Trump news: President abruptly drops sanctions on Turkey, as Republicans storm impeachment hearings

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

Bill Taylor, acting US ambassador to Ukraine, told the House impeachment inquiry on Tuesday he was informed the delivery of almost $400mn (£309mn) in military aid to the country was “dependent” on president Volodymyr Zelensky agreeing to publicly announce a corruption probe into Donald Trump’s 2020 rival Joe Biden, confirming the existence of the suspected quid pro quo at the heart of the Democratic-led investigation.

Taylor had become a person of interest to the inquiry when US special envoy Kurt Volker released text messages between the two of them and US ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, in which Taylor was seen writing to Sondland on 9 September and saying:

I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

Speaking behind closed doors on Tuesday, Taylor said that after his appointment as ambassador in May - replacing the ousted Marie Yovanovitch - he had become alarmed by the existence of a secondary, “highly irregular” diplomatic channel and attested that other US officials had said they were busy working to convince Zelensky to investigate Biden and his son Hunter, then on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma. Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, was guiding the plan, Taylor claimed.

His quid pro quo contention arose from a conversation with Sondland, he explained in his opening statement:

During that phone call, Ambassador Sondland told me that President Trump had told him that he wants President Zelensky to state publicly that Ukraine will investigate Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election.

Ambassador Sondland also told me that he now recognised that he had made a mistake by earlier telling the Ukranian officials to whom he spoke that a White House meeting with President Zelensky was dependent on a public announcement of investigations.

In fact, Ambassador Sondland said, ‘everything’ was dependent on such an announcement, including security assistance. He said that President Trump wanted President Zelensky ‘in a public box’ by making a public statement about ordering such investigations.

Taylor went on to say he felt he had been kept in the dark about what was really going on between the two countries and described the State Department, the Defence Department, the CIA and national security adviser John Bolton scrambling to stop the withholding of the much-needed aid at a time when Ukrainian soldiers were fighting Russian-back forces to the north and lost 13,000 men.

He also offered this damning quote from Sondland on the administration's thinking:

President Trump is a businessman... When a businessman is about to sign a cheque to someone who owes him something, the businessman asks that person to pay up before signing the cheque.

“It was just the most damning testimony I’ve heard,” Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told The Washington Post afterwards, while her Democratic colleagues Carolyn Maloney and Dean Phillips both used the word "disturbing".

Here's Clark Mindock's full report.

President Trump attempted to distract from Taylor's deposition by describing the inquiry as “a lynching” on Twitter yesterday.

While the remark brought incredulity and angry condemnation from across the political spectrum (exactly the reaction he intended to provoke), there were some craven attempts to defend him by his own side.

One of his apologists, senator Lindsey Graham, has now announced he is planning to table a resolution in the Republican-held upper chamber condemning the House’s activities.

"This resolution puts the Senate on record condemning the House... Here's the point of the resolution: Any impeachment vote based on this process, to me, is illegitimate, is unconstitutional, and should be dismissed in the Senate without a trial," Graham told Fox News's Sean Hannity last night. 

At this juncture, it's hard to disagree with Barack Obama's former national security adviser Susan Rice on Graham:

Here's Chris Riotta on the president's latest assault on human decency.

Trump was up late on Twitter last and angrily lashed out at reports suggesting he is plotting to replace his blundering acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney with either senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway or treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin.

He also retweeted a Winston Churchill quote from Piers Morgan (urgh, too early to think about him) and praise for ex-press secretary Sean Spicer's perfomances on Dancing with the Stars from Mulvaney's predecessor, Reince Priebus.

Meanwhile, it seems Trump's frustration with Mulvaney goes back further than his disastrous quid pro quo press conference last week...

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell made an interesting break with Trump yesterday, refuting the president's claim that he had been reassured by McConnell that the rough transcript of his now-notorious phone call with President Zelensky of 25 July was perfectly fine.

(Michael Reynolds/EPA)

Trump had told reporters on 3 October:

He put out a statement that said that was the most innocent phone call he's read, and I spoke to him about it too. He read my phone call with the president of Ukraine. Mitch McConnell - he said, 'That was the most innocent phone call that I've read.' I mean, give me a break.

Not true, according to the Kentucky senator yesterday:

We’ve not had any conversations on that subject.

McConnell has said that the idea the transcript contains an impeachable offence is "laughable" and complained that the inquiry is a Democratic ploy to hold up the ratification of the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement but this was significant: the Republican knew his words would embarrass the president.

The Trump administration's special envoy to Syria, James Jeffrey, has told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he was not consulted on the president's decision to withdraw 1,000 US troops from the region after the "defeat" of Isis, leaving America's Kurdish allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces at the mercy of the Turkish military, which considers them a terror group.

Jeffrey said he was "very thoroughly briefed" on Trump's call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan after it had happened on 6 October but was not kept in the loop beforehand. 

“That specific decision, I was not [told] in advance,” he answered, when pressed by Utah senator Mitt Romney on the question of the withdrawal. Jeffrey did defend the administration, however, on the basis that Obama and George W Bush had made landmark decisions in the region without running it by his predecessors.

Romney asked Jeffrey if it was wrong to conclude that “Erdogan basically said, ‘We’re coming in. Get out of the way,’ and America blinked.”

“It isn’t that we got out of the way because we were not militarily in the way,” Jeffrey answered, insisting that Erdogan's offensive was “absolutely” unrelated to the withdrawal.

(Sha Hanting/Getty)

“I don’t really know why we have someone with the title special representative for Syria engagement and special envoy to the global coalition to defeat Isis if they are not consulted before the president takes the most significant single action affecting US interests in Syria and the future of Isis during his presidency and I think it speaks to the utter chaos of American foreign policy,” commented senator Chris Murphy.

Well, quite.

The only person more damning on the subject was Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who reacted to Jeffrey's comments as the five-day ceasefire agreed by vice president Mike Pence came to an end by saying the US had betrayed and abandoned the Kurds and advised them to retreat from the Syrian border - as per a deal between Moscow and Ankara - or be mauled by the Turkish army.

"The United States has been the Kurds' closest ally in recent years. In the end, it abandoned the Kurds and, in essence, betrayed them," the Russian said. "Now [the Americans] prefer to leave the Kurds at the border and almost force them to fight the Turks."

Support for impeaching Trump has surged among political independents and has risen by three percentage points overall since last week, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

More Americans also said they disapproved of the president's handling of foreign threats. The 18-22 October poll showed public opinion continued to shift as Americans digested a flurry of news over the past several weeks stemming from the congressional impeachment inquiry and his decision to pull troops from Syria.

Overall, 46 per cent of Americans said they supported impeachment and 40 per cent said they opposed it. Support for impeachment was relatively steady among Republicans and Democrats over the past week but it surged among independents, a group that includes people who neither identify as Democrats nor Republicans and do not favor either party when they vote.

Among independents, 45 per cent said in the latest poll they supported impeachment and 32 per cent said they opposed it, the strongest level of support recorded in more than a year. A little more than one in three independents had said they were in favour of impeachment in more than a dozen previous Reuters/Ipsos polls since June 2018.

Trump leveraged his advantage in support among independents to narrowly win the White House in 2016 and it is expected that he will need them again to be re-elected.

Overall, the poll found that Americans were more critical of Trump's handling of US foreign policy and Isis than they were in a similar poll in April. Among Republicans, 73 per cent said they approved of the president's handling of US foreign policy and 75 per cent said they approved of his handling of Isis, down six points and eight points respectively from April.

The White House official who wrote an anonymous op-ed for The New York Times in September 2018 reassuring the public that there are adults in the room carrying out a covert, active resistance to the president is writing a book, entitled A Warning.

The author explained in the piece that there are senior officials “working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations", sending "deep state" conspiracy theorists wild in the process. 

Trump was not the only subject of ire after his appalling "lynching" tweet yesterday: Joe Biden also found himself with some apologising to do after an old clip of him using the same ill-advised analogy during the Bill Clinton impeachment of 1998 resurfaced online.

Jon Sharman has more.

The last thing 2019 needs is another podcast but we're getting one anyway: ex-Breitbart editor and Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon is starting one called War Room: Impeachment, spun off from a daily radio show being broadcast on six conservative stations in Florida and Virginia.

He says it will be directed at Washington political operatives and grassroots activists, interview right-wing lawyers on the mechanics of the impeachment process and "get very granular".

Bannon tells Politico he is concerned about the “well-oiled Democratic media machine” and doesn't trust the GOP to respond to what he considers "a mortal threat to Trump's presidency": “It doesn’t take an astrophysicist to see that among independents and even Republicans, you’re starting to see a move against the president on this impeachment issue. It’s not being taken seriously.”

Personally, I'll be sticking with Adam Buxton, Athletico Mince and Last Podcast on the Left.