Donald Trump has launched a fresh attack on “corrupt” Puerto Rico and the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, as Storm Dorian bears down on the island, also raging on Twitter against Fox News and joining in the mockery of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who was driven from social media after objecting to being called a “bedbug”.
The president is also facing questions after allegedly promising officials he would pardon them if they found themselves having to break laws in order to get his US-Mexico border wall completed in time for the 2020 election, according to a Washington Post report.
Deutsche Bank has meanwhile revealed it has Mr Trump's tax returns, with one source suggesting the lender also has possession of loan documents to Mr Trump co-signed by Russian billionaires known to be close to Vladimir Putin, according to NBC News' Lawrence O'Donnell.
The bank said in court papers it has the returns in question in response to a subpoena sent this year, in which Congress asked the bank for a host of documents related to the president and his family.
Mr Trump has long declined to release his tax returns and wants to block two House committees from getting the records, calling their document requests unlawful.
A federal appeals court ordered Deutsche Bank to say whether or not Mr Trump’s tax returns were in its possession after an attorney for the bank refused to answer that question during a hearing last week.
The bank, in its court filing Tuesday, blacked out the name of the person or people whose tax records it had, citing privacy rules. It said it also has tax records “related to parties not named in the subpoenas but who may constitute ‘immediate family’” of individuals named in the document request.
Messages were left with a Deutsche Bank attorney seeking comment on the filing.
Deutsche Bank has lent Mr Trump’s real estate company millions of dollars over the years. Lawmakers have said they are seeking the banking records as they investigate possible “foreign influence in the US political process.”
Mr Trump and three of his children sued to stop the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees from getting the records on the grounds that the requests were overly broad and unconstitutional.
The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals indicated last week it would take a hard look at the legality of the subpoenas.
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Donald Trump has told officials in his administration he will pardon them if they have to break laws to get his US-Mexico border wall completed in time for the 2020 election, according to The Washington Post.
“Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,” the president allegedly told aides after they expressed concern about carrying out his orders to fast-track the project to build hundreds of miles of new partition by seizing private land through eminent domain, ignoring environmental regulations and pushing through billion-dollar contracts with construction firms.
Trump has repeatedly promised to complete 500 miles of fencing by the time voters go to the polls in November 2020, stirring chants of "Finish the Wall!" at his political rallies as he pushes for tighter border controls.
But the US Army Corps of Engineers has completed just about 60 miles of "replacement" barrier during the first 30 months of Trump's presidency, all of it in areas that previously had border infrastructure.
One of the administration officials who spoke to The Post, who did so on condition of anonymity, insisted the president had been joking when he made the pardon remark but that hardly inspires confidence somehow.
Deutsche Bank has meanwhile revealed it has tax returns relevant to a subpoena issued by House Democrats investigating the president, with one source suggesting the lender also has possession of loan documents to Trump co-signed by Russian billionaires known to be close to Vladimir Putin.
The House Financial Services and House Intelligence committees subpoenaed Deutsche in April to provide financial records belonging to the president and his children Donald Trump Jr, Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump.
The bank's filing, in the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, revealed it has the tax returns it would need to hand over if it complied with the subpoenas, which the Trumps are seeking to block, suing the committee on the grounds that the requests were overly broad and unconstitutional.
It is not clear whose returns Deutsche has as names were redacted but the bank has lent Trump's real estate company millions of dollars over the years.
House committee members say they are seeking the banking records as they investigate possible "foreign influence in the US political process."
The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals indicated last week it would take a hard look at the legality of the subpoenas and is considering an appeal from a lower court's decision this year to allow the subpoenas to proceed.
US district judge Edgardo Ramos said in that case that Trump and his companies are "highly unlikely" to succeed in challenging them, meaning things could be about to get dicy for the ever-embattled president.
Here's our report.
As Storm Dorian approaches Puerto Rico, President Trump has declared an emergency while repeating his false claim the island already cost the US $92bn (£75bn) in aid when it was blasted by Hurricane Maria in 2017, the actual amount granted by Congress being closer to $42bn (£34bn), with only some $14bn (£11.5bn) of that spent so far.
"Just so you understand, we gave Puerto Rico $91 billion for the hurricane," Trump last told reporters at the White House in May (what's $1bn here or there?), apparently seeking to fudge the issue by confusing the actual amount with a government estimate of how much Puerto Rico might need in recovery money over 20 years, according to ABC.
San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz - who memorably feuded with Trump last time around - told CNN: "The president continues to express lies because the truth really does not suit him.
"As you said, it's not $92bn, it is close to $42bn. It's close to between $12.6bn and $14bn dollars that have come to Puerto Rico and still, things have not worked appropriately."
She added: "It seems like some people have learned the lessons of the past or are willing to say that they didn't do right by us the first time and they are trying to do their best. That is not the case with the president of the United States.
"So get out of the way, President Trump, and let the people that can do the job get the job done."
Here's more on Trump's apparent annoyance that Puerto Rico keeps suffering natural disasters from Conrad Duncan.
Also on Twitter, the president has mocked the "Three Stooges" proposing to challenge him to a Republican primary: former congressmen Mark Sanford and Joe Walsh and ex-Massachusetts governor Bill Weld.
He also joined in the teasing of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote an angry email to George Washington University professor David Karpf yesterday after he called him a "bedbug" (alluding to yesterday's stories that the Times newsroom and Trump's own Miami hotel had suffered infestations of the same), an exchange that subsequently went viral and saw Stephens quit Twitter.
The president has otherwise been preoccupied with old beefs, from Axios claiming he wanted to nuke tropical storms at sea to the "Corrupt and Fake News Media" misrepresenting him at the G7 and Elizabeth Warren having bigger crowd size energy than him.
He was also busy promoting Fox News host Jeanine Pirro's new book (in another casual abuse of the powers of his office) and obsessing over that approval rating poll from Zogby, once dismissed as the "worst pollster in the world".
Trump also continued his tiresome attack on the Federal Reserve yesterday - following his total meltdown on Friday afternoon over interest rates - saying the US central bank "loves watching our manufacturers struggle with their exports", which is total nonsense.
One man who has had enough of all of this is William Dudley, former president of the Fed's New York regional bank, who has written an editorial for Bloomberg Opinion arguing the institution should stop enabling Trump.
"This manufactured disaster-in-the-making presents the Federal Reserve with a dilemma: Should it mitigate the damage by providing offsetting stimulus, or refuse to play along?" Dudley wrote, alluding to the prospect of a recession.
"Trump's re-election," he continues, "arguably presents a threat to the US and global economy, to the Fed's independence and its ability to achieve its employment and inflation objectives. If the goal of monetary policy is to achieve the best long-term economic outcome, then Fed officials should consider how their decisions will affect the political outcome in 2020."
Dudley said any rate cuts intended to offset the damage done by Trump's trade war with China should not be considered: "What if the Fed's accommodation encourages the president to escalate the trade war further, increasing the risk of a recession?
"The central bank's efforts to cushion the blow might not be merely ineffectual. They might actually make things worse."
The piece forced the Fed to issue a statement insisting its duty is to remain apolitical. Chairman Jerome Powell must have the patience of a saint.
More on the border, where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced plans to divert $271m (£222m) from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund, Customs and Border Protection, the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration to boost its anti-immigration efforts.
Of that, $116m (£95m) will go towards adult beds for detention centes and $155m (£127m) to boost the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) programme AKA Remain in Mexico.
The news has not gone down well with House Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee chairwoman Lucille Roybal-Allard, who has written to acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan:
Secretary of defence Mark Esper has meanwhile approved an additional 20 miles of 30-foot high barriers for the southern border, a section of wall that is being paid for by a previously repurposed $2.5bn (£2bn) in Pentagon funds.
That money has been had been shifted from various programmes, including personnel and recruiting, Minuteman III and air launch cruise missiles, E-3 aircraft upgrades and the Afghan security forces training fund, according to CNN.
Remember how Trump said he was "an environmentalist" at the G7?
Yeah, you remember. It was just after he skipped out on that vital meeting of world leaders on how to go about stopping climate change.
The man who said in the same press conference he doesn't believe in wasting American wealth "on dreams, on windmills" and previously claimed turbines cause cancer is now moving to lift logging restrictions on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the country’s largest national woodland, according to The Washington Post.
Under orders from his boss, agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue will seek to roll back the Clinton administration's Roadless Rule, which prohibts “road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting on 58.5m acres of inventoried roadless areas on National Forest System lands.”
The plan to open up the 16.7m acres of woodland to the axes was apparently cooked up between Trump and the state's Republican governor Mike Dunleavy when they met briefly at at the Elmendorf Air Force Base in late June.
If all of that weren't grotty and unpleasant enough for one morning, here's Kellyanne Conway singing Taylor Swift.
In putting on this distressing exhibition, the president's adviser conveninently overlooked the pop star having called out the administration over its silence on the Equality Act petition for LGBT+ rights at the MTV Video Music Awards a matter of hours earlier.
Lowenna Waters has more, for all you masochists out there.
Trump’s approval rating has sunk in every 2020 battleground state, showing major vulnerabilities for the incumbent president a little over a year from election day.
That’s according to Morning Consult’s tracking poll, which found Trump’s popularity slipping in 17 of the states that are expected to be competitive next year.
His approval rating remains above water in just two of those states - with a two per cent net positive rating in Georgia and six per cent in Texas.
Here's Clark Mindock's report.
Despite Trump's lobbying efforts on behalf of Vladimir Putin at the G7, where he pressed for Russia to be allowed back into the collective, relations between the Washington and Moscow remain strained.
Two US senators - Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Democrat Chris Murphy of Connecticut - have been denied visas to visit the country as part of a congressional trip, according to CNN. The move comes shortly after Israel stopped Muslim Democratic congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib from entering, apparently after Trump leant on prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to embarrass them.
"Unfortunately, the Russian government is further isolating their country by blocking our visit and several others in recent months." Murphy said in a statement.
"With the collapse of recent arms control agreements and significant domestic opposition to Vladimir Putin's authoritarian rule, this is potentially a perilous moment for our two nations' fragile relationship, and it's a shame that Russia isn't interested in dialogue."
Johnson was also annoyed.
"Working with [outgoing] Ambassador [Jon] Huntsman, I had hoped direct dialogue with Russian parliamentarians could help set the stage for better future relations between our two nations. Unfortunately, Russian officials continue to play diplomatic games with this sincere effort and have denied me entrance to Russia," he said.
Johnson called it a "petty affront" but vowed to "continue to advocate a strong and resolute response to Russian aggression - and frank dialogue when possible."
A third senator, Republican Mike Lee of Utah, was not denied a visa and will press ahead with the trip. Murphy will instead fly to Germany where he will meet up with Johnson for trips to Kosovo, Serbia and Ukraine.
The president's suggestion that next year's G7 meeting take place at his Trump National Doral Miami resort in Florida (bedbugs permitting) has reawakened interest in the question of his profiteering from his stint in the Oval Office.
That tweet last night about Fox anchor Jeanine Pirro's new book was unquestionably another example of the president abusing his position to do a favour for a Republican pal.
But that's nothing compared to the news attorney general William Barr is planning a Christmas party at the Trump International Hotel in downtown DC.
The festive bash is not an official Justice Department celebration and the $30,000 (£24,570) cost will come from Barr's own pocket, his office told The Washington Post, stressing that the AG had checked ethics guidelines before relocating there from the Willard Hotel after the resort double-booked in error.
"On the letter of the law, this isn't a violation, however it doesn't look good. That's not nothing when we're talking about the chief law enforcement officer of the country and his private activity," Liz Hempowicz, the director of public policy watchdog the Project on Government Oversight, told CNN.
"It contributes to this idea that you have to be putting money into an entity that will benefit the president - if not today, then down the road - personally to stay in his good graces."
It's worth noting that the president has an extremely light schedule for the second day in a row.
Lunch with veep Mike Pence was all he had on the books yesterday and today he's dining with secretary of the interior David Bernhardt and sitting through an intelligence briefing, which could well just mean a nap.
There will be tweets.
Here's the president with more Bret Stephens bashing over Bedbuggate.
A timely question from CNN's John Berman.
Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar has hit back at the Alabama Republican Party after it attempted to have her booted off Capitol Hill.
The Alabama GOP were supporting a resolution calling for the outspoken Minnesota representative to be ousted and urged the state's congressional delegation to expel her for what they deemed to be "antisemitic" language after she criticised the influence of Israeli lobbyists in DC, a stance that has seen her viciously attacked by Trump and his alt-right fanbase and banned from entering Israel by the country's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Responding to The Hill's story about the campaign, Omar detailed precisely how she was elected to Congress before criticising them for choosing alleged child molester Roy Moore as nominee for state senator in 2017, a battle he ultimately lost to Democrat Doug Jones.
Here's Greg Evans with the full story.
Democratic 2020 contender Joe Biden said on the campaign trail yesterday that racism in America is an institutional "white man's problem visited on people of colour," arguing that the way to attack the issue is to defeat Trump and hold him responsible for deepening the nation's racial divide.
Taking aim at incendiary racial appeals by Trump, Biden said in an interview with a small group of reporters on Tuesday that a president's words can "appeal to the worst damn instincts of human nature," just as they can move markets or take a nation into war.
Biden is leading his Democratic challengers for the presidential nomination in almost all polls, largely because of the support of black voters. He has made appealing to them central to his candidacy and vowed to make maximising black and Latino turnout an "overwhelming focus" of his effort. The interview, more than an hour long, focused largely on racial issues.
"White folks are the reason we have institutional racism," Biden said. "There has always been racism in America. White supremacists have always existed, they still exist." He added later that in his administration, it would "not be tolerated."
By highlighting the nation's racial tensions and placing blame on Trump, Biden is showing that he, too, is willing to make race a core campaign issue, but from the opposite perspective of the Republican president. Turnout and enthusiasm among black voters will be critical for the Democratic nominee, notably to try to reclaim states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. He also emphasised a crossover appeal to both black voters and non-college-educated white voters.
To accentuate his appeal to black voters, Biden said that he will advertise in black publications and engage with cultural institutions like the black church, black fraternities and sororities and historically black colleges.
"The bad news is I have a long record. The good news is I have a long record," Biden said when asked about his enduring support among black voters. "People know me - at least they think they know me. I think after all this time, I think they have a sense of what my character is, who I am."
"I've never, ever, ever in my entire life been in a circumstance where I've ever felt uncomfortable being in the black community," he added, suggesting that his familiarity was not matched by many of his competitors for the 2020 nomination.
While he did not specify to whom he was referring, Biden said he believes there are "assertions and assumptions" made about black voters that he believes are inaccurate, and he said that "a lot of people haven't spent much time in the community."
Without mentioning her by name, Biden also referenced California senator Kamala Harris's attack on him during the first presidential debate on the issue of busing as a solution to school desegregation.
"All I know is I don't think anybody in the community thinks I am - what's the phrase?" Biden asked, paraphrasing Harris' comment that "I know you're not a racist, Joe."
"I don't think anyone thinks that about me," Biden said.
Biden was also asked whether he would select a woman or person of colour as his running mate should he become the nominee. He said that while he would "preferably" do so, he is ultimately seeking a partner on the ticket who is "simpatico with what I stand for and what I want to get done."
"Whomever I pick would be preferably someone who was of color and who was of a different gender, but I'm not making that commitment until I know that the person I'm dealing with I can completely, thoroughly trust, is authentic, and is on the same page."
Looking ahead to the next Democratic debate in Houston in September, he said that he understands why he has a target on his back but cautioned that Democrats "shouldn't be forming a circular firing squad and shooting" because it only helps Trump.
Trump's re-election campaign dismissed Biden's accusation that Trump had inflamed racial tensions in the country.
"Having moved on from the Russia Hoax, Democrats are now employing the oldest play in the Democrat playbook: falsely accusing their opponent of racism, extending it even to the President's supporters. Calling half the country racist is not a winning strategy," said Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign's communications director.
Biden also said that the Democratic field would narrow and allow for more meaningful exchanges. In the current crowded field, he said it's difficult to have any meaningful debate at all, calling it a "non-debate debate."
Biden, who has been attacked most forcefully by Harris, said that he believed "those who made the most direct attacks on one another haven't really benefited much by it at the end of the day."
AP
Trump may insist he's on friendly terms with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un (and imagines Melania is too) and regularly expresses faith that Washington and Pyongyang will resume nuclear talks soon but the lad himself appears to be comprehensively reneging on his promises to the president.
Adam Withnall has the latest.
Trump's former secretary of defence Jim Mattis has been speaking up in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, offering a thinly veiled rebuke to the foreign policy shambles his old boss has orchestrated.
In the last hour, Trump has gotten mighty sarcastic about the backseat driving he's been subjected to by economists over his trade war...
...and attempted to reassure the public on Storm Dorian while simulatenously having another dig at Puerto Rico's "incompetent" San Juan mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz.
It would be easier to take him at his word on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) if he hadn't just carved a fat slice out of their budget to pay for his "zero tolerance" border policies.
This video of Trump apparently summoning the first lady by tapping his thigh is doing the rounds on Twitter.
The clip is taken from the president's visit to Dayton, Ohio, three weeks ago to pay his respects to the community after nine people were killed in a mass shooting.
Whether that's quite what happened is open to question but it's not a good look for the man who landed the world with the phrase: "Grab 'em by the p****."
Greg Evans digs down into it.
