two well-known attributes of Biden: his liability as undisciplined and his strength as one who empathises with those in pain.
Axelrod doesn't see it as particularly damaging, but notes such episodes, should they continue, could answer one of the central question facing Biden: Is he up to the intellectual rigors of being president?
"Where it becomes problematical is if It's seen as evidence of some sort of decay," said Axelrod, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama. "That is obviously a danger. Anything that raises those concerns is problematic. I don't think this is the one that could tip the scales."
Biden's supporters this week in South Carolina have been unfazed by any mounting criticism - particularly in comparison to Trump, who regularly misspeaks and has treated truth casually since he first launched his campaign in 2015.
"Look at Trump, a habitual, sinister liar," said Dawn Deboskey, a 57-year-old from Anderson, South Carolina. "The vice president is absolutely on point, discussing every issue in a knowledgeable way. I have zero concerns."
At the campaign town hall where Deboskey came to see Biden, the candidate opted for a humorous defence against those who question whether he's still up for the job. On education, he opted against offering detailed numbers when talking through his usual riff on the need for more social workers.
Offer a number and turn out to be wrong, Biden said, "and the press will say Biden's losing his mind. He can't remember."
AP
Alabama's Republican governor Kay Ivey has been forced to apologise and is facing calls to resign after it emerged she had appeared in blackface in a college sorority skit.
Ivey, 74, issued the apology after a 1967 radio interview surfaced in which her now-ex-husband describes her actions at Auburn University in the state, where she was vice president of the student government association.
"I offer my heartfelt apologies for the pain and embarrassment this causes, and I will do all I can - going forward - to help show the nation that the Alabama of today is a far cry from the Alabama of the 1960s," Ivey said.
Ivey released a recording of the college radio interview she and then-fiance Ben LaRavia gave. In the interview, LaRavia describes Ivey as wearing coveralls and "black paint all over her face" while pretending to search for used cigars on the ground in a skit at the Baptist Student Union party. The skit was called "Cigar Butts." No other details of the skit were given.
Ivey and LaRavia were married for a short time and later divorced. She said on Thursday that she did not remember the skit, but "will not deny what is the obvious."
"As such, I fully acknowledge - with genuine remorse - my participation in a skit like that back when I was a senior in college," she said.
"While some may attempt to excuse this as acceptable behavior for a college student during the mid-1960s, that is not who I am today, and it is not what my Administration represents all these years later."
Ivey's press secretary, Gina Maiola, said Auburn University brought the recording to the attention of the governor's office, which decided to release it publicly. University officials discovered the interview while working on a project to digitize and archive old university records, Maiola said.
Migrant girls being held by the Trump administration in border detention centres are being given only very limited access to items as basic as sanitary pads and tampons, according to a news lawsuit casting fresh light on the appalling conditions being endured by youngsters held in US custody.
As 2020 Democratic contender Julian Castro points out above, this is a disturbing but very necessary read from Andrew Buncombe.
In the last hour, Trump has been attacking General Motors for relocating production to China and, seemingly, his own inspector general Michael Horowitz for not prosecuting James Comeyover those leaked memos.
This is indeed very odd.
Here's our report?
The latest on Hurricane Dorian from FEMA's Pete Gaynor on CNN's New Day.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis has also given an update.
It's all a cunning plan, you see.
