A post was merged into an existing topic: Congressional Oversight 2020 - election edition
Now that we’ve seen so much underhanded hacking and sucking information from campaigns connected to Russia and others malignant sources, I now read pronouncements like T testing their campaign websites as a “pre-game” warning that more hacking is to come, and T’s team is doing fine.
But here’s this news, T has been securing his campaign websites.
Hackers have stepped up efforts to knock Trump campaign and business websites offline ahead of the U.S. election, in what a security firm working for the campaign said could be preparation for a larger digital assault, according to emails seen by Reuters.
The security assessment was prepared by staff at U.S. cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, which has been hired by President Donald Trump to help defend his campaign’s websites in an election contest overshadowed by warnings about hacking, disinformation and foreign interference.
Cloudflare is widely used by businesses and other organizations to help defend against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which aim to take down websites by flooding them with malicious traffic.
Internal Cloudflare emails sent to senior company managers - including CEO Matthew Prince - on July 9 state that the number and severity of attacks on Trump websites increased in the preceding two months and reached record levels in June. The emails did not give the total number of attacks.
“As we get closer to the election, attacks are increasing in both numbers (and) sophistication” and succeeded in disrupting access to the targeted websites for short periods of time between March 15 and June 6, the assessment said.
Cloudflare did not respond directly to questions about the emails or their contents. The company said it was providing security services to both U.S. presidential campaigns and declined to answer further questions about the nature or details of its work.
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Just a little spot check on what the polls are saying…per FiveThirtyEight.com and I realize we are not to put too much emphasis on these, I still like seeing the UNFAVORABLES.
Polling data from Sept 1 2020
Polling Aug 31, 2020
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More than 350 faith leaders to back Biden for president, including many first-time endorsers
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Biden Expected to Surpass $300 Million Raised in August, Shattering Record
Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to report a record-breaking haul of donations for August, raising more than $300 million between his campaign and his shared committees with the Democratic Party, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The sum would shatter past monthly records as small donors have poured money into Mr. Biden’s coffers, especially since the selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, and big contributors, from Silicon Valley to Wall Street, have given checks that can be as large as $721,300.
In a sign of the financial momentum behind Democrats, ActBlue, the main site that processes donations to the party, reported the second-biggest fund-raising day in its history on Monday, with more than $35 million donated. A majority of Mr. Biden’s August total came from online grass-roots donors, according to another person familiar with the figures.
The people familiar with Mr. Biden’s fund-raising did not know the exact final figure for the month of August, or how much higher than $300 million it would be.
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Exclusive: Dem group warns of apparent Trump Election Day landslide
A top Democratic data and analytics firm told “Axios on HBO” it’s highly likely that President Trump will appear to have won — potentially in a landslide — on election night, even if he ultimately loses when all the votes are counted.
Why this matters : Way more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, due to fears of the coronavirus, and it will take days if not weeks to tally these. This means Trump, thanks to Republicans doing almost all of their voting in person, could hold big electoral college and popular vote leads on election night.
- Imagine America, with its polarization and misinformation, if the vote tally swings wildly toward Joe Biden and Trump loses days later as the mail ballots are counted.
- That is what this group, Hawkfish, which is funded by Michael Bloomberg and also does work for the Democratic National Committee and pro-Biden Super PACs, is warning is a very real, if not foreordained, outcome.
What they’re saying: Hawkfish CEO Josh Mendelsohn calls the scenario a “red mirage.”
- “We are sounding an alarm and saying that this is a very real possibility, that the data is going to show on election night an incredible victory for Donald Trump,” he said.
- “When every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be some day after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage,” Mendelsohn said. “It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted.”
Data: Hawkfish; Graphic: Axios Visuals
By the numbers: Under one of the group’s modeling scenarios, Trump could hold a projected lead of 408-130 electoral votes on election night, if only 15% of the vote by mail (VBM) ballots had been counted.
- Once 75% of mail ballots were counted, perhaps four days later, the lead could flip to Biden’s favor.
- This particular modeling scenario portrays Biden as ultimately winning a massive victory, 334-204.
- The methodology, described in detail below, was based in part on polling from FiveThirtyEight in August.
- The ultimate results may well sit somewhere between these low-end and high-end scenarios and will also be impacted by who actually votes, and how voters’ views about their options change over the coming weeks.
The other side: “The news media should get out of the business of predicting the future,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said in response.
Between the lines: Hawkfish is not just trying to educate the public about the possibility that Trump could prematurely declare victory, or try to delegitimize a Biden victory if it took days or weeks to determine.
- The group is also trying to sensitize state and county elections officials, news and social media organizations, and the courts to the perils of premature results — and to the possibility of Trump and his team applying challenges and political pressure to reject a high share of mailed-in ballots counted after election day.
- And the group is warning voters that rejection rates for mail ballots are higher than in-person voting.
- To avoid having their votes thrown out, Hawkfish is advising voters to be extra careful about voting early enough and following all the instructions to the letter — or, potentially, putting on masks and gloves and going early either to safely vote in person or return the mail ballot in person.
Methodology: Hawkfish surveyed 17,263 registered voters in 50 states and DC, July 1-Aug. 16, 2020, to assess who people planned to vote for and whether they intend to vote by mail or in person at a polling place.
- Responses were filtered for those described as definitely voting or likely to vote and weighted for state and national registered voter demographics.
- The scenarios assumed votes at polls would be counted on election day itself (Nov. 3). A scenario taking a week to count mail ballots would translate to approximately 15% per day on average.
- In another scenario, mail ballot counts took four days at 25% per day. For states that have had high vote-by-mail participation rates, Hawkfish assumed they would take two days
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The presidential debates will be moderated by Chris Wallace, Steve Scully and Kristen Welker.
The Commission on Presidential Debates has selected the moderators for the three debates between President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. this fall, as well as the single vice-presidential debate, according to a person familiar with the planning.
Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” anchor, will moderate the first debate on Sept. 29, to be held in Cleveland, the person said.
The second debate, a town hall-style forum scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami, will be moderated by Steve Scully of C-SPAN.
And the final one, on Oct. 22 in Nashville, will be moderated by Kristen Welker of NBC.
The vice-presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, which is set for Oct. 7 in Salt Lake City, will be moderated by Susan Page of USA Today.
The choices of moderators are likely to anger the Trump campaign, which has made a list of demands and named moderators it considers acceptable.
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This has some good rationales for not to panic too up front about election returns - yes, it is scary…per Axios Hawkfish [Axios - Will Dems lose on election night per Hawkfish - not all ballots in?]🗳 2020 General Election - Trump vs Biden from @anon95374541
- Do not declare a winner - and Biden to never concede (per Obama)
This Is Democrats’ Doomsday Scenario for Election Night
What if early results in swing states on Nov. 3 show President Trump ahead, and he declares victory before heavily Democratic mail-in votes, which he has falsely linked with fraud, are fully counted?
“We’re likely to see a significantly dramatic blue shift in multiple states because of the virus and the political response to the virus,” said Edward Foley, an election law expert at Ohio State University, who coined the term “blue shift.”
“How will the public process the concept that election night may end in uncertainty, and this phenomenon is not fraud, it’s just the counting process?” he said.
While TV viewers are used to election night projections of who has won, some broadcast and digital journalists are discussing ways to clearly inform voters that results may be incomplete.
A claim of victory on election night by Mr. Trump, before results are certified by officials, would have no legal effect, Dr. Hasen said. “That said,” he added, “it could have a great political effect and convince his most ardent supporters that he has won the election and any changes in the counts are due to fraud. That’s really a huge concern.”
Partisan lawsuits are already flying in multiple states around voting procedures, and legal and political challenges are sure to come where results are razor-thin.
Mail ballots, whose use soared in primaries this year because of the pandemic, have been subject to high rejection rates because of human errors: omitted signatures, missed deadlines and missing postmarks. For many Democrats, recent fears that the Postal Service could fail to deliver ballots on time to be counted could potentially swing the pendulum back toward in-person voting.
The party is shifting from its springtime message, that mail voting is safer, to one urging voters to request and return absentee ballots early, and if possible to vote in person. Michelle Obama told viewers of the Democratic National Convention, “We’ve got to vote early — in person if possible.”
In Pennsylvania, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, and other officials have called for a new law to allow absentee ballots to be opened and processed as early as three weeks before Election Day. Those results would be reported at the same time as Election Day in-person votes.
The point is “to try to avoid candidates making false claims about wins and losses,” said Representative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from the Philadelphia suburbs who backs the legislation.
Republican state lawmakers partly support the reform, calling in a bill for early processing of mail ballots the Saturday before Election Day. For now, the bill is deadlocked because Democrats oppose other voting changes sought by Republicans, such as eliminating ballot drop-off boxes.
“I worry about a deadlock and not doing the right thing for our elections,” Ms. Dean said. “I’m hoping cooler heads will prevail.”
And see how insightful some voters are…they know that the ballots will be coming in later…
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Presidential Photo Opp Falsely Identifies Owner Of Burned Business
Donald Trump made a big deal Tuesday out of a photo opp he said was with the owner of a camera store that burned down during recent protests in Kenosha. During the visit, he told the man “A day earlier we would have saved your store, one day earlier.” But now we are learning the store didn’t belong to the man who met with Trump, instead it was the previous owner. The current owner Tom Gram turned down the president’s request to appear on camera with him to tour the damage. The NBC affiliate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin explains “Gram has owned Rode’s Camera Shop since he bought the business from the Rode family eight years ago.”
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He’s just a roll guys 
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I don’t know about anybody else but I am here for Harris v. Pence. Like what is his angle of approach going to look like? I have to know that. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the Presidential debate or what nightmares the lead-up to or fallout from the election will bring, but in the mean time I will be anticipating the VP debates like it’s the new season of The Umbrella Academy.
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Me too. Love Harris. She’s formidable.
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As election nears, Trump builds the very ‘deep state’ he railed against
White House manipulation of US intelligence on Russian and Chinese interference may rival WMD fiasco that led to Iraq war, say experts
Two months before the presidential election, the US intelligence agencies are under increasing pressure from the Trump administration to provide only the information it wants to hear.
After installing loyalist John Ratcliffe at the pinnacle of the intelligence community, the administration is seeking to limit congressional oversight, and has removed a veteran official from a sensitive national security role in the justice department
One former senior intelligence officer has suggested Donald Trump is seeking to create the very thing he was repeatedly complained about: a “deep state”. Another official has compared it to the intelligence fiasco that preceded the 2003 Iraq invasion.
The intense focus of the current struggle is the covert Russian role in the election campaign. The intelligence community has assessed that Moscow is taking an active role, as it did in 2016, to damage Joe Biden and boost Trump, largely through spreading disinformation. But administration officials have sought to stop public discussion of such interference.
ABC News reported this week that an aide to the homeland security secretary, Chad Wolf, blocked a bulletin in July warning about Russian efforts to create doubts about Joe Biden’s mental health.
Ratcliffe, the new director of national intelligence (DNI), informed Congress at the end of last week that his office would no longer provide in-person briefings on election security, but would instead deliver written reports that could not be subjected to cross-examination by sceptical legislators.
He justified his action by accusing Congress of leaking classified material but did not explain why the same risk did not apply to written reports. John McLaughlin, former deputy CIA director, said the fears of leaks should not outweigh the need for transparency.
“Frankly, having briefed the Congress many times, it’s possible to talk about sensitive things without giving away sources and methods,” McLaughlin told the Guardian.
“In my view the American voter needs to know as much about this as can be revealed. They need to know if someone is attempting to influence their vote or manipulate them.”
Ratcliffe’s predecessor as acting DNI, Richard Grenell, another highly partisan figure, had sought to consolidate responsibility for election security under that office, taking the highly charged issue out of the hands of career intelligence professionals.
And on Monday it emerged that the attorney general, William Barr, had abruptly removed a veteran official running the law and policy office in the justice department’s national security division.
The official, Brad Wiegmann, was a widely respected career professional, part of whose job was to advise on public disclosure of evidence of election interference. He was replaced by a much younger prosecutor, Kellen Dwyer, a conservative cyber-security specialist with very limited national security experience.
Katrina Mulligan, a former national security official who helped draft the policy by which the law and policy office could raise the alarm on meddling, said: “It remains the only avenue the [justice department] has to disclose foreign interference in the absence of criminal charges.
“As you can imagine, when it comes to foreign interference we may have things going on that the public should know, and we don’t want to wait to have all our ducks in a row for an indictment, before we disclose that to the public,” Mulligan argued.
Is China really the biggest meddler?
As more voices on the issue have been muted, senior Trump officials have been putting out a different message on election interference – that it is China, not Russia, that is the biggest meddler.
“It simply isn’t true that somehow Russia is a greater national security threat than China,” Ratcliffe told Fox News. “China is the greatest threat that we face.”
On Wednesday evening, Barr echoed the claim. “I believe it’s China,” he told CNN, “because I’ve seen the intelligence, that’s what I’ve concluded.”
He would not say who China was backing, but he did not need to. In early August, William Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, issued a statement in which he said Russia and China were backing different sides in the election.
“Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former vice-president Biden,” Evanina said, adding: “We assess that China prefers that President Trump – whom Beijing sees as unpredictable – does not win re-election.”
He gave details of concrete actions that Moscow was taking to damage Biden but was much more vague about Beijing, saying it was “expanding its influence efforts ahead of November 2020 to shape the policy environment” to “deflect and counter criticism of China”.
Democrats and intelligence professionals have complained a false equivalence is being made between the two threats when it comes to direct election interference.
“The documentary evidence on Russia is massive and the documentary evidence – in public at least – on China is minuscule,” McLaughlin said.
John Sipher, a CIA veteran who once ran the agency’s Russia operations, argued in a New York Times commentary on Tuesday that the pattern of the Trump administration’s actions “smacks of the very thing that Mr Trump has used to stoke outrage in his followers – the formation of a politicised national security apparatus that can serve as a personal weapon for the president. A ‘deep state’.”
David Rohde, journalist and author of a book published in April on the issue – In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State” – agreed with Sipher’s assessment.
“If a ‘deep state’ is a group of officials who secretly wield government power with little accountability or transparency, Trump and his loyalists increasingly fit that definition,” Rohde said. “Under the guise of stopping a ‘coup’ that does not exist, Trump is politicising the intelligence community and the justice department and using them to boost his re-election effort.”
The battle over intelligence is set to intensify as the election approaches. Barr has picked a prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the FBI and special counsellor investigators who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The attorney general has said he would not observe normal protocol and wait until after the election to publish Durham’s findings, or at least a version of those findings, with the likely aim of creating the impression that Trump was the victim of a conspiracy to undermine his presidency.
“The Durham investigation presents the opportunity for bad actors to make a lot of mischief, but the lack of clarity makes it difficult for observers to criticise,” said Susan Hennessey, a former National Security Agency attorney.
She added that the Trump tactics in manipulating US intelligence represented a historic threat, potentially overshadowing the fiasco that led to the 2003 Iraq invasion.
“What we are seeing now is, in some respects, even worse than the intelligence failures surrounding weapons of mass destruction,” said Hennessey, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and executive editor of the Lawfare blog. “Iraq was obviously immensely consequential and illustrates why it is imperative to guard against even subtle political influence in intelligence reporting. But the politicisation here is brazen and explicitly partisan in nature.
“It’s all these little things and so it’s often hard to pin down the precise place where the line has been crossed,” she added. “Lots of lines have been crossed. At this point, the cumulative picture of where we are at is not that there is a risk of politicisation of intelligence, but that we’ve already crossed the Rubicon.”
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This would be hilarious. I insist on buzzers for lies. We wouldn’t be able to hear a thing Trump is saying during his turns.
Biden calls for live fact-checking at debates with Trump
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Watch: Biden to Trump: My son “wasn’t a sucker”
During a speech on the latest jobs report, Joe Biden directly addressed President Trump for reportedly calling American war heroes “losers” and “suckers,” slamming Trump with a personal anecdote about his late son, Beau.
What they’re saying: “When my son volunteered to join the United States military, as the attorney general, and went to Iraq for the year — won the bronze star and other commendations — he wasn’t a sucker,” Biden said.
- “When my son was an assistant U.S. Attorney who volunteered to go to Kosovo while the war was going on, as a civilian, he wasn’t a sucker,” Biden added.
- He continued: “The service men and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not losers.”
- Biden specifically mentioned Beau’s service in Kosovo on the same day that Trump met with the President of Serbia and the Prime Minister of Kosovo at the White House to sign an economic normalization agreement.
Driving the news: The Atlantic reported Thursday that, according to multiple sources, the president has privately referred to Americans who died while serving in war as “losers” and “suckers.”
- The president has denied the claims, telling reporters: " It is a disgraceful situation, by a magazine that is a terrible magazine, I don’t read it."
- Later in his press conference on Friday, Biden said that he believes the reporting is true. “I’ve never been as disappointed in my whole career with a leader that i’ve worked with, president or otherwise,” he said. “It is a disgrace.”
The big picture: Biden’s visit to Delaware was his fourth in-person campaign event this week — he’s largely stuck to virtual events until now. And although he released a written statement last night criticizing the president for his reported remarks, he’s continuing to directly address him during these remarks.
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Some of T’s messaging is coming through…
Why Biden could still lose the suburbs to Trump
Two Democratic strategists who recently viewed focus groups of suburban voters described high-propensity voters increasingly concerned about unrest in urban centers, though both strategists said it was unclear whether that concern would push them to Biden or to Trump.
One of the strategists described a focus group in which white, college-educated women reacted to the protests by discussing their own property values and, in one woman’s case, her family’s mortgage.
“White women who have college degrees are starting to really get sick of this,” the strategist said.
Some state polls are showing signs of it. In Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, a Monmouth University poll released last week found that Biden’s lead over Trump had narrowed statewide, and that Trump was leading Biden by 2 percentage points in 10 swing counties, including some Philadelphia suburbs, erasing a large advantage Biden had built there earlier this year.
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Ok…newsflash, T’s campaign is having a cash crunch issue. At this juncture, it wouldn’t seem like that is possible, but ok, we’ll gladly take it.
Trump faces surprising cash crunch
Money concerns are very real for President Trump’s campaign — an unusual predicament for a sitting president, and one that worries veteran Republican operatives, with Trump so far behind in swing states as the race climaxes.
Why it matters: The campaign’s view is that Trump will get his message out, and he depends less on paid media than normal politicians. But the number of states Trump has to worry about has actually grown, and Joe Biden’s massive August fundraising haul has given his campaign a lift as early voting begins.
The New York Times leads today’s paper with a big Labor Day scene-setter with several intriguing references to money problems for Trump:
- "The light television spending and advertising blackouts in some key states have mystified allies," The Times reports.
- Trump "is expected to increase television spending next week, but several Republicans said that Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager since July, was taking a cautious approach after the former leadership spent huge sums on television and digital ads earlier this year, to no discernible effect."
Last Monday, AP’s Brian Slodysko reported that the Trump campaign had pulled most TV ads over the previous week, ceding the airwaves to Biden, who was outspending Trump by more than 10 to 1.
- Biden and DNC raised a stunning $365 million in August , breaking the record for one month of presidential fundraising.
- At the end of July, before the announcement of Sen. Kamala Harris swelled Biden’s fundraising, Trump reported slightly more cash on hand.
In Final Stretch, Biden Defends Lead Against Trump’s Onslaught
The president is attempting to overtake his Democratic challenger with a strategy of racial polarization in heavily white Midwestern states, even as Democrats make inroads in the Republican-leaning South and West.
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What’s interesting is that in all of the e-mails they send out begging for cash they claim they’re crushing Biden in terms of money, which probably undermines their efforts.
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As part of their “if I say it, it must be true,” Campaign strategy.
And it could be part of this arrangement.
How Trump Draws on Campaign Funds to Pay Legal Bills
He has drawn on campaign donations as a piggy bank for his legal expenses to a degree far greater than any of his predecessors.
In New York, Mr. Trump dispatched a team of lawyers to seek damages of more than $1 million from a former campaign worker after she claimed she had been the target of sexual discrimination and harassment by another aide. The lawyers have been paid $1.5 million by the Trump campaign for work on the case and others related to the president.
In Washington, Mr. Trump and his campaign affiliates hired lawyers to assist members of his staff and family — including a onetime bodyguard, his oldest son and his son-in-law — as they were pulled into investigations related to Russia and Ukraine. The Republican National Committee has paid at least $2.5 million in legal bills to the firms that did this and other legal work.
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Yeah, and that backfires big time; when people believe you have plenty of money, they’re less likely to give.
We also know that there’s been some strange shenanigans behind the scenes with Parscale and others raiding the coffers. I remember a while back state and local GOP went begging to congressional GOP, urging them to get the RNC to help them, and thus far have been getting nada because Jared Kushner runs it. What do you want to bet Trump has short-sightedly robbed them blind and now can’t pay the bills like usual?
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