Democratic debate: Warren takes hits from all sides as Trump impeachment remains top focus

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

Donald Trump’s ex-national security adviser John Bolton urged former Russia adviser Fiona Hill to warn the White House about a campaign to pressure Ukraine orchestrated by the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, describing the latter as a “hand grenade who’s going to blow everybody up”.

“I am not part of whatever drug deal Rudy and [acting chief of staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up,” Bolton told Hill, according to reports of her 10-hour closed-door testimony before a panel of congressional investigators on Monday.

Three House committees are probing the president’s attempts to push Ukraine to dig up dirt on his Democratic 2020 challenger Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who had business dealings in the country, following the emergence of a CIA whistleblower complaint raised in response to Trump's call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky on 25 July, in which he appeared to threaten to withhold military aid unless a corruption investigation was launched to discredit the Bidens.

The latest twist in the tale might appear to place Bolton, a notorious war hawk and advocate for regime change, in the unlikely position of becoming a liberal hero, but here's some timely perspective.

Trump's short-lived former press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci, is not interested in any such cautious readings of the situation, declaring it "just a matter of time" before his old boss is removed from office.

Jon Sharman has more.

Hill, the White House's former senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, also reportedly told House investigators during her marathon testimony yesterday she had strongly and repeatedly objected to the ousting earlier this year of the administration's ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch.

Yovanovitch herself testified on Friday that Trump had pressured the State Department to remove her.

Hill's interview is one of what could eventually become dozens of closed-door depositions in the impeachment probe. There are five more scheduled this week, mostly with State Department officials, though it is unclear if they will all appear after Trump declared he wouldn't co-operate with the probe.

Hill's lawyer Lee Wolosky, incidentally, potentially paved a path for other witnesses to follow when he sent the White House a stinging letter arguing that executive privilege could not be applied to "information which is no longer confidential and has come within the sphere of public knowledge through broad disclosure" and when "government misconduct" was the issue at stake.

While interviews have focused on the interactions with Ukraine, the probe could broaden as soon as next week to include interviews with White House budget officials who may be able to shed light on whether military aid was withheld from Ukraine as Trump and Giuliani pushed for the investigations.

The three committees leading the probe are understood to be seeking interviews next week with Russell Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and Michael Duffey, another OMB official who leads national security programmes.

The packed schedule of interviews comes as Democrats are methodically working to pin down the details of Trump's pressuring Zelensky. Once Democrats have completed the probe and followed any other threads it produces, they will use their findings to help determine whether to vote on articles of impeachment. House speaker Nancy Pelosi said she wants the committees to move "expeditiously."

Democrats have already obtained documents and testimony that verify parts of an original whistleblower's complaint that launched the probe. A cache of text messages between three diplomats provided by one of the inquiry's first witnesses, former Ukrainian envoy Kurt Volker, detailed attempts by the diplomats to serve as intermediaries around the time Trump urged Zelensky to start the investigations into a company linked to Biden's son. Yovanovitch told lawmakers there was a "concerted campaign" against her based on "unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives."

One of the diplomats in the text exchanges, US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, is expected to appear for a deposition under subpoena on Thursday. He's expected to tell Congress that his text message reassuring another envoy that there was no quid pro quo in their interactions with Ukraine was based solely on what Trump told him.

Fiona Hill (Michael Reynolds/EPA)

Also up this week: Michael McKinley, a former top aide to secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who resigned last week. McKinley, a career foreign service officer and Pompeo's de facto chief of staff, resigned on Friday, ending a 37-year career. He is scheduled to testify behind closed doors on Wednesday.

The committees are also scheduled to talk to deputy assistant secretary of state George Kent on Tuesday and Ulrich Brechbuhl, a State Department counselor, on Thursday. On Friday, the lawmakers have scheduled an interview with Laura Cooper, who is the deputy assistant secretary of defence for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia. It is unclear if any of those officials will show up after Trump's vow of non-co-operation.

Because of the Trump administration's edict, the Democrats have been subpoenaing witnesses as they arrived for their interviews - a move sometimes known as a "friendly" subpoena that could give the witnesses additional legal protection as they testify. Both Yovanovitch and Hill received subpoenas the mornings of their testimony.

One witness who may not be called before Congress is the still-anonymous government whistleblower who touched off the impeachment inquiry. Top Democrats say testimony and evidence coming in from other witnesses, and even the Republican president himself, are backing up the whistleblower's account of what transpired during Trump's call with Zelensky. Lawmakers have grown deeply concerned about protecting the person from Trump's threats and may not wish to risk exposing the whistleblower's identity.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said on Sunday it "may not be necessary" to reveal the whistleblower's identity as the House gathers evidence. He said Democrats "don't need the whistleblower, who wasn't on the call, to tell us what took place on the call" and said the "primary interest right now is making sure that that person is protected."

Trump himself, of course, has shown no signs of backing down:

Republican lawmakers have aimed their ire at Democrats and the process, saying Pelosi should hold a vote to begin the inquiry and hold the meetings out in the open, not behind closed doors.

"The tragedy here and the crime here is that the American people don't get to see what's going on in these sessions," said Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform panel.

Here's more from Peter Stubley.

Florida congressman and Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz, last seen failing to understand the concept of a "kangaroo court"..

...yesterday arrived at the Hill deposition, only to be ordered to leave by Schiff because the Republican was not a member of any of the three committees involved in the impeachment inquiry.

California Democrat Eric Swalwell said Gaetz's appearance was a "stunt" and accused him of deliberately wasting the investigators' time by disrupting proceedings.

Here's Chris Riotta's story.

Trump's relationship with Fox News continues to fluctuate by the day.

He raged last Thursday that the right-wing broadcaster is "much different than it used to be in the good old days" after it published a poll finding the majority of Americans in favour of impeachment, complaining about several anchors (including the since-departed Shep Smith) and reportedly called up CEO Suzanne Scott to moan about their coverage directly.

He now appears to have forgiven them though after it emerged the data concerned was flawed - and is using the matter to attack The New York Times for not running a prominent correction after citing it.

He is, of course, citing another Rupert Murdoch-owned property there, The New York Post, a week after attorney general Bill Barr met with the aged Aussie media tycoon in private, presumably to strategise on 2020 and how to respond to the ongoing inquiry.

It feels like only yesterday his supporters were gloating over a violent meme of him killing journalists (oh wait, it was!). And yet, today, he's worried about best practice.

Trump has announced sanctions against Turkey and suspended negotiations on a $100bn (£79bn) trade deal, amid a mounting outcry over its assault upon Kurdish fighters as it invaded northern Syria. 

The president signed executive orders to sanction the nation and will also boost tariffs on Turkish steel to 50 per cent. In a statement, Trump vowed to "swiftly destroy" the Turkish economy if it continued down “this dangerous and destructive path”. He added that US troops coming out of Syria will redeploy and remain in the region to monitor the situation.

"The United States will aggressively use economic sanctions to target those who enable, facilitate, and finance these heinous acts in Syria," he added. 

The US Treasury later said in a statement that action had been taken "against two [Turkish] ministries and three senior Turkish government officials in response to Turkey's military operations in Syria".

Here's Clark Mindock's report.

Speaker Pelosi wasted no time in denouncing the sanctions, saying the adminstration's measures “fall very short of reversing the humanitarian disaster brought about by his own erratic decision-making”.

Pelosi has also said she and a leading Senate Republican Lindsey Graham want Congress to produce bipartisan legislation to “overturn” Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from the region after the pair spoke on Monday.

Graham had been drafting a bipartisan measure to bar weapons sales to Turkey and impose sanctions on the US assets of Turkish leaders prior to the president's annnouncement.

The top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee have said they will introduce similar legislation.

While you might have expected Pelosi to dismiss the sanctions, the Republican response to this latest development in Syria has been more interesting.

Whereas the aforementioned Graham threw his support behind the administration...

...Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said he was still "gravely concerned" about the situatiuon in Syria "and by our nation's apparent response thus far" arising from Trump's decision to withdraw US troops, leaving America's Kurdish allies against Isis in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) vulnerable to the Turkish onslaught.

More cynically, Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney made a rather desperate attempt to blame the matter on the impeachment inquiry during her appearance on Fox and Friends. It's the Democrats' fault the White House greenlit the carpet-bombing of the SDF, you see.

Giuliani has responded to Bolton's criticism, raising his "hand grenade" by likening the moustachioed warmonger to "an atomic bomb".

This is an equally spot-on critique of Bolton.

Here's Jon Sharman's updated story.

Back to the crisis in Syria.

The US is sending vice president Mike Pence and Bolton's replacement as national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, to Ankara as soon as possible in an attempt to begin negotiations with Turkey, after the administration called on Recep Tayyip Erdogan to stop the invasion and declare a cease-fire.

Pence said Trump has spoken directly to Erdogan, who has promised not attack the border town of Kobani, which in 2015 witnessed Isis's first defeat in a battle by US-backed Kurdish fighters.

"President Trump communicated to him very clearly that the United States of American wants Turkey to stop the invasion, implement an immediate cease-fire and to begin to negotiate with Kurdish forces in Syria to bring an end to the violence," Pence said.

The US will continue to ramp up the sanctions "unless Turkey is willing to embrace a cease-fire, come to the negotiating table and end the violence," he added.

Here's an interesting theory on why Pence might have taken the lead on this.