Support for Donald Trump’s impeachment is soaring according to the polls as it emerges the president recently attempted to pressure Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison and other foreign leaders into assisting his attorney-general William Barr with an investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russian election hacking probe.
New details continue to surface about Mr Trump’s now-infamous call with Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky of 25 July, the basis for the House Democrats’ inquiry announced last week, including the revelation that secretary of state Mike Pompeo took part in the offending conversation.
The president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has meanwhile been subpoenaed by the opposition for text messages, phone records and other communications related to the botched attempt to corner the Eastern European nation into pursuing a corruption allegation involving leading 2020 Democrat Joe Biden but laughed off the matter on Fox News: “They seem to forget that I’m a lawyer.”
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The number of Americans who believe Donald Trump should be impeached has risen by 10 percentage points over the past week as more details continue to emerge about the president's efforts to pressure Ukraine to smear his leading Democratic political rival Joe Biden, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll published on Monday.
The survey found respondents evenly split: 47 per cent of adults believe Trump "should be impeached," compared with 37 per cent in a similar poll that ran last week. Another 47 per cent said the president should not be impeached.
The surge largely comes from Democrats, 90 per cent of whom are now in favour of impeaching Trump, according to Quinnipiac, up from 73 per cent on 25 September. Independents are now 42 per cent in favour, up from 34 per cent (with 58 per cent opposed) while just seven per cent of Republicans are in favour of impeachment, although even that low number is up three percentage points in a week.
Fifty-two per cent of voters meanwhile explicitly expressed support for the House Democrats' inquiry announced by speaker Nancy Pelosi a week ago.
The findings mirror several other recent opinion polls, which have shown public support increasing rapidly for articles to be drawn up in the lower chamber against the president. A Reuters/Ipsos survey, also released on Monday, had the total at 45 per cent in favour - up eight percentage point since Pelosi's press conference. Forty-one percent of respondents to that poll were opposed while 15 per cent said they were unsure.
But don't take the experts' opinion on it. Trump has provided his own data, courtesy of those titans of impartiality, er, Breitbart News, which has only 2.17 per cent in favour of impeachment, shockingly.
So that's all right then.
In the latest twist in the case, the Justice Department confirmed on Monday that the president recently attempted to pressure Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison and other foreign leaders into assisting his attorney-general William Barr with a retaliatory investigation into the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russian election hacking probe, which dogged his steps for two years before ending inconclusively.
The revelation underscores the extent to which Trump remains consumed by the special counsel's work and the ways in which he has used the apparatus of the United States government to investigate what he believes are its politically-motivated origins. It also highlights Barr's hands-on role in leading that investigation, including traveling overseas for personal meetings with foreign law enforcement officials.
Trump's interactions with foreign leaders - and Barr's role in those discussions - are under heightened scrutiny now that the House has launched its impeachment inquiry. The probe centres on Trump's now-infamous 25 July call with Ukraine's president Volodymr Zelensky, revealed by a whistleblower CIA intelligence officer, in which Trump presses Zelensky for help investigating Biden.
Trump has heaped praise on Barr since he took the helm of the Justice Department earlier this year, viewing him as a key ally for his political agenda, including his push to "investigate the investigators" in the Russia probe. But the Justice Department has denied Barr had any knowledge that Trump encouraged Ukraine to work with him on a separate investigation into Biden.
The president has sought, without evidence, to implicate the Bidens in the kind of corruption that has long plagued Ukraine (doing so twice on Twitter yesterday). Hunter Biden served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company at the same time his father was leading the Obama administration's diplomatic dealings with Kiev.
Though the timing raised concerns among anti-corruption advocates, there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by either the former vice president or his son. There is no evidence that Biden's son was ever under investigation in Ukraine.
Trump was requesting help for US attorney John Durham's investigation into the origins of special counsel Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The investigation outraged Trump, who cast it as a politically-motivated "witch hunt." Durham's investigation has been cheered by Trump allies, who believe the original FBI probe into Russia's election interference was driven by Democrats.
Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec confirmed as much last night. "At Attorney General Barr's request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr Durham to appropriate officials," she said.
Barr reportedly traveled to Italy last week with Durham, where the two met with government officials as part of the investigation. As part of his investigation, Durham is examining what led the US to open a counterintelligence investigation on the Trump campaign and the roles various countries played in that probe. The attorney general's presence on the trip exemplifies how much of an active role the nation's chief law enforcement officer is taking in overseeing the investigation.
Justice officials said that has involved seeking help from numerous foreign countries, including Australia. The FBI's counterintelligence investigation that later became the Mueller probe was triggered, in part, from a tip from an Australian diplomat. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, had told the diplomat, Alexander Downer, in May 2016 that Russia had thousands of stolen emails that would be potentially damaging to Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump's campaign, had learned from a Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, that Russia had "dirt" on Clinton in the form of stolen emails. The FBI's investigation into potential co-ordination between Russia and the Trump campaign later morphed into part of Mueller's probe.
One official said Trump told Morrison that the attorney general would be contacting his Australian counterpart.
Morrison's office said in a statement, "The Australian government has always been ready to assist and cooperate with efforts that help shed further light on the matters under investigation."
"The PM confirmed this readiness once again in conversation with the president," the statement said, referring to Morrison.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the 2016 conversation with Professor Mifsud and served a nearly two-week sentence in federal prison.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.
New details continue to surface regarding the Zelensky call, including the revelation from The Wall Street Journal that secretary of state Mike Pompeo took part in the offending conversation.
The president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has meanwhile been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee for text messages, phone records and other communications related to the botched attempt to corner the Eastern European nation into pursuing a corruption allegation against the Bidens.
The former mayor of New York laughed off the matter in discussion with Trump ally Sean Hannity on Fox News, however, preferring to spread further conspiracy theories drawing in financier George Soros: “They seem to forget that I’m a lawyer.”
Clark Mindock has more.
Among the many strange things Trump has tweeted in recent days, this is right up there.
A 2020 campaign promo apparently taking inspiration from the video for A-Ha's 1985 pop classic "Take on Me", the clip seeks to present a softer side to the race-baiting, anti-immigration president, drawing on such memorable moments as that time Jimmy Fallon ruffled his hair or his excrutiating dance to Drake's "Hotline Bling" on Saturday Night Live back in 2015.
Harry Cockburn offers his assessment.
Democratic 2020 candidate Kamala Harris appeared on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 last night to call for Trump's Twitter account to be suspended before using her own to repeat the message.
Harris was speaking after the president sent out a four-part tweet quoting notoriously Islamophobic Texan pastor Robert Jeffress, who had appeared on Fox to warn of a coming civil war if Trump is impeached.
Twitter of course remains a vital communication tool to Trump, who uses it to bypass the "Fake News Media" to speak to his 65m followers directly without oversight, criticism or inconvenient truths getting in the way of whatever wild, unfounded rhetoric he's currently pushing.
But Facebook is another key Trump asset and his campaign team have been working overtime on pushing out targeted advertising to his base in the wake of Pelosi's impeachment inquiry announcement last Tuesday, according to CNN.
Over 1,800 ads on his Facebook page using the word "impeachment" have been run in the last seven days, seeking to counter the dominant media narrative. The posts have been viewed between 16 and 18m times at a cost of between $600,000 (£488,000) and $2m (£1.6m) by the reckoning of Laura Edelson, a data analyst at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering.
The adverts seek to enlist people in what his campaign is calling the "Official Impeachment Defense Task Force."
"I want to know who stood with me when it mattered most, which is why my team is making me a list of EVERY AMERICAN PATRIOT who adds their name and joins the Official Impeachment Defense Taskforce," one reads.
Which is only slightly sinister.
Another, on vice president Mike Pence's page, reads: "There are now over 150 House Democrats who back Impeachment. These Impeachment claims have nothing to do with me, President Trump - the Democrats thrive on silencing and intimidating my supporters, like YOU. They want to take YOUR VOTE away."
Bearing in mind that it is not yet 7am in DC, Trump has been up early and busy retweeting posts from yesterday on positive US business news concerning Apple, Hyundai, Kia and Aptiv.
He's now slamming the media for not taking his Biden conspiracy theories seriously and touting the stock market before most of the country is even awake.
He's now tweeted this, which I'm just going to leave with you.
Washington time: 6.48am.
More retweets and now this...
...with no word whatsoever on the shooting of a pro-democracy protester by Chinese police in Hong Kong.
Trump has now posted this and made it his pinned tweet in place of the cutesy animation:
If it looks familiar, it's because it was tweeted on Saturday by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who was taken to task by historian Kevin M Kruse, among many others for misrepresenting the 2016 election map to make it look more Republican red.
Here's more from Indy100.
Now he's back to bashing House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff.
You will recall that yesterday he called for Schiff to be arrested for treason, after accusing him of misrepresenting the wording of the Ukraine transcript before Congress last Thursday.
Trump has long had it in for "Liddle" Adam Schiff, previously selling a campaign T-shirt featuring a cartoon of him as a pencil topper in clown make-up, riffing on his childish "Pencil-Neck" nickname.
Yesterday at the White House, following the swearing-in of Eugene Scalia as the country's new labour secretary (replacing Alex Acosta, ousted over his role in the 2008 Jeffrey Epstein plea deal), Trump was asked whether he knew the identity of the whistleblower at the centre of the Ukraine scandal.
"We're trying to find out," he answered.
The informant's lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, quickly took to Twitter to remind the president his client is "entitled to anonymity" and any attempt to expose them "is a violation of federal law".
An aide to Trump's former chief of staff John Kellyhas told CNN the president was once so unprepared for calls with foreign leaders that staff would have to coach him in advance on what to say as a matter of course.
"Kelly always wanted a bunch of us to be there in the Oval [Office]... to just babysit on these calls," the source said, adding that his old boss (below) would often mute the phone on the Resolute Desk to allow staffers to offer guidance or prevent the president speaking unwisely.
"He would go on random tangents about the Mueller investigation with foreign leaders... it was unnecessary and unhelpful," the source said.
"And sometimes he just wouldn't have his facts straight and he would really rattle some of the foreign leaders with whom he spoke. Eventually they figured it out and they adjusted, but those calls were nothing like what a normal call would be between presidents."
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The aide in question left the White House in December 2018 with Kelly's departure so could not say whether the practice is still in play in the West Wing but the network reports that, these days, only four peope typically listen in following fears about leaking: the national security adviser, the National Security Council director and the deputy director for the region in question among them.
"We were there to coach him in real time, because he was so impervious to coaching ahead of time," the source said, but admitted that, "if the president was determined to say something, you couldn't really press mute."
"There was no stopping him. But when there was a lag because a long translation was going on, Kelly would mute the call so that staff in the room could give guidance," they added.
Trump's biggest problem, the aide suggested, was being "diplomatic": "He was so direct and blunt about trade deficits. No one would ever talk like that... Sometimes what he would say wasn't earth shattering, but it would be very different from the public messaging or positions."
“There is enough evidence of an abuse of power, a breach of his oath of office,” Richard Nixon's White House counsel, John Dean, has told The San Francisco Chronicle.
“What they need to do is get evidence that fleshes it out. They need to show exactly what was going on.”
Dean was, of course, Nixon’s counsel in June 1972 when burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in DC and participated in the cover-up of that crime before ultimately urging his boss to come clean and testifying before the Senate in dramatic fashion. Nixon later resigned before he could be impeached in August 1974.
(Getty)
Dean expresses a hope that his successor Don McGahn, so frequently cited in the 446-page Mueller report, could still come forward in defiance of White House stonewalling and likewise electrify Congress.
“Maybe McGahn will come forward,” Dean says. “He’s got to understand it is not a pleasant route. No one likes to be a tattletale. No one really wants to be a whistleblower unless they’re deeply offended.”
Dean also draws a parallel between the White House moving the Ukraine call onto “electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature” with the Watergate tapes.
“The question is, why would you put them there if there wasn’t very damaging material on them?” Dean said. “Why wouldn’t you put them in a normal filing system? The Nixon White House had filing systems upon filing systems upon filing systems for that very reason.”
If you're feeling baffled by the pace of developments in DC - understandable given that it's still only Tuesday - this summary on where we're at from CNN's New Day is as timely as any.
Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night and had this to say on her successor Mike Pompeo's role in the Ukraine call.
Here's her interview in full - along with daughter Chelsea. The conversation naturally touches on impeachment.
In case you missed this yesterday, New York Republican Chris Collins, the first congressman to endorse Trump for the presidency back in 2016, has resigned his seat the day before he was reportedly set to file a guilty plea over felony charges accusing him of insider trading.
Chris Riotta has more.
Trump is back and continuing to obsess over the idenity of the whistleblower, using inverted commas without rhyme or reason at this point.
Another Trump to have blurted out an ugly secret is Don Jr, who has revealed the ghastly nickname of the president's former press secretary Sean Spicer in seeking to drum up support for the lad's surely ill-fated run on Dancing with the Stars.
Narjas Zatat has the gory details for Indy100.
