Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      US health secretary Alex Azar tells Trump Capitol attack threatens legacy

      by

      The US health secretary, Alex Azar, warned Donald Trump in a letter that last week’s attack on the Capitol threatened the administration’s legacy, and he urged the president to support a peaceful transfer of power.
      In the two-page, formal resignation letter, dated 12 January, Azar recited what he saw as the administration’s key accomplishments but voiced concern that last week’s siege in Washington and Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud “threaten to tarnish these and other historic legacies of this administration”.
      “The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy and on the tradition of peaceful transitions of power,” Azar wrote.
      “I implore you to continue to condemn unequivocally any form of violence, to demand that no one attempt to disrupt the inaugural activities in Washington or elsewhere, and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power on January 20, 2021,” he added.
      Azar says he will resign at noon on 20 January, when Joe Biden is sworn in.
      Azar is not the first member of Trump’s cabinet to issue strong words in the wake of the attack, in which five people died and which led to the president’s second impeachment.
      Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, resigned after of the attack, saying in a letter to the president that she blamed his “rhetoric” for “the mess caused by violent protestors overrunning the US Capitol in an attempt to undermine the people’s business”.
      Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary, also resigned, calling the attacks “traumatic and entirely avoidable”.
      Azar took up the role of health secretary in 2018, overseeing the department during the unprecedented coronavirus crisis, which has so far claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 Americans. Some experts are estimating half a million deaths could be possible by the end of February.
      Earlier on Friday, Azar told NBC News the US did not have a reserve stockpile of Covid-19 vaccines, but it was confident that there would be enough produced for second doses.
      “We now have enough confidence that our ongoing production will be quality and available to provide the second dose for people. So we’re not sitting on a reserve any more. We’ve made that available to the states to order,” Azar said.
      The news on Friday came as Joe Biden called for a vast expansion of federal aid in order to vaccinate 100 million Americans in his first 100 days in office. Biden has tapped Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, to lead the health department. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump ally Mike Lindell of MyPillow pushes martial law at White House

      by

      My Pillow founder and Trump supporter Mike Lindell was photographed entering the West Wing of the White House on Friday, carrying notes which seemed to advocate the imposition of martial law.Donald Trump will be replaced as president in five days’ time, by Joe Biden. Trump continues to baselessly claim his election defeat by the Democrat was the result of electoral fraud.The president has now said he disavows the violence he incited at the US Capitol last week when he urged a mob of his supporters to march on the building. The resulting deadly attack on the Capitol led to his second impeachment.Amid proliferating reports of plots to kidnap and kill lawmakers, and with further demonstrations by Trump supporters reportedly planned around inauguration day, Trump remains at the White House unable to use social media and apparently estranged from many of his closest advisers.Lindell has risen to prominence among allies urging the president on in his attempts to deny reality. On his Facebook page on Friday, the mustachioed seller of sleep aids wrote: “Keep the faith everyone! We will have our president Donald Trump 4 more years!’Later a Washington Post photographer caught images of Lindell in which parts of notes he carried were visible. Among visible text were the words “Insurrection Act now as a result of the assault on the”, “martial law if necessary” and “Move Kash Patel to CIA Acting”.The notes also referred to Sidney Powell, an attorney and conspiracy theorist involved in Trump campaign lawsuits meant to overturn election results in battleground states, almost all of which have been unsuccessful.The notes seemed to advocate naming an attorney named Colon, described as “up to speed on election issues” and seemingly based at “Fort Mead”, to a national security role. A current LinkedIn page indicates that a Frank Colon is currently senior attorney-cyber operations for the 780th Military Intelligence Brigade, based at Fort Meade, Maryland.Trump allies, among them the political dirty trickster Roger Stone, have previously advocated the imposition of martial law in the event of electoral defeat.Kash Patel is a Trump loyalist who after the election was moved to the Department of Defense, where he has been accused of obstructing the transition to Biden.The White House pool reporter said Lindell refused to answer questions about his visit on Friday.Earlier, apparently in error, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted a message in which he claimed to be “working with the FBI to expose and place total blame on John and the 226 members of antifa that instigated the Capitol ‘riot’”.It was not clear which “John” Giuliani meant. The FBI has rubbished Republican claims that leftwing groups, collectively known as “antifa”, were to blame for the attack on the Capitol. Giuliani himself addressed Trump supporters before the riot, telling them he wanted “trial by combat”.The message Giuliani tweeted ended: “I can see what I can do with Kash, I wish I had.”Biden has picked a senior diplomat, Bill Burns, for CIA director, replacing Gina Haspel.CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, said he had spoken with Lindell, who confirmed he had met briefly with Trump and was told to give his documents to White House aides. “Lindell also claimed the phrase ‘martial law’ did not appear on the document despite photos,” Acosta tweeted. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Donald Trump will fly to Florida hours before Biden inauguration, reports say

      by

      Donald Trump is expected to leave the White House as president on Wednesday morning, just hours before Joe Biden’s inauguration, flying off on Air Force One to his beachside home in Florida.Trump’s post-presidential plans have been clouded in uncertainty. But several US news organisations reported on Friday that Trump intends to live at Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach resort. His daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner are expected to join him there, at least for some of the time.Trump has said he will not attend Biden’s inauguration, following last week’s deadly invasion of the US Capitol and Trump’s second impeachment on Wednesday. He is expected to leave Washington on the morning of 20 January, Bloomberg reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.The Associated Press, citing a person familiar with the planning, said there would be a departure ceremony at Andrews air force base, with a military band, red carpet and 21-gun salute under discussion.Several White House staff are likely to work for Trump and his family from their new Florida base. According to the Palm Beach Post, Melania Trump recently visited a private school in Boca Raton that the couple’s teenage son Barron is due to attend.Adjusting to life outside the White House may be tough. When the president arrives at Palm Beach on Wednesday roads will be shut as his motorcade threads its way to Mar-a-Lago. Once Biden is sworn in, however, they will reopen. Commercial flights from the nearby international airport that pass directly over his estate will resume.It is unclear what exactly Trump intends to do next. It seems inevitable he will spend some of the weeks and months ahead closeted with his lawyers – and, as per his presidency, on the golf course. He faces a second impeachment trial in the Senate and a slew of other legal cases, federal and civil. As an ex-president he loses his immunity from prosecution.In Washington Trump’s staff are busy packing up. On Wednesday, a photographer for Reuters snapped the president’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, carrying a large, framed photograph of one of Trump’s meetings with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping. Other items on their way out of the building included a stuffed pheasant and an Abraham Lincoln bust.The removals and piles of boxes have prompted a rash of puns on Twitter, with several calling on the president to “stop the steal”.In September 2019 the Trumps filed court papers declaring Mar-a-Lago their permanent residence. Renovations are reportedly going on inside the family’s private quarters. Melania Trump has been shipping items for almost two months, ahead of her return next week, with one source telling CNN: “She just wants to go home.”Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of having the former first family move in. Late last year neighbours sent a letter to the town of Palm Beach saying Trump would violate an agreement made in 1993 that allowed him to convert Mar-a-Lago into a private club. It stipulated that no one could reside at the property, the DeMoss family who live next door complained. More

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump official admits family separation policy 'should never have been implemented'

      by

      For the first time, a senior Trump administration official who helped implement family separation has condemned the hardline immigration policy, which made it possible for the government to take more than 3,000 children, including infants, from their parents at the US-Mexico border in 2018.In response to a damning report published on Thursday by the US justice department’s internal watchdog on the “zero-tolerance” policy, which made family separation possible, the former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein said the policy “should have never been proposed or implemented”.The justice department’s Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) long-awaited report said department leadership knew the policy would result in children being separated from their families and that the former US attorney general Jeff Sessions “demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children”.“We concluded that the Department’s single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations,” the report said.The OIG said justice department leadership “did not effectively coordinate” with the relevant agencies before implementing zero-tolerance, despite being aware of the challenges created by increasing prosecutions of adult asylum seekers under the policy.In a conference call in May 2018, Sessions told prosecutors: “We need to take away children,” according to notes taken by people on the call and provided to the OIG.Rosenstein, who publicly denounced the policy for the first time on Thursday, told the OIG he had known the zero-tolerance policy would result in family separations. He also told investigators he had not been involved with the formulation of the policy and had received reassurances about it that he now believed were wrong.In July 2020, the Guardian reported that Rosenstein had made comments in a conference call with US attorneys charged with implementing the policy that in effect meant that no child was too young to be separated from their parents.The call came after US attorneys on the south-west border had repeatedly raised concerns about how zero-tolerance was supposed to be operated. A month after the policy had been in place, to help attorneys, a list of questions was drafted for DHS and HHS, which included: “How does DHS deal with infants?”At that point, it was clear no agency had a master list of separated children.In a statement provide to the Guardian on Thursday, Rosenstein said he and his colleagues at the justice department “faced unprecedented challenges” compared with work he had done as a US attorney under previous presidential administrations.“Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero-tolerance immigration policy,” Rosenstein said. “It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.”Sessions, who resigned in November 2018, announced the zero-tolerance policy in April 2018. Facing intense pressure nationally and abroad, the Trump administration stopped mass family separations in June 2018, though asylum-seeking families continue to be separated today at a smaller scale.Family separation, which legal experts and doctors said constituted torture, was supported by multiple federal agencies.The homeland security department (DHS) separated families at the border and detained the parents, the health department eventually took custody of children separated from their parents and the justice department leadership provided the legal framework that made separations possible.The justice department OIG report confirms earlier watchdog reports from the other agencies’ monitors, which found inadequate tracking systems were in place.A January 2019 report from the health department OIG found the Trump administration might have separated thousands of migrant children from their parents at the border for up to a year before family separation was a publicly known practice.The lead attorney on an ongoing family separation lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Lee Gelernt, said: “This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can’t sink any lower, it does.“The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don’t doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge,” Gelernt said. “We need them to act with urgency – every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families.”Dick Durbin, a Democratic US senator from Illinois, said he would hold the justice department officials responsible to account as the incoming chair of the US Senate judiciary committee. “Those who planned and executed the zero-tolerance policy will have to live with the knowledge that their cruelty and cowardice are responsible for the scars these children will carry for the rest of their lives,” Durbin said.Despite being the driving force behind the zero-tolerance policy, Sessions refused to be interviewed by OIG investigators.The report said Sessions told US attorneys on the south-west border that families would be quickly prosecuted and reunited, even though doing so was, “in most cases, a practical and legal impossibility”. The former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has repeatedly defended her decision to enforce the zero-tolerance policy, which was announced in April 2018. More

    • 150 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Sorry, try Obama's house: Secret Service barred from using Ivanka Trump's bathrooms

      by

      The dying days of the Trump administration have been plagued by yet more scandal in the form of riots, Twitter bans and impeachment. Now the Washington Post has added another: water closet gate.
      In a multi-bylined article one of America’s top investigative news outlets has chronicled in leg-crossing detail the apparently extreme difficulty that the Secret Service detail assigned to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have had in finding a place to go to the bathroom.
      According to the Washington Post the president’s daughter and her top White House adviser spouse have apparently exiled the squad of men and women assigned to keep them from harm’s way from using the toilets in their sprawling Washington DC mansion.
      “Instructed not to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the couple’s house, the Secret Service detail assigned to President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law spent months searching for a reliable restroom to use on the job,” the paper reported, citing neighbors and law enforcement official.
      It quoted one law enforcement official as saying: “It’s the first time I ever heard of a Secret Service detail having to go to these extremes to find a bathroom.”
      It added that Secret Service members in the couple’s detail who were desperate to relieve themselves had resorted to a porta-potty, as well as bathrooms at the homes of Barack Obama and Vice-President Mike Pence.
      The solution to the problem was not a cheap one. Since September 2017, the paper reported, the federal government rented the stricken Secret Service members a basement studio with a bathroom for the purposes of them going to the loo. The cost to taxpayers? Some $3,000 a month.
      A White House spokesperson denied the couple restricted agents from their home. But the Post stuck by its investigative guns, saying: “That account is disputed by a law enforcement official familiar with the situation, who said the agents were kept out at the family’s request.”
      The Post’s story is unlikely to endear Washington citizens – or indeed many other Americans – to Ivanka Trump and her husband as they leave office after four high-profile years in Donald Trump’s administration. Multiple reports have already gleefully detailed the couple’s likely rejection from the New York and Washington DC social circles in which they have previously moved.
      Not that the couple will lack for a place to call home. They have recently bought a $30m plot of land on an exclusive island in Florida nicknamed the Billionaire’s Bunker. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Last two federal executions under Trump can proceed, court rules

      by

      A US appeals court ordered that the last two scheduled federal executions under Donald Trump’s outgoing administration could proceed on Thursday and Friday, overturning a stay from a lower court delaying them until March to allow the two condemned men to recover from Covid-19.The US Department of Justice announced last month that Corey Johnson, 52, and Dustin Higgs, 48, had been diagnosed with Covid-19 but that it would proceed with their executions this month.Both men, convicted in separate murders, are being held on death row at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.On Tuesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan of the US district court ordered the executions be delayed until at least 16 March to allow the condemned men to heal, siding with medical experts who said their coronavirus-damaged lungs would result in inordinate suffering if they were to receive lethal injections.A split panel of judges at US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit overturned Chutkan’s stay by a 2-1 vote overnight on Wednesday.Lawyers for the two men asked the appeals court to reconsider the ruling by filing a petition on Thursday morning seeking a so-called rehearing en banc.“We will ask the full court to step in to reinstate the stay, but it is time for the government to stop carrying out super-spreader executions,” Shawn Nolan, a federal defender representing Higgs, said in a statement.Trump, a longstanding advocate of capital punishment, oversaw the resumption of federal executions last summer after a 17-year hiatus as the novel coronavirus continued to spread.Death row inmates, at least two of their lawyers and multiple prison and execution staff have since become ill with Covid-19.The president-elect, Joe Biden, will be inaugurated next Wednesday, and says he will seek to abolish the death penalty.Higgs was convicted of overseeing the kidnapping and murder of three women on the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland in 1996. He did not kill anyone himself, which his lawyers have argued is grounds for clemency.Johnson was convicted of murdering seven people in Virginia in 1992 as part of a drug-trafficking ring. His lawyers say he has an intellectual disability that means it would be unconstitutional to execute him.Their lawyers, citing medical experts who testified in court, say that their damaged lung tissue would rupture more quickly than usual after lethal doses of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, had been administered.There could be a period of several minutes in which the men experience drowning as their lungs filled with bloody fluids – a pulmonary edema – before the drug rendered them insensate or killed them, the lawyers argued, calling it a form of torture.Earlier this week, Lisa Montgomery became the first woman executed in the US by the federal government in almost seven decades, after an appeal to the US supreme court failed. More

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Revealed: White House liaison sought derogatory info on E Jean Carroll from DoJ official

      by

      The White House liaison to the Department of Justice (DoJ), Heidi Stirrup, sought out derogatory information late last year from a senior justice department official regarding a woman who alleges she was raped by Donald Trump, according to the person from whom Stirrup directly sought the information.
      The revelation raises the prospect that allies of the US president were directly pressing the justice department to try to dig up potentially damaging information on a woman who had accused Trump of sexually attacking her.
      E Jean Carroll, a journalist and advice columnist, sued Trump in November 2019, alleging he had defamed her when he denied her account of having been raped by him. Carroll alleges Trump sexually assaulted her in a dressing room in Bergdorf Goodman, a high-end Manhattan department store, in either late 1995 or early 1996.
      Trump at the time responded to her allegations by claiming Carroll was “totally lying” and attempted to ridicule her by saying “she’s not my type”. Those and similar comments led Carroll to sue him.
      Stirrup apparently believed the justice department had information that might aid the president’s legal defense in the suit. The attorney who Stirrup sought information from regarding Carroll said that Stirrup approached them not long after a judge had ruled the justice department could not take over Trump’s defense.
      Stirrup asked if the department had uncovered any derogatory information about Carroll that they might share with her or the president’s private counsel. Stirrup also suggested that she could serve as a conduit between the department and individuals close to the president or his private legal team.
      Stirrup also asked the official whether the justice department had any information that Carroll or anyone on her legal team had links with the Democratic party or partisan activists, who might have put her up to falsely accusing the president.
      Earlier, Trump himself, without citing any evidence, suggested that his political opponents were behind the allegations: “If anyone has information that the Democratic party is working with Ms Carroll or New York Magazine [to whom Carroll first told her story], please notify us as soon as possible,” Trump said.
      The official from whom Stirrup sought information admonished Stirrup, telling her that her request was inappropriate.
      The official recalled “conveying to her in the strongest possible terms” that it was wrong in the first place to seek out such information, and instructed her not to do so in the future.
      When it was learned Stirrup had later sought out non-public information from other justice department officials about other ongoing investigations, including around election fraud, and non-public information in regards to matters of interest to the White House, Stirrup was told she was unwelcome at the justice department and banned from the building.
      On 3 December the Associated Press, citing three sources, reported Stirrup’s banning “after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House”. It has not been previously reported, however, that one of the issues that led to Stirrup’s banning was her seeking out information about the Carroll case.
      It is unclear whether Stirrup was acting on her own or at the direction of the White House when it comes to the Carroll case.
      But many see it as unlikely that Stirrup was making her inquiry entirely independently. Stirrup served as the liaison to the justice department during a period when the White House was removing its liaisons to virtually every major federal agency who they believed might be disloyal – while informing their replacements that they would no longer reporting to the agencies they were assigned to but rather directly to the White House.
      A justice department spokesperson declined to comment, saying that they had been unsuccessful in uncovering more information.
      The outcome of the Carroll defamation case may have immense political and legal consequences for Trump.
      Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, said that if the case comes to trial, Trump will have to “provide evidence and give testimony about the underlying rape allegation” and he could run the risk of perjury.
      Not testifying truthfully during a civil case can have severe consequences for a president or other high-profile political figure. When former president Bill Clinton was sued for sexual harassment, and later admitted to giving misleading testimony in that case, he was impeached by the House of Representatives, acquitted by the US Senate after a trial, and voluntarily surrendered his license to practice law for five years.
      Judge Lewis Kaplan, of the southern district of New York, who considered the justice department’s attempt to take over Trump’s legal counsel, noted in a 26 October ruling, that any finding that Trump defamed Carroll would probably be considered an implicit finding by a jury that Trump indeed raped Carroll.
      “The question as to whether Mr Trump in fact raped Ms Carroll appears to be at the heart of her lawsuit. That is so because the truth or falsity of a defendant’s alleged defamatory statements can be dispositive of any defamation case,” Kaplan said.
      In early September, the justice department, at the direction of the then attorney general, William Barr, sought to replace Trump’s private legal counsel with department attorneys, to defend him from Carroll’s lawsuit. Justice officials contended that while accusing Carroll of lying and further attacking her, Trump was acting in his official capacity as the president of the United States.
      Kaplan ruled that the justice department could not take over Trump’s defense, concluding Trump’s alleged defamation of Carroll had nothing to do with his official duties as president or “the operation of government” or “within the scope of his employment”.
      The justice department pledged to appeal Kaplan’s decision. But it is unlikely the justice department of Joe Biden will move forward with any such appeal.
      Justice officials and outside legal observers say the department’s position that the president was acting in official capacity while allegedly defaming his alleged rape victim – from about 20 years earlier – is a position that would be unlikely to prevail with most judges.
      Last week, while announcing that he was nominating the federal appeals court judge Merrick Garland to be his new attorney general, the president-elect said he would end Trump’s practice of “treating the attorney general as his personal lawyer and the department as his personal firm”. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Jamie Raskin: grieving congressman leads push to impeach Trump

      by

      For Jamie Raskin, the Democratic congressman and constitutional law professor who is leading the push to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, the last fortnight has been tumultuous.He lost his son 25-year-old son, Tommy, who had struggled with depression, on New Year’s Eve.Seeing it as his duty, Raskin attended last week’s certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory in Congress with members of his family, from whom he was separated as a mob of pro-Trump extremists stormed the Capitol building.Despite these profound emotional shocks, Raskin has spent the last week drafting the article of impeachment against Trump over his role in inciting the storming of Congress, which is likely to be voted on by the House of Representatives later on Wednesday.The day before the storming of the Capitol, Raskin had buried his son, who died after leaving his family a note. “Please forgive me,” he had written. “My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”As he stood to speak in the debate on the certification less than 24 hours later, Raskin – who had pinned a piece of black cloth to his lapel – received a standing ovation from fellow members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, who were aware of his recent loss and that he had still come to vote.Not long afterwards, the Trumpist mob broke in.Since then, Raskin has authored the House resolution that called on the vice-president, Mike Pence, to invoke the 25th amendment and declare Trump unable to complete his term, which expires next week. Pence ruled out doing that Tuesday night.The chamber quickly moved to the article of impeachment, which Raskin also helped draft. He has been clear about why he has needed to push through the difficult emotions he and his family have been confronting to hold Trump to account.“The president is a lethal danger to the American republic and the American people,” Raskin told the Atlantic magazine last week as he began drawing up the article of impeachment. “There has been nothing like this since the civil war.”And as Raskin told the Washington Post, he felt his son’s presence throughout the recent events. “I felt him in my heart and in my chest,” he said. “All the way through the counting of the electoral college votes and through the nightmare of the armed attack on the Capitol.”His son, a law student, as Raskin explained to the paper, had once asked him a question that had focused his mind.For a class about the first amendment issue of freedom of speech, Tommy Raskin had asked his father about “incitement to imminent lawless action”, and whether a government official who had sworn an oath to uphold the constitution should be held to a higher standard.“That ironically is going to be the critical issue for us talking about Donald Trump,” said Raskin. “Some people are saying: ‘Well, Donald Trump was just exercising his free speech.’ As president of the United States, he cannot be encouraging, counselling and inciting mobs that go and attack the Capitol of the United States.”Raskin is clear about what the US is confronting in the aftermath of the assault on Congress.“The president didn’t want to let go, and the fruit of his obsession with his big lie that he had actually won the election was this nightmarish assault on Congress,” Raskin said. “The president has become a clear and present danger to the republic.”“That is the groundwork for fascism, when you add racism, antisemitism, conspiracy theory and magical thinking. That is an absolute powder keg in terms of an assault on democracy,” Raskin said of the riot in an interview. “So we have to be very tough, and very strong right now in defending the constitution and democracy.”During the storming of Congress, Raskin’s thoughts were mostly on his 23-year-old daughter, Tabitha, and his son-in-law, who had accompanied him to the Capitol and were separated in the mayhem.When they were eventually reunited, Raskin assured his daughter that the next time she went to the Capitol, it would be calmer. “Dad, I don’t think there’s gonna be a next time,” she replied.Associated Press contributed to this reportIn the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org. More