No more free love...

Trump unloads to Fox News as impeachment threat heightens

The president spent nearly an hour riffing on topics from Nancy Pelosi to Hong Kong in what one of the network’s hosts called a 'stress release.'

By QUINT FORGEY

One day after the wrap of the first phase of public impeachment hearings, President Donald Trump unloaded to Fox News, declaring he wants a Senate trial, pushing a debunked theory that Ukraine has a DNC server, and deeming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy as a bedbug.”

The expansive remarks by the president came during a rambling, roughly hourlong phone call to “Fox & Friends,” in an exercise co-host Brian Kilmeade dubbed a “stress release.”

The previous two weeks have been a period of intense pressure for the White House, as impeachment investigators have heard televised testimony from a dozen witnesses detailing a sweeping campaign by the Trump administration seeking Ukraine-led probes into the president’s political opponents.

But if House lawmakers ultimately approve articles of impeachment, Trump claimed Friday he would like the Republican-controlled Senate to take up the case in a public trial.

“Frankly, I want a trial,” he said, calling for testimony by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, the head of the Democratic investigation into the president’s conduct; former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter; and the unknown member of the intelligence community who lodged a whistleblower complaint describing Trump’s July phone call with Ukraine’s leader.

“I know exactly who it is. Everybody does,” Trump said of the anonymous official.

“The one I want to testify most is ‘Shifty Schiff,’ and I want to find out why did he make up my statement?” he added. “He made up my statement, and I want to find that out. Why did ‘Shifty Schiff’ — who's a crooked politician, he's a corrupt politician — why did he make up my statement?”

Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly needled Schiff for reading aloud an exaggerated version of his conversation over the summer with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump urged his foreign counterpart to investigate domestic rivals including the Bidens.

Trump also encouraged Zelensky to look into unfounded accusations of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 election, including the baseless assertion that a hacked email server belonging to the Democratic National Committee is being housed somewhere in the Eastern European nation.

“I still want to see that server,” Trump said Friday, advancing the conspiratorial line. “You know, the FBI's never gotten that server. That's a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?”

The allegations seemed to strain the credulity of even the “Fox & Friends” anchors, a normally receptive audience for the president who appeared visibly skeptical of his statements regarding the server. “Are you sure they did that? Are you sure they gave it to Ukraine?” asked co-host Steve Doocy.

“Well, that’s what the word is,” Trump replied.

“That's what I asked, actually, in my phone call, as you know. I mean, I asked it very point blank because we're looking for corruption,” he continued. “There's tremendous corruption. We're looking for — why should we be giving hundreds of millions of dollars to countries when there's this kind of corruption?”

Over the course of the discursive interview, the president also opined on the protests in Hong Kong, a potential trade pact with China, the 2020 Democratic field, his much-vaunted border wall, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and his personal health following an unannounced medical visit to Walter Reed, among several other topics.

And he made time to target one of his favorite foils, Pelosi, alternately disparaging the Democratic leader as “paralyzed,” “totally incompetent,” “absolutely lost,” “crazy as a bedbug” and simply “nuts.”

“She's not talented. She's highly overrated,” Trump said. “All she's doing is sitting. She's not doing any work for the people, and now it turns out the whole impeachment thing is a scam.”