American former General Colin Powell says the Republican Party “needs to get a grip on itself” amid the Ukraine scandal engulfing the administration of US President Donald Trump.

“The Republican party has got to get a grip on itself,” Powell told a crowd at The Jefferson Series, an event in New Albany, Ohio, on Monday. “Republican leaders and members of the Congress, both Senate and the House, are holding back because they’re terrified of what will happen to any one of them if they speak out.” 

The former secretary of state, who calls himself a “moderate Republican,” added that the US foreign policy is “in shambles right now.”

“I see things happening that are hard to understand,” he said.

Trump has apparently pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Jo Biden, his potential opponent for the 2020 presidential election, warning that he would not give Ukraine the promised military aid in case he refused.

Republicans have shown “blind partisan loyalty” to Trump, according to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy.

“This entire country should be scared that at a moment when we need patriots, what we are getting is blind partisan loyalty,” Murphy said in an interview on “Meet the Press.”

Democrats controlling the House have launched an impeachment inquiry based on whistleblower complaints that accuse Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

“I feel like this is a moment where patriots need to step up and try to save this country,” Murphy said. “And I think there are a lot of regular citizens out there that are going to demand that their members of Congress look at the facts, make a decision on the facts, not make a decision based on their loyalty to the cult of Donald Trump.”

Trump has dismissed the impeachment probe as an attempted “coup” and a “witch hunt,” and has even asked China to investigate Biden as well.

“You really think he was serious about thinking that China’s going to investigate the Biden family?” Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said on ABC. “I think he’s getting the press all spun up about this. Remember, this is the president who’s been tougher on China than any other president… You would think after … a few years of following this president, you would understand sort of how this guy communicates. I think that is what he’s doing.”

Biden has accused Trump of asking Ukraine to “manufacture lies” about him.

“In my experience, asking a foreign government to manufacture lies about your domestic political opponent is not ‘done all the time,’” said the former vice president.

He was responding to a Trump tweet that alleged: “As President I have an obligation to end CORRUPTION, even if that means requesting the help of a foreign country or countries. It is done all the time. This has NOTHING to do with politics or a political campaign against the Bidens. This does have to do with their corruption!”

Source: Presstv

The rapidly escalating impeachment inquiry against US President Donald Trump is the latest and perhaps most serious threat to his presidency, and the White House is failing to contain the crisis, accoding to US media reports.

US Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, has become the public face of the impeachment investigation about the Republican president, which has has produced an intense partisan fight in Washington.

House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry in September after an unidentified whistleblower alleged Trump had sought to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former US Vice President Joe Biden, a leading contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Trump has branded the impeachment probe a “hoax” and has attacked Schiff as a “lowlife” and a “liar.”

“Schiff is a lowlife who should resign (at least!),” Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday. Hours later at a White House news conference, he described Schiff as a “stone-cold liar.”

Trump’s aggressive new strategy to thwart the Democrats’ impeachment offensive is already sinking under the weight of new revelations, CNN reported.

Text messages released on Thursday between US diplomats and a senior Ukrainian aide reveal that Zelensky was told he should open an investigation against Biden if he wanted an invitation to visit Washington.

Speaking at a news conference on Thursday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Schiff accused Trump with “incitement of violence” in his combative response to the whistleblower complaint and inquiry.

“It’s hard to imagine a more corrupt course of conduct,” Schiff said of the phone call and the alleged efforts to keep private its contents.

“We’re not fooling around here,” Schiff said. “We don’t want this to drag on for months and months and months, which appears to be the administration’s strategy.”

Schiff also warned US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who recently admitted to having participated in the call with Zelensky, that “any effort” to keep State Department officials from testifying before the House Intelligence Committee would be “evidence of obstruction.”

During a July 25 call, Trump asked Zelenskiy to speak with the Republican president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani about whether Ukrainian officials improperly dropped an investigation of a company that hired Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

Schiff, who represents a district in Los Angeles, California, was also  defender of the investigation of alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

A two-year investigation by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller that ended in March concluded that Moscow sought to influence the election in Trump’s favor and that his campaign worked to benefit from those efforts, but did not find evidence to establish a conspiracy.

US Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, said Schiff was a good choice to lead the impeachment probe because he could withstand the president’s attacks and is “not going to be deterred from doing his job.”

Source: Presstv

US presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders was treated for a blocked artery after experiencing chest discomfort and has canceled campaign events until further notice, an adviser said on Wednesday.

Sanders, 78, was in Las Vegas to campaign when he was taken to a hospital on Tuesday night for evaluation.

“He was found to have a blockage in one artery, and two stents were successfully inserted,” Sanders senior adviser Jeff Weaver said in a statement.

“Sen. Sanders is conversing and in good spirits. He will be resting up over the next few days. We are canceling his events and appearances until further notice, and we will continue to provide appropriate updates,” Weaver said.

Sanders, the oldest of 19 contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, had visited a community healing garden in Las Vegas on Tuesday night and had been scheduled to hold a town hall and appear at a gun safety forum on Wednesday.

Aides did not offer any guidance on how long Sanders might be off the campaign trail. The first nominating contest is not until Feb. 3 in Iowa, but Sanders is one of 12 candidates scheduled to participate in the fourth Democratic debate in Ohio on Oct. 15.

Sanders thanked supporters for offering their well wishes and said on Twitter that he was “feeling good.” He then shifted to a plug for his signature Medicare for All healthcare insurance plan.

“I’m fortunate to have good health care and great doctors and nurses helping me to recover,” Sanders said. “None of us know when a medical emergency might affect us. And no one should fear going bankrupt if it occurs. Medicare for All!”

A democratic socialist, Sanders galvanized progressives during a 2016 run for president when he lost the nomination to Hillary Clinton, pushing the party to the left and popularizing ideas such as Medicare for All, a proposal for a government-run healthcare plan based on the system for Americans over the age of 65.

The U.S. senator from Vermont has been among the top contenders in the crowded field seeking the 2020 nomination to challenge Republican President Donald Trump.

His campaign canceled at least $136,000 in cable and $600,000 in broadcast television spending following the news, according to Medium Buying, a company that tracks political ad spending.

The incident could renew questions about Sanders’ age in a Democratic race featuring a generational divide between older candidates such as Sanders and front-runner Joe Biden, 76, and younger contenders.

In a letter made public during the 2016 campaign, Sanders’ doctor said he was in “overall good health” and had no history of cardiovascular disease.

The insertion of stents to open blocked heart arteries is a relatively common procedure, with as many as 1 million Americans a year undergoing it. After a balloon-tipped catheter is used to clear the blockage, stents – tiny, wire-mesh tubes – are used to prop open the artery.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both underwent the stent procedure after they left the White House.

In general, recovery takes a few days, but how quickly Sanders will bounce back depends on his symptoms before he got the stents, said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.

“People recover quickly, and assuming no complications, there is no reason why he could not get back on the campaign trail in a timely fashion,” Nissen said.

Sanders had been running in second place in the Democratic race behind Biden, the former vice president, until the last month, when a surge by fellow progressive and U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts moved her ahead of Sanders in many opinion polls.

The campaign halt comes the day after Sanders reported a big $25.3 million fundraising haul for the third quarter, putting him in the early lead in the closely watched campaign money race.

Sanders’ Democratic rivals in the presidential race rushed to send him wishes for a speedy recovery.

“I hope to see my friend back on the campaign trail very soon,” Warren wrote on Twitter.

A former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders won a U.S. House of Representatives seat in 1990, making him the first independent elected to the House in 40 years.

In 2006, he won a U.S. Senate seat and in 2018 was voted in for a third six-year term. He remains an independent but caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.

(Source: Reuters)

US President Donald Trump has ripped Democratic lawmakers for engaging in an impeachment inquiry, which he likened to “bulls—.”

The president unleashed an avalanche of tweets Wednesday against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as well as House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Trump made it look like the Ukraine scandal is just about toppling him at the 2020 presidential election, misstating the 232 electoral votes his opponent, Hillary Clinton, got in 2016.

“The Do Nothing Democrats should be focused on building up our Country, not wasting everyone’s time and energy on BULLS—, which is what they have been doing ever since I got overwhelmingly elected in 2016, 223-306,” Trump tweeted. “Get a better candidate this time, you’ll need it!”

Trump has apparently pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden, his potential opponent for the 2020 presidential election, and his son, Hunter, before Kiev can receive the US military aid.

Pelosi said in a presser earlier in the day that House Democrats want to work with Trump on reducing drug prices despite the impeachment inquiry underway.

“The American people want us to do that. If the president is saying ‘if you question my actions I can’t agree on any subject,’ then the ball is in his court,” she said.

Trump, however, shattered prospects that the White House might opt to cooperate with the House over any issues.

“Nancy Pelosi just said that she is interested in lowering prescription drug prices & working on the desperately needed USMCA. She is incapable of working on either,” Trump tweeted. “It is just camouflage for trying to win an election through impeachment. The Do Nothing Democrats are stuck in mud!”

Schiff, for his part, called out Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was on a July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky, yet rejected the Democrats’ subpoena over the case.

“We are deeply concerned about Secretary Pompeo’s effort now to potentially interfere with witnesses whose testimony is needed before our committee,” he said, adding that any attempts to interfere with witness testimony “will be considered as evidence of obstruction.”

Trump also attacked Schiff and defended the former spymaster at the helm of his state department.

“Adam Schiff should only be so lucky to have the brains, honor and strength of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,” Trump tweeted Wednesday. “For a lowlife like Schiff, who completely fabricated my words and read them to Congress as though they were said by me, to demean a First in Class at West Point, is SAD!”

The House speaker has vowed to look into Trump’s case impartially.

“We will treat the president with fairness as we go forward,” Pelosi said. “We will have investigations and questioning that are worthy of the Constitution of the United States. It is unworthy of the Constitution what the president did in that call.”

Source: Presstv

In New York, President Hassan Rouhani of Iran refused to engage in a phone conversation with his American counterpart, Donald Trump, which had been secretly arranged by French President Emmanuel Macron, leaving Trump waiting on the line, US media reports say.

The New Yorker magazine reported on Monday that Macron had tried to engineer a three-way conversation by having technicians set up a secure line in a meeting room on Rouhani’s floor at the Millennium Hilton Hotel across the road from the UN General Assembly (UNGA), on September 24 evening.

The French leader, it added, hoped that the telephone conversation would lay the groundwork for the first meeting between an American president and an Iranian president since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Sources familiar with last Tuesday’s events said, “The call to Trump’s line came through at 9:30. Macron took the call. But Rouhani never emerged from his room.”

“As we have been doing for several months, we worked in New York to get Iran to make new commitments and for the US, in exchange, to ease sanctions,” a French diplomat told The New Yorker. “We made technical arrangements in the event that a telephone call could take place. That call did not take place.” 

Later on Monday, The New York Times confirmed the report, saying that Rouhani had left Trump hanging and Macron waiting outside his hotel suite.

“The telephone line had been secretly set up. President Trump waited on the other end. All President Hassan Rouhani of Iran had to do was come out of his hotel suite and walk into a secure room where Mr. Trump’s voice would be piped in via speaker,” it said.

According to three people with knowledge of the developments, Macron, accompanied by a small team of advisers, “awaited an answer” outside Rouhani’s suite.

“Messages were passed between them via Mr. Rouhani’s aides,” they said. “In the end, Mr. Rouhani refused even to come out of his room. Mr. Macron left empty-handed and Mr. Trump was left hanging.”

Macron has been seeking to play a mediatory role aimed at easing Washington-Tehran tensions, which have been on the rise since the US withdrawal from a 2015 multilateral nuclear deal in May 2018.

The French leader has also been leading European efforts to save the accord, whose fate remains in doubt since Washington’s exit.

Iran has repeatedly rejected Trump’s offer of talks, saying it would not engage in such negotiations unless the US returns to the deal and lifts its unilateral sanctions.

Tehran says negotiations with Washington would be possible within the framework of the P5+1, comprising the US, France, Britain, Russia, China plus Germany, which successfully negotiated the deal with Iran, if Washington meets those conditions.

In a speech at the General Assembly on Wednesday, Rouhani reaffirmed Iran’s position and said he was not interested in a “memento photo” with Trump on the sidelines of the UN meetings, while the US was piling economic pressure on Iran.

“Memento photos are the final stage of negotiations, not the first one,” Rouhani told the world body.

In 2013, Rouhani and then US president Barack Obama held a telephone conversation as the Iranian president was wrapping up his visit to New York for the 68th annual session of the UNGA, as diplomatic efforts were underway between the two sides within the P5+1 format in the run-up to the nuclear deal.

The New York Times cited Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a political-risk consulting firm in Washington, as saying that Trump’s desire for negotiations with Iran was meant to “flip the news cycle” from the Ukraine scandal.

“Trump really wants a foreign policy win and can’t find one,” he said. “He thinks talks with Iran now may be his best shot.”

Trump “was especially desperate at the UNGA — he wanted to flip the news cycle from Ukraine and Biden to a dramatic meeting with Rouhani,” he added.

The US president is facing an impeachment inquiry related to allegations that he pressured Ukraine to smear his top Democratic political rival Joe Biden.

Source: Presstv

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that a successful impeachment of President Donald Trump would be worth losing the Democrats’ House majority in 2020.

Pelosi’s latest remarks come days after she announced the launch of a formal impeachment inquiry into the president. Nearly all House Democrats have publicly backed the inquiry, though about a dozen have yet to endorse it.

Speaking in an interview at Tribune Fest, hosted by the Texas Tribune, the California Democrat suggested that complying with Congress’ mandate to hold the president answerable is more important than politics.

When asked by Tribune CEO Evan Smith whether “any of the stuff we’re talking about” would impact her “ability to hold control of the House in 2020,” she said, “It doesn’t matter.”

“Our first responsibility is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

“People say you have to take a political risk doing that. That doesn’t matter. That doesn’t matter. Because we cannot have a president of the United States undermining his oath of office, his loyalty to his oath of office, undermining our national security, and undermining the integrity of our elections.”

She also said more Americans now favor the impeachment inquiry against Trump.

“In the public, the tide has completely changed; it could change now – who knows – but right now after seeing the complaint and the IG (Inspector General) report and the cavalier attitude the administration had towards it, the American people are coming to a different decision,” Pelosi said at the journalism event.

In a recent Hill-HarrisX poll, 47 percent of respondents said they supported the move, while 42 percent said they opposed it.

Also, a NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist survey found that 49 percent of American adults favored impeachment, whereas 46 percent disliked the idea.

Support for the move surged following revelations this week that Trump had pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and had temporarily held up aid for the country over the summer.

Trump has denied wrongdoing, claiming that he held up the aid because he wanted other countries to contribute more to Ukraine’s defense, while Democrats argue the move amounted to the president seeking help from a foreign power against a political rival.

The White House released a memo of the July call between the presidents in which Trump encouraged Zelensky to look into Biden, the Democratic presidential front-runner.

While many Republicans have yet to weigh in regarding the impeachment inquiry, one GOP lawmaker has expressed support for investigating the allegations over Ukraine.

Culled from Presstv

European leaders have threatened to start withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal in November if Tehran does not return to full compliance.

President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in May 2018, and has since reinstated old sanctions and imposed new ones on Tehran in the hope of crippling its economy and forcing it into falling in line. 

Since then, Europe says it has strived to preserve the deal, setting up a financial mechanism called INSTEX to help Iran circumvent US sanctions. But in reality not much has been achieved. Trade with Iran has not surged via INSTEX, and Europe has not stood up to the US over its illegal sanctions and unceremonious withdrawal from the historic deal. And yet Iran is the signatory being asked to cooperate.

Three separate steps have been taken so far by Iran and the fourth is scheduled for November. Tehran wants the US sanctions to be lifted, but as pressure on the Iranian people increases with inflation skyrocketing and vital goods and medicines becoming increasingly scarce, the government is losing patience.

This past week European leaders tried to orchestrate a meeting between Trump and Rouhani at the UN General Assembly. Macron told Rouhani it was an opportunity he shouldn’t miss, but Iran’s president was candid.

So no talks on any level until all US sanctions are lifted. During and after the UN general assembly Europe’s tone became increasingly aggressive towards Tehran. The JCPOA’s European trio blamed Iran for the attacks on Saudi oil refineries and threatened to withdraw from the nuclear deal in November if Iran did not return to full compliance. 

Source: Presstv

The whistleblower complaint at the heart of the burgeoning controversy over President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukrainian president claims not only that Trump misused his office for personal gain and endangered national security, but that unidentified White House officials tried to keep it a secret even within the government.

In seven stark, carefully worded pages, the unidentified whistleblower alleged the commander in chief pushed his foreign counterpart to investigate Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, and that senior White House officials then tried to “lock down” records related to the matter.

The pressure, the whistleblower alleged, came in a phone call July 25 between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, an exchange that turned so politically problematic that White House lawyers directed other officials to remove the electronic transcript of the conversation from the computer system where it was stored.

The transcript, the whistleblower alleged, was then loaded onto a separate system meant for highly classified information. And according to White House officials who informed the whistleblower, that was “not the first time” a transcript was put there due to concerns about politics rather than national security, the complaint alleged.

Trump, the whistleblower wrote, was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”

The whistleblower’s assertions — made public Thursday after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) released the person’s complaint — fueled an already intense political battle that this week led congressional Democrats to formally launch an inquiry into whether Trump should be impeached.

At a hearing to question Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, Democrats pressed him on why he had not given them the complaint sooner, as they say the law required. Republicans attacked the reliability of the whistleblower’s information as unproven hearsay.

Maguire told lawmakers he believed the whistleblower had acted “in good faith,” but declined to offer any conclusion about the allegations.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) read portions of the complaint to reporters Thursday, declaring: “This is a coverup.”

Trump lashed out publicly and privately against the accusations. At a closed-door event in New York to thank U.S. personnel who had worked on Trump’s visit to the United Nations General Assembly, the president suggested darkly that the people who spoke about his conversation with Zelensky should be viewed as traitors.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” he said in a recording of the remarks obtained by the Los Angeles Times. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

(Source: The Washington Post)

Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has announced the launch of a formal inquiry into whether President Donald Trump should be impeached over a controversial Ukraine call.

Pelosi made the announcement on Tuesday after meetings with Democratic congressional leaders and working out plans to move toward impeachment proceedings against Trump over his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

During the phone call, Trump allegedly sought Ukraine’s help to smear the former vice president and current front-runner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden.

“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed the dishonorable fact of the president’s betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” Pelosi said in a televised address.

“Therefore, today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry,” Pelosi added. “The president must be held accountable; no one is above the law.”

Trump reportedly urged Zelensky about eight times during the phone call to work with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to investigate government corruption involving Biden and his son, Hunter.

Source: Presstv