Trump news: President called Fox reporter into Oval Office to argue over Alabama gaffe as new tax fraud allegation emerges

This morning, Esper says Iran is "inching toward" a place where talks could be held, days after Trump left the door open to a possible meeting with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani at the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York.

"It seems in some ways that Iran is inching toward that place where we could have talks and hopefully it'll play out that way," Esper said at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London.

Friction between the two countries has grown since Trump last year withdrew from a 2015 international accord, under which Iran had agreed to rein in its nuclear programme in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

Washington has since renewed and intensified its sanctions, slashing Iran's crude oil sales by more than 80 per cent.

Rouhani said on Wednesday Iran would take another step away from the 2015 deal by starting to develop centrifuges to speed up its uranium enrichment, but he also gave European powers two more months to try to save the multilateral pact.

Vice president Mike Pence is returning to the US from his European tour today, where his hotel arrangements in Ireland were the most noteworthy event.

In Iceland yesterday though his motorcade was confronted by rainbow flags, seen as a clear protest at his "anti-gay" voting record and reputed personal beliefs... 

...while in London he was told in no uncertain terms by prime minister Boris Johnson that Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is "not on the table" in any post-Brexit trade talks. 

The PM said he would not allow the NHS to be carved up in by America in future negotiations and added that Britain was "not too keen on that chlorinated chicken".

In a dig at Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his decision to block a general election, Johnson added: "We have a gigantic chlorinated chicken of our own on the opposition benches."

He made the comments at 10 Downing Street before being told to "shut up" by aides, with journalists whisked away to allow the pair to continue their bilateral talks.

Very hard to argue with this sentiment.

Having said that, this is a masterpiece.

On a more serious note, this is what we should be focusing on regarding Hurricane Dorian as the Bahamas struggles to come to terms with the devastation wrought in the storm's aftermath.

The Trump administration has unveiled its plan for ending government control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two giant mortgage finance companies that nearly collapsed in the financial crisis 11 years ago and were bailed out at a total cost to taxpayers of $187bn (£152bn).

The administration's plan calls for returning the lenders to private ownership and therein reducing the risk to taxpayers, doing so while preserving homebuyers' access to 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages, a pillar of housing finance. Steve Mnuchin's Treasury Department published the plan on Thursday and submitted it to Trump, who first called for it back in March.

While not prominently in the public eye, the two companies perform a critical role in the housing market. Together they guarantee roughly half of the $10trn (£8.1trn) US home loan market.

(AP)

Fannie and Freddie, operating under so-called government conservatorships, have actually become profitable again in the years since the 2008 rescue and have repaid their bailouts in full to the Treasury.

The administration initially looked to Congress for legislation to overhaul the housing finance system and return the companies to private shareholders. But Congress hasn't acted and now officials say they will take administrative action for the core change, ending the Fannie and Freddie conservatorships.

The new plan would make the companies privately-owned yet government "sponsored" companies again. Their profits would no longer go to the Treasury but would be used to build up their capital bases as a cushion against possible future losses.

Trump's long-standing beef with California looks set to continue as his administration moves forward with a proposal to revoke part of the state's authority to set its own automobile gas mileage standards.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was preparing paperwork for the White House for the move on Thursday, meant to help the administration set a single, less rigorous mileage standard enforceable nationwide.

Trump has pushed for months to weaken Obama-era mileage standards nationwide and has targeted California's decades-old power to set its own mileage standards as part of that effort. But administration moves to rescind authority that Congress granted probably would end up in court. When George W Bush challenged California's greenhouse gas emissions and mileage-setting ability, California fought it. The Obama administration subsequently dropped the Bush effort.

The Trump plan would have to be posted in the Federal Register and subject to public comment.

His administration has tried to ease or remove scores of environmental regulations that it regards as unnecessary and burdensome. The tougher mileage standards were a key part of the Obama administration's efforts to reduce climate-changing fossil fuel emissions.

California has sued the Trump administration 27 times on environmental matters alone, often as part of a group of states. Counting preliminary injunctions, California has won in court 19 times, according to Sarah Lovenheim, a spokeswoman for California attorney general Xavier Becerra. The latter, a Democrat, made clear his state would battle this move as well. "California will continue its advance toward a cleaner future. We're prepared to defend the standards that make that promise a reality," he said in a statement.

The mileage move would target California's half-century-old authority under the Clean Air Act to set its own, tough tailpipe emission standards, which are closely linked to fuel efficiency.

California's long struggles with smog mean the state has been setting its own standards since before the 1970 law was written. Congress allowed California to seek waivers from the national standards for that reason.

About a dozen states have opted to follow California's pollution and mileage standards. The waiver has allowed California, the state with the highest population and by far the biggest economy, to steer the rest of the nation toward cutting down on car and truck emissions that pollute the air and alter the climate.

Margo Oge, director of the EPA's Office of Transportation and Air Quality from 1994 to 2012, said the Trump administration is likely to lose in a court challenge of California's powers. "There is nothing under the Clean Air Act that allows the EPA to revoke a waiver that was given to the state," she said. "They cannot do that, in my view, based on 20 years managing the programme."

The Trump administration has proposed freezing gas mileage requirements for automakers at 2021 levels, thus eliminating Obama-era regulations that require them to rise about 5 per cent per year on average for the fleet of new cars sold in the US. A final proposal is expected next month.

Trump's own administration, in documents proposing to freeze the standards, puts the cost of meeting the Obama-era requirements at around $2,700 (£2,195) per vehicle. It claims buyers would save that much by 2025, over standards in place in 2016. But that number is disputed by environmental groups and is more than double the estimates from the Obama administration.

Consumer Reports found that the owner of a 2026 vehicle will pay over $3,300 (£2,683) more for gasoline during the life of a vehicle if the standards are frozen at 2021 levels.

Many in the auto industry don't like the far tougher Obama-era mileage standards and fear it won't be able to meet them, as US consumers keep shifting away from sedans to less-efficient trucks and SUVs. Most automakers favor increasing mileage requirements at a lower rate than set under Barack Obama. They also want one US standard to avoid having to engineer separate vehicles for California and the states that follow its rules.

In July, four automakers - Ford, Honda, BMW and Volkswagen - broke from the rest of the industry and struck a deal with California agreeing to 3.7 per cent increases in mileage per year. That's less than the 5 per cent annual increase under the Obama-era standards. The side deal has irked Trump, who has chastised Ford in tweets.

AP

Donald Trump is once again attacking the Federal Reserve in a series of morning tweets, writing "Where did I find this guy Jerome? Oh well, you can't win them all," referring to the Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

The president is also sharpening his attacks against the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals programme, otherwise known as DACA, in his morning tweets. He's saying the programme "will go before the Supreme Court" while adding a "bipartisan deal" would be made to replace it - 

Donald Trump suggested the Supreme Court “must” rule against the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals plan, otherwise known as DACA, after it granted an appeal to his decision to end the youth immigration programme.

Mr Trump attacked Barack Obama and his initiative in a tweet posted on Friday morning, writing: “DACA will be going before the Supreme Court. It is a document that even President Obama didn’t feel he had the legal right to sign - he signed it anyway!”

Mr Trump’s claim that his predecessor did not feel he possessed the legal right to create the immigration plan, which provides protections to undocumented immigrants who arrived to the US at an early age, is entirely unfounded. Mr Obama released a statement shortly after Mr Trump sought to revoke protected status for DACA recipients in 2017, saying his administration created the plan “ based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm.”

In his attacks against the programme, Mr Trump added: “Rest assured that if the [Supreme Court] does what all say it must, based on the law, a bipartisan deal will be made to the benefit of all!”

Joe Biden is also getting grief over the environment after attending a fundraiser on Thursday evening in New York hosted by Andrew Goldman, a former aide during his Senate days who has since co-founded a fossil fuel company, Western LNG.

He did say this about Vladimir Putin at the event, however.