Trump's new 'liaison for Christian policy' claims he stopped a tsunami through prayer

Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump has appointed a new "liaison for Christian policy".

Citing Mario Bramnick, an official with the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, Right Wing Watch says the Trump campaign has taken on Frank Amedia of Touch Heaven Ministries in Ohio to arrange meetings with conservative leaders.

Until recently Amedia's church's website said he was "an Apostle, Prophet, Pastor, Evangelist, Teacher, and Minister in sound biblical doctrine with gifts of knowledge, healing, and discernment... For over two decades, his clarity of vision, prophetic insight, and revelations of the mysteries of the Kingdom of God in the scriptures have been an enormous blessing to a worldwide audience."

On Miami pastor Guillermo Maldonado's TBN programme in 2012, Amedia claimed to have stopped waves from the 2011 tsunami in Japan from hitting a Hawaiian island where his daughter was at the time. He said: "I stood at the edge of my bed and I said, 'In the name of Jesus, I declare that tsunami to stop now.' And I specifically said, 'I declare those waters to recede,' and I said, 'Father, that is my child, I am your child, I'm coming to you now and asking you to preserve her.'

"Apostle, it was seen by 400 people on a cliff. It was on YouTube, it was actually on the news that that tsunami stopped 200 feet off of shore. Even after having sucked the waters in, it churned and it went on and did devastation in the next island."

Amedia was granted immunity in 2001 to testify he had helped try to bribe a prosecutor to drop a case against a car-dealer friend. He was never charged, but admitted he helped arrange a payment of $250,000 through a prominent local businessman. He later said his family members were subjected to death threats by mobsters over the incident.

Donald Trump has polarised evangelical opinion, with some high-profile supporters like Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church, Dallas, coming out in his favour while others like Russell Moore, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, have been fiercely critical.