Attorney general refused a request by Trump to hold a news conference and declare that no laws were broken in the call, New York Times reported The president is laying down fire on Twitter in response to reports that he wanted attorney general William Barr to hold a news conference to say Trump’s 25 July call with the Ukrainian president was not criminal by any stretch. Trump has sent out a pair of tweets claiming that “the degenerate Washington Post MADE UP the story.” He does not mention the Times’ corroborating report. Related: Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president: read the full memorandum Hello and welcome to our politics live blog coverage. Attorney general William Barr has done a lot for Donald Trump. He pre-baked the Mueller report. He is hard at work on a report that is expected to attack the work of US intelligence agencies on which that report was built. He did not recuse himself from a justice department review of a phone call Trump had with the Ukrainian president, despite being mentioned himself on the call. The review, perhaps not surprisingly, found that the call was, legally speaking, peachy. Trump tried to get one government to have a press conference saying he committed no crime for trying to get a different government to have a press release saying that his political opponent did commit a crime. https://t.co/lCFDw26yp9 Continue reading... |