Tokyo stocks down at break after Trump accusations

Tokyo stocks slipped Wednesday morning as the yen strengthened against the dollar following explosive accusations that US president Donald Trump tried to quash an FBI probe.

The embattled administration was facing claims late Tuesday by recently fired FBI boss James Comey that Trump pressed him to drop a probe into ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn over his links to Moscow.

The White House denied the claims, but it was the latest in a string of crises, raising more doubts about Trump's future and his ability to push through an economic agenda that include tax cuts and big government spending.

"At the very least the view is that Trump's economic policies will be delayed over this, and the dollar is being sold," Tomoichiro Kubota, an analyst at Matsui Securities in Tokyo, told Bloomberg News.

"At the moment there's a strong sense of investors trying to gauge how far this will go. It's a situation where you can't completely rule out the possibility of impeachment down the road, so it's difficult for investors to buy."

Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei 225 index fell 0.49 percent, or 97.63 points, to 19,822.19 by the lunch break, while the Topix index of all first-section issues was down 0.49 percent, or 7.80 points, at 1,576.43.

In forex markets, the dollar weakened to 112.47 yen, from 113.15 yen in New York.

A stronger yen is bad for Japanese shares as it hurts the profitability of the country's major exporters.

Toyota shares fell 1.26 percent to 6,015 yen while Panasonic was down 1.09 percent at 1,357.5 yen by the end of morning trade.

Banking giant Mitsubishi Financial Group slipped 0.58 percent to 715.5 yen and rival Mizuho dropped 2.17 percent to 198.7 yen.

Toshiba rose 0.43 percent to 231 yen after diving more than 12 percent in the previous session in response to warnings that it likely lost more than $8.4 billion in the past fiscal year.

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