Trump news: Leading ally of president lashes out over impeachment as accuser claims to have documents corroborating sexual assault

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

Donald Trump has made the bizarre claim that his administration is building a border wall in Colorado during an address at a shale gas conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, despite the mountainous state being entirely landlocked, a gaffe he subsequently attempted to spin as a joke on Twitter as the ridicule rained down.

This was his midnight attempt to downplay the mistake but no one was buying it.

Colorado's Democratic governor Jared Polis wrote "Well this is awkward" on Facebook as CNN's Don Lemon broke up into a fit of hysterical laughter while trying to report the story...

...while Democratic senator Patrick Leahy was just one of many to tweet an amended map (corrections made with the president's trademark Sharpie, a nice touch).

Clark Mindock has a full account of the latest lunacy.

That wasn't the only questionable statement Trump made at the 9th annual Shale Insight Conference from the Steel City's David L Lawrence Convention Center last night.

The president also lied through his teeth with an anecdote about witnesses being reduced to tears by the sight of him signing an executive order - quickly disproved by video evidence of the event in question - mocked hostile demonstrators during an interruption (later proudly tweeting a clip) and urged his audience of energy industry professionals to demand he serve a further 16 years in the Oval Office.

One again, the president flagrantly treated an official White House event as a campaign rally and bemoaned the House's impeachment inquiry into his dealings with Ukraine: "I have witch hunts ever week. I say, what's the witch hunt this week?"

Trump was speaking after an extraordinary day on Capitol Hill in which he announced an agreement with Turkey to make its Syria ceasefire “permanent” in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

“We reserve the right to reimpose crippling sanctions should Turkey fail to honour its obligations,” he said in a live address from the White House's Diplomatic Reception Room, before going on to wash his hands of peacekeeping in the region.

Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand.

The president attempted to spin the news as a triumph at his White House press conference - not unlike David Brent in The Office announcing the Slough branch of Wernham Hogg would incorporate Swindon, only saving his colleagues' own jobs after failing a medical and missing out on a pivotal promotion himself.

It is, of course, anything but a triumph.

It was Trump's decision to withdraw 1,000 US troops for Syria in pursuit of positive headlines - against the advice of his experts and allies and at the encouragement of Recep Tayyip Erdogan - that greenlit Turkey's attack on America's Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a group it considers a terror faction.

He should have shored up the diplomatic consequences of his actions before abandoning the SDF, not after the bombs had begun falling, but there you go.

Here's Bel Trew's report.

Even more dramatically, a 30-strong mob of Republican congressmen led by "Florida man" Matt Gaetz and House minority whip Steve Scalise caused a five-hour delay to the impeachment inquiry by protesting during the deposition of senior State Department official Laura Cooper.

The group demanded the release of transcripts of the behind-closed-doors proceedings and denounced the Democratic-led panel's “Soviet-style” investigation of the president, saying it was an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2016 election a year before Americans go to the polls”.

The GOP rabble also brought their mobile phones into the classified briefing room and appeared to be able to tweet from inside, raising security concerns and violating House rules, prompting chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson to call on the seargeant-at-arms Paul Irving to "take action".

Alex Woodward reports from the circus.

Trump called on his Republican colleagues to "get tougher" during a Cabinet meeting on Monday and the ludicrous behaviour of Gaetz, Scalise and company - obstructing a process their fellow Republican committee members were, after all, taking part in - appear to be the fruit of that call to arms. 

The president continued to attack on GOP disloyalty last night, branding "Never Trumpers" within the party "human scum".

Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger - a regular Trump critic - quickly hit back, telling Wolf Biltzer on CNN's The Situation Room: 

To call anybody human scum is beneath the office of the presidency. You can't say that, right? You're the president. You have different standards.

Alex Woodward has more.

For Indy Voices, Molly Jong-Fast says Gaetz's frat boy antics are about anything but "transparency".

This is a truly incredible line from yesterday.

During a hearing before a federal appeals court in Manhattan over New York district attorney Cy Vance's right to see Trump's tax returns, one of The Donald's personal lawyers, William Consovoy, echoed his boss's famous "Fifth Avenue" boast when he argued that a sitting president should never face criminal charges, even if he had gunned someone down in the street.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was also on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to take questions from the House Financial Services Committee.

The Silicon Valley humanoid got well and truly roasted by New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when he struggled to answer her questions about why the social media giant outsources its fact-checking and allows content from the likes of white supremacist site The Daily Caller to appear unquestioned on its pages.

Clark Mindock has more.

While her father is being laughed over his Colorado wall gaffe, Ivanka Trump also finds herself derided this morning for attempting to take credit for Google's giant leap forward in computer processing, after its engineers developed a quantum processor capable of making calculations it would have taken a conventional computer tens of thousands of years to complete. 

California Institute of Technology professor John Preskill has meanwhile argued that the achievement, while impressive, serves little practical purpose and Google's big tech rival IBM argues its own earlier supercomputer, Summit, could have made the calculation in two and a half days, not the multiple decades Google has touted as the norm.

Here's Greg Evans for Indy100.