Trump news: President rebuked by judge for 'totally inappropriate' tweets as Roger Stone met with ‘Lock Him Up’ chants following sentencing
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Donald Trump was called out for his “totally inappropriate” tweets by the judge presiding over Roger Stone’s trial as she handed down a 40-month sentence for the president’s longtime friend, saying his crimes should cause universal “dismay and disgust”.
The comments came just before he took to the stage in Colorado Springs for a "Keep America Great Again" rally, as a part of a string of events he is doing this week across the country.
Colorado stands out as an important battleground state this year, with the Republican Senate majority potentially on the line as GOP senator Cory Gardner faces stiff competition in his reelection campaign.
The president has meanwhile been live-tweeting attacks towards his Democratic 2020 rivals after the latest debates, as well as deriding them on the campaign trail in at an Arizona rally where he also called the FBI “dishonest scum” and complained that Conan, the US military’s war hero dog, “got more publicity” than him over the killing of Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Mr Trump’s rally coincided with the latest primary debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Michael Bloomberg was attacked from all sides, with Elizabeth Warren characterising him as a “a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians”.
Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves
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Trump whips up base at Arizona rally, laying into rivals and expressing hero dog envy
Donald Trump derided his Democratic 2020 rivals at his latest wild campaign rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, pushing an election rigging conspiracy theory, calling the FBI “dishonest scum” and complaining that Conan, the US military’s war hero dog, “got more publicity” than him.
The president also said the House Democrats had "really taken away three years" from his administration by pursuing his misdeeds in office with investigations and scaremongered on immigration.
Minutes before the president took to the stage, Democrats watched billionaire and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg make his primary ahead of Nevada's party caucuses on Saturday.
Trump wasted no time in taking aim at the new favourite target, saying: "I hear he's getting pounded tonight - you know he's in a debate. "I hear that pounding. He spent $500m dollars so far and I think he has 15 points. Crazy Bernie was at 30."
He also derided senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas" for her past claims of Native American heritage and claimed her presidential campaign had stalled. "Fortunately she self-destructed anyway," he said.
"We don't care who the hell it is," he added. "We're going to win."
Arizona is a 2020 battleground state, but Democrats think with a little luck the state could be in play. The state is home to Republican senator Martha McSally, who stood by the president during the Senate's impeachment trial. In her rally remarks McSally mentioned her Democratic opponent Mark Kelly, who has said he would back Bernie Sanders if he is the party's nominee.
"Mark Kelly is flying on Bernie Sanders' wing and I'm flying on your wing, President Trump," she said.
Trump was on stage for more than an hour and 20 minutes.
Before he arrived at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum, a crowd of protesters swelled into the hundreds. A large contingent of migrant rights advocates waved signs declaring "Dump Trump" and "Power to the people!"
After the president left, the protesters - in a "free speech zone" near the coliseum - were confronted by Trump supporters. Lots of yelling ensued as tensions flared, but there were no signs of violence.
On Thursday, Trump will host a rally in Colorado Springs for another vulnerable Republican, senator Cory Gardner. On Friday, the president will appear at a rally in Las Vegas.
He did not wait until evening to start his counter-programming, weighing in on his Democratic rivals on Twitter. Earlier in the day, he took a swipe at Bloomberg, who was criticised in 2016 for saying at Oxford University: "I could teach anybody - even people in this room, no offence intended - to be a farmer." The former New York mayor continued: "It's a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn."
"Mini Mike hates the farmer," Trump said. "Never mind, I don't think he's going to be the candidate anyway, to be honest with you."
Here's John T Bennett's report.
Elizabeth Warren roasts Michael Bloomberg at debut debate
Over at the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, debutant Michael Bloomberg was indeed attacked from all sides, with Elizabeth Warren characterising him as a “a billionaire who calls people fat broads and horse-faced lesbians”.
Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who was once a Republican, was forced to defend his record and past comments related to race, gender and his personal wealth in an occasionally rocky debate stage debut. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, tried to beat back pointed questions about his embrace of democratic socialism and his health following a heart attack last year.
The ninth debate of this cycle featured the most aggressive sustained period of infighting in the Democrats' yearlong search for a presidential nominee. The tension reflected growing anxiety among candidates and party leaders that the nomination fight could yield a candidate who will struggle to build a winning coalition in November to beat Trump.
The campaign is about to quickly intensify. Nevada votes on Saturday and South Carolina follows on 29 February. More than a dozen states host Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks with about one-third of the delegates needed to win the nomination at stake.
Massachusetts senator Warren was in a fight for survival and stood out with repeated attacks on Bloomberg. She sought to undermine him with core Democratic voters who are uncomfortable with his vast wealth, his offensive remarks about policing of minorities and demeaning comments about women, including those who worked at his company.
Sanders also lashed out at Bloomberg's policing policies as New York City mayor that he said targeted "African-American and Latinos in an outrageous way."
And former vice president Joe Biden charged that Bloomberg's "stop-and-frisk" policy ended up "throwing five million black men up against the wall."
After the debate, Warren told reporters: "I have no doubt that Michael Bloomberg is reaching in his pocket right now, and spending another hundred million dollars to try to erase every American's memory about what happened on the debate stage."
Warren's performance was so devastating that one watching wit subsequently amended his Wikipedia page to include her as his "cause of death".
On a night that threatened to tarnish the shine of his carefully constructed TV-ad image, Bloomberg faltered when attacked on issues related to race and gender. But he was firm and unapologetic about his wealth and how he has used it to effect change important to Democrats. He took particular aim at Sanders and his self-description as a democratic socialist.
"I don't think there's any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump," Bloomberg declared before noting Sanders' rising wealth. "The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses!" Sanders defended owning multiple houses, noting he has one in Washington, where he works, and two in Vermont, the state he represents in the Senate.
While Bloomberg was the shiny new object Wednesday, the debate also marked a major test for Sanders, who is emerging as the front-runner in the Democrats' nomination fight, whether his party's establishment likes it or not. A growing group of donors, elected officials and political operatives fear that Sanders' uncompromising progressive politics could be a disaster in the general election against Trump, yet they've struggled to coalesce behind a single moderate alternative.
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, went after both Bloomberg and Sanders, warning that one threatened to "burn down" the Democratic Party and the other was trying to buy it.
He called them "the two most polarisng figures on this stage," with little chance of defeating Trump or helping congressional Democrats in contests with Republicans.
Here's Andrew Buncombe's report on the night's events.
Amy Klobuchar hits back at Pete Buttigieg in bad-tempered Democratic debate
Bloomberg and Sanders were the prime targets, but the stakes were no less dire for the other four candidates on stage.
Longtime establishment favourite Biden, a two-term vice president, desperately needed to breathe new life into his flailing campaign, which entered the night at the bottom of a moderate muddle behind Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar. And after a bad finish last week in New Hampshire, Warren was fighting to resurrect her stalled White House bid.
A Warren campaign aide said on Twitter that her fiery first hour of debate was her best hour of fundraising "to date."
The other leading progressive in the race, Sanders came under attack from Biden and Bloomberg for his embrace of democratic socialism. Sanders, as he has repeatedly over the last year, defended the cost of his signature "Medicare for All" healthcare plan, which would eliminate the private insurance industry in favor of a government-backed healthcare system that would cover all Americans.
"When you asked Bernie how much it cost last time he said...'We'll find out,"' Biden quipped. "It costs over $35 trillion, let's get real."
And ongoing animosity flared between Buttigieg and Klobuchar when the former Indiana mayor slammed the three-term Minnesota senator for failing to answer questions in a recent interview about Mexican policy and forgetting the name of the Mexican president.
Buttigieg noted that she's on a committee that oversees trade issues in Mexico and she "was not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country."
She shot back: "Are you trying to say I'm dumb? Are you mocking me here?"
Later in the night she lashed out at Buttigieg again: "I wish everyone else was as perfect as you, Pete."
The debate closed with a question about the possibility that Democrats remain divided deep into the primary season with a final resolution coming during a contested national convention in July.
Asked if the candidate with the most delegates should be the nominee - even if he or she is short of a delegate majority, almost every candidate suggested that the convention process should "work its way out," as Biden put it.
Sanders, who helped force changes to the nomination process this year and hopes to take a significant delegate lead in the coming weeks, was the only exception.
"The person who has the most votes should become the nominee," he said.
Here's Phil Thomas on the Buttigieg-Klobuchar beef.
Who won and who lost the Democratic debate?
Here's Clark Mindock's assessment of the candidates' performances on stage in Nevada.
President up late fretting about Roger Stone sentencing
Watching on last night, Trump joined in the mockery of Bloomberg on Twitter, calling his performance "perhaps the worst in the history of debates" with his customary hyperbole, snearing at him as "stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent".
Trump's tweets otherwise promoted the latest stop on his post-acquittal grievance tour, insisted that the ex-Illinois governor he just pardoned did nothing wrong and claiming the "internal REAL Polls" show him winning in 2020 - again without offering evidence - and boosted his trip to India next week.
Trump stayed up late into the night thereafter tweeting about the imminent sentencing of his former adviser, Roger Stone, a notorious Republican political operative and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster”, posting a Tucker Carlson heavily hinting that Stone too could be about to receive a pardon.
Here's Tom Embury-Dennis on Trump's evening, from blundering through simple words in Phoenix to stirring outrage about Stone having to face the music.
Trump picks 'totally unqualifed partisan' for key intelligence post
Also on Twitter last night, the president announced that his ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is his pick to the new acting director of national intelligence, replacing former US Navy admiral Joseph Maquire - in the hot seat since the resignation of Dan "Mr Rogers" Coats.
The outspoken Grenell - who recently slammed the UK for partnering on 5G with Chinese telecoms giant Huawei - will be the president's first openly gay cabinet appointee but the move was quickly criticised by academic Brian Klaas, who called him a "totally unqualified partisan".
Here's more from Phil Thomas.
White House rejects lawyer's claim Trump offered Julian Assange a pardon
The administration has been forced to deny a claim made by Edward Fitzgerald, an attorney for the WikiLeaks founder, that his client as was offered clemency by ex-Republican representative Dana Rohrabacher when he visted the Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2017.
"The president barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he's an ex-congressman. He's never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject," White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.
"It is a complete fabrication and a total lie."
John T Bennett has more on this below.
Trump to be protected by monkey police on India visit
Yep, you read that right.
Here's Peter Stubley to explain.
Outrage after Melania Trump given 'Woman of Distinction' award
Students and alumni of Palm Beach Atlantic University are pushing back against a decision by their peers to award the first lady with its annual honour in tribute to her "Be Best" campaign to tackle opioid abuse and cyber-abuse (the latter cause undermined by her husband on a daily basis).
Clark Mindock has more on this.
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