Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was said to fall asleep while President Donald Trump delivered his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
As the president droned on Iran, video panned to Ross, who appeared to be sleeping, according some watchers on Twitter.
MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle challenged her guests to explain why the latest impeachment threat against President Donald Trump should be taken any more seriously.
More and more Democrats are backing impeachment as details leak out about Trump's phone call to the Ukrainian president, offering U.S. aid in exchange for campaign dirt against Joe Biden, but MSNBC panelists agreed the president had faced down serious challenges before.
"The president has had several vulnerable moments," said Philippe Reines, a State Department deputy under Hillary Clinton. "One was firing Jim Comey, another was a revelation Don Jr. had his meeting in Trump Tower, Charlottesville, Helsinki and now this."
"What is what is interesting about those moments is his typical defenders," he continued, "whether it's Lindsey Graham or Jim Jordan, they have to be quiet for a period of days because, one, they don't know, and two, they are uncomfortable. What's particularly problematic is ... right now people assume the worst, but the problem here is that everyone is looking for a quid pro quo, and maybe it's there and maybe the transcript says it."
"It is unlikely that the transcript will be so flat out, but that doesn't matter," Reines added. "The moment that Donald Trump said to a foreign leader help me get dirt on Joe Biden, the minute those two words, Joe Biden, came out, he crossed such a serious red line that that's what needs to be focused on, and that's what the House Democrats are focusing on."
Ruhle said she'll believe it when she sees it.
"What does crossing a serious red line actually mean?" she said. "What are the consequences? Because we've been talking about crossing red lines for the last two and a half years. You know what the White House does? They smile and wink back at us."
President Donald Trump on Tuesday reacted with fury after being asked how he felt about growing calls in the House of Representatives for his impeachment.
"It's ridiculous, it's a witch hunt!" the president exclaimed while standing outside the United Nations building in New York.
The president then went on to falsely claim that he's leading all Democratic presidential rivals in the polls, even though all recent polls show him losing to top Democratic contenders.
"I'm leading with polls, they have no idea how they stop me, the only way they can try is through impeachment!" he shouted.
Real Clear Politics' average of current polls, for example, has Trump losing to Joe Biden by nearly 12 points, losing to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) by 6.5 points, and losing to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) by 5 points.
The president then tried to turn the conversation back to Biden, whom he accused without evidence of being "corrupt."
Watch the video below.
Tom LoBianco, who has written a biography of Vice President Mike Pence called "Piety and Power," appeared on CNN Tuesday to discuss what's really motivating the man who is second in line to the presidency.
During an interview, CNN's John Berman said that he was really struck by how LoBianco's book describes Pence and his wife Karen as being in "need of and awe of money."
LoBianco then illustrated this point with an anecdote about Pence using the Trump inauguration committee's funds to pay for his living expenses after the 2016 presidential election.
"Karen Pence says, immediately after the election, tells Mike, she says, 'What are we going to do? We're out of money. We need money," LoBianco explains. "He kind of pulls her, grabs her, walks her out of the room, and a few weeks later their chief political aide goes to the inaugural aide and says, 'Hey, we need some money for the Pences."
LoBianco then reveals that inaugural committee staffers were "not sure how to take" this request, although they eventually did fulfill it to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"What I do know is that when you check the tax forms, the 990s, for the inaugural committee and the VP's residence fund, you see a charitable donation from the inaugural committee to the VP's residence fund for $750,000," he said.
Watch the video below.
The revelations that President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine to dig up dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden — and ordered administration officials to suspend hundreds of millions in military aid a week before doing so — has created a political firestorm and fresh calls for impeachment.
Caught in this situation, the anchors at Fox & Friends — Trump’s favorite morning show and a huge promoter of the president — opted to aggressively gaslight their viewers.
Steve Doocy acknowledged the report "doesn't look like good timing to a lot of people," but added, "Fox News has confirmed that [Trump] wanted to make sure that the new president of Ukraine understood" he was serious about ending corruption. (This principled good-governance stance apparently doesn't apply to Saudi Arabia, which Trump is giving lucrative arms sales even as they dismember journalists with bone saws.)
Ainsley Earhardt, meanwhile, wrung her hands over the fact that lawmakers are accusing Trump of wrongdoing without hearing his actual call with the Ukraine president — it is "like saying Brian or Steve, you’re going to lose your job because of a conversation that someone says you promised someone, but we don’t know what you said. We don’t know what the conversation was. It’s ridiculous!" (Trump, bear in mind, already admitted he pressured Ukrainian leaders to investigate Biden.)
"If the president said 'I will give you the money but you’ve got to investigate Joe Biden,' that is really off-the-rails wrong," acknowledged Doocy. "But if it’s something else, you know, it would be nice to know what it is." (Trump himself could clear all of this up by releasing the transcript of his call and giving the whistleblower complaint to Congress, neither of which he has done.)
And Brian Kilmeade speculated — with zero evidence — that the whistleblower was just taking revenge on Trump for winning the 2016 election, and demanded to know — again, with zero evidence — whether President Barack Obama made any corrupt deals with the Cuban government.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough busted President Donald Trump's claims about Joe Biden's dealings in Ukraine as exactly wrong.
The president has insisted that he asked Ukraine's president to investigate the former vice president's diplomatic efforts in the country as a possible case of corruption, but the "Morning Joe" host said Biden, not Trump, had been trying to root out a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor.
"The Trump administration is hoping that Americans are so ignorant that they actually believe the investigator was fired by Joe Biden because he was looking into a company that Biden's son was attached to," Scarborough said. "The reality, and if you can go into this a little bit, the reality is that the (International Monetary Fund) and other Western leaders wanted this investigator fired in part because -- critical point here, critical point, everybody, wait for it Trump fans -- because there was a concern he was not investigating that company and others aggressively enough."
Scarborough said the facts already laid out in the past week's reporting are damning enough, even before a transcript or whistleblower complaint are released showing what Trump actually said to his Ukrainian counterpart.
"He would never say on the phone call there was a quid pro quo," Scarborough said, "but we have facts in front of us."
"We have congress passing $391 million of support, military support for Ukraine, after they have attacked and Donald Trump has attacked Barack Obama for years for not sending that sort of defense weaponry to Ukraine," he added, "and then Donald Trump decides in the middle of July suddenly to tell Mick Mulvaney, 'Hey, kill that, we're not going to send it over to them. If anybody asks, just say it's interagency mumbo jumbo.'"
"Then suddenly he talks eight times to the president of Ukraine," Scarborough concluded, "eight times saying, you need to work with my personal lawyer. They have a good conversation, he apparently gets reassurances and then what happens, the $391 million is released. I can tell you, not only in the court of law, but I would suggest among American citizens, that's pretty strong evidence."
Despite the growing movement for impeachment, advisors to President Donald Trump believe the bombshell reports about soliciting foreign election interference from Ukraine can be "spun as a positive" for the president's 2020 re-election campaign.
Ashley Parker, a White House reporter for The Washington Post, was interviewed about the thinking of Trump's advisors by MSNBC's Steve Kornacki on Monday.
"This is a White House, a Trump White House, that is used to being under siege. There was of course the two-and-a-half-year saga with the Mueller investigation culminating in the Mueller report, Mueller’s testimony recently. There have been a million other controversies, flare-ups, moments when the White House was forced to defend a comment from the president, allegation against the president, these sorts of things," Kornacki noted.
"How is the White House regarding the developments in the last 24-hours, specifically relating to Democrats in impeachment?" he asked. "Do they view this as par for the course or do they view this as something different?"
"So the impeachment development is quite new ... generally speaking, and this is not everyone in the White House and in the president’s orbit, there are some people who are concerned, but there is a sense that this is potentially -— can be spun as positive for the president if he can take this issue," Parker replied. "And this is his skill set and it involves his trademark shamelessness, but take this issue and make it less about him, less about what he did or did not do or say, and use that media spotlight to focus on Biden and his son in Ukraine."
"And, again, you said in the intro of the show there is no evidence there was any wrongdoing there, but that has not stopped Trump and his allies -- we saw this in the last 24 hours -- trying to say Biden and his son did something untoward and something corrupt that needs to be investigated," she continued. "From the president’s point of view, and you saw this in his public comments today up in New York, he is sort of loving this moment."
"That said, there is some concern, you know, of course, there was the concern that this could lead to impeachment. That’s what we’re seeing tonight, at least one step closer, we’ll know more after the meeting tomorrow. That is a problem in part because you see how the president reacts it is often quite erratically and making a problem worse for himself when he does feel under threat, when he does feel under assault," she noted.
"There is also the risk that as they're trying to shine the spotlight on Biden and his son that this narrative of the president yet again potentially asking a foreign country to intervene, to help in an election, help with a political foe is not a narrative they want to harden in the public consciousness," Parker added.
Watch:
Yet another Democrat is backing impeachment following the latest revelations that Donald Trump allegedly solicited foreign election interference from Ukraine in return for military aid.
The movement for impeachment grew significantly on Monday.
MSNBC's Ali Velshi interview Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), who has not been publicly backing impeachment.
"What’s happened in the last week greatly disturbs me. I’d said yesterday and I’m just going to be very frank tonight, we are a divided country and that scares me. But we cannot be divided on following the rule of law," Dingell explained. "And what we have heard in the last week is deeply disturbing."
"As members of Congress, we have a fundamental responsibility to protect our national security and to protect the Constitution. We have no choice now but to launch an investigation that is going to give us the facts. That is our moral responsibility," she explained.
"So I guess I’m joining with many of my other colleagues. And I hope my Republican colleagues will think about this because they too need to be concerned about rule of the law," Dingell said.
Watch:
MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Monday reported how President Donald Trump is returning to the Paul Manafort playbook as he seeks re-election in 2020.
Manafort, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, was Trump's campaign chairman during the 2016 election.
Maddow reminded how weird of a selection the choice had been seen at the time.
"Whether or not Paul Manafort, himself, is going to spend the rest of his days in prison, personally, what happened around the time that Paul Manafort was the campaign chairman for the Donald Trump for president campaign in 2016 is that however weird it seemed that the Trump campaign was hiring a guy like Manafort to come basically from Ukraine, come back to the U.S. and work on a political campaign here, I mean, what he brought with him were contacts and business partners and secret funders and organized crime-linked Kremlin connections in Ukraine," Maddow reported.
"That was the cartful of baggage that Paul Manafort brought with him as a presidential campaign chairman for Trump in 2016 -- at a time when the Kremlin wanted to use lots of different levers of power to try to get Donald Trump elected president. And now four years later for the re-elect, Trump is going back to Ukraine," she noted.
"If 2016 had been a movie, you could not sell this as a sequel. You would have to sell it as a remake because apart from Paul Manafort being in prison this time around, it’s basically all the same stuff happening all over again involving all the same people," Maddow concluded.
Watch Part I:
Watch Part II:
Last week, CNN's Chris Cuomo played host to President Donald Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who went off on a half-intelligible rant about former Vice President Joe Biden and tried to paint him as corrupt for fighting to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor.
"For us it's about whether or not people in power are telling you the truth, and Rudy Giuliani was not telling you the truth on things that matter," said Cuomo. "So we wanted to check the holes in the president's theory several times on this show. It's not just about the Biden family, it about other things that Rudy Giuliani's calling out and we went to the source."
"December 16th, 2018 there is a finding by a court in the Ukraine that a man named Teleshenco, something like that, that he produced a phony affidavit that was given to the American authorities and an FBI agent named Greenwood and they found him guilty of that. Nobody reports that," said Giuliani in a prior clip.
"If you're going to put somebody at the center of your theory, know their name, okay?" said Cuomo. "The man's name is Serhiy Leshchenko, a former member of that country's parliament. We spoke exclusively with him tonight and we covered a lot of turf, including what Mr. Giuliani just left out."
"This was a decision of administrative court in Ukraine, which was never in active status because we went it appeal court, which stopped and then cancelled the decision of the administrative court and for today there is no decision stating that I violated any law in sense of intervention in America elections or something like that," Leschenko told Cuomo.
"He did appeal. He of won. Then there was another level of review and he won," said Cuomo. "Mr. Giuliani did know this? Either he was ignorant or he knew that what he was making the crux of the complicity here was a false allegation. You can decide which it is, but there is no judicial decision that says that Leshchenko did anything wrong. Then there's the central question that the right has been pushing about the 2016 election and who it was that really interfered."
"Several people in the Ukraine knew about a tremendous amount of collusion between Ukrainian officials and Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee," said Giuliani in another clip.
"You were a member of parliament during this period. Do you know about collusion between members of your government at that time and the Clinton campaign in order to hurt Donald Trump and help her?"
"Not at all," said Leschenko. "It's just a conspiracy of Mr. Giuliani, which he constructed and maybe he believed in. And in reality, this collusion does not exist, did not exist."
Cuomo also asked Leschenko about the central claim of Trump and Giuliani: that Biden tried to remove the prosecutor to stop an investigation into his son Hunter's shares in a Ukrainian energy firm.
"Just to be clear, you're saying that Mr. Shokin, the prosecutor that the United States and others wanted to push out, actually didn't want to look at this investigation, he wasn't running after Mr. Biden, Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden's son," said Cuomo. "You're saying he was being pressured to investigate him, not that he was applying pressure to investigate him?"
"Mr. Shokin was very weak as a prosecutor," said Leschenko. "He did not deliver investigation. The reason why Ukrainian society, members of parliament, we campaign to resign him from this position. We started to collect signatures in Ukrainian parliament. We collected more than 120 signatures to impeach and procedure of his resignation. It was issue for the whole society to have transparent and unbiased prosecutor general."
"So just to review," said Cuomo. "Giuliani says this man and others were trying to hurt Trump in the 2016 campaign. Leshchenko says, no, I was trying to root out corruption in my country. Giuliani says, oh, yeah, then why were you convicted of making it up about Manafort? Giuliani's making that up. That case went away and you just heard it from the man who is there and you can Google it and you'll find the procedural history on the case. And then Giuliani says, yeah, but look, Biden wanted to get rid of this prosecutor who was coming after his kid. That makes sense to all of us, right? That would make sense. Except this guy, they wanted him out, his own party, 298 — or 89 votes in the parliament to get him out. Western democracies wanting had him out, the U.N. wanted him out because he wouldn't take up cases. No evidence he took up cases against Hunter Biden."
Watch below:
Former press secretary Sean Spicer appeared for his second dance on "Dancing with the Stars" Monday evening.
Interestingly enough, Spicer's appearance did not air on ABC in Washington, D.C. because the Washington Redskins were playing the Chicago Bears, who were up 7-0 while Spicer was dancing. It could put Spicer at a disadvantage for his crusade to win and it could be why he sent an email to his audience begging for help.
"We're doing bumper-stickers, yard signs, whatever it takes," Spicer said. Footage showed him with a bullhorn driving around the streets begging for people to vote for him.
“PS- today is my birthday and all I'm asking for this year is your votes," Spicer said in an email to supporters.
You can watch his appearance below:
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl on the spectrum, left Republicans in conniptions after a forceful speech at the United Nations General Assembly calling on older generations to act to save the planet for hers.
One such offended Republican was Michael Knowles of the right-wing Daily Wire, who went on Fox News and blasted Thunberg as a "mentally ill Swedish child" — only to be promptly demolished by Fox guest Christopher Hahn.
"The climate hysteria movement is not about science," sneered Knowles. "If it were about science it would be led by scientists, rather than by politicians and a mentally ill Swedish child who's being exploited by her parents and by the international left."
"How dare you," said Hahn. "You're a grown man and you're attacking a child. Shame on you. She's trying to do what she thinks is right."
"I'm not," said Knowles. "I'm attacking the left for exploiting a mentally ill child."
"Relax, skinny boy!" snapped Hahn. "I've got this, okay. You're attacking a child. You're a grown man. Have some couth."
"I'm attacking the left for exploiting a mentally ill child," repeated Knowles.
"Maybe on your podcast, you get away with and say whatever you want because no one's listening," said Hahn. "You're on national television. Be a grown-up when you're talking about children. She's trying to save the planet because your president doesn't believe in climate change and kids need to take to the streets to worry about your future. You are despicable for talking about her like that, and you should apologize on national television right now."
"I think the international left and her parents who are exploiting a girl with many mental illnesses—"
"You called her mentally ill!" shouted Hahn. "Take it back now."
"She is mentally ill," said Knowles. "She has autism, she has obsessive-compulsive disorder, she has selective mutism."
"You are despicable!" said Hahn.
A Fox News spokesperson condemned Knowles remarks.
"The comment made by Michael Knowles who was a guest on The Story tonight was disgraceful," the spokesperson said. "We apologize to Greta Thunberg and to our viewers."
Watch below:
On Monday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called for Trump to release the whistleblower complaint to Congress as federal law requires.
Trump “should make available the whistleblower complaint that has been deemed to be credible and urgent. I think it'd be very helpful to get the bottom of the facts," Romney told NBC News. "If they don't, it will be up to the House to decide how to proceed.”
That did not sit well with Trump, who released a video attacking the fellow Republican.
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