Trump news: Republicans 'stop defending president off the record' as impeachment crisis deepens amid new Ukraine scandal revelations

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

The impeachment inquiry swirling around Donald Trump took another dramatic turn on Thursday night as the House Intelligence Committee released 25 pages of damning text messages from former US special envoy Kurt Volker revealing the extent of American diplomatic pressure on Ukraine in the run-up to the notorious Volodymyr Zelensky call on 25 July.

The texts reveal the administration suggested Mr Trump would not meet face-to-face with Mr Zelensky without a commitment from his country that it would investigate his domestic political rival Joe Biden, a step Ukrainian officials had begun preparations to announce by drafting a preliminary statement.

The draft was shared with Volker and Gordon Sondland, US ambassador to the EU, as a gesture intended to demonstrate the new government in Kiev was committing to tackling corruption. They in turn passed it on to Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal attorney, was said it did not go far enough and demanded changes, according to The New York Times, although he now denies this.

Volker wrote to senior Ukrainian aide Andrey Yermak:

Heard from White House - Assuming President Z convinces trump he will investigate / “get to the bottom of what happened” in 2016, we will nail down date for visit to Washington.

The exchanges also make it clear that another envoy, William Taylor, threatened to quit over the prospect of withholding $400m (£325m) in military aid as a quid pro quo. 

Taylor told Sondland:

It's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

Zamira Rahim has this report.

Volker, who resigned after being named in the initial whistleblower complaint, appeared before Congress behind-closed-doors yesterday and told House investigators he had told Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, the conspiracy theory about the Bidens and Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma were not credible.

Giuliani seemingly ignored this correct reading of the situatiuon and continued to press the preceeding Petro Poroshenko regime to pursue the allegations.

Here's Andrew Buncombe's report.

In a chaotic week in DC, the White House released a newsletter admitting Trump had requested Ukraine “fully cooperate with the Justice Department investigation” into the Bidens, only to later amend it to read "any Justice Department investigation".

That original definite article appears to suggest attorney-general William Barr is or was preparing to open a probe of his own into the former vice president.

Chris Riotta has more.

Trump himself has meanwhile been on the war path again - following his explosive press conference with the president of Finland on Wednesday evening and his shocking call for China to join in the Biden hunt yesterday - tweeting that he has "an absolute right, perhaps even a duty” to investigate graft. It was tantamount to a confession.

He also dangled the idea of attempting to sue House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a similarly nonsensical and empty threat to his recent call for House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to be arrested for treason.

Those were just two of numerous, increasingly panicked messages he posted yesterday in and around his trip to Florida to speak to Republican retirees as his social media strategy finally begins to fail him. None of his messaging is allowing him to redirect the news agenda away from the raging dumpster fire that is the Ukraine affair.

Zamira Rahim has more.

He was up to his old distraction tricks, however, tossing a smoke grenade by labelling progressive Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "a wack job" after Don Jr posted a video nastily mocking one of her supporters at a climate change town hall at Queens Public Library in New York.

This a day after an attack on teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg the Swede has so far not dignified with a response.

AOC responded with typical snap...

...as did presidential contender Bernie Sanders, who gallantly came to her aid just two days after suffering a heart scare.

In Florida yesterday, Trump spoke at the Sharon L Morse Performing Arts Center in The Villages as he signed an executive order protecting Medicare, a visit postponed as a result of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings back in August.

Although the trip was paid for by taxpayers and not a campaign event, the president wasted little time in laying into his 2020 challengers and promising "the country would go to hell" if he is not re-elected next year.

He also "joked" about serving multiple further terms and creating a state-run media outlet to counter CNN. Why not simply nationalise Fox News?

His thoughts on healthcare were every bit as deranged as you might have expected.

Here's a rare bit of news that will please Trump: Ukraine has announced it will review the circumstances surrounding the closure of the criminal investigation into Burisma, the gas company Hunter Biden worked for between 2014 and 2019.

Ruslan Riaboshapka, Ukraine's chief prosecutor, announced on Friday his office will conduct a review into the matter, which the Trump administration alleges was curtailed in 2016 by then-prosecutor general Viktor Shokin on the insistence of Biden's father, then the vice president of the United States.

There is no known evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens to support their contention.

Oliver Carroll and Zamira Rahim have more.

Republican House minority leader Kevin McCarthy wrote to Speaker Pelosi yesterday, asking her to delay the impeachment inquiry into Trump, demanding she answer eight questions about its handling.

Pelosi shot him down, writing back: 

As you know, our Founders were specifically intent on ensuring that foreign entities did not undermine the integrity of our elections.

I received your letter this morning shortly after the world witnessed President Trump on national television asking yet another foreign power to interfere in the upcoming 2020 elections.

We hope you and other Republicans share our commitment to following the facts, upholding the Constitution, protecting our national security, and defending the integrity of our elections at such a serious moment in our nation’s history.

McCarthy has since offered an angry follow-up notice, but has so far been ignored.

Pelosi has meanwhile let it be known that she is "very worried" about the whistleblower's safety in the wake of Trump's comments that his people are "trying to find out" their identity.

"I’m very ashamed of the president’s words, threatening whistleblowers or anyone who gives that information," she said in Florida, where she was attending a town hall at the at the Bonaventure Town Center Club about the political crisis in Venezuela.

She continued:

For 25 years, I’ve been in intelligence. I was there to write the rules for whistleblowers and to protect them. Intelligence depends on whistleblowers being protected. So the president doing what he’s doing is undermining our national security as well as endangering people who speak truth to power.

CNN is often a focal point of Trump's never-ending attacks on the media but today they're pushing back, refusing to run his campaign adverts on the basis that the claims they make about Biden and the impeachment inquiry are "demonstrably false".