US President Donald Trump attends the UN climate summit in New York on September 23, 2019Photo: VCG

 

Facing the threat of impeachment, US President Donald Trump has launched a ferocious counterattack with the help of Republican loyalists in Congress, media allies and a stream of angry tweets.

Veering wildly between rage, defiance and self-pity, Trump is seeking to undo the political damage from asking Ukraine's leader to conduct an investigation into his potential 2020 Democratic rival Joe Biden, and a possible White House coverup. "We're at war," the 73-year-old president declared.

For the coming fray, Trump has enlisted his allies in Congress and the media to try to shift the focus away from any wrongdoing by him and on to Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was vice president.

A list of White House talking points to Republican supporters in Congress for responding to the fallout from the Ukraine scandal launched by an anonymous whistle-blower was accidentally emailed to Democratic lawmakers this week.

The document listed "myths" and "facts" that Republican lawmakers should address when publicly discussing the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that prompted the Democratic-led House of Representatives to launch an impeachment inquiry for abuse of power.

"The real scandal here is that leaks about a second-hand account of the president's confidential telephone call with a foreign leader triggered a media frenzy of false accusations against the president," it said.

"The president didn't do anything wrong," said Mark Meadows, a Republican congressman from North Carolina, in a clip from an interview on Fox Business Network retweeted by Trump.

Trump sought to turn the Ukraine scandal to his electoral advantage on Friday, repeating unsubstantiated allegations against the Bidens in an ad for his 2020 reelection campaign.

"Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company," a narrator intones ominously as eerie music plays in the background.

"But when President Trump asks Ukraine to investigate corruption the Democrats want to impeach him and their media lap dogs fall in line," the narrator says. "They lost the election. Now they want to steal this one."

The accusations against the Bidens have been pursued for months by Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, and the US president asked Zelensky to "look into" them with the former mayor of New York.

The charge is that Joe Biden sought the removal of Ukraine's top prosecutor to shield his son from a corruption probe into the gas company where Hunter Biden held a lucrative position on the board.