Polls as of 8.30.20
The polls can switch daily and of course, difficult to stake the whole race on these changing polls.
After hearing from T’s camp that he is leading, these polls show Biden continues to lead in many battleground states. I just like to refer to them as a marker.
Based on all polls…
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden have emerged from their presidential nominating conventions with each candidate believing he has a head of steam. Trump’s job approval ratings and standing in polls are perilously low for an incumbent, but Biden and other Democrats vividly remember 2016, when Trump made an against-all-odds October comeback and defeated Hillary Clinton.
Five key questions as the 2020 campaign moves toward the fall home stretch:
WHAT WILL A COVID-19 CAMPAIGN LOOK LIKE?
Expect a flurry of travel and speeches as the candidates spend the next nine weeks desperately trying to move the needle and win new votes against the backdrop of a global pandemic.
Trump is set to launch an aggressive travel schedule with multiple events a week, according to advisers. After an arena rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, early this summer drew a paltry crowd, his campaign has settled on a new format in the age of the coronavirus: packing smaller crowds into open-air airport hangars. The campaign has also been handing out masks at its events and, on Friday, told attendees they would be mandatory, per local regulations. He’s also planning a series of policy speeches and is expected to continue to use the powers of his office — including signing executive orders and issuing pardons — to help his prospects.
Biden is planning to ramp up travel to battleground states after Labor Day after spending most of the spring and summer at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, holding mostly virtual events, with only occasional travel to tightly controlled gatherings. Campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond said the former vice president will be active but emphasized that Biden’s events still will follow public health guidelines. That means no indoor, crowded rallies and lots of mask-wearing. Expect plenty of roundtables, meet-and-greets and question-and-answer sessions. If there are larger gatherings, the drive-in watch party outside Biden’s nomination acceptance address could be the blueprint.
WHOSE VERSION OF THE OTHER CONVINCES MORE VOTERS?
Trump will continue trying to win back suburban, female and older voters, and win over independents and people who didn’t vote four years ago, by painting the election as a stark choice between law and order and anarchy and between a radical, socialist takeover and economic prosperity. Never mind that Biden has spent decades in the political establishment and California Sen. Kamala Harris, his running mate, is a former prosecutor. Trump will use every scare tactic he can muster.
If his 2016 race is any indication, expect Trump to launch a scorched-earth strategy if he feels he’s losing come October. Realizing his only shot then was to drive up Clinton’s unfavorable ratings to match his own, Trump’s campaign used every trick they could think of, including inviting women who accused Bill Clinton of rape and unwanted sexual advances to appear at one of the debates.
Attacks on Biden’s family? Accusations he’s drugged up or senile? There is no line Trump won’t cross to win.
Biden will continue to hammer Trump as a fundamental threat to democracy and try to make the case that the president is a selfish, corrupt figure incapable of empathy. Biden will sell himself as a steady, experienced hand with a progressive policy agenda on issues including climate action and criminal justice – just not as progressive as Trump tries to make him when he blasts Biden as the front man for a “radical” takeover.
Biden’s campaign believes that he is enough of a known quantity that voters beyond Trump’s base simply won’t buy the president’s descriptions of the former vice president. If they are right, they see Trump’s base-driven campaign as one that opens up a wide coalition – from progressives who aren’t in love with Biden to anti-Trump moderates Republicans – for the Democratic ticket.
CORONAVIRUS AND AN OCTOBER SURPRISE?
Biden has defined his White House bid from the start as a moral and competency case against Trump. The COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified the approach. Biden’s campaign believes there’s no cover for Trump with the coronavirus death toll surpassing 180,000 and climbing, cases nearing the 6 million mark, unemployment hovering in double digits and Congress at an impasse on further economic aid.
In remarks Thursday before Trump’s nomination acceptance speech, Harris summarized the campaign’s thinking: “Trump’s incompetence is nothing new,” she said, “but in January of this year, it became deadly.” She said the incumbent “failed at the most basic and important job of a president … to protect us.”
Trump is hoping for a late development that could be a campaign game-changer: The release of a vaccine that would mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic on his watch, before Americans vote. His administration has been doing everything it can to accelerate the process, along with hyping new therapeutics, even when it’s not clear they work. “We’ll produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner,” he said in his convention keynote. It’s unclear, however, whether science can deliver on his timetable.
HOW IMPORTANT ARE THE DEBATES?
They’re crucial.
The conventions largely succeeded in fulfilling both campaigns’ objectives, so the debates – scheduled for Sept. 29, Oct. 15 and Oct. 22 – will be the most high-profile opportunities for the candidates to highlight contrasts, animate core supporters and cajole the small but critical slice of persuadable voters.
Biden and his team say they relish the idea of confronting Trump face to face. “The debates will give the V.P. the chance to call Trump on all of his B.S.,” Richmond said.
It also will be another chance for the 77-year-old Democrat to work to dismantle Trump’s framing that Biden is too old for the job. Richmond said that narrative could backfire on Trump, himself a 74-year-old who regularly mangles syntax and offers meandering answers.
Some in Trump’s camp seem to agree. After months of trying to cast Biden as feeble and mentally diminished, they’re now talking up Biden’s abilities as a way to try to lower expectations on Trump’s side.
“Joe Biden is really good at debates,” Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller has been saying, portraying Biden as much more skilled than Hillary Clinton.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO HAVE A WINNER?
It might not be on election night.
The campaigns and national parties are engaged in lawsuits across many states, arguing over rules for absentee voting amid the pandemic, and that litigation could continue if results are close on Nov. 3.
Republicans and Democrats alike are pushing their supporters to ask for absentee mail ballots, even as Trump continues to question the integrity of the election before a single vote is cast.
Don’t expect that landscape to change between now and Election Day – or even for several weeks afterward. Trump has refused to say whether he’ll accept the results if he loses, and Clinton has warned Biden not to concede if the election is remotely close.
One thing is clear, though: The Constitution sets Inauguration Day as Jan. 20, and barring catastrophic developments, either Trump or Biden will take the oath of office that day.
In 2017, Trump famously described participants in a white supremacist march as “very fine people.” Now, as the 2020 presidential campaign barrels toward its conclusion, the Trump campaign is accepting thousands in donations from a notorious neo-Nazi leader and other racist extremists.
In between stints in prison, Morris Gulett set up an outpost of the Aryan Nations, also known as the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, in Louisiana. He promoted his group as the “most-feared and revered white supremacist organization the world has ever known.” The Trump campaign has repeatedly accepted cash from Gulett.
A cache of Gulett’s website from 2016 promoted white Anglo-Saxons as “the supreme ruling race.” (The website is currently offline.)
We believe that the White, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic and kindred peoples are the direct descendants of the Adamic man made in the image of YHVH (Genesis 1:27), and were placed here to be the light bearers and supreme ruling race (Deuteronomy 7:6; Deuteronomy 28:10) of this lost and dying world.
The same website also described “miscegenation and integration” as “an abomination to He who created us.” He once said that he would celebrate Black History Month when “when every Negro becomes just that – history.”
Gulett is also deeply anti-Semitic, ending every sermon with a Nazi salute. His website asserted that “the Jew is the literal child of Satan and is the natural enemy of the White race, the Children of God.”
The Trump campaign has accepted at least $2000 from Gulett in 29 separate transactions since December 2017. The most recent contribution from Gulett, according to Federal Election Commission data, was dated May 31, 2020.
Gulett has also donated at least $626 to the Republican National Committee from August 2018 to June 2020. Most of these contributions appear to be the result of donations to Trump’s joint fundraising committees, where the amount donated is split between the Trump campaign and the RNC.
Is it possible that the Trump campaign is simply unaware of these donations or Gulett’s background? No. Gulett’s contributions were brought to the attention of the Trump campaign in July 2018 by The Forward. At the time, Gulett had donated to the Trump campaign three times for a total of $200. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The Forward.
The Trump campaign also did not respond to a request for comment by Popular Information about Gulett’s continued donations.
Trump accepts maximum contribution from infamous racist
Gulett’s donations are not an anomaly. The Trump campaign has also accepted the maximum donation from Peter Zieve, a Washington State businessman. Zieve was sued by Washington State for discriminating against minority applicants and imposing his racist views on his employees.
The lawsuit describes how Zieve allegedly screened applicants by race, hired a nearly all-white staff, and offered employees a $1000 bonus for getting married and another $1000 bonus for having children. The stated purpose of the “procreation bonus” was to prevent the country from being overrun by minorities.
In a February 6, 2015 email, Zieve stated that he found immigrants from developing countries “repulsive” and didn’t want them “around me.” In an October 2, 2015 email announcing the birth of his own daughter, Zieve said that “381,000 terrorist savages have gotten into Europe so far this year and if we don’t make more babies the light will out on civilization.”
Zieve settled the lawsuit in 2017 for $485,000 and agreed to a consent decree to curb his discriminatory conduct.
In 2018, three days after Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS) said she would sit in the front row of a lynching, Zieve donated the legal maximum to her campaign. Hyde-Smith returned the money after the donation was reported by Popular Information.
In 2020, Trump accepted $5600 from Zieve — the legal maximum — to support his primary and general election campaigns. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
(Zieve has also donated $2800 in 2020 to Senator Martha McSally (R-AZ), who is facing a serious challenge from former astronaut Mark Kelly (D).)
Trump accepts donations from writer for an "overtly white nationalist organ"
K.C. McAlpin is a long-time associate of John Tanton, “the racist architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement.” Tanton founded a constellation of anti-immigrant groups. A collection of Tanton’s private papers at the University of Michigan exposed his white nationalist views.
“I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that,” Tanton wrote. McAlpin defended Tanton’s comments in a 2018 column posted on Tanton’s website. According to McAlpin, Tanton’s comments were not “about race” but “the preservation of European culture and traditions.” McAlpin argues that “Tanton was right about that concern.” McAlpin is also a frequent donor to the Trump campaign.
McAlpin has held a variety of positions in Tanton’s groups and has written regularly for The Social Contract, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an “overtly white nationalist organ.”
In a 2017 column, McAlpin praised “The Camp of the Saints,” a racist novel favored by white nationalists. The novel depicts immigrants as “diseased people who eat human feces.” The plot involves a group of Indian immigrants who invade France, overrun the content of Europe, and destroy the “white race.” It was cited as inspiration by mass shooters in New Zealand and Texas. McAlpin said the author, Jean Raspail, had “amazing foresight,” and the book is “not racist.” McAlpin insisted that Raspali’s description of refugees as “wretched creatures” who were “starting to rot” was not an insult.
McAlpin has donated about $1600 to the Trump campaign since April 2019. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from Popular Information.
Bigoted businessman kicks in $10 million for Trump’s reelection
One of the biggest supporters of Trump’s reelection campaign is Timothy Mellon, “a reclusive heir to the wealthy Mellon family fortune.” Mellon has donated $10 million to American First Action, the approved Super PAC of Trump’s 2020 campaign. America First Action is chaired by Linda McMahon, a former member of Trump’s cabinet, and stocked with alums of the Trump campaign and Trump White House.
In a self-published autobiography, Mellon wrote that social programs had made black people “even more belligerent” and " unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations." Blacks who benefit from social programs like nutrition assistance or Obamacare are “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”
Mellon described “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, [and] LGBT Studies” as “meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome.”
Mellon has also donated $20 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund and $10 million to Senate Leadership Fund, two Super PACs working to elect Republicans to Congress. Oddly, Mellon donated $2,700 to Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in 2018.
A spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez told the Washington Post, which first reported on Mellon’s autobiography, that she would return the contribution. America First Action did not respond to the Washington Post’s request for comment.
2020 Democratic presidential candidiate Joe Biden delivers remarks in Pittsburgh on public safety and law enforcement.
Why isn’t this on C-Span’s YouTube channel?
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.
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
More than 350 faith leaders to back Biden for president, including many first-time endorsers
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.
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
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.
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
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…
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.”
He’s just a roll guys 
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.
Me too. Love Harris. She’s formidable.
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.”
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.
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.
