President Donald Trump expressed his dissatisfaction against those who tried to remove him from office at a prayer breakfast Thursday, a day after his acquittal by the Senate in his impeachment trial.
Speaking from a stage where he was joined by congressional leaders, including Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the impeachment charge against him, Trump shattered the usual veneer of bipartisanship at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.
“As everybody knows, my family, our great country and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people,” Trump said at the annual event. His airing of grievances came hours before he was to deliver a formal response to the impeachment vote at the White House.
“They have done everything possible to destroy us and by so doing very badly hurt our nation,” said Trump, who triumphantly held up copies of two newspapers with banner “ACQUITTED” headlines as he took the stage.
Bernie Sanders says he raised $25 million in January and will use his presidential campaign’s flush bank account to increase television and digital advertising in 10 states.
The Vermont senator spent $50 million during the final three months of 2019 and finished the year with $18.2 million in cash on hand, putting him in a stronger position than many of his rival candidates even before his latest bonanza last month. Partial results show Sanders in a near tie for first with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in Monday’s leadoff Iowa caucuses.
New Hampshire will hold its primary next Tuesday.
Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, announced Thursday that his candidate will immediately increase staffing in states that vote during the Democratic primary’s Super Tuesday, March 3. The campaign also plans to spend $5.5 million on television and digital ads in eight new states voting then: Arkansas, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Utah.
Sanders will expand ad buys the campaign already made in California and Texas, the two largest states voting on Super Tuesday.
“Bernie’s multiracial, multigenerational, people-driven movement for change is fueling 2020’s most aggressive campaign for president,” Shakir said in a statement, saying the campaign is ”in a strong position to compete in states all over the map.”
January was the Sanders campaign’s best fundraising month to date, featuring donations from 648,000 people, including 219,000 new donors, the statement said. Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2019, Sanders has raised more than $121 million, built on donations from more than 1.5 million people. That total doesn’t include an additional $12.7 million in transfers all made in 2019 from Sanders’ other federal accounts, the campaign said.
In Minnesota, two pedestrians have been killed in separate crashes.
Minneapolis police said a man was crossing a four-lane avenue about 3 a.m. Wednesday when a driver struck him at an intersection. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office Thursday identified the victim as 54-year-old Kurt Dwane Howe, of Minneapolis.
The driver, in his 20s, remained on the scene and was cooperating with investigators. Police say there was no indication he was impaired.
Howe died at Hennepin County Medical Center.
And, a crash in northern Minnesota Tuesday night killed a 45-year-old Squaw Lake man who was standing near a stalled vehicle along Highway 46.
The State Patrol says Tommy John Schultz died at the scene after he was struck by a pickup truck in Itasca County. The pickup driver was not injured.
Jack Stanek can be reached at stan5468@stthomas.edu.