Presidential Election Live: Donald Trump’s Victory
Donald J. Trump’s victory in the presidential race on Tuesday night capped a remarkable election in which several Democratic Senate candidates fell short and Republicans retained their majority in the House of Representatives. Here are some key takeaways from a stunning result that upended conventional expectations and set the stage for a drastic reordering of politics in Washington:
• Mr. Trump took the stage at the Hilton just before 3 a.m. and told his supporters that Hillary Clinton called him to concede the election. Striking a gracious note, he wished her well and said, “We owe her a major debt of gratitude for her debt to our country.”
• Reading from teleprompters and flanked by Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana and his son, Barron, Mr. Trump said he wanted to “reclaim our country’s destiny” and be bold and daring. He also called for unity and said that he hoped Democrats and Republicans would work together.
• Democratic hopes that Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Mr. Trump crumbled as the evening wore on, as the Republican candidate’s bombastic style appeared to win significant support among white, working-class and rural voters across the country.
• Mrs. Clinton’s loss seemed to result, in part, from a worse-than-expected showing among African-Americans and young voters — two important parts of the coalition that lifted President Obama to victories in 2008 and 2012.
— Black voters made up 12 percent of the national electorate this year, nearly the same as in 2012. Mrs. Clinton won a broad majority of black voters — 88 percent, compared with 8 percent for Mr. Trump. But Mr. Obama received 93 percent of the African-American vote four years ago.
Adver— Mrs. Clinton also did slightly worse than Mr. Obama among young voters. People under 30 made up 19 percent of this year’s electorate, the same as in 2012. Mrs. Clinton got 54 percent of their support, compared with Mr. Obama’s 60 percent. Mr. Trump had the backing of 37 percent of voters under 30, the same percentage that Mitt Romney won in 2012.
— Mr. Trump won in part on his strength with voters who were not strongly identified with either party. Independents made up 31 percent of 2016 voters, compared with 29 percent in 2012. Mrs. Clinton won 42 percent of independents, compared with Mr. Trump’s 47 percent, while 6 percent voted for Gary Johnson and 3 percent supported Jill Stein.
— In the key battleground of Florida, Mr. Trump built his support largely on voters who expressed deep dismay with Washington. Nearly nine in 10 of his voters in Florida said they were dissatisfied or angry with the state of the federal government. Just as many disapproved of Mr. Obama’s job performance, and three-quarters thought the president’s health care law went too far.
— Nearly four in 10 Florida voters said they were most interested in electing a president who would bring serious change, and Mr. Trump won that group by a broad margin. Mrs. Clinton won voters looking for a compassionate, experienced or more judicious leader — but it was not enough to cancel out Mr. Trump’s support among those hungry for change.
— Hispanic voters made up 11 percent of voters nationwide in 2016, just 1 point higher than in 2012. While Mrs. Clinton got 65 percent support among Hispanics, compared with 29 percent for Mr. Trump, her support from this group was 6 points lower than Mr. Obama’s in 2012.
— While Mrs. Clinton did better than Mr. Trump among nonwhite voters in Florida, it was not enough to offset his success with white voters, who skew older in the state. He won those by nearly 2 to 1, including those with a college degree. One-quarter of Florida’s electorate was white and over 60. Mr. Trump pulled most of his support from the Gulf Coast and the central part of the state, a hub for wealthy retirees, offsetting Mrs. Clinton’s gaping lead in the Miami and Orlando areas.
— Mr. Trump also did well in Ohio, where voters ages 18 to 29 were 11 points less likely to support the Democratic candidate this year than in 2012, with Mr. Johnson and Ms. Stein capturing 7 percent of their votes. Black voters in Ohio were 6 points less likely to support Mrs. Clinton than they were to support Mr. Obama four years ago.
— In North Carolina, 30 percent of voters were nonwhite, and Mrs. Clinton won this group by a 62-point margin (79 percent to 17 percent). Mr. Trump, countering with a strong showing among whites, won the state.
— The suburban share of the North Carolina vote increased to 38 percent, from 28 percent in 2012, while the share of the rural vote decreased by 10 points, to 24 percent. Mr. Trump won majorities in both groups.
NEW YORK — Donald J. Trump will be the 45th president of the United States, the Associated Press projected Wednesday. He will be the first person to hold the office despite having no prior political or military experience.
“It’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” Trump, flanked by his family and his running mate, Mike Pence, told the crowd inside the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan. “To all Republicans, Democrats and independents across this nation: I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time.”
The Republican nominee’s victory over Hillary Clinton marks a stunning upset that neither the polls nor the pundits saw coming. But Trump, defiant to the end, insisted he would win despite burning bridges with key voting groups and even many Republicans. In winning, Trump upended almost every norm of American politics and apparently changed the shape of the Republican Party.
Clinton called Trump to concede the race shortly before he took the stage, Trump said.
“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton,” he said. “She congratulated us — it’s about us — on our victory. And I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign. I mean, she fought very hard. Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a very long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. And I mean that very sincerely.”
Trump spent the final three weeks of his once-unlikely White House bid railing against a “rigged” election, alleging without evidence that voter fraud would be widespread. He even hinted at the idea of not conceding the race if he lost, jokingly promising to accept the results of the election “if I win.”
But the brash billionaire also predicted that he would shock the establishment and said his campaign would be “Brexit Plus Plus,” a reference to Britain’s exit from the European Union, which also was not forecast in the polls. And in the end, to borrow one of Trump’s favorite expressions, he did indeed exceed expectations “big league.”
“They all told it wrong from day number one,” Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump adviser and Trump Organization attorney, told Yahoo News.
“America is going to see the change that it deep needs and they’re going to have a leader a real leader,” Cohen added.
Trump spent the night huddled with family and friends, watching the returns inside the Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, where one Trump campaign source initially said some allies expected him to lose and were simply hoping he would outperform Mitt Romney’s showing in the 2012 presidential race. But as the night wore on, the Trump team became more optimistic and began to think the celebrity businessman had a chance, based on razor-thin margins in battleground states. After Ohio was called for Trump, the same source predicted that even the Democrats might also be changing their assessments of Trump’s chances.
Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, described a jubilant atmosphere in his war room in a text to Yahoo News before Trump was projected the winner.
“Absolutely buoyant. We can smell the win,” Conway said.
The crowd that waited to see Trump speak in a ballroom at the Hilton cheered each time a state was called for him. (Unsurprisingly, the television monitors at the event were showing Fox News, the cable news network favored by conservatives on which Trump had appeared often.)
“I had hoped for this,” a second Trump campaign source said. “I knew there was a chance for this, but I gave it a 30 percent chance. I thought we would come up just short.”
Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump cheer as they watch election returns during an election night rally, Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2016, in New York. (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Polls had widely shown Trump to be an underdog against Clinton, the Democratic nominee who faced a series of questions over her use of a private email server and how her family foundation interacted with the State Department during her tenure as secretary of state. But those polls were apparently wrong.
Clinton had enjoyed a double-digit lead over Trump in national polls following the presidential debates, but she saw that cushion evaporate after FBI Director James Comey set off a political firestorm 10 days before Election Day. Comey said newly discovered emails related to the investigation were being reviewed, and Trump started predicting that she would be indicted. On Sunday, Comey said a review of those emails did not change his position that Clinton should not face criminal prosecution.
The results indicated that Trump outperformed expectations among working-class whites, forming a coalition of states that few thought possible when the campaign began. Meanwhile, Clinton underperformed among college-educated and young white women.
In the end, Clinton failed to overcome the showman, who gobbled up thousands of hours of free airtime on cable news by making a series of controversial and improbable promises, like a pledge to build a wall along the southern border of the U.S. and a promise to “shut down” Muslim immigration. Trump also stayed in the spotlight by fighting a series of feuds and raging against the media. And despite Clinton’s strong performance in the presidential debates, in which she goaded Trump into gaffes and kept the focus squarely on his shortcomings, she could not translate those performances into votes.
Trump’s election is already sending shock waves through the political system because it signals a repudiation of establishment politicians that, to many voters, the Clintons represent. The property magnate and former “Celebrity Apprentice” host, one of the most unconventional major-party candidates in U.S. history, had vowed to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C. He derided many of the leaders he’ll likely now need to work with, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and many other congressional Republicans.
It also remains to be seen if President-elect Trump will be able to heal the country’s sharp political divisions, some of which were sparked by his campaign.
But the Queens, N.Y.-born Trump, 70, will have to face all of those challenges and more when he is inaugurated in January.
“Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream,” Trump said. “I’ve spent my entire life and business looking at the untapped potential in projects and people all over the world. That is now what I want to do for our country. Tremendous potential, I’ve gotten to know our country so well — tremendous potential. It’s going to be a beautiful thing.”
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he continued. “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure — which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.”
Donald Trump Sues Nevada Official for Keeping Election Polls Open
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sued the Clark Country Registrar of Voters in an attempt to challenge a decision by the Registrar to keep polls open as people waited to vote on Friday night.
In a lawsuit filed on Election Day in Las Vegas, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sued the Clark Country Registrar of Voters in an attempt to challenge a decision by the Registrar to keep polls open as people waited to vote on Friday night.
The complaint is titled Donald Trump v. Joe Gloria, first reported by CNN’s Joe Sciutto, and can be viewed here. Update: in a live-streamed hearing, a state judge refused a request by a lawyer for Trump to seize the disputed ballots.
The lawsuit came after a surge in early voting in Las Vegas on Friday resulted in a line of people waiting to vote after 8 p.m. local time, which is when the polls officially closed. In response, the county kept the polls open for additional hours until those still in line could cast their ballot.
Soon after, Trump seized on the county’s decision as evidence of a “rigged system.”
The accusation, however, appears to be without merit. A Nevada state law, like those in many other states, clearly instructs election officials to ensure that those who arrive at a poll in time are given an opportunity to vote. Here’s a screenshot of the law:
Meanwhile, an election law blog post about the controversy explains that Nevada also relies on a related regulation to ensure the process is not manipulated. The safeguard reportedly relies on stickers or other methods of identifying who is in line:
This administrative rule is Nevada Administrative Code § 293.247, and it provides:
After determining who is the last person waiting to vote at the time that the polls close, a member of the election board shall:
(a) Place a sticker or other distinguishing mark on the last person waiting in line to vote; or
(b) If the last person waiting to vote does not want a sticker or other distinguishing mark placed on him or her, physically stand behind the last person waiting in line to vote, to ensure that no other person enters the polling place to vote.
Political observers have suggested the Friday lines in Las Vegas are the result of a surge in voting by Hispanic Americans, which would benefit Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The lawsuit, therefore, may be amount to an early challenge by the Trump campaign to overall results in Nevada, which is an important battleground state in the presidential race.
Trump sought a “writ of mandamus” or a “writ of prohibition” – basically an order from the court for a state official to do something or refrain from doing something. Reports from the hearing on Twitter show the judge was annoyed and incredulous at the request, and suggested it was a threat to the secrecy of the ballot and could lead to intimidation at the polls:
In rejecting the request, the judge ruled, at around 2:55pm ET, that the Trump campaign had not exhausted its administrative remedies – and that the candidate should instead lodge his complaints with the Secretary of State.
How A Kid With Cerebral Palsy Got Ejected From A Trump Rally. Then He Met The President.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign speech Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016, in Tampa, Fla. (AP Photo/Chris O’Meara)
J.J. Holmes, age 12, had two very different experiences this weekend.
Twelve-year-old J.J. Holmes begged his mother to drive him to a Donald Trump rally in Tampa, Florida, on Saturday. J.J., who has cerebral palsy, wanted to go and protest the Republican nominee’s treatment of people with disabilities.
His mother, Alison, agreed to make the trip. But once they got there and began chanting Hillary Clinton’s name, Trump ordered them out of the rally.
Trump supporters responded by “chanting ‘U-S-A’ and pushing his wheelchair,” Alison told The Washington Post.
“We were put out by security,” she said. “Mr. Trump kept saying, ‘Get them out.’”
The day after J.J. and his mom were kicked out of the Trump rally, they headed to Kissimmee, Florida, about an hour east of Tampa, to watch President Barack Obama deliver one of his final campaign speeches on behalf of Clinton. The president and the former secretary of state are two of J.J.’s heroes, Kimberly DeFalco, a woman who witnessed the events at the Trump rally and spoke about it with Alison, posted on Facebook.
Yesterday, this young man was kicked out of a Trump rally. As he was leaving, people kicked at his wheelchair. Today, he met his President.
DeFalco asked for help in arranging a meeting between the 12-year-old boy and the president. “This would be life-changing for JJ and also send powerful encouragement for all who live with disabilities and rise up despite them!” she wrote.
In his speech, Obama urged Floridians to go out and vote. “It is about the character of this country,” he said. “Who are we? What do we stand for?”
After he finished speaking, Obama took a moment to meet J.J. and shake hands with the young Trump protester.
As Alison described their experience at Saturday’s Trump rally to The Washington Post, J.J., speaking with the help of a computer vocalization device, interjected.
“I hate Donald Trump,” he said. “I hate Donald Trump.”
File: “We’ve got to fight for this thing,” Obama thundered at a rally in Philadelphia last Tuesday. “I need you to work as hard for Hillary as you did for me. I need you to knock on doors. I need you to make phone calls. You’ve got to talk to your friends, including your Republican friends.”
(CNN)In a strong appeal to black voters on Wednesday, President Barack Obama warned that if Donald Trump wins the election next week, the Republican presidential nominee would undo his administration’s legacy.
“If we let this thing slip and I’ve got a situation where my last two months in office are preparing for a transition to Donald Trump, whose staff people have said that their primary agenda is to have him in the first couple of weeks sitting in the Oval Office and reverse every single thing that we’ve done,” Obama said during an interview on the “Tom Joyner Morning Show,” a syndicated radio program.
The “African-American vote right now is not as solid as it needs to be,” he said.
Early voting numbers from key swing states and a state Clinton is hoping to flip to the blue column show that African Americans have not been voting early in the same numbers as they have in past elections. In North Carolina, blacks account for 23% of the early voting electorate, compared to 28% at this point in 2012. In Georgia, blacks so far make up 31% of the early voting population compared to 36% at this time in 2012. In Florida, blacks accounted for 15% of the early vote at this stage in 2008 — the most recent year for which statistics were available — compared to 12% this year.
“And I know that there are a lot of people in barbershops and beauty salons, you know, in the neighborhoods who are saying to themselves, ‘We love Barack, we love — we especially love Michelle, and so, you know, it was exciting and now we’re not as excited as much.’ You know what? I need everybody to understand that everything we’ve done is dependent on me being able to pass the baton to somebody who believes in the same things I believe in,” Obama said.
The pitch was similar to remarks Obama made in September at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner, when he said that he would consider a Trump victory to be “an insult to my legacy.”
In an attempt to drive home the point that the black community could be particularly affected by a Clinton loss, the President said Wednesday the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, support for historically black colleges and universities, civil rights, voting right and even the first lady’s garden would be at risk under a Trump presidency.
He said progress made on criminal justice reform could also be stalled, citing the case of the Central Park Five, a group of black and Hispanic youths whose wrongful conviction in a 1989 New York rape was later overturned.
“Donald Trump is somebody who after the Central Park case was recognized as having convicted young African American men who were innocent today still insists that they should be in jail and what – this is the guy who’s gonna suddenly help to make sure that folks have fair treatment in the criminal justice system?”
Polls: Clinton, Trump neck-and-neck in Florida; new results in NC, PA and Ohio
Washington (CNN) ♦ A new slate of state-based polls released Wednesday shows Hillary Clinton up 3 points in North Carolina, while Donald Trump has a 5-point edge in the state of Ohio. Clinton has a tight lead on Trump in Pennsylvania and the two presidential candidates are tied in Florida.
Clinton has 47% support from likely voters in North Carolina to Trump’s 44%, while Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson has 3% support, according to the Quinnipiac University swing-state polls.
CNN’s Poll of Polls for North Carolina, which averages the results for the five most recent publicly released North Carolina polls that meet CNN’s standards, has Clinton leading Trump 46%-42%.
In Quinnipiac’s Ohio survey, Trump leads Clinton 46%-41%, with 5% for Johnson and 2% for Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
Quinnipiac surveyed 602 likely North Carolina voters between October 27-November 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points. In Ohio, Quinnipiac surveyed 589 likely voters between October 27-November 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Florida
In the Florida, Clinton has 46% compared to Trump’s 45%, while 2% support Johnson and 2% are for Stein, according to the Quinnipiac polls. A CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday had similar results, with Clinton leading Trump 49%-47% among likely voters.
CNN’s Poll of Polls for Florida has Clinton and Trump tied at 45%.
Quinnipiac surveyed 626 likely Florida voters between October 27-November 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.9 percentage points.
Pennsylvania
Clinton leads Trump 48% to 43% among likely voters in the state, while 3% support Johnson and 3% support Stein.
In the CNN/ORC poll released Wednesday, Clinton holds a 4-point edge among likely voters against Trump, 48% to 44% respectively.
Quinnipiac surveyed 612 likely Pennsylvania voters between October 27-November 1 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
CNN’s Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report
The George W. Bush White House deleted 22 Million Emails
Bush.. His White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails.
For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton’s personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.
Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.
Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?”
Most troubling, researchers found a suspicious pattern in the White House email system blackouts, including periods when there were no emails available from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. “That the vice president’s office, widely characterized as the most powerful vice president in history, should have no archived emails in its accounts for scores of days—especially days when there was discussion of whether to invade Iraq—beggared the imagination,” says Thomas Blanton, director of the Washington-based National Security Archive. The NSA (not to be confused with the National Security Agency, the federal surveillance organization) is a nonprofit devoted to obtaining and declassifying national security documents and is one of the key players in the effort to recover the supposedly lost Bush White House emails.
Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails.
The media paid some attention to the Bush email chicanery but spent considerably less ink and airtime than has been devoted to Clinton’s digital communications in the past 18 months. According to the Boston social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon, which ran a study for Newsweek, there have been 560,397 articles mentioning Clinton’s emails between March 2015 and September 1, 2016.
In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which mandated that all presidential and vice presidential records created after January 20, 1981, be preserved and that the public, not the president, owned the records. The following year, the Reagan administration installed the White House’s rudimentary first email system.
Despite the PRA, neither the Reagan nor the George H.W. Bush administration maintained email records, even as the number of White House emails began growing exponentially. (The Bush administration would produce around 200 million.) In 1989, a federal lawsuit to force the White House to comply with the PRA was filed by several groups, including the National Security Archive, which at the time was mostly interested in unearthing the secret history of the Cold War. The suit sparked a last-minute court order, issued in the waning hours of the first Bush presidency, that prevented 6,000 White House email backup tapes from being erased.
When Bill Clinton moved into the White House, his lawyers supported the elder Bush in his effort to uphold a side deal he’d cut with the National Archives and Records Administration to allow him to treat his White House emails as personal. At the time, George Stephanopoulos—then the White House communications director—defended the resistance, saying his boss, like Bush, didn’t want subsequent, and potentially unfriendly, administrations rooting around in old emails.
The Clinton White House eventually settled the suit, and White House aide John Podesta—now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—even invited members of the National Security Archive into the White House to demonstrate how the new system worked. If anyone tried to delete an email, a message would pop up on screen indicating that to do so would be in violation of the PRA.
Eight years later, in 2003, a whistleblower told the National Security Archive that the George W. Bush White House was no longer saving its emails. The Archive and another watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (which had represented outed CIA agent Valerie Plame in her case against the Bush administration), refiled their original lawsuit.
The plaintiffs soon discovered that Bush aides had simply shut down the Clinton automatic email archive, and they identified the start date of the lost emails as January 1, 2003. The White House claimed it had switched to a new server and in the process was unable to maintain an archive—a claim that many found dubious.
Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney’s office were in the administration’s system but he couldn’t get them.
Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney listens as former President George W. Bush makes remarks about the U.S. defense budget after meeting with military leaders at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., November 29, 2007. Larry Downing/Reuters
The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC and called gwb43.com. The White House, meanwhile, officially refused to comply with the congressional subpoena.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) called the president’s actions “Nixonian stonewalling” and at one point took to the floor in exasperation and shouted, “They say they have not been preserved. I don’t believe that!” His House counterpart, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), said Bush’s assertion of executive privilege was unprecedented and displayed “an appalling disregard for the right of the people to know what is going on in their government.”
In court in May 2008, administration lawyers contended that the White House had lost three months’ worth of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq War. Bush aides thus evaded a court-ordered deadline to describe the contents of digital backup believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March—when the U.S. invaded Iraq—and September. They also refused to give the NSA nonprofit any emails relating to the Iraq War, despite the PRA, blaming a system upgrade that had deleted up to 5 million emails. The plaintiffs eventually contended that the Bush administration knew about the problem in 2005 but did nothing to fix it.
Eventually, the Bush White House admitted it had lost 22 million emails, not 5 million. Then, in December 2009—well into Barack Obama’s administration—the White House said it found 22 million emails, dated between 2003 and 2005, that it claimed had been mislabeled. That cache was given to the National Archives, and it and other plaintiffs agreed, on December 14, 2009, to settle their lawsuit. But the emails have not yet been made available to the public.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was operating on a different track but having no more luck. In a bipartisan vote in 2008, the committee found White House aides Karl Rove and Joshua Bolten in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas in the investigation of the fired U.S. attorneys. The penalties for contempt are fines and possible jail time, but no punishment was ever handed down because a D.C. federal appeals court stayed the Senate’s ruling in October 2008, while the White House appealed. Rove’s lawyer claimed Rove did not “intentionally delete” any emails but was only conducting “the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly,” according to the Associated Press.
By then, Obama was weeks away from winning the election, so the Bush administration basically ran out the clock. And neither the Obama administration nor the Senate committee pursued the matter.
The committee’s final report on the matter was blunt: “[T]his subversion of the justice system has included lying, misleading, stonewalling and ignoring the Congress in our attempts to find out precisely what happened. The reasons given for these firings were contrived as part of a cover-up, and the stonewalling by the White House is part and parcel of that same effort.”
At the time, some journalists and editorialists complained about a lack of transparency on the White House’s part, but The Washington Post, in an editorial, accepted the White House explanation that the emails could have been lost due to flawed IT systems.
The mystery of what was in the missing Bush emails and why they went missing is still years away from being solved—if ever. The National Archives now has 220 million emails from the Bush White House, and there is a long backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests already. But not all of the emails will be available to the public until 2021, when the presidential security restrictions elapse. Even then, with currently available archiving and sorting methods, researchers still have years of work to figure out whether Cheney deleted days’ worth of emails around the time of the WMD propaganda campaign that led to war, Blanton says.
“To your question of what’s in there—we don’t know,” he says. “There was not a commitment at the top for saving it all. Now was that resistance motivated by political reasons? Or was it ‘We gotta save money’?”
Former U.S. President George W. Bush winks to a member of the audience before he delivers the final State of the Union address of his presidency at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., January 28, 2008. Tim Sloan/Reuters
Like Leahy, Blanton has doubts that the emails were ever truly “lost,” given that every email exists in two places, with the sender and with the recipient. But unlike watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has been relentless about forcing the State Department to publicly release Hillary Clinton’s emails, Blanton and his fellow researchers have decided not to press their fight for the release of the Bush emails.
Blanton says he has no idea whether the Bush email record will be found intact after 2021, when his group will be allowed to do a systematic search and recovery process in the National Archives. “Did they find all of them? We don’t know,” he says. “Our hope is that by that time, the government and the National Archives will have much better technology and tools with which to sift and sort that kind of volume.”
Blanton says he’s not expecting that kind of upgrade, though. “Their entire budget is less than the cost of a single Marine One helicopter,” he says. “It’s an underfunded orphan.”
Meanwhile, the episode has been nearly forgotten by almost everyone but the litigants. A source involved with the stymied congressional investigation recalled the period as “an intense time,” but the Obama administration didn’t encourage any follow-up, devoting its political capital to dealing with the crashing economy rather than investigating the murky doings that took place under his predecessor. Since then, no major media outlet has devoted significant—or, really, any—resources to obtaining the emails, or to finding out what was in them, or what, exactly, the Bush administration was hiding (or losing).
Lawsuit Charges Donald Trump with Raping a 13-Year-Old Girl
A civil suit against Donald Trump alleging he raped a 13-year-old girl was dismissed in California in May 2016 and refiled in New York in June 2016.
In late April 2016, rumors began to circulate online holding that Republican presidential Donald Trump had either been sued over, or arrested for, raping a teenaged girl. One of the earliest versions of the rumor was published on 2 May 2016 by the Winning Democrats web site, which reported that woman using the name Katie Johnson had named Trump and billionaire Jeffrey Epstein in a $100 million lawsuit, accusing them of having solicited sex acts from her at sex parties held at the Manhattan homes of Epstein and Trump back in 1994 (when Johnson was just 13 years old):
The first major scandal to hit the Trump campaign besides the typical “what a racist, such a sexist, yada yada yada,” came from a lawsuit stemming from the infamous sex parties held by billionaire and known pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. The woman named in the suit is Katie Johnson, who says Trump took her virginity in 1994 when she was only 13 and being held by Epstein as a slave.
Johnson says in the complaint that Trump and Epstein threatened her and her family with bodily harm if she didn’t comply with all of their disgusting demands. The Trump campaign has been on this immediately, calling it absolute nonsense and not even remotely true or possible.
Many aggregated reports cited a 28 April 2016 article that described the circumstances under which the lawsuit had been filed:
Presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is fighting what could be the biggest election season bombshell yet — explosive court claims that he raped a woman when she was a teen.
The woman — identified as Katie Johnson — filed documents in a California court on April 26, accusing Trump and billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein of “sexual abuse under threat of harm” and “conspiracy to deprive civil rights,” RadarOnline.com has exclusively learned.
She filed the lawsuit herself — without legal representation — and is suing for $100 million.
A copy of the California lawsuit (filed on 26 April 2016) shared via the Scribd web site outlined the allegations, which included the accusation that Trump and Epstein had (over 20 years earlier) “sexually and physically” abused the then 13-year-old plaintiff and forced her “to engage in various perverted and depraved sex acts” — including being “forced to manually stimulate Defendant Trump with the use of her hand upon Defendant Trump’s erect penis until he reached sexual orgasm,” and being “forced to engage in an unnatural lesbian sex act with her fellow minor and sex slave, Maria Doe, age 12, for the sexual enjoyment of Defendant Trump” — after luring her to a “series of underage sex parties” by promising her “money and a modeling career”:
According to RadarOnline’s initial reporting, the lawsuit filed in California on 26 April 2016 was dismissed over technical filing errors (the address listed in court documents was a foreclosed home that has been vacant since its owner died), with the plaintiff failing in her attempt to avoid incurring the cost of the litigation:
A judge recommended on April 29 that “Katie Johnson” should have to pay her own attorneys’ fees and court costs related to the $100 million lawsuit she brought against Trump and billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein over alleged sexual assault charges. Then on May 2, a U.S. District judge ordered the entire lawsuit thrown out.
“Johnson” had previously filed forms asking to be let off the hook for the costs of the lawsuit, claiming she had only $300 to her name … such an allowance — known as in forma paupers — is only given in civil rights cases in California, and the judge ruled that she “failed to state a claim for relief” on a civil rights basis, even though she “utilized the form provided by the Central District of California for civil actions.”
“Even construing the … pleading liberally, Plaintiff has not alleged any race-based or class-based animus against her, and consequently, her … allegations fail to state a claim upon which relief may be granted,” the judge wrote … the address listed on the paperwork leads to an abandoned property, and the phone number goes straight to voicemail.
For his part, Trump asserted that the charges were “not only categorically false, but disgusting at the highest level and clearly framed to solicit media attention or, perhaps, are simply politically motivated,” adding that “There is absolutely no merit to these allegations. Period.”
On 20 June 2016, New York City-based blog Gothamist reported that the plaintiff had refiled a similar complaint in a New York State federal court:
A federal lawsuit filed in New York accuses Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl more than 20 years ago, at several Upper East Side parties hosted by convicted sex offender and notorious billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein.
The suit, first reported by the Real Deal, accuses Trump and Epstein of luring the anonymous plaintiff and other young women to four parties at Epstein’s so-called Wexner Mansion at 9 East 71st Street. Epstein allegedly lured the plaintiff, identified in the suit only as Jane Doe, with promises of a modeling career and cash.
Another anonymous woman, identified in additional testimony as Tiffany Doe, corroborates Jane’s allegations, testifying that she met Epstein at Port Authority, where he hired her to recruit other young girls for his parties. Trump had known Epstein for seven years in 1994 when he attended the parties at Wexner, according to the suit. He also allegedly knew that the plaintiff was 13 years old.
Jane Doe filed a similar suit in California in April, under the name Katie Johnson, also accusing Trump and Epstein of rape. That suit was dismissed on the grounds of improper paperwork — the address affiliated with her name was found to be abandoned. Today’s suit confirms that the plaintiffs are one and the same.
The online outlet that first reported the second filing in New York explained that the lawsuit might be allowed to proceed even though the statute of limitations for bringing suit has expired, because (according to plaintiff’s lawyer) the plaintiff lacked the “freedom of will to institute suit earlier in time” due to her having been threatened by Trump:
It should be noted that anyone can file a civil complaint in federal court. The statute of limitations in New York for civil rape cases is five years, but [the] complaint argues that the time limit should be waived, noting that the plaintiff was too frightened to report the abuse because Trump had threatened that if she did “her family would be physically harmed if not killed.”
“Both defendants let plaintiff know that each was a very wealthy, powerful man and indicated that they had the power, ability and means to carry out their threats,” the complaint claims.
A copy of the New York-based suit was also uploaded to Scribd, and in the second filing (which asked for no specific amount of monetary damages) the plaintiff was represented by Thomas Francis Meagher, a New Jersey patent lawyer who learned of her allegations via an article published on the GossipExtra web site advertising that she was “shopping for an attorney.” In a statement attached to her filing, the plaintiff (aka “Jane Doe”) asserted:
I traveled by bus to New York City in June 1994 in the hope of starting a modeling career. I went to several modeling agencies but was told that I needed to put together a modeling portfolio before I would be considered. I then went to the Port Authority in New York City to start to make my way back home. There I met a woman who introduced herself to me as Tiffany. She told me about the parties and said that, if I would join her at the parties, I would be introduced to people who could get me into the modeling profession. Tiffany also told me I would be paid for attending.
The parties were held at a New York City residence that was being used by Defendant Jeffrey Epstein. Each of the parties had other minor females and a number of guests of Mr. Epstein, including Defendant Donald Trump at four of the parties I attended. I understood that both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein knew I was 13 years old.
Defendant Trump had sexual contact with me at four different parties in the summer of 1994. On the fourth and fnial sexual encounter with Defendant Trump, Defendant Trump tied me to a bed, exposed himself to me, and then proceeded to forcibly rape me. During the course of this savage sexual attack, I loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to stop but he did not. Defendant Trump responded to my pleas by violently striking me in the face with his open hand and screaming that he would do whatever he wanted,
Immediately following this rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I wold be physically harmed if not killed.
The filing also included a statement from “Tiffany Doe” (i.e., the woman referenced in plaintiff’s statement above who brought her to the parties) attesting that:
I personally witnessed four sexual encounters that the Plaintiff was forced to have with Mr. Trump during this period, including the fourth of these encounters where Mr. Trump forcibly raped her despite her pleas to stop.
I personally witnessed the one occasion where Mr. Trump forced the Plaintiff and a 12-year-old female named Maria [to] perform oral sex on Mr. Trump and witnessed his physical abuse of both minors when they finished the act.
It was my job to personally witness and supervise encounters between the underage girls that Mr. Epstein hired and his guests.
A video reportedly featuring “Katie Johnson” (her identity hidden through the use of facial pixillation, a long blonde wig, and an electronic voice distorter) appeared online, in which she graphically described giving Donald Trump a hand job and being raped by him:
There is little doubt that Donald Trump knows Jeffrey Epstein, as Trump acknowledged in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein:
Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Epstein has been named in multiple similar lawsuits over the last several years, served 13 months in jail, and is registered as a sex offender for life:
Billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has paid another accuser.
The 56-year-old money manager has quietly settled with Jane Doe 102, an unnamed woman who alleged in federal court in Florida that Epstein had induced her to “serve his every sexual whim” from the time she was 15 until she was 19. The woman also claimed Epstein had flown her around the world, paying her “to be sexually exploited by [his friends] … including royalty, politicians, academicians [and] businessmen.”
Epstein flatly denied those charges. But a source close to the financier confirms “the matter has been resolved to the satisfaction of both parties.” The woman’s lawyer, Robert Josefsberg, wouldn’t say how much she’s getting. Epstein had in the past offered accusers a minimum of $150,000.
Epstein has settled at least two other civil suits but still faces more than a dozen from women who claim he sexually abused them as minors at his Palm Beach mansion.
As of now, all of the information about this lawsuit comes solely from the complaint filed by “Katie Johnson,” and no one has as yet located, identified, or interviewed her.
A status conference for the lawsuit is scheduled to be held on 16 December 2016.
Hillary Clinton Leads Donald Trump in ABC News’ Electoral Ratings Before Tough Battleground Contests
File photo: NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 13: People cheer as Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at her official kickoff rally at the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan on June 13, 2015 in New York City. The long awaited speech at a historical location associated with the values Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined in his 1941 State of the Union address, is the Democratic the candidate’s attempt to define the issues of her campaign to become the first female president of the United States. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is maintaining a decided advantage in the Electoral College this November, strengthening her grip around states tipping her way while forcing Republican nominee Donald Trump to defend a handful of typical GOP strongholds.
But a narrow path still exists for Trump. Toss-ups in North Carolina and Florida — as well as optimism that states like Pennsylvania and Michigan might tip back into play — leave supporters hopeful.
So ABC News dug through states’ voting history, demographic shifts and head-to-head polling to develop these electoral ratings. ABC News’ puts Clinton at 278 electoral votes and Trump at 198, when including both solid and leaning states, which would give Clinton enough states right now in the solid and lean blue columns to hand her the White House. Sixty-two electoral votes are in toss-up states.
Still, this election cycle has shown that this race can be unpredictable, and Trump has vowed to shake up the traditional map and put several blue states in play. A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the White House.
Solid Democratic
Despite Trump’s hopes of putting New York’s 29 electoral votes in play this election, the Empire State would be expected to pull for Clinton, along with other reliably liberal-leaning swaths of the mid-Atlantic. Most of the rest of the historically liberal Northeast would likely remain solidly Democratic in November. In the Midwest, Minnesota and Illinois would likely deliver Clinton a combined 30 electoral votes.
California, which boasts the largest share of electoral votes, at 55, has not voted Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Recent polling there shows Clinton leading Trump by double digits, keeping the Golden State safely in the Democratic column, along with Oregon and Washington. New Mexico is predicted to vote Democratic for the third consecutive presidential election.
Leaning Democratic
More states across the Mountain West and Rust Belt would give Clinton another 75 electoral votes, but Trump is hopeful that he could pick off at least of one them. Colorado voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and growing Hispanic populations in both states may keep these states in the blue column for good.
New Hampshire polling has shown the state leaning Hillary Clinton’s way, creating a firewall that blocks any attempt by Trump to cobble together a series of smaller states.
Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are usually reliably Democratic states, but Trump’s popularity among working-class whites may put these states in play. A win would be an upset for Trump: Democrats have won every presidential race in Michigan and Pennsylvania since 1992 and Wisconsin since 1988.
Virginia, home to Democratic vice-presidential pick Tim Kaine, is also expected to tip toward Clinton, having voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. New Hampshire polling also shows a Hillary Clinton advantage there. And polling in Maine, another classic Democratic state, has shown the state’s at-large electoral votes could be up for grabs.
Toss-ups
Four toss-up states, worth 62 electoral votes, could tip the election toward a Clinton blowout, as Trump would likely need to win nearly all those states in order to reach the White House. Toss-up states this year include large electoral vote prizes like North Carolina and Florida, which were decided by just a few percentage points in the 2012 election. Utah and Arizona also have joined the ranks of toss-up states – though Arizona hasn’t gone blue since 1996 and Utah hasn’t gone blue in decades.
Leaning Republican
Ohio will be one of the key states to watch: The Buckeye State has voted for the winner of the White House every year since 1960.
Georgia has voted for the Republican nominee in seven of the last eight presidential elections, but white voters are quickly making up a smaller proportion of active registered voters in the state. White voters made up 68 percent of registered voters in 2004, but they now make up only 58 percent of registered voters, according to data from the Pew Research Center.
Polling in Iowa also shows Trump with a slight advantage there, mostly thanks to an overwhelmingly white electorate. Nebraska’s Second Congressional district, which Obama won in 2008, is also showing signs it could tip Hillary Clinton’s way in 2016.
Solid Republican
The bulk of Trump’s electoral votes would likely come from historically Republican portions of the Great Plains, West and Midwest, as well as the Bible Belt, which stretches from South Carolina to Texas and boasts large numbers of evangelical Christian and social conservative voters.
West Virginia, which has seen unemployment levels rise under Obama, is expected to vote Republican for the fifth presidential election in a row, as is Alaska, which has not voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Ratings Changes
Nov. 1:
Ohio from Tossup to Leans Republican. Clinton has not held a statistically significant lead in the state in any polling there in nearly two months. Recent polling has shown a tight race. But early voting statistics have shown positive signs for Trump. Ohio does not show early vote by party. But voting is down by almost 80,000 votes in Cuyahoga County compared to 2012 – an Obama stronghold – and turnout is up in Warren County – a key Romney stronghold. Clinton has shifted her efforts and resources to other firewall states like Pennsylvania and Florida, only holding six events there herself during the last two months.
Alaska from Solid Republican to Leans Republican. Alaska has supported the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1964. Alaska has a historical willingness to vote for third party or unconventional candidates, like its independent governor and Joe Miller over incumbent senator Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 Republican senate primary, then wrote-in Murkowski to victory in the general election. Alaska’s small population also allows for more realistic swings in its preferences.
Maine At-Large from Leans Democratic to Solid Democratic. A recent poll from the Press Herald/UNH showed Hillary Clinton with an 11-point lead there. The state’s second Congressional district remains a toss-up, but we don’t expect a potential Trump victory there to be wide enough to tip the entire state his way.
Oct. 28: Florida from Leans Democratic to Tossup. A new Bloomberg Politics poll out this week shows Trump earning 45 percent support vs. 43 percent for Clinton. Meanwhile, early voting shows the two parties running virtually even in early votes.
Oct. 21: Florida from Tossup to Leans Democratic. Florida has been seen as a must-win for Trump, so this shift makes the Republican nominee’s shrinking path even narrower. The latest Quinnipiac poll out this week shows Clinton leading Trump by 4 points in the Sunshine State, which went for Obama in 2012 and 2008.
Nevada from Tossup to Leans Democratic. The state has voted with the overall winner of the presidential election since 1980 and campaign officials there feel that the state is tipping toward the Democrats.
Utah from Leans Republican to Tossup. Independent candidate Evan McMullin’s rapidly growing popularity in the state, especially among Mormon voters who are defecting from Donald Trump, threatens to siphon votes from the GOP nominee – increasing the odds that Hillary Clinton edges ahead or McMullin wins the state outright.
Arizona from Leans Republican to Tossup. Clinton has put once-reliably red Arizona in play, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat since Bill Clinton in 1996. Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders campaigned there this week in hopes of galvanizing Democratic support, particularly among the state’s growing number of Latino and young voters.
Oct. 14:
There is only one change to the ABC presidential race ratings this week. Utah, which changed in August from “Solid Republican” to “Leans Republican” before returning to “Solid Republican,” is once again being downgraded to “Leans Republican.” Utah’s large religious population expressed dismay over last week’s release of a video clip showing Trump making derogatory comments about women and third party candidates such as Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin could siphon votes away from Trump.
Oct. 7:
ABC News is now rating Maine’s first congressional district for the first time: “Solid Democratic.” While Clinton holds a solid lead in CD-1, the race in the second congressional district is still a “Tossup.” The state’s two electoral at-large votes continue to be rated “Leans Democratic.”
Sept. 2:
ABC News changed New Hampshire from “Tossup” to “Leans Democratic” and Nevada from “Leans Democratic” to “Tossup.” New polling from WMUR/UNH shows Hillary Clinton with a nine-point lead in the Granite State, which hasn’t voted Republican since 2000. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to dump big television advertising dollars into Nevada – second only to Ohio in the most dollars per electoral vote – showing that state very much up for grabs.
Aug. 30:
ABC News changed Maine’s rating from “Solid Democratic” to “Leans Democratic,” the state’s second congressional district from “Leans Democratic” to “Tossup,” and Missouri from “Leans Republican” to “Solid Republican.”
Maine Recent polling in Maine has shown a competitive race. Maine could split its electoral votes for the first time – with two votes going to the state’s overall winner and one to the winner of each of the two Congressional districts. A new poll from Press Herald/UNH shows Clinton and Trump within the margin of error, with Trump leading by 14 percentage points in the state’s more rural second Congressional district. Still, the state hasn’t gone red in 1988.
Missouri While the race for the U.S. Senate remains competitive in Missouri, the presidential race there has tipped back toward Republican nominee Donald Trump. The state has gone blue only twice in the last four decades – both times for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Still, Mitt Romney won the state by a wide 10 percentage points in 2012 and Clinton’s campaign and super PAC have not invested time or resources there.
Aug. 22:
ABC News changed Iowa from “Tossup” to “Leans Republican” and Utah from “Leans Republican” to “Solid Republican.” It also rated the second Congressional District in Maine as “Leans Democratic” and the second Congressional district in Nebraska as “Leans Republican.”
Aug. 12:
ABC News changed Utah from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican” and Virginia from “Tossup” to “Lean Democratic.”
Virginia Recent polling and other changes in the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton show that Virginia, once a tossup state, is leaning Democratic. Virginia, historically a battleground state, last awarded its votes in the Electoral College to a Republican in 2004. For the past four election cycles, Virginia has cast its votes in the Electoral College for the eventual winner of the presidential race. In new NBC/WSJ/Marist poll out today, Clinton’s lead over Trump widened since last month, with 46 percent of voters going for Clinton and only 33 percent saying that they would vote for Trump. Clinton’s recent selection of Tim Kaine as her running mate strengthens her position in Virginia. Kaine, a former governor of Virginia and the state’s current senator, is a popular figure in the Old Dominion. All signs show a state leaning towards voting for a Democrat in the White House once again.
Utah Trump is still favored to win Utah, but it won’t be as easy a lift as previous GOP nominees. Clinton has signaled she wants to play in the state, penning an opinion piece in the Deseret News this week. “Every day, Trump continues to prove he lacks the morals to be our commander-in-chief,” she wrote, appealing to deeply-religious Mormons who make up a crucial voting bloc in Utah. With prominent players like Mitt Romney still sitting on the sidelines, the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and new conservative candidacy of former CIA operative Evan McMullin threaten to strip some support from Trump. Still, Utah has voted for a Republican in every presidential election in the last 50 years, including delivering a sweeping 73-25 percent victory for Mitt Romney in 2012.
June 17:
ABC News changed Missouri from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican” and Arizona from “Solid Republican” to “Lean Republican.”
♦ Culled from the ABC News’ ( by JOHN KRUZEL and RYAN STRUYK, Noah Fitzgerel, Adam Kelsey and Ben Siegel).
Top Senate Dem says FBI chief may have broken law on emails
Comey jolted the White House race with his letter to Congress informing lawmakers of the newly found emails. Democrats fear the discovery creates fresh momentum for Republican Donald Trump in the final week of the presidential race as well as for down-ballot Republicans running for the Senate and the House.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top Senate Democrat said Sunday that FBI Director James Comey may have broken the law when he disclosed 11 days before the election that investigators had newly discovered emails that may be relevant to the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
In a scathing letter to Comey, Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada accused the FBI chief of a double standard, resisting Democratic calls to discuss possible ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government while informing Congress last Friday of the emails found in the sexting investigation of Anthony Weiner, the former New York congressman and estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top aide to Clinton.
“Your actions in recent months have demonstrated a disturbing double standard for the treatment of sensitive information, with what appears to be a clear intent to aid one political party over another,” Reid said. “I am writing to inform you that my office has determined that these actions may violate the Hatch Act, which bars FBI officials from using their official authority to influence an election. Through your partisan actions, you may have broken the law.”
Comey jolted the White House race with his letter to Congress informing lawmakers of the newly found emails. Democrats fear the discovery creates fresh momentum for Republican Donald Trump in the final week of the presidential race as well as for down-ballot Republicans running for the Senate and the House.
With more than a half dozen toss-up or competitive Senate races, nearly all involving Republican-held seats, Democrats have a chance at reclaiming the majority. The one competitive Democratic seat is held by Reid, who is retiring at the end of the year.
Reid, never one to shy from a political fight in the heat of a campaign, said once Comey “came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible.”
Reid underscored that he has been a supporter of the FBI director and fought for Comey’s Senate confirmation when Republicans blocked the nomination.
“I led the fight to get you confirmed because I believed you to be a principled public servant,” Reid wrote. “With the deepest regret, I now see that I was wrong.”
Separately, former Attorney General Eric Holder and dozens of other former federal prosecutors signed a letter critical of Comey’s recent actions in the Clinton email case.
The letter obtained Sunday by The Associated Press contends that Comey deviated from Justice Department policy when he alerted Congress to the new discovery of emails potentially related to the Clinton email investigation.
Justice Department officials are instructed not to discuss ongoing investigations and to “exercise heightened restraint near the time of a primary or general election,” to avoid the appearance of prosecutorial influence in the electoral process, according to the letter.
“We cannot recall a prior instance where a senior Justice Department official — Republican or Democrat — has, on the eve of a major election, issued a public statement where the mere disclosure of information may impact the election’s outcome yet the official acknowledges the information to be examined may not be significant or new,” the letter states.
The emails were found on a device seized during an unrelated criminal sexting investigation of Weiner.
Comey acknowledged in a letter to FBI colleagues on Friday that he knew the letter was at risk of being misunderstood so close to the election, but that he felt obliged to update Congress on the emails after having earlier told lawmakers that the email inquiry had been closed.
But the ex-prosecutors say Comey’s letter was so devoid of detail as to “invite considerable, uninformed public speculation” about the emails’ significance. They note that Comey did not reveal who had sent or received the emails, whether the emails include duplicates of messages that have already been reviewed or whether the emails contain any classified information.
The letter is signed by dozens of attorneys, including former Justice Department officials in Washington — among them, former deputy attorneys general Donald B. Ayer, James Cole, Jamie Gorelick, Larry Thompson and David Ogden — and a group of United States attorneys and assistant U.S. attorneys. Thompson, Ayer and Lourdes Baird, a former U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California, were appointed by Republican administrations.
