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As it happenedended1575059862

Trump impeachment news: President given deadline to offer evidence, as White House ‘engaged in unprecedented obstruction’

President returns from surprise visit to Afghanistan as House committees set deadline for president to give evidence in impeachment inquiry

Chris Riotta
New York
,Joe Sommerlad
Friday 29 November 2019 20:51 GMT
Comments
Donald Trump uses pardoning of Thanksgiving turkey to make digs at impeachment hearings

Donald Trump’s White House has “engaged in unprecedented obstruction”, former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal has declared in a damning interview with MSNBC, as the White House admits it has no record of a key call between the president and EU ambassador Gordon Sondland that Republicans had hoped would exonerate him.

Mr Trump made a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan on Thursday, serving turkey to American troops at the Bagram Air Field and pledging to resume peace talks with the Taliban just three months after declaring the process “dead”.

His inner circle had gone to some lengths to conceal the trip from the media, sending out Mr Trump’s motorcade to his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, as a red herring after the president tweeted a picture of his head Photoshopped onto a shot of Sylvester Stallone in character as underdog boxer Rocky Balboa to serve as a distraction.

The House Judiciary Committee meanwhile gave Mr Trump a deadline in one week to say whether his legal counsel intends to introduce evidence and call witnesses in upcoming impeachment proceedings that could lead to formal charges of misconduct.

The Democratic-led committee is due to begin weighing possible articles of impeachment against Mr Trump next week.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler sent a two-page letter to the president setting a deadline of 5 pm on 6 December for the president's counsel to specify intended actions under the committee's impeachment procedures.

The procedures set out rules by which the president can call witnesses, introduce evidence and make presentations.

Mr Nadler set the same deadline for Republican lawmakers on the committee to notify him about intended witnesses and evidence and scheduled a 9 December meeting to consider the matter.

The Judiciary panel is expected to hold a series of impeachment proceedings, including an initial hearing on Wednesday at which legal experts are due to testify about the constitutional grounds for impeachment.

The committee invited Mr Trump to participate in the hearing and gave him until 6 pm on Sunday to say whether he or his legal team would attend.

The impeachment probe is looking into whether Mr Trump abused his power to pressure Ukraine to launch investigations of political rival Joe Biden and a discredited conspiracy theory promoted by Trump that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

After weeks of closed-door witness depositions and televised hearings, three investigating panels led by the House Intelligence Committee are due to release a formal report soon after lawmakers return to Congress on Tuesday from a Thanksgiving recess. The report will outline evidence gathered by lawmakers on the panel, along with those on the Foreign Affairs and Oversight committees.

After Wednesday, the Judiciary panel, which could recommend a full House impeachment vote before Christmas, is expected to hold a hearing to examine the evidence report and further proceedings to consider formal articles of impeachment.

Reuters contributed to this report. Please allow a moment for our live blog to load

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Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 10:05
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Trump announces new Taliban peace talks on surprise Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan

Donald Trump made a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan on Thursday, serving turkey to American troops at the Bagram Air Field and pledging to resume peace talks with the Taliban just two months after declaring the process “dead”.

“The Taliban wants to make a deal, and we’re meeting with them and we’re saying it has to be a ceasefire, and they didn’t want to do a ceasefire, and now they do want to do a ceasefire. I believe it’ll probably work out that way,” the president said at a gathering of some 1,500 troops also attended by Afghan president Ashraf Ghani.

The announcement comes two months after Trump broke off peace talks with the Islamist extremists after a bombing in Kabul killed 12 people, including an American soldier.

The meal Trump served up included turkey, ham, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes and candied yams. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Entertainment Tonight and a Harry Potter movie played on TVs in the dining hall while the soldiers ate.

Here's Dave Maclean's report.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 10:20
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President mocks Newsweek on Twitter for reporting he would spend Thanksgiving tweeting

The White House had gone to some lengths to conceal the trip from the media, sending out Mr Trump’s motorcade to his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida, as a red herring after the president tweeted a picture of his head Photoshopped onto Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa to serve as a distraction. Other Thanksgiving tweets were also scheduled to cover his imminent silence on social media.

Press joining the party were told to meet on Wednesday night on the top floor of a parking garage in Maryland and were transported in black vans to Andrews Air Force Base, not knowing where they would be going and having their cellphones confiscated, told only to dress casually and warmly.

Trump meanwhile flew back from Florida on the quiet to meet the departing flight while the original plane he set out in remained parked on the tarmac at West Palm Beach as a decoy.

The president clearly took particular satisfaction in the ruse, later mocking Newsweek for reporting that he would be spending Thanksgiving golfing and tweeting.

To be fair to the publication, the Afghan trip was not included on his official schedule so everyone else thought much the same and, as the post, below proves, they were half right after all.

The journalist who wrote the piece in question has since responded.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 10:35
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White House has no record of key Trump-Sondland call

While the rest of America was arguing with their families over the dinner table or stuck in snowbound traffic jams yesterday, the White House found itself forced to deny it had any record of a phone call Trump claims exonerates him over the Ukraine scandal.

Gordon Sondland, the US ambassador to the European Union, testified to Congress last week that the president had made clear to him in a call that took place on 9 September that there was “no quid pro quo” with Ukraine. 

“This is Ambassador Sondland speaking to me,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on 20 November, while reading Sharpie-written notes of Sondland’s testimony to the House impeachment inquiry. 

“Here’s my response that he just gave: ‘I want nothing... I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.’”

He also claimed on Twitter the “Impeachment Witch Hunt” was “over” and again quoted Sondland’s recollection of the conversation. 

But no other evidence has emerged regarding the call, which would have occurred before dawn in Washington. According to The Washington Post, the White House has located no record of the conversation in its switchboard logs, though Trump may have used a personal mobile. 

Here's Tom Embury-Dennis's report.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 10:50
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Ken Cuccinelli storms out of DC bar after being told he 'cages children for a fascist president'

In perhaps the story of the week, Trump’s acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli was forced to flee The Dubliner pub in DC on Wednesday night after being denounced over the administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policies.

Cuccinelli was accosted by Martin O’Malley, former Baltimore mayor, governor of Maryland and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, who branded him "the son of immigrant grandparents who cages children for a fascist president".

Stephen Miller, the deeply unappealing White House adviser behind such winning Trump policies as family seperation at the border, has frequently been confronted in public in a similar manner, while the president's ex-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in Virginia in June 2018 for putting customers off their meals.

O'Malley explained to The Washington Post that both he and Cuccinelli had graduated from the same Catholic high school in Washington and he was meeting with a group of fellow alumni who felt similarly: "We all let him know how we felt about him putting refugee immigrant kids in cages – certainly not what we were taught by the Jesuits at Gonzaga."

Cuccinelli is best known for suggesting in August that Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty in New York, which famously says "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free", should be amended to welcome only the "poor who can stand on own two feet and who will not become a public charge".

Here's Chris Riotta's report.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 11:10
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Republican groups stockpiling Don Jr’s book Triggered

The New York Times reports today that at least nine major Republican groups have bulk-bought copies of Don Jr's new book Triggered to sell off to activists and save the first family from embarrassment should it slump in the best-seller lists and end up being pulped prematurely like Alan Partridge's little-loved memoir Bouncing Back.

The push to promote the book - which Trump himself has loudly endorsed on Twitter - is being seen as an attempt to bolster Trump's eldest son's media persona. He is already a sought-after speaker in conservative ciricles.

The likes of Turning Point USA say they will be giving away copies to VIP ticketholders at an upcoming event in Florida.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 11:30
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Eric Trump ridiculed over 'LOPA' hat

Don Jr's brother Eric is also being mocked for pitching a new alternative to the MAGA hat...

LOPA stands for "Leave Our President Alone", he says, but people have plenty of their own alternative acronyms to suggest, the most popular being "Lock Our President Away".

"Lopa" apparently means "cow" in Albanian, "theft" in Sanskrit and "shed" in Melania's native Slovenian, incidentally.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 11:50
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White House 'engaged in unprecedented obstruction', says legal expert

Donald Trump’s White House has “engaged in unprecedented obstruction”, former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal has declared in a damning interview with The Last Word on MSNBC.

Promoting his new book Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump, Katyal told Steve Kornacki there are three "high crimes" he says the president is "clearly" guilty of, meaning the House of Representatives has little choice but to impeach the president and the Senate must ultimately remove him from office.

Those crimes are, according to Katyal:

1. Abusing the public trust by soliciting foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election

2. Abusing the public trust by engaging in bribery – repeatedly – through this quid pro quo exchanges with President Zelensky of Ukraine

3. Abusing the public trust by obstruction of justice in the investigations of his conduct, adopting an unconstitutional view of executive power

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 12:10
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North Korea launches two missiles in ominous Thanksgiving message to Trump

Pyongyang fired two projectiles on Thursday, using the start of the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States to telegraph its frustration over Washington's refusal to grant it sanctions relief.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 12:30
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Amy Klobuchar rejects suggestion America not ready to elect a woman president

Turning out attention to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates briefly, our man in the Midwest Andrew Buncombe has been hanging out with Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, who told him the idea America is not ready to elect a woman to the Oval Office is nonsense.

Joe Sommerlad29 November 2019 12:50

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