Facing legal threats, Trump says impeachment would 'crash' economy S.Africa lashes Trump over land 'seizures' tweet

Facing legal threats, Trump says impeachment would 'crash' economy

AFP / Mandel NGAN As Washington grapples with the latest upheaval in Trump's stormy presidency, the brash leader appears adamant on riding it out

US President Donald Trump warned Thursday the US economy would collapse if he were impeached, as legal chaos roiling the White House has experts saying his presidency is under threat.
Days after Trump's former fixer Michael Cohen told a federal judge he made illegal campaign contributions at the president's request -- to silence women alleging affairs with Trump -- the Republican leader told Fox News that an impeachment would only cause more turmoil.

"I will tell you what, if I ever got impeached, I think the market would crash. I think everybody would be very poor," Trump said on "Fox and Friends." "You would see -- you would see numbers that you wouldn't believe in reverse."
The US president then launched into a rambling statement on job creation and other economic progress he said had been made during his presidency.
"I don't know how you can impeach somebody who has done a great job," Trump said.
Trump was dealt severe back-to-back blows on Tuesday when Cohen pled guilty to illegal campaign finance violations and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of tax and bank fraud within minutes of each other.
The Manafort conviction was the first case sent to trial by the special prosecutor probing Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
But an unchastened Trump appears intent on riding out the storm as Washington grapples with the latest upheaval in his tumultuous presidency.
The president has insisted he did nothing wrong after Cohen, his longtime private lawyer and fixer, implicated him in the illicit hush payments made before the 2016 election to two women who claimed to have had affairs with the Republican presidential candidate.
Although Cohen did not name them, the women were believed to be porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal.
Because the hush payments were intended to influence the outcome of the elections, they violated US laws governing campaign contributions.
In entering a guilty plea, Cohen said the payments were made "in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office," in clear reference to Trump.
Trump was evasive when asked in the Fox News interview if he had instructed Cohen to make the payments, saying that his former lawyer "made the deals," and insisted that Cohen's actions were "not a crime."
"Campaign violations are considered not a big deal, frankly," he said.
Trump then said the hush payments were financed with his own money -- to which Cohen had access -- and that while he had no knowledge of them at the time, he had since been fully transparent.
- Presidential pardon? -
Despite Trump's defiant tone, Washington-based campaign finance expert Kate Belinski, of the Nossaman law firm, said to expect legal consequences for both Trump and his campaign -- most likely in the form of a civil complaint before the Federal Election Commission.
In addition to the two counts of violating campaign finance laws, Cohen also has pled guilty to six counts of fraud.
In the sit-down with Fox, Trump slammed his once close associate for "flipping," saying it "almost ought to be outlawed."
Trump conversely praised Manafort for going to trial -- where the president's former campaign chief was found guilty of eight counts of financial fraud.
The US president lauded the 69-year-old Manafort for leaving his fate to a jury rather than striking a plea deal -- a move that has sparked speculation Manafort hopes for a pardon.
Asked if he was considering such a move, Trump said only that he has "great respect for what he has done, in terms of what he has gone through."
"One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial," Trump said.
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S.Africa lashes Trump over land 'seizures' tweet

AFP/File / GULSHAN KHAN South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa has promised to intervene to accelerate land reform

South Africa accused US President Donald Trump of fuelling racial tensions on Thursday after he said farmers were being forced off their land and many of them killed.
Trump's tweet touched on the overwhelmingly white ownership of farmland in South Africa -- one of the most sensitive issues in the country's post-apartheid history.

"South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past," said the government on an official Twitter account.
The foreign ministry said in a statement it would meet officials at the US embassy to challenge the "unfortunate comments," which were "based on false information."
Foreign Minister Lindiwe Sisulu will also speak directly with her American opposite number, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, it added.
Trump wrote overnight: "I have asked Secretary of State... Pompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers."
His tweet apparently followed a segment on conservative Fox News about Pretoria's plan to change the constitution to speed up expropriation of land without compensation to redress racial imbalances in land ownership.
"'South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers'," said Trump's post, which tagged the show's host, Tucker Carlson, as well as the channel.
Ahead of South African elections in 2019, President Cyril Ramaphosa has vowed to accelerate land reform in order to "undo a grave historical injustice" against the black majority during colonialism and the apartheid era.
Even though apartheid ended in 1994, the white community that makes up eight percent of the population "possess 72 percent of farms" compared to "only four percent" in the hands of black people who make up four-fifths of the population, Ramaphosa said.
The imbalance stems from purchases and seizures during the colonial era that were then enshrined in law during apartheid.
Seeking to redress the situation, Ramaphosa recently announced that the constitution would be amended to allow for land to be seized and redistributed without compensation to the current owners.
But the plans have yet to be approved by parliament, and there is a vigorous debate in South Africa about how land redistribution would work -- and whether seizures could be economically damaging as they were in post-independence Zimbabwe.
- 'The US has a lot of power' -
Earlier this year, Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton sparked a diplomatic row with Pretoria after he said that Canberra should give "special attention" to white South African farmers seeking asylum because they faced a "horrific" situation.
The level of violence against farmers is hotly contested but the police's latest figures show there were 74 farm murders in 2016-17, according to the Africa Check fact-checking site.
South Africa's leading farming lobby group AgriSA on Thursday praised the government's "commitment to agriculture".
"As a country it's important that we find solutions together -- we did this pre-1994 and we can do it again," AgriSA chief executive Omri van Zyl told the SABC broadcaster.
Van Zyl was speaking at a conference on the land issue also attended by Deputy President David Mabuza who warned against "spreading falsehoods".
"We would like to discourage those who are using this sensitive and emotive issue of land to divide us," he said.
But Kallie Kriel, chief executive of AfriForum -- a group that advocates for its largely white membership -- welcomed Trump's intervention and attacked Ramaphosa for pressing ahead with the policy.
"We need to get international support to put pressure on the South African government to hopefully make them re-visit their stance," he told AFP.
Kriel added that Trump could suspend South Africa from the African Growth and Opportunity Act trade programme if property rights were not respected.
"The US has a lot of power," he said.
South Africa's rand currency dropped as much as 1.9 percent against the US dollar following Trump's tweet, according to the Bloomberg news agency, ending four days of gains against the greenback.
Julius Malema, the leader of the radical opposition Economic Freedom Fighters party, called Trump a "pathological liar" and told him to "stay out of South Africa's domestic affairs".
"South Africa is a post-colonial country seized with deep racial inequalities," he said at a media briefing in Johannesburg.

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