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Trump rudely dismissed an adult-film star’s allegations against him, meaning his campaign has unfolded more or less as we all expected ― short of the appearance t-shirt cannons and someone playing a guitar that spews fire from its neck. Washington power players are having lawyers run opposition research on them, because having your name crop up in Wikileaks is so yesterday. And a group of Republicans are threatening to sue TV stations for airing ads that link them to Donald Trump, because threatening to sue over media coverage you don’t like is the best way to avoid comparisons to Donald Trump. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Monday, October 24th, 2016:
TRUMP SUPER PAC CAUGHT FUNNELING FOREIGN DONATIONS - Telegraph: “Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is facing a fundraising scandal after a Telegraph investigation exposed how key supporters were prepared to accept illicit donations from foreign backers. Senior figures involved with the Great America PAC, one of the leading ‘independent’ groups organising television advertisements and grassroots support for the Republican nominee, sought to channel $2 million from a Chinese donor into the campaign to elect the billionaire despite laws prohibiting donations from foreigners. In return, undercover reporters purporting to represent the fictitious donor were assured that he would obtain ‘influence’ if Mr. Trump made it to the White House.” [Telegraph]
TRUMP IMAGINES BEAUTIFUL UTOPIA WHERE ALL OUR TOYS ARE MADE OF LEAD - And airbags are just whoopie cushions that shoot confetti. Dave Jamieson: “It can be notoriously difficult to pin down Donald Trump on the finer points of policy. But on Monday morning, the Republican presidential nominee put forth a surprisingly specific proposal: He is going to cut ‘70 to 80 percent’ of federal regulations if he wins the White House. Trump, lagging badly in the polls, made his anti-regulatory vow while speaking at a farmers’ roundtable in Boynton Beach, a town in the must-win state of Florida. The real estate mogul did not explain how his administration would determine which rules to axe, or how they would go about accomplishing such an unprecedented rollback through executive fiat. ‘We want clean air, we want clean water,’ Trump said. ‘But we have and you have situations and regulations, which we’re gonna cut ― we will probably cut 70 to 80 percent of the regulations, OK?’” [HuffPost]
tfw your very existence is construed as an insult: “[Some] Republicans are threatening to sue TV stations for running ads that link them to the GOP presidential nominee. Five candidates ― Reps. Bob Dold (R-Ill.), Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), David Jolly (R-Fla.), John Katko (R-N.Y.) and Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican running for an open seat that’s currently occupied by his brother ― contend that certain commercials paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee provide false or misleading information by linking them to Trump.” [HuffPost’s Matt Fuller]
TRUMP MAKES INSURANCE FRAUD GREAT AGAIN - What’s the over/under on the White House burning down and President Trump blaming it on a stray gas leak? Jeff Horowitz and Terry Spencer: “Donald Trump said he received a $17 million insurance payment in 2005 for hurricane damage to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, but The Associated Press found little evidence of such large-scale damage. Two years after a series of storms, the real estate tycoon said he didn’t know how much had been spent on repairs but acknowledged he pocketed some of the money. Trump transferred funds into his personal accounts, saying that under the terms of his policy, ‘you didn’t have to reinvest it.’ In a deposition in an unrelated civil lawsuit, Trump said he got the cash from a ‘very good insurance policy’ and cited ongoing work to the historic home.... Trump’s description of extensive damage does not match those of Mar-a-Lago members and even Trump loyalists. In an interview about the estate’s history, Trump’s longtime former butler, Anthony Senecal, recalled no catastrophic damage.” [AP]
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TRUMP DISMISSES NEW SEXUAL ASSAULT CLAIMS IN TRUMP-IEST WAY POSSIBLE - Donald Trump, the “sup,babe?” candidate. Igor Bobic: “Donald Trump dismissed an adult film star who came forward over the weekend and alleged the GOP nominee had sexually mistreated her in 2006, stating in an interview, ‘Oh, I’m sure she’s never been grabbed before.’ Speaking at a Saturday press conference in Los Angeles alongside her attorney, women’s rights activist Gloria Allred, Jessica Drake became the 12th woman to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against the New York real estate mogul. She accused Trump of kissing her and her friends without permission and offering her money to spend the night with him…. ‘These are stories that are made up, these are total fiction,’ Trump said during an interview on WGIR radio, according to CNN.” [HuffPost]
NO, TRUMP DID *NOT* RECEIVE A NAACP AWARD - Perhaps from the National Association For Awesomely Classy People, but not the NAACP you know. Christina Wilkie: “A photograph of Donald Trump, Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks that the founder of Trump’s ‘diversity coalition’ hailed as evidence the Republican nominee won an ‘NAACP medal’ for ‘helping America’s inner cities’ was actually taken at an awards ceremony organized by a business associate with an ethnic grievance. William Fugazy, a politically well-connected businessman who later pleaded guilty to perjury, gave the awards to Trump and 79 other people, most of them white, to protest the awarding of ‘medals of liberty’ to a group of 12 recent immigrants that included a Chinese-born architect, a Costa Rica-born astronaut, a leading expert on the psychology of race, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but no ‘Irish, Italian, or Polish’ people.... The NAACP has not awarded any medals to Trump for ‘helping America’s inner cities,’ the group told HuffPost. Nor have any other civil rights groups, according to Trump’s biographers.” [HuffPost]
GRASSLEY: GARLAND HEARINGS TOO EXPENSIVE - We’re guessing his staff isn’t going to tell the senior senator from Iowa about the costs of the Dirksen cafeteria’s sushi bar. Cristian Farias: “Speaking last week to the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, a leading newspaper in his home state, the senator suggested that holding a confirmation hearing for Garland would not be the fiscally conservative thing to do. ‘My staff tells me that’s about a half a million to $750,000 to hire people to maybe work for three or four months to do it,’ Grassley told the editorial board, which wrote in May that history won’t remember the senator kindly for blockading Obama’s nominee. In the hourlong sit-down with the paper, Grassley said that not holding a hearing due to its potential cost was simply ‘a tradition’ he might follow because of ‘how deep you have to go in to go through a person’s record in order to hold a hearing that’s worthwhile.’” [HuffPost]
RECALLING TRUMP’S SECOND MARRIAGE - Jennifer Bendery: “Trump, who was 45 at the time, was with Maples at a Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, when he walked into a dining room where contestants were eating pizza and demanded, ‘I want to see the bodies that won the swimsuit contest,’ People reported at the time. One of them, 24-year-old Carolyn Sapp of Hawaii, stood up, embarrassed. Trump looked her over for a moment before he and Maples walked out. Apparently that didn’t rattle Maples as much as it did when the pageant was over, when Trump and some of his friends made rude comments about Sapp, who went on to become Miss America, as Maples sat there with them. ‘They were sitting around saying, ‘She’s got a great body!’ and ‘It’s about time they got a good-looking one,’’ Maples told People. ‘He still thinks it’s cool to act like a ladies’ man. But I don’t think it’s very respectful. I deserve better than that.’ She called off their marriage soon after that. They eventually did tie the knot in 1993, though, for six years.” [HuffPost]
AYOTTE DUMPS TRUMP - Eric Bradner: “New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte has dropped Donald Trump ― and now, facing a tough re-election challenge, she is making the case that she’d be a check on Hillary Clinton in Washington. Ayotte, the first-term Republican who’s trailing Democratic challenger Maggie Hassan in the polls, all but admitted that Clinton is poised to win the White House on Monday. ‘There’s so much at stake in this presidential election: the Supreme Court, our national security, so many issues that matter to people of this state,’ Ayotte told CNN’s Manu Raju in an interview. ‘And Gov. Hassan is going to essentially follow Hillary Clinton’s lead on all of them, where I’m going to stand up to her when she’s not taking us in the right direction,’ Ayotte said.” [CNN]
WHAT A LOAD OF CRAPO - Expect other super-smart Crapo wordplay in this space. Only the best for you, dear readers. Arthur Delaney: “When it became clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican Party’s nominee for president earlier this year, Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) endorsed him. When a video surfaced a few weeks ago of Trump boasting of sexually assaulting women, Crapo withdrew his endorsement and said Trump should withdraw his candidacy. But the Idaho Republican later said he hadn’t decided whether he’d vote for Trump. On Friday, Crapo came clean: He will vote for Trump after all. ‘The choice we still have today and the choice we will have is between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,’ Crapo told an Idaho radio station. ‘In that context, I have to tell you, though I thought and felt we needed a different choice, that’s not what we’re going to get, and we cannot elect Hillary Clinton for many reasons.’ On Monday, to make sure people noticed the re-endorsement, Crapo’s campaign pushed out the Idaho State Journal’s Friday story.” [HuffPost]
@anamariecox: Listening to Rush Limbaugh rn telling his audience they should not reject polling. Admits he was wrong to question polls in 2012.
NEITHER CAMPAIGN AGREEING TO PROTECTIVE POOL REPORTS - But how will the globalist conspiracy spread its internal messages? Michael Calderone: “Neither campaign has yet agreed to a protective pool to track the president-elect’s movements, a departure from recent election cycles. ‘It is not normal and it is unacceptable,’ Jeff Mason, a Reuters correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told The Huffington Post. The White House Correspondents’ Association oversees the rotating group of reporters who travel everywhere with the president and file dispatches to the larger press corps on what he’s doing, whom he’s meeting with and when he returns home. This arrangement, known as a protective pool, is considered necessary to ensure journalists are present in the event of any newsworthy comment or moment, including a threat on the president’s life. Both the Clinton and Trump campaigns have traveling press pools, but neither is fully protective.” [HuffPost]
HAVE YOU OPPO’D YOURSELF? Forget Googling yourself. Real power players get the citizenship status of their eldest child’s nanny from the 1990s checked out. Sarah Wheaton, Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia: “More than a dozen people who expect — or simply hope — to be tapped by Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have already reached out to top D.C. lawyers for help in sifting through their finances and business dealings in anticipation of being nominated to a top post in the next administration, POLITICO has learned. ‘More and more, people who are effective nominees are coming to see the wisdom of retaining people to help them,’ said one D.C. lawyer. ‘I talk to a lot of people who are interested in serving, and I tell them all they should get private counsel.’ This need for private professional help — before an election is even over and the confirmation process has begun — has spawned a small yet influential cottage industry within big D.C. law firms of professional vetters, who can charge anywhere from hundreds of dollars to as much as $1,000 per hour to sort through a potential nominee’s convoluted finances, tax returns or even old arrest records.” [Politico]
Echochamber update: “Hyperpartisan political Facebook pages and websites are consistently feeding their millions of followers false or misleading information, according to an analysis by BuzzFeed News. The review of more than 1,000 posts from six large hyperpartisan Facebook pages selected from the right and from the left also found that the least accurate pages generated some of the highest numbers of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook — far more than the three large mainstream political news pages analyzed for comparison.” [BuzzFeed]
BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR - Here’s a dog trying to eat the rain.
THIEL LOSING BUSINESS OVER TRUMP SUPPORT - And here we thought Silicon Valley might be upset with his rape apologism. Whatever! Lizette Chapman: “Arlan Hamilton, managing partner at Backstage Capital, said she rejected a potential investor because the person refused to disavow and sever ties with Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies Inc. She declined to name the investor, saying the person offered to put $500,000 in her Los Angeles-based technology seed fund. While the amount is tiny by industry standards, it is significant to Hamilton’s year-old seed fund, which has about $5 million in commitments, according to a report by Inc. The stymied deal reflects the growing divisiveness in the run up to the U.S. presidential election, which is spilling into everyday business. Hamilton took to Twitter to air her political protest.” [Bloomberg]
COMFORT FOOD
- Today is the 70th anniversary of the first photo of Earth from space.
- The world’s most delightful mountain.
- Baking bread with a volcano.
TWITTERAMA
@OKnox: “My GOD!” he exclaimed. “Rearrange ‘nasty women’ and you get ‘amnesty now!’”
@elisefoley: I sense a tweetstorm coming. My knee is acting up.
@aedwardslevy: “So, that’s nine votes for pasta, five for pizza, and two for eggpl-”
“THIS ELECTION IS RIGATONIED”
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