Donald Trump, apparently displeased with the Washington Post’s publication of Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power - out tomorrow!
The @WashingtonPost quickly put together a hit job book on me- comprised of copies of some of their inaccurate stories. Don't buy, boring!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2016
For the record, Trump gave more than 20 hours of interviews to the journalists who wrote the book.
Updated
Sheldon Adelson, the Nevada casino mogul and conservative mega-donor, is leading a campaign against pro-Palestine groups on US college campuses and has funded posters that accuse individual students of supporting terrorism and promoting “Jew Hatred”.
The multimillion-dollar effort, which has launched at six campuses in California, is targeting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement that has become increasingly popular among American university students protesting the Israeli government.
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recent Adelson-funded posters named 16 students and professors, saying they “have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetuate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus”. It further claimed BDS was a “Hamas-inspired genocidal campaign to destroy Israel”.
Robert Gardner, a 25-year-old UCLA senior, saw his name on one of the posters outside a grocery market. “I was really shocked and felt really disturbed,” he said.
“They are trying to cast us as antisemitic, that we are somehow a discriminatory group,” said the political science student, who is a member of the college’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. “That is a completely spurious accusation. One of our core principles is anti-oppression and anti-racism.”
Tensions surrounding Israel-Palestine campus activism have escalated in recent years, but SJP leaders said the posters identifying specific students were particularly aggressive and had led some of them to face online harassment and death threats.
Speaking on Bill O’Reilly’s program on Fox News, Donald Trump again declined to elaborate on his now-obscure position on immigration, telling the host that “I just want to follow the law” and dismissing reports from multiple outlets that detailed remarks he made to a Latino organization over the weekend in which he implied support for a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants.
“I just want to follow the law,” Trump said. “What I’m doing is following the law. You know, this was put out - we had a great meeting over the weekend with Hispanics and leaders of the Hispanic community, and we discussed a lot of different things. And this was one of the many things that was discussed.”
“And one of the groups, one of the media outlets that have gotten everything about me wrong, including the fact that I would never run and the reporter actually said he would give up his salary if he did. I don’t think I have ever held him to that but one of these media outlets said that they had word from one of the people. It turned out to be false. In fact, the people all denied it, Bill, and I think you probably have seen that.”
When asked again for specifics, Trump focused on deporting criminals, saying that undocumented immigrants who haven’t broken laws while in the country will go through “a process.”
“We are going to obey the existing laws. now the existing laws are very strong. The existing laws, the first thing we are going to do if and when I win, is we are going to get rid of all of the bad ones. We have gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. We are going to get them out. And the police know who they are - they are known by law enforcement who they are, we don’t do anything. They go around killing people and hurting people, and they are going to be out of this country so fast your head will spin. We have existing laws that will allow you to do that.”
“As far as everybody else, we are going to go through the process. What people don’t know is Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country. Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing and I just said that. At the same time, we want to do it in a very humane, we want to do it in a very humane manner.”
Updated
Donald Trump veered off the teleprompter on Monday night to claim that “inner cities run by the Democrats” were more dangerous than countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Republican nominee was meant to be delivering a scripted speech calling for Hillary Clinton be investigated by a special prosecutor. However, once again he veered off message in an attempt to appeal to minority voters in apocalyptic terms.
“You can go to war zones in countries that we are fighting and it is safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats,” Trump said. The Republican nominee also promised if elected, “we’ll get rid of the crime. You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
Trump has made increased appeals for support from African Americans in recent days. Despite that, a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed Trump receiving the support of only 1% of African American voters, a historically low total. The poll did have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%. The Republican nominee has repeatedly argued that African American voters should support him in the past week, saying: “What have you got to lose?” In contrast, the New York real estate developer has railed against what he called “the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees people of color only as votes and not as human beings worthy of a better future”.
The intended focus of the Republican nominee’s message on Monday was his call for a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton’s leadership of the state department. Trump claimed that the FBI and Department of Justice could not be trusted to investigate “Hillary Clinton’s crimes”. The FBI in July decided not to pursue criminal charges against Clinton for her use of an unsecured private email server while secretary of state. However, in doing so, FBI Director James Comey rebuked Clinton for the “extremely careless” way in which she handled her emails.
In the speech, Trump also said he was “fighting for peaceful regime change in our country” and warned gravely of potential election fraud. “You got to go out and watch. You know what I’m talking about.” Trump has long made unsubstantiated claims about “a rigged election” and warned of in-person voter fraud recently at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania. However, an exhaustive investigation of in-person voter fraud in the United States found only 31 cases since 2000 out of more than 1bn ballots cast.
Trump spoke in the blue collar city of Akron, Ohio. The Buckeye State has 18 electoral votes, and no Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. According to data complied by Real Clear Politics, Clinton has not trailed in a single statewide poll of Ohio since April. However, despite these sagging poll numbers and cryptic warnings about election fraud, Trump was still confident of victory: “I just get the feeling that we’re going to win in a landslide.”
The Democratic party’s nominee for governor in West Virginia declared today that he can’t support his party’s presidential nominee, citing her positions on coal mining.
“I cannot be a supporter of Hillary Clinton,” billionaire coal magnate Jim Justice told West Virginia MetroNews’s radio show Talkline. “The reason I can’t be is her position on coal is diametrically, completely wrong in many, many different ways.”
In May, Clinton ad-libbed remarks declaring that, if elected, “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
Speaking to an audience in Akron, Ohio, Donald Trump encouraged his followers to survey polling places during the general election - “you know what I’m talking about, right?”
“You’ve gotta get everyone of your friends,” Trump said. “You’ve gotta get everyone of your family. You’ve gotta get everybody to go out and watch and go out and vote. And when I say watch, you know what I’m talking about, right? You know what I’m talking about. I think you gotta go out and you gotta watch.”
Bill Clinton will quit the board of his charitable foundation but not disband it if Hillary Clinton wins the US presidency, he said on Monday, as Republicans pressed allegations of a conflict of interest.
The announcement came as newly disclosed emails revealed how Huma Abedin coordinated a meeting for a Bahraini prince with officials at the Clinton Foundation during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.
Amid intensifying political controversy, Bill Clinton told foundation staff last week that it will stop accepting foreign or corporate donations in the event of his wife reaching the White House. In a blog post on Monday, he put flesh on the bones.
He defended the foundation’s work, saying it had “improved millions of lives around the world”, for example, by providing HIV/Aids drugs at vastly reduced cost, but admitted it would need to change if his wife wins.
“If Hillary is elected president, the foundation’s work, funding, global reach, and my role in it will present questions that must be resolved in a way that keeps the good work going while eliminating legitimate concerns about potential conflicts of interest. Over the last several months, members of the foundation’s senior leadership, Chelsea, and I have evaluated how the foundation should operate if Hillary is elected,” the 70-year-old former president wrote.
In the event of a Clinton victory in November, he added, the foundation will accept contributions only from US citizens, permanent residents and US-based independent foundations, whose names will be made public. Many of its international activities will be transferred to other organisations and its official name will change from the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation to the Clinton Foundation.
Bill Clinton, who set up the foundation at the end of his presidency 15 years ago, wrote: “While I will continue to support the work of the foundation, I will step down from the board and will no longer raise funds for it.”
Donald Trump speaks in Akron
Watch it live here:
Donald Trump said today that, if elected president, he would give back to police departments the controversial military equipment the Obama administration forced them to return, the Guardian’s Jon Swaine and Ben Jacobs report.
Speaking with police officers in Ohio, the Republican presidential nominee indicated he would reverse a recall of tanks, heavy weaponry and other equipment carried out by the federal government after the 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.
During discussions at a fraternal order of police lodge in Akron, Trump was asked by one questioner if he would return “military equipment” to law enforcement, according to a pool reporter who observed the event.
“Yes I would,” said Trump, who added that the current situation facing law enforcement was “ridiculous”.
In May last year, Barack Obama banned the transfer of some surplus military equipment from the US defense department to regional police departments. Millions of dollars’ worth of gear was transferred under a longstanding program not widely noticed until heavily armored police clashed with protesters in Ferguson.
Obama’s prohibition applied to items such as grenade launchers, armored vehiclesand large-caliber weapons. Police departments have remained free to buy the equipment commercially but chiefs say they are deterred by high prices.
Some departments complained after receiving notices from the Obama administration recalling vehicles and other equipment. Police leaders said that following the fatal shooting of officers in Dallas, Texas, in July, the Obama administration had agreed to revisit its executive order and consider taking some items off its banned list.
Trump has wrapped himself in the mantle of law enforcement in recent months and proclaimed himself to be “the law and order candidate” in his acceptance speech at the Republican national convention.
On the heels of news that Donald Trump has postponed an impending address on immigration in Denver, Colorado, the campaign has also announced that it has cancelled a rally and fundraising trump set to take place in Portland, Oregon, on August 31.
“The campaign has decided to cancel the Aug. 31 fundraiser and rally in Portland as Mr. Trump has had to make changes to his calendar in the wake of the Louisiana flood disaster,” Trump’s Oregon campaign director, Jacob Daniels, told Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Left-leaning Portland, the largest city in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential nominee in more than three decades, was always an odd choice for a Trump rally, although Daniels vowed that Trump will reschedule: “We look forward to having Mr. Trump and Gov. Pence in Oregon at a later date.”
As the new school year approaches, a federal court in Texas has blocked new US school rules for accommodating transgender students. This legal battle with the White House may soon head to the supreme court. Reed O’Connor, a district judge in Fort Worth, issued the injunction on Sunday night to keep public schools from having to allow equal access to bathrooms and changing facilities.
Lawyers for Melania Trump are pursuing legal action against the Daily Mail for reporting “100% false” rumors that she worked as an escort in the 1990s as well as raising questions about her immigration status at the time.
While Donald Trump has a reputation for threatening and pursuing litigation, it is unusual for a major party nominee or their spouse to mount legal action against a publication only months before an election.
The Republican nominee’s wife had previously denied a story in Politico in which questions about her immigration status were first reported but had not previously addressed the other accusations.
The suit comes in the wake of Trump launching an offensive against many media outlets, banning some such as Politico and the Washington Post from covering his rallies as well as calling for libel laws in the US to be opened up. He also banned the Guardian from attending an event in Scotland after Trump took offence when reporter Ewen MacAskill questioned the Republican nominee about his allegedly “toxic” politics.
In a statement to the Guardian, Charles Harder, an attorney at the firm of Harder, Miller and Abrams which is representing Trump, said: “This law firm is litigation counsel for Melania Trump. Mrs Trump has placed several news organizations on notice of her legal claims against them, including Daily Mail among others, for making false and defamatory statements about her supposedly having been an ‘escort’ in the 1990s. All such statements are 100% false, highly damaging to her reputation, and personally hurtful. She understands that news media have certain leeway in a presidential campaign, but outright lying about her in this way exceeds all bounds of appropriate news reporting and human decency.”
Harder’s not-quite-four-year-old Beverly Hills firm, Harder Mirell & Abrams LLP, is perhaps best known for representing Hulk Hogan in the lawsuit that eventuallybankrupted Gawker Media, which was sold at auction to media company Univision earlier in August. The suit was funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who spoke on behalf of Trump at the Republican national convention in Cleveland. Harder has also represented a number of other plaintiffs against Gawker as well; most recently, Harder has threatened a lawsuit against the now-defunct website because of an investigative report about Donald Trump’s hair.
A spokesperson for the Daily Mail did not respond to a request for comment.
They are not all, however, run by pre-teens.
Trump has 15 field offices in Ohio but none in the 2 biggest counties that include Cleveland and Cincy. pic.twitter.com/QjuYT4YXlt
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) August 22, 2016
Donald Trump’s pivot is a tale of two hirings, and which one he gives more weight to will have a dramatic impact on the outcome of his campaign.
Most analysis thus far has revolved around Breitbart News chairman Stephen K Brannon, who last week was named the campaign’s chief executive. It was a move widely seen as a rebuke to the more traditional presidential campaign that the recently ousted Paul Manafort sought to implement.
But the hiring of Manafort’s actual replacement, seasoned GOP operative Kellyanne Conway, tells a very different story. Namely, that Trump is going to remain true to himself, only this time in a winning way.
Conway, who started with the Trump campaign in July as an adviser to Manafort, has promised to do what Manafort could not: to “sharpen the message” put forward by Trump, rather than try to rebuild his personality from scratch with a teleprompter – something she’s previously described as being less about changing Trump than giving him choices. (In a July interview with the Washington Post, Conway compared her approach to the time she persuaded her daughter to swap out a turquoise Memorial Day outfit for a more flattering blue alternative.)
That means Conway listening to Trump as much as he listens to her. And unlike a lot of women, conservative and otherwise, she’s been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, recently telling MSNBC “I think you should judge people by their actions, not just their words on a political campaign trail”. Whether Trump will be able to listen to and learn from Conway’s guidance, however, remains to be seen.
Listening to women has never exactly been Trump’s strong suit, but now his entire campaign may hang in the balance of his ability – or more likely, lack of ability – to do just that.
The Clinton campaign is really pushing this new campaign advert:
In times of crisis, America depends on steady leadership, clear thinking, and calm judgment. https://t.co/Tpo3Sp7Ri1
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 22, 2016
Donald Trump postpones immigration speech
Donald Trump’s highly anticipated speech on immigration, originally set to take place on Thursday in Denver, Colorado, has been postponed.
A Trump campaign spokesperson told the Denver Post that although the candidate will be appearing in at a big-dollar fundraiser in Aspen, Colorado, the trip will not be accompanied by a much-ballyhooed policy address on Trump’s signature issue: immigration.
Rumors flourished this weekend that Trump had softened his stance on deporting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US, including openness to creating a pathway to legal status, after a meeting with Latino leaders in which Trump reportedly admitted that deporting millions of US residents “is neither possible nor humane”.
In an interview with Fox & Friends this morning, a defiant Trump dismissed the reports, but did not come out and say that he would, as he’s previously suggested, implement a “deportation force” to hunt down undocumented immigrants living in the United States,
“I’m not flip-flopping,” Trump said. “We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer. That’s - it has to be very firm.”
Updated
Arizona senator: Republican party should shift resources from Trump to Congress
Republican senator Jeff Flake told an Arizona public-access show that the Republican party should reallocate resources dedicating to electing Donald Trump president to aid vulnerable Republican candidates for senate, recalling a similar abandonment of the party’s nominee two decades ago.
“I can tell you, it’s gonna be tough to see, if we see Hillary Clinton in office appointing supreme court nominees. It’s gonna be even tougher if she does so and they are confirmed by a Democratic Senate,” Flake told PBS. “So I do hope that we shore up the senate. Right now, if the election were today, it would be very dicey.”
Flake recalled the final weeks of the 1996 general election, in which Republicans reallocated funds to bolster their congressional majority as a “check” on Bill Clinton’s power, functionally abandoning nominee Bob Dole before his defeat.
“He had full support of the Republican Party,” Flake said of Dole. “That wasn’t enough, and he wasn’t gonna get there and everybody knew it by the time we got to September, particularly October, so the senate committee spent a lot of time focusing on the senate ... the RNC, just to make sure that they were shored up.”
Updated
Nearly 15,000 emails recovered by the FBI from the private server used by Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state are set to be made public just before the presidential election in November, it emerged in court today.
The state department said it was reviewing 14,900 documents that came to light in the now-closed investigation into the handling of sensitive information that flowed through the server in question. That is a major addition to the 30,000 emails that Clinton’s lawyers considered work-related and returned to the department in December 2014.
The FBI cleared Clinton of criminal conduct but found her to have have been “extremely careless”, and the saga continues to dog her. On 5 August the FBIcompleted a transfer of several thousand previously undisclosed work-related emails for the state department to review and publish.
Responding to the news, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, said Clinton “seems incapable of telling the truth”.
State lawyers told federal judge James Boasberg on Monday they expected to release the emails in batches on 14, 21 and 28 October and 4 November. The election, against Republican nominee Donald Trump, takes place on 8 November.
Boasberg ordered that the department should aim for a more ambitious deadline. The judge set another hearing for 22 September, so progress can be reviewed.
Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, which brought the case under a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) request, tweeted: “FBI found almost 15,000 new Clinton documents. When will state release them?”
Another federal judge, Emmet Sullivan, last week ordered Clinton to answer written questions from Judicial Watch. Her answers are not due until after the presidential election.
One of Donald Trump’s most trusted (if informal) advisors has told a radio interviewer today that the Republican presidential nominee should release his tax returns “immediately”.
Roger Stone, equally reviled and renowned as one of the Republican party’s most aggressive campaign strategists, told The Fernand Amandi Show on 610 WIOD Miami radio that “I think he should release his tax returns immediately,” referring to the vast trove of tax documents that the Trump campaign has refused to release, citing an audit.
In the interview, first reported by Buzzfeed News, Stone was asked whether Trump, whose business success stands as his largest self-stated qualification for the presidency, should release his tax information publicly “in the interest of transparency”.
2015 email says Powell 'does recall' email conversation with Clinton
The author of a book that first recounted a scene at a dinner of Colin Powell telling Hillary Clinton about how he used a private email account while secretary of state – this author, Joe Conason, has called baloney on Powell’s current claim that he recalls no such dinner conversation.
On Friday, Powell’s office released a statement saying he “has no recollection of the dinner conversation.”
But Conason has now published an email from last June from Powell’s assistant stating explicitly that Powell “does recall sharing with Secretary Clinton his use of his email account”:
His principal assistant, Margaret “Peggy” Cifrino, informed me then via email that their calendar showed that the Albright dinner had occurred in June 2009. While he didn’t recall some details of the dinner because it had occurred seven years ago, according to Cifrino, he remembered what he did and didn’t say to Clinton on the topic in question that evening:
He does recall sharing with Secretary Clinton his use of his email account and how useful it was and transformative for the Department. He knew nothing then or until recently about her private home server and a personal domain, nor, therefore, could he have advised her on that or suggested it. By June I would assume her email system was already set up.
So it is perplexing for him to say he doesn’t remember that dinner conversation at all now, since, according to his own assistant, he remembered at least some of what he said as recently as two months ago.
Updated
It appears that the Trump campaign is motivating first-time Hispanic voters in North Carolina. But not in a positive way?:
North Carolina: since Trump launch 6/14/15, Hispanic voter registration has increased 22%, vs. 5% for all other voters.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 22, 2016
The Trump campaign’s perceived hostility to nonwhite voters may start with the candidate, but it’s promulgated by the rank and file on social media, according to a new AP examination of “the social media feeds of more than 50 current and former campaign employees who helped propel Trump through the primary elections”:
The campaign has employed a mix of veteran political operatives and outsiders. Most come across as dedicated, enthusiastic partisans, but at least seven expressed views that were overtly racially charged, supportive of violent actions or broadly hostile to Muslims.
Trump's paid campaign staffers during GOP primary used social media to spread racist, inflammatory content: https://t.co/6lbn2nfq0o
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) August 22, 2016
A graphic designer for Trump’s advance team approvingly posted video of a black man eating fried chicken and criticizing fellow blacks for ignorance, irresponsibility and having too many children. A Trump field organizer in Virginia declared that Muslims were seeking to impose Sharia law in America and that “those who understand Islam for what it is are gearing up for the fight.” [...]
Before being tapped as statewide director of coalitions, Craig Bachler of Bradenton, Florida, posted jokes in 2015 about Mexican accents superimposed over pictures of an overweight man wearing a sombrero. Bachler was named by the campaign as official staff in November, though there is no record he has been paid for his work. Bachler did not respond to a request for comment via Facebook or a message left at his office voicemail. After AP’s inquiries, Bachler blocked access to an AP reporter, and his Facebook account — which included a photo of Bachler with Trump — was scrubbed to remove the offensive post.
Read the full piece here.
In which the Breitbart site, the house organ of the Donald Trump campaign, mischaracterizes, we’d say, what happened to the Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt when he bravely committed last week to only getting all of his news from reading Breitbart for 48 hours straight.
“That’s not to say Breitbart is objective,” Adam wrote afterwards. “It just pushes its rightwing message with a surprising subtlety.”
Adam’s project was inspired by the appointment of Breitbart chief Steve Bannon as “CEO” of the Trump campaign.
Here’s the Breitbart home page from a couple minutes ago (since revised):
Adam does not use the word “genius” in his piece although it did make the stand-first. Here’s the piece if you would like to read it for yourself:
.@adamgabbatt only read Breitbart for two days and you won't believe what happened next https://t.co/RMzSHy2LtN
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 19, 2016
This isn’t Adam’s first tango with Trumpland. Back in 2012 when Trump was trying to get Barack Obama to release his passport and college records, Adam called Trump gatekeeper Michael Cohen to place a reciprocal request for Trump’s records. Cohen deemed the request “stupid.”
Update: the Breitbart commenters are manhandling Gabbatt!
Breitbart commenters have very good takes on @adamgabbatt pic.twitter.com/rliV1jMQcP
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 22, 2016
Updated
Tim Kaine’s in Las Vegas today. And Mike Pence is about to speak on a flatbed truck. The running mates get all the plum assignments:
GOP VP nominee @mike_pence will speak from this flatbed truck of a stage in Cedar Rapids this afternoon pic.twitter.com/yjPg5CNhBO
— Jason Noble (@jasonnobleDMR) August 22, 2016
Kaine speaks at the ironworkers' union convention in Las Vegas. His father—who owned an ironworking shop—is here too pic.twitter.com/7472eEw3Ez
— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) August 22, 2016
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Campaign: Clinton 'never took action... because of donations'
In a statement replying to the new emails released today by the Judicial Watch group, the Clinton campaign says that “Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation.”
Requests that action be taken, after all, are different from actual action being taken. Or so they might say. Here’s the statement:
Re JW emails, HRC campaign maintains HRC "never took action as Secretary of State" due to foundation donations. pic.twitter.com/PAOCFcBSQX
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) August 22, 2016
Clinton camp denies withholding work emails
The Clinton campaign responds to the Judicial Watch announcement that Clinton did not turn over “almost 15,000 documents” to the state department in accordance with an internal investigation of her handling of classified material.
The Clinton camp says “Hillary Clinton provided the state department with all the work-related emails she had in her possession in 2014.”
Clinton campaign statement after @washingtonpost report on FBI discovery of more emails pic.twitter.com/RnrPDv5QyJ
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) August 22, 2016
FBI director James Comey said last month that the FBI had “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”
A new poll of likely voters in Ohio by Monmouth University finds a four-point edge for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in a race that includes Libertarian party candidate Gary Johnson and the Green party’s Jill Stein.
RealClearPolitics’ average has Clinton up by 4 points in a four-way race in the Buckeye state. HuffPost Pollster has her up 2.3 points.
New Monmouth Poll of Ohio
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) August 22, 2016
Clinton: 43%
Trump: 39%
Johnson: 10%
The poll finds that Ohio governor John Kasich’s non-endorsement of Trump has not hurt him:
This has not hurt the governor’s reputation among his fellow Buckeyes – 38% say they think more highly of Kasich because he is not supporting Trump and just 17% think less highly of him. Another 44% say Kasich’s stand against Trump has had no impact on their opinion of the governor.
Further:
Monmouth poll finds that if @JohnKasich were the Republican nominee he'd be leading @HillaryClinton 57% to 33% in Ohio.
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) August 22, 2016
Updated
'Huma, I need your help now to intervene please'
Here’s another juicy email unearthed by Judicial Watch. Note that there’s no explicit nexus to the Clinton foundation here. It’s more a corporate interest cracking the whip to demand government access. The writer is a top Democratic political operative and paid consultant (this year she is a “top-ten bundler” for the Clinton campaign, the New York Times reports). The recipient is Abedin:
This does indeed go without saying https://t.co/CZau8mjsvf pic.twitter.com/BbpopepWSo
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) August 22, 2016
“Hope you are well.”
New Clinton emails contain additional requests for access for foundation donors
The conservative group Judicial Watch has released previously unseen emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin in 2009 that appear to show that Abedin was repeatedly approached by foundation consultant Doug Band, her friend, to ask for favors from the state department – meetings, embassy appointments – for foundation “friends” and donors.
Judicial Watch has obtained Clinton emails through a Freedom of information act lawsuit. Earlier this month, the group released additional emails between Band, Abedin, and another Clinton aide, also seeking a meeting with state department officials for an important Clinton foundation donor.
In a separate but related development, Judicial Watch said the Clinton team had failed to turn over “15,000 documents” to the state department as part of an internal investigation into how classified information was handled under the private server system Clinton used.
FBI director James Comey said last month that the FBI had “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”
FBI found almost 15,000 new Clinton documents. When will State release them? Court hearing today.
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) August 22, 2016
Here’s one Abedin-Band email chain highlighted by Judicial Watch. In the chain, Band, the foundation consultant, asks Abedin, then a state department employee, about arranging a meeting between the crown prince of Bahrain, a “good friend” of the foundation, and Clinton, then secretary of state.
Abedin’s email makes it clear that the request from Band does not represent “normal channels”:
From: Doug Band
To: Huma Abedin
Sent: Tue Jun 23 1:29:42 2009
Subject:
Cp of Bahrain in tomorrow to Friday
Asking to see her
Good friend of ours
From: Huma Abedin
To: Doug Band
Sent: Tue Jun 23 4:12:46 2009
Subject: Re:
He asked to see hrc thurs and fri thru normal channels. I asked and she said she doesn’t want to commit to anything for thurs or fri until she knows how she will feel. Also she says that she may want to go to ny and doesn’t want to be committed to stuff in ny…
From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com]
Sent: Thursday, June 25, 2009 10:35:15 AM
To: Doug Band
Subject:
Offering Bahrain cp 10 tomorrow for meeting woith [sic] hrc
If u see him, let him know
We have reached out thru official channels
Read the latest from Judicial Watch here.
Trump calls for shuttering Clinton Foundation
Bill Clinton last week told staff with the Clinton Foundation – the charitable organization whose projects include everything from literacy in Haiti to farming in east Africa to earthquake relief in Nepal – that the foundation would stop accepting gifts from foreign donors and he would resign from the board if Clinton is elected president.
Not good enough, Donald Trump said in a statement issued Monday morning calling the foundation “the most corrupt enterprise in political history”:
Hillary Clinton is the defender of the corrupt and rigged status quo. The Clintons have spent decades as insiders lining their own pockets and taking care of donors instead of the American people. It is now clear that the Clinton Foundation is the most corrupt enterprise in political history. What they were doing during Crooked Hillary’s time as Secretary of State was wrong then, and it is wrong now. It must be shut down immediately.
– Donald J. Trump
Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told ABC News that “millions of people around the world depend on the life-saving health treatment that the foundation provides” and shutting it “would threaten lives”:
Clinton camp manager: "Just pulling the plug" on Clinton Foundation "would threaten lives" https://t.co/yI4E7SCQ4N https://t.co/CeN6N9LGAm
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 22, 2016
Updated
In which Donald Trump running mate Mike Pence finds Trump’s gasbaggery about attracting African American supporters casually funny:
“Why are you laughing?” My god, this video of Pence on Fox News is incredible. https://t.co/iYGF8VUKkV pic.twitter.com/B1q6LxaiVf
— Andrew Kirell (@AndrewKirell) August 22, 2016
Pence reflects the view of some Trump supporters that Trump’s hyperbole is part of his charm and it’s foolish to take him literally.
The candidates are preparing for their meeting in the first presidential debate, at Hofstra University on Long Island, on 26 September. Donald Trump held his first debate prep session on Sunday at a golf club in New Jersey, the New York Times reported.
Clinton, meanwhile, will practice against an adversary “expected to confront her about the death of Vincent Foster, label her a rapist’s enabler, and invoke the personally painful memories of Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers,” Politico reports:
“You have to start off by saying, ‘I want to thank the American people, especially Monica and Gennifer Flowers,” anticipated a top Clinton ally with close ties to the campaign. “Nobody who is a friend of hers is going to want to say that in debate prep.”
Anthony Weiner should play Trump in the debate prep. I am dead serious. https://t.co/RcWXi8edmr
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) August 22, 2016
12-year-old in charge of Trump operation in key Colorado county
Donald Trump’s get-out-the-vote operation in Jefferson County, Colorado – part of the Denver metropolitan area – is being run by 12-year-old Weston Imer, local KMOV reports:
Imer is in charge of the operation where volunteers will gather and help get out the vote, and while sitting behind a desk may not be the coolest thing to do, he hopes to use the position to inspire others.
“Get involved,” Imer said. “That’s what I’m going to say. Get involved. Kids need to be educated.”
Imer’s mother, Laurel Imer, is the official field coordinator on paper, but she wants to give her son most of the responsibility and help show other parents - Democrat or Republican - how to get their kids involved.
“You have a responsibility to your children to teach them,” Laurel Imer said.
For those interested, the video on the WMOV web site is worth a watch. “Weston is hoping to continue his role until school starts in September,” the reporter says.
New FEC fillings show that the Trump campaign, which maintains a skeleton staff of about 70 people, has not significantly increased spending on payroll, office leases or other line items to indicate a national footprint.
The Hillary Clinton campaign employs about 700 people and runs a ground operation built on the template that delivered Barack Obama double victory. Colorado is theoretically a swing state but polling averages have Clinton far ahead there.
And don’t miss our previous coverage:
Updated
Trump: 'I'm not flip-flopping' on immigration
Donald Trump has denied that he is rejiggering his best-known policy suggestion, a plan to use a “deportation force” to expel millions of undocumented migrants from the United States and build a wall along the border with Mexico.
“I’m not flip-flopping,” Trump told Fox News. “We want to come up with a really fair but firm answer.”
Trump was pressed on the issue after reports surfaced that he had hinted to Latino leaders in a private weekend meeting that he was open to pathways to legal status for some undocumented people. His new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said on Sunday that Trump’s position on deportations was “to be determined.”
Here’s a transcript of Trump’s insistence on his consistency:
Trump this morning on immigration: "I'm not flip flopping. We want to come up with a really fair but firm answer." pic.twitter.com/Phdi3E5KsT
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) August 22, 2016
Read further:
Updated
Clinton on Louisiana: 'I am committed to visiting'
Following Donald Trump’s visit to flood zones in Louisiana on Friday, and the announcement that Barack Obama will visit the area on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton has issued a statement saying “I am committed to visiting communities affected by these floods, at a time when the presence of a political campaign will not disrupt the response.”
“This month’s floods in Louisiana are a crisis that demand a national response,” begins her statement, which continues:
More than 30,000 people have been rescued by the Coast Guard, National Guard, and other emergency responders. Thousands of people have lost everything. At least 13 lost their lives. We must make sure that all resources are brought to bear in responding to the crisis and helping communities rebuild.
“That is why I have called on supporters of this campaign to give what they can to the Red Cross, to bring much-needed aid and supplies to the more than 100,000 people affected by the floods. We also need to make sure that this crisis is not compounded by another, by ensuring mosquito abatement is happening hand-in-hand with flood response, to reduce the riska [sic] of mosquitoes that could carry the Zika virus from gaining a foothold in Louisiana.
“The best way to help Louisianans affected by these terrible floods is to make sure they have the resources they need today. I am committed to visiting communities affected by these floods, at a time when the presence of a political campaign will not disrupt the response, to discuss how we can and will rebuild together.
“In times of crisis, Americans have always come together to lift each other up, support each other, and rebuild stronger and better than before. That is what we must do now in Louisiana, and I am committed to standing with Louisianans every step of the way.”
Hello, and welcome to our live-wire coverage of the 2016 race for the White House. Former secretary of state Colin Powell has accused the Hillary Clinton cabal of trying to “pin” her email scandal on him, after the revelation last week that Clinton brought up Powell in discussing the issue with the FBI.
“Her people have been trying to pin it on me,” Powell told People magazine at a fundraiser for the Apollo theater in East Hampton, New York, on Saturday night. “The truth is, she was using [the private email server] for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did.”
Powell told NBC News last week he sent a memo to Clinton “describing his use of his personal AOL email account for unclassified messages and how it vastly improved communications within the State Department”. The New York Times reported last Thursday that Clinton told the FBI that Powell had “advised her to use a personal email account”. The report was based on a leak by Congress of notes from a classified interview.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Powell, 79, told People. “But it’s OK; I’m free.”
It doesn’t bother Powell. Will it bother voters?
Big Clinton ad buy
The Clinton campaign has reserved $80m in air time in eight competitive states for the fall, bringing their total spending on TV ads to $150m, the Associated Press reports. Donald Trump only began airing ads in recent days and has reserved just $5m worth.
A new ad the Clinton camp will air is called Just One, as in: “All it takes is one wrong move. Just one”…
The ad is running in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina and Omaha, Nebraska. Prominently excluded from that list: Virginia (where polling averages have Clinton up 8 points) and Colorado (ditto).
Trump teases dirt on TV hosts
A day after his newly minted campaign manager told a Sunday show host that “he doesn’t hurl personal insults”, Trump, apparently riled by something he saw on the MSNBC program Morning Joe, tweeted that he would “tell the real story” of the show’s hosts “when things calm down”.
Trump may have been reacting to this segment (although who knows how Trump’s brain cooks tweets):
.@rickwtyler: Reince Preibus sort of talked about Trump 'as if he graduated from diapers to big boy pants' https://t.co/5NlRA9O5L7
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 22, 2016
Some day, when things calm down, I'll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2016
Donald Trump’s life lately: totally craaazzzy. He just wants to be elected president so all you people will go away and he can spill the beans about Joe and Mika, presumably in his first turn in the Brady briefing room.
Trump wriggles on deportation plan
Trump may also be reversing himself on a call to deport undocumented migrants:
Thanks for reading, and please join us in the comments.
