Coronavirus US live: Trump claims to take hydroxychloroquine and threatens to withdraw US from WHO
Fifteen Republican state attorneys general have filed a legal brief telling a federal judge they support the Trump administration’s attempt to drop the case against the former national security adviser.
Michael Flynn. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
According to CNN, which said it had obtained a copy of the legal brief, “the Republican attorneys general wrote they believed that Judge Emmet Sullivan’s questioning of the justice department was the court ‘inserting itself’ into ‘prosecutorial discretion’ and politics.
“They urged Sullivan to dismiss the case, ending Flynn’s legal jeopardy. They also asked him to dismiss Flynn’s charge ‘without irrelevant or personal comment’.”
Flynn, a retired general, was fired by Trump for lying to the vice-president about conversations with the Russian ambassador. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Obama administration requests to “unmask” him, as an American speaking to surveilled foreign nationals during the investigation of Russian election interference, a routine intelligence practice, are at the heart of Donald Trump’s attempts to create a scandal, so-called “Obamagate”, to ensnare his predecessor and his challenger at the polls this year, former vice-president Joe Biden.
Judge Sullivan has put a hold on attorney general William Barr’s attempt to drop the case against Flynn, and appointed a retired judge, John Gleeson, to argue against the motion to dismiss.
The 15 Republican attorneys general are from the following states: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
“Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics,” they said. “They are autocracies.”
Barr has his own views on that. On Monday, while Senate judiciary chair Lindsey Graham said he wanted to subpoena records from senior Obama administration figures, the attorney general said he expected no criminal investigations would be opened into Barack Obama or Biden.
In Congress, the Senate banking, housing and urban affairs committee will today hear from treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, about federal stimulus efforts for the cratering US economy.
Short version: Powell wants more spending, Mnuchin doesn’t, and neither do Republicans who control the Senate. The House passed a $3tn bill on Friday but Speaker Nancy Pelosi knows it isn’t going anywhere.
The hearing’s at 10am – Mnuchin, with Vice-President Mike Pence, will also meet Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy on Capitol Hill.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, doesn’t have a briefing on his schedule today. But he will deliver “remarks on supporting our Nation’s Farmers, Ranchers, and Food Supply Chain” at 11am and hold a cabinet meeting at 3pm. Precedent suggests that will give the president ample time to comment to the press should he so desire.
Fox News hosts reacted in differing ways to Trump’s declaration that he is taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, to guard against the coronavirus despite the FDA saying that is a bad idea.
Fox News, you’ll remember, enthusiastically joined the president in touting the drug in the early stages of the pandemic, until trial results came back and did not provide the results for which its proponents had been hoping. Safe to say, Trump’s Monday bombshell set off a few explosions.
Anchor Neil Cavuto got out of the gate with a horrified reaction: “This is stunning … A number of studies, those certainly vulnerable in the population have one thing to lose, their lives.”
“I only make this not to make a political point here,” Cavuto added, “but a life-and-death point. Be very, very careful.”
A medical expert was present to say Cavuto’s assessment was correct and the Fox News website published a cautionary story about the drug.
But, unsurprisingly, the opinion hosts who take over in the evenings – Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity – didn’t agree.
Nor did the president, who, entirely presidentially, retweeted a Twitter user whose biography says his “opinions are mine and my stash of lesbian porn proves I’m not homophobic” and who called Cavuto “an asshole”.
The president also opined: “Fox News is no longer the same. We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!”
To House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told CNN of Trump’s claim to be taking hydroxychloroquine…
“I would rather he not be taking something that has not been approved by the scientists, especially in his age group, and in his, shall we say, weight group: ‘Morbidly obese,’ they say”.
Is the president obese, morbidly or otherwise? Not to President Taft Is Stuck In The Bath levels, obviously (key fact, key fact fans: I’m sort of related to Taft by marriage – sort of). But according to his 2019 physical, he is.
This was how Politico put it last year, after the president’s last full examination: “President Donald Trump gained 4lbs over the last year, according to a new assessment from his doctor, a weight increase that makes him technically obese. But Trump’s doctor, Sean Conley, nonetheless determined that the president ‘remains in very good health overall’ in a memorandum released by the White House.”
According to that assessment, Trump, 73, is 6ft 3in and 243lbs, which is technically obese and sometimes referred to as morbidly obese. Which doesn’t make me, 42, at 6ft 4in and… more than that… feel particularly pleased with myself.
About Dr Conley: he released a memo yesterday about Trump’s claim to be taking a drug which the FDA says you shouldn’t take as a guard against the coronavirus:
Compare that missive and a White House spokeswoman’s confirmation that Trump is taking the drug to what various prominent doctors were telling the US public last night:
“There is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine is effective for the treatment or the prevention of Covid-19. The results to date are not promising.” – Dr Patrice Harris, president of the American Medical Association
People should not infer from Trump’s example “that it’s an approved approach or proven,” because it’s not – Dr David Aronoff, infectious diseases chief at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville
Trump tweeted a letter to the WHO late on Monday night, saying it had 30 days to make “substantive” changes or his funding freeze would become permanent and he would “reconsider our membership”. Early on Tuesday, a WHO spokeswoman had no immediate comment, Reuters said. The Trump administration says the WHO is too close to China, which it blames for the pandemic, and has also started a fight at the world body over the status of Taiwan.
Yes, all that happened. And as it did, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the number of positive cases of Covid-19 in the US passed 1.5m and the number of deaths passed 90,000.
As Tom McCarthy reported, hydroxychloroquine “is not approved as a treatment for Covid-19 and Trump has not been diagnosed with the disease, to public knowledge.
Trump’s claim to be taking the drug was made as he attacked an administration whistleblower who went before Congress last week and described internal pressure to endorse the drug as an effective coronavirus treatment.
The whistleblower, Rick Bright, was the former director of a federal agency in charge of vaccines.
…Previously, Trump had endorsed the injection of disinfectants or light into the body to fight coronavirus – recommendations that were followed by a spike in calls to poison control centers.
…Trump touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment in March, a claim that was amplified for weeks on Fox News. But alarming reports in April about the health risks tied to the drug silenced that talk until the Bright episode.
Where does one go from there? To widespread shocked reaction, for one thing, and to our explainer of what you need to know about the drug for another, and to Fox News hosts, if not all of them, heralding the president’s supposed actions, for one more.
In his testimony before Congress, by the by, Bright warned of “the darkest winter in modern history” lying ahead if the US economy is reopened too soon, testing is not available as widely as possible and of course a vaccine is swiftly found. The virus, he and other public health experts fear, may come back.
But Trump, who dropped his hydroxychloroquine bombshell around a teleconference with governors attempting to manage the pandemic, presses on with his determined attempt to “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY” and thereby “TRANSITION TO GREATNESS”.
All this and more to come of course, including developments in Trump’s other current project, the “Obamagate” pseudoscandal which some cynical souls suggest might just be an attempt to distract from the administration’s handling of the pandemic and the cratering economy.
On Monday night, Senate judiciary chair Lindsey Graham said he wanted to subpoena papers from key Obama administration figures: Clapper, Comey, Brennan and so forth.
Earlier, attorney general William Barr saidno criminal investigations would be opened into Barack Obama or Joe Biden’s actions in office towards Michael Flynn, the Trump aide who ended up pleading guilty to lying to the FBI before Barr decided to try to drop the case against him and Trump came up with its “scandal” over routine intelligence practices.
Barr also said he wouldn’t use the “criminal justice system for partisan political ends”. Which is, well, the kind of thing which causes comment when you have a record like William Barr’s.
Oh, and there’s a real scandal brewing at the Department of State, where Trump fired the official watchdog, who was investigating secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who Trump then seemed to throw somewhere near, if not yet right under, the bus.
