Trump news: President says he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for weeks after insisting coronavirus vaccine announcement coming soon
Donald Trump claims he takes a daily pill of the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine "as a preventative" against coronavirus, despite no evidence that links the anti-malaria drug as a preventative medicine to combat Covid-19 infection. "What do you have to lose?" he told reporters on Monday.
The president also attacked his predecessor Barack Obama for his criticism of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, saying the 44th president was “grossly incompetent” in office, despite Mr Trump overseeing the deaths of nearly 90,0000 Americans during the outbreak.
While the former president has kept a dignified silence for much of his successor's tenure, Mr Obama's recent return to the limelight to endorse Joe Biden as the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee has seen the president whip up a spurious conspiracy theory involving Obama officials, the FBI and attempts to entrap Mr Trump's incoming administration in 2017.
Eric Trump, the president’s son, has meanwhile been branded “unbelievably reckless” by Mr Biden for suggesting the pandemic is a Democratic plot to stop his father campaigning and will “magically disappear” after election day in November.
The president said he is "surprised" that his attorney general William Barr said he doesn't expect that an internal Justice Department review of the agency's Russia election meddling investigation will lead to criminal charges against Mr Obama and Mr Biden, whom the president claimed "were participants" in what he called "an illegal takedown" attempt of his 2016 presidential campaign.
He said: "Whether or not it was criminal, I think it would be very serious."
Mr Barr said on Monday that US attorney John Durham's findings will likely not lead to a "criminal investigation of either man" but said that "our concern over potential criminality is focused on others".
The US attorney general also attempted to undermine Robert Mueller's investigation, calling his report a "false and utterly baseless Russian collusion narrative" while claiming that the president was victimised by law enforcement.
Mr Trump's allies have also shifted blame for the pandemic's impact and the deaths of thousands of Americans to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention as the White House begins to mount a defensive amid a fraught election year, while Republicans plan to deploy 50,000 polling site monitors, what voting rights groups say is a thinly veiled attempt to harass voters in battleground areas.
The president's frequent false claims about rampant voter fraud have been debunked by his own administration — a 2018 review by the president's advisory commission on election integrity were not able to discover a single case of voter fraud.
Follow live coverage as it happened
Please allow a moment for our live blog to load
Read more
Trump says he's been taking hydroxychloroquine for a 'few weeks'
Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine. What are the side effects?
GOP recruiting 50,000 polling site monitors for 2020 election
