[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #846 Two Town Halls

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Rupert Murdoch, the media titan behind Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, has told several people that he thinks former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will beat President Trump in November, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Murdoch, known for speaking freely among associates and family members, has said on several occasions he thinks Mr. Biden is likely to win the presidency, the person said. He has used the word “landslide” in some instances.

Mr. Murdoch prides himself on his ability to sniff out the electorate’s political mood, but in this case he sees Mr. Trump’s character flaws as his biggest Achilles heel. The polling data is the least of it, this person said. The Daily Beast first reported on Mr. Murdoch’s political prognostications.

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Op vrijdag 16 oktober 2020 23:48 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:

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Mja, maar tegelijkertijd ook: Biden campaign manager: Race is 'far closer' than experts say

Hoewel ze ook niet iets anders kan zeggen natuurlijk, maar toch...
[..]

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Op zaterdag 17 oktober 2020 01:21 schreef SnertMetChoco het volgende:
Mij werd eerder vandaag nog verteld door Ensiferum dat Trump juist een TheOnion-achtig artikel postte, om zo meer aandacht te genereren, maar dat was dus Scavino's genie?

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President Donald Trump recently accepted $1 million in campaign contributions from a couple whose vocal support for the QAnon conspiracy theory led to the cancellation of a fundraiser they were supposed to host for Vice President Mike Pence last month.

The couple, Caryn and Michael Borland, have shared QAnon memes and retweeted posts from QAnon accounts, The Associated Press reported in September, which led to the cancellation of a Montana fundraiser. The conspiracy theory includes baseless, farfetched allegations about liberals and satanism and child sex trafficking as well as claims that Trump is fighting entrenched enemies in the government.

New campaign finance disclosures released Thursday night show Trump’s joint fundraising effort with the Republican National Committee accepted $1.03 million from the couple, which they donated in late August before the fundraiser was canceled. Their son, whose occupation is listed as “student,” contributed an additional $580,000 around the same time, the records show.

The couple did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday. The Trump campaign also did not immediately respond.

Candidates often return donations given by supporters whose personal dealings could be problematic. While many Republicans have dismissed QAnon, Trump has been unwilling to reject support from adherents, a sign of how deeply it has gained a foothold in the GOP.

During a townhall forum broadcast on NBC Thursday night, Trump repeatedly declined to say the QAnon theory was false and professed to know little about it.

“Can you just, once and for all, state that that is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?” moderator Savannah Guthrie asked during a pointed exchange.

“I know nothing about it,” Trump responded. “I do know they are very much against pedophilia, they fight it very hard. But I know nothing about it.”

Guthrie followed up: “Why not just say it’s crazy and not true?”

Trump responded: “I don’t know that and neither do you.”

QAnon is a wide-ranging conspiracy fiction spread largely through the internet, centered on the belief that Trump is waging a campaign against enemies burrowed in the government’s “deep state” — and also including the baseless, farfetched idea of Trump foes behind a sex trafficking ring run by satanic pedophiles and cannibals. It references cryptic postings by the anonymous “Q,” purportedly a government insider.

The story has grown to include other long-standing conspiracy theories, gaining traction among some extreme Trump supporters. The movement is often likened to a right-wing cult; some followers have run for office, primarily in the Republican Party, though some have run as independents or as third-party candidates.

The Borlands have shared multiple QAnon social media posts, as well as other discredited conspiracies. Since the AP’s initial story, they both blocked their Twitter accounts from public view. Michael Borland also scrubbed his public facing Facebook account of most QAnon content.

It previously featured several QAnon “Q” logos, including a flaming “Q” with a Christian cross in the middle. He also previously shared the QAnon oath as well as its slogan, which states: “Where We Go One We Go All.”

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A 36-year veteran of the Justice Department this week accused Attorney General William P. Barr of abusing his power to sway the election for President Trump and said he was quitting, making him the third sitting prosecutor to issue a rare public rebuke of the attorney general.

“Barr’s resentment toward rule-of-law prosecutors became increasingly difficult to ignore, as did his slavish obedience to Donald Trump’s will,” Phillip Halpern, a federal prosecutor in San Diego, said in a letter published Wednesday in The San Diego Union-Tribune. “This career bureaucrat seems determined to turn our democracy into an autocracy.”

Mr. Halpern said he chose to retire as well, calling Mr. Barr “a well-trained bureaucrat” without prosecutorial experience and alleging that he scorned honest apolitical prosecutors and selectively meddled in the criminal justice system to help Mr. Trump’s allies.

He said he would have quit earlier but stayed on because he worried that the department under Mr. Barr would have interfered in his prosecution of former Representative Duncan D. Hunter, Republican of California, who pleaded guilty in December to conspiracy to steal campaign funds.

The condemnations by Mr. Halpern and the two other prosecutors, one in Seattle and one in Boston, broke with a longstanding practice by Justice Department lawyers not to publicly discuss internal affairs.

“I have never seen sitting prosecutors go on the record with concerns about the attorney general,” said Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown Law who served as a federal prosecutor during Mr. Barr’s earlier tour as attorney general in the George Bush administration. “This is unprecedented.”

He said that during Mr. Barr’s first stint as attorney general, line prosecutors did not feel the sense of crisis that they feel now. “Trump is the difference,” Mr. Butler said. “Barr was attorney general, but he was still beholden to the president, and he didn’t put the pressure on the attorney general that Trump has.”

Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, did not respond to a request for comment on the letters or to a question about whether the two prosecutors still at the department who spoke out would face disciplinary action.

More than 110,000 people work at the Justice Department, and internal disagreement is common, as at any large organization; the disputes sometimes spill into view through news reports. The department and its prosecutors have come under tremendous scrutiny under Mr. Trump, as he has publicly criticized prosecutors for charging his allies and said that he wanted them to put his political enemies in jail.

Mr. Butler pointed to a recent book by Andrew Weissmann, a prosecutor on the Russia investigation, as an example of how the norm of the department’s rank and file remaining quiet had softened. Mr. Weissmann’s book gives an inside looking into some of the deliberations that took place during the investigation and criticized the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for being overly cautious.

Mr. Mueller publicly pushed back on some of Mr. Weissmann’s claims in a rare public statement.

“Even five years ago, that would have been shocking,” Mr. Butler said of the back-and-forth.

But he argued that the three prosecutors’ critiques of Mr. Barr were particularly unusual. “Most people in the past would have been afraid that they would be tainted or blackballed from future jobs for publicly criticizing the attorney general,” Mr. Butler said. “But I don’t think that these letter writers will suffer consequences outside of the department.”

Mr. Halpern, who worked under six presidents of both parties, said that he observed colleagues quitting and that highly qualified lawyers seemed unwilling to apply to be federal prosecutors because of how Mr. Barr helmed the department.

“I always believed the department’s past leaders were dedicated to the rule of law and the guiding principle that justice is blind,” Mr. Halpern said. “That is a bygone era, but it should not be forgotten.”

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Officials in multiple states are taking aggressive steps to protect voters from efforts by militias or other armed groups seeking to congregate near polling places on Election Day, as simmering online activity indicates that some groups are trying to register as campaign poll watchers for Donald Trump's campaign.

In Michigan, an open carry state, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson on Friday announced a ban on open carry firearms at and near polls.

"Michiganders should know that law enforcement across multiple levels is working together to ensure that anyone who wishes to exercise their right to vote in person on Election Day can do so safely and without the threat of intimidation," said Col. Joe Gasper, the state's police director.

New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal issued a statement, also on Friday, that reiterated guidance for local law enforcement to help protect voters. Poll watchers "may not harass or intimidate voters, engage in electioneering, cause disturbances at polling places or challenge voters based on their race or ethnicity or how they are expected to vote," the statement said.

Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said at a Thursday press conference that she's "putting security provisions in place" to assure voters "there's no place for violence, there's no place for threats."

The measures come as online accounts tied to neo-Nazi sympathizers and "alt-right" groups such as the Proud Boys have been generating posts that encourage supporters to join the campaign's Election Day operations, according to two new reports this week. That includes sending out links to poll-watching registration sites for the Trump campaign's so-called Army for Trump, an effort working to recruit thousands of supports to sign up as poll watchers for the campaign on Election Day.

In one instance, a Proud Boys-affiliated user, in a group that claimed to circulate to 1,800 people affiliated with the Proud Boys, shared the link to sign up, writing that Democrats "don't want us Republicans to be in their polls," according to the report from SITE Intelligence Group, a non-governmental agency group that tracks potential security threats online, that was released on Tuesday. A separate SITE report released on Thursday said a link was shared within a neo-Nazi channel that claims to have about 5,000 members.

"The call to watch the polls, initially made by President Trump himself in the first presidential debate, has been answered by several far-right groups," the SITE report said.

Samantha Zager, deputy national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement to ABC News on Friday that the president "has unequivocally denounced hate groups by name on numerous occasions but the media refuses to accurately cover it because that would mean the end of a Democrat Party talking point."

Zager did not reject these groups' apparent interest in joining the campaign's poll watching team when specifically asked by ABC News.

Poll watchers are legal under strict rules that vary by state. In most states, both parties are permitted to have trained representatives observe the voting process, relay information back to their parties, and watch for irregularities. They are not supposed to interfere with voting aside from reporting issues through official channels.

ABC News previously has obtained videos of Trump campaign poll watcher training sessions, held in multiple battleground states, in which attendees explicitly were told to avoid interacting with voters.

The SITE report said efforts by the Proud Boys or similar groups to volunteer for Trump "have so far not been followed with direct threats of voter suppression," but it could be "inferred" that their "presence at election locations as 'poll watchers' would potentially serve to intimidate, pressure and harass oppositional voters."

"Some of these groups will be listening to his false claims of fraud, and you put that in combination with his refusal to condemn white supremacists and civil unrest -- it really is a very thinly veiled call for his most militant supporters to go to the polls," Mary McCord, a longtime national security official and Georgetown University Law professor, previously told ABC News.

Previously, at a debate, Trump urged his backers to "watch very carefully" at polls on Election Day, heightening already high political tensions. He later backtracked, saying at a Thursday town hall event, "I denounce white supremacy."

Experts have told ABC News they're concerned over the Trump campaign's use of the word "Army" in recruiting poll watchers.

"An 'army' doesn't sound like people just there to observe," said Sean Morales-Doyle, deputy director of voting rights and election programs at the Brennan Center for Justice. "An 'army' sounds like people there to engage in war with the enemy."

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The lawyer’s objection, coupled with his advice to seek approval from the Department of Justice, is a significant blow to Trump’s hope to promote the hastily devised plan before Election Day.

Robert Charrow, a political appointee who serves as the Health and Human Services department's general counsel, warned in the memo that the plan's timing and design could invite legal challenges, those officials said. For instance, Charrow cautioned health officials that moving forward with the proposed $7.9 billion plan — which would be paid for by dipping into one of Medicare's trust funds, and which senior Trump appointees had hoped to tout in letters sent to millions of seniors this week — would spark concerns about inappropriately using federal funds so close to the election.

Meanwhile, Charrow and his office late last week instructed administration officials to seek guidance from the DOJ's public integrity section, which deals with election crimes, before moving forward with the drug-discount plan. That has further stalled the plan as the health department waits for DOJ review, said two officials.

"Every day that passes is one less day" to roll out the plan before the election, said one of the officials.