THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The FBI has obtained a warrant to search the emails found on a computer used by former congressman Anthony Weiner that may contain evidence relevant to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, according to law enforcement officials.

One official said the total number of emails recovered in the investigation into Weiner (D-N.Y.) is close to 650,000, but that reflects many emails that are not related to the Clinton investigation. But officials familiar with the case said that the messages include a significant amount of correspondence associated with Clinton and her top aide, Huma Abedin, Weiner’s estranged wife.

FBI agents investigating Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state knew early this month that messages recovered in a separate probe might be germane to their case, but they waited weeks before briefing the FBI director, according to people familiar with the case.

The director, James B. Comey, has written that he was informed of the development Thursday, and he sent a letter to legislators the next day letting them know that he thought the team should take “appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails.”

// posted by montag @ 1:37 PM 0 Comments

Dear Director Comey:

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. 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.

The double standard established by your actions is clear.

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government – a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.

By contrast, as soon as you came into possession of the slightest innuendo related to Secretary Clinton, you rushed to publicize it in the most negative light possible.

Moreover, in tarring Secretary Clinton with thin innuendo, you overruled longstanding tradition and the explicit guidance of your own Department. You rushed to take this step eleven days before a presidential election, despite the fact that for all you know, the information you possess could be entirely duplicative of the information you already examined which exonerated Secretary Clinton.

As you know, a memo authored by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on March 10, 2016, makes clear that all Justice Department employees, including you, are subject to the Hatch Act. The memo defines the political activity prohibited under the Hatch Act as “activity directed towards the success or failure of a political party, candidate for partisan political office, or partisan political group.”

The clear double-standard established by your actions strongly suggests that your highly selective approach to publicizing information, along with your timing, was intended for the success or failure of a partisan candidate or political group.

Please keep in mind that I have been a supporter of yours in the past. When Republicans filibustered your nomination and delayed your confirmation longer than any previous nominee to your position, I led the fight to get you confirmed because I believed you to be a principled public servant.

With the deepest regret, I now see that I was wrong.

Sincerely,

Senator Harry Reid

// posted by montag @ 1:00 PM 0 Comments

Year after year, both in his messy personal life and his brazen theft of classified documents from the National Security Agency, Harold T. Martin III put to the test the government’s costly system for protecting secrets.

And year after year, the system failed.

Mr. Martin got and kept a top-secret security clearance despite a record that included drinking problems, a drunken-driving arrest, two divorces, unpaid tax bills, a charge of computer harassment and a bizarre episode in which he posed as a police officer in a traffic dispute. Under clearance rules, such events should have triggered closer scrutiny by the security agencies where he worked as a contractor.

Yet even after extensive leaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning in 2010 and Edward Snowden in 2013 prompted new layers of safeguards, Mr. Martin was able to walk out of the N.S.A. with highly classified material, adding it to the jumbled piles in his house, shed and car.

A federal judge in Baltimore ruled on Friday that Mr. Martin, 51, must remain jailed on charges of stealing government documents and mishandling classified information over two decades. Prosecutors say they will add new charges under the Espionage Act. Mr. Martin, whose arrest in August was disclosed by The New York Times this month, has admitted to taking the material but denies giving secrets to anyone else.

His actions, which prosecutors described in court as “breathtaking,” have already cast a harsh light on the government’s ability to police the 3.1 million employees and 900,000 contractors who hold clearances — or even the much smaller number who work inside the most closely guarded programs, as Mr. Martin did. His case appears to show serious breakdowns in personnel evaluation, technology designed to detect leaks and the basic job of inspecting people leaving secure buildings.

Dennis C. Blair, a former director of national intelligence, said he was “shocked” that Mr. Martin managed to remove classified material in bulk as recently as this year, in part because the government has spent tens of millions of dollars since 2010 on measures to prevent unauthorized activity or downloads.

“If there are breakdowns in your security system, as there clearly were with Snowden and this guy, you have to look at whatever went wrong and fix it,” Mr. Blair said.

// posted by montag @ 1:42 PM 0 Comments

Trump promised to give away the proceeds of Trump University. He promised to donate the salary he earned from "The Apprentice." He promised to give personal donations to the charities chosen by contestants on "Celebrity Apprentice." He promised to donate $250,000 to a charity helping Israeli soldiers and veterans.

Together, those pledges would have increased Trump's lifetime giving by millions of dollars. But The Post has been unable to verify that he followed through on any of them.

Instead, The Post found that his personal giving has almost disappeared entirely in recent years. After calling 420-plus charities with some connection to Trump, The Post found only one personal gift from Trump between 2008 and the spring of this year. That was a gift to the Police Athletic League of New York City, in 2009. It was worth less than $10,000.

The charity that Trump has given the most money to over his lifetime appears to be his own: the Donald J. Trump Foundation.

But that charity, too, was not what it seemed.

The Trump Foundation appeared outwardly to be a typical, if small, philanthropic foundation - set up by a rich man to give his riches away.

In reality, it has been funded largely by other people. Tax records show the Trump Foundation has received $5.5 million from Trump over its life, and nothing since 2008. It received $9.3 million from other people.

Another unusual feature: one of the foundation's most consistent causes was Trump himself.

New findings, for instance, show that the Trump Foundation's largest-ever gift - $264,631 - was used to renovate a fountain outside the windows of Trump's Plaza Hotel.

Its smallest-ever gift, for $7, was paid to the Boy Scouts in 1989, at a time when it cost $7 to register a new Scout. Trump's oldest son was 11 at the time. Trump did not respond to a question about whether the money paid to register him.

At other times, Trump used his foundation's funds to settle legal disputes involving Trump's for-profit companies and to buy two large portraits of himself, including one that wound up hanging on the wall of the sports bar at a Trump-owned golf resort. Those purchases raised questions about whether Trump had violated laws against "self-dealing" by charity leaders.

In advance of this story, The Post sent more than 70 questions to the Trump campaign.

Those questions covered the individual anecdotes and statistics contained in this story, including the tale about Trump crashing the ribbon-cutting in 1996, as well as broader questions about Trump's life as a philanthropist.

Exactly when, before this spring, did Trump last give his own money to charity?

What did Trump consider his greatest act of charity in recent years?

Trump's campaign did not respond.

The result of The Post's examination of Trump's charity is a portrait of the GOP nominee, revealed in the negative space between what he was willing to promise - and what he was willing to give.

"All of this is completely consistent with who Trump is. He's a man who operates inside a tiny bubble that never extends beyond what he believes is his self-interest," said Tony Schwartz, Trump's co-author on his 1987 book "The Art of the Deal." Schwartz has become a fierce critic of Trump in this election.

"If your worldview is only you - if all you're seeing is a mirror - then there's nobody to give money to," Schwartz said. "Except yourself."

// posted by montag @ 12:59 PM 0 Comments

Senior Justice Department officials warned the FBI that Director James B. Comey’s decision to notify Congress about renewing the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was not consistent with long-standing practices of the department, according to officials familiar with the discussions.

The bureau told Justice Department officials that Comey intended to inform lawmakers of newly discovered emails. These officials told the FBI the department’s position “that we don’t comment on an ongoing investigation. And we don’t take steps that will be viewed as influencing an election,” said one Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the high-level conversations.

“Director Comey understood our position. He heard it from Justice leadership,” the official said. “It was conveyed to the FBI, and Comey made an independent decision to alert the Hill. He is operating independently of the Justice Department. And he knows it.”

Comey decided to inform Congress that he would look again into Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails during her time as secretary of state for two main reasons: a sense of obligation to lawmakers and a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup.

The rationale, described by officials close to Comey’s decision-making on the condition of anonymity, prompted the FBI director to release his brief letter to Congress on Friday and upset a presidential race less than two weeks before Election Day. It placed Comey again at the center of a highly partisan argument over whether the nation’s top law enforcement agency was unfairly influencing the campaign.

// posted by montag @ 2:05 PM 0 Comments

The announcement, posted on a company blog, affects two products: a new version of its signature meal-replacement powder, and a 250-calorie snack bar that has for months caused problems for customers.

“For the past several weeks, we have worked aggressively to uncover why people were having these negative experiences,” Soylent wrote. “This has included product testing, an exhaustive industry search, and discussions with many of our suppliers. Our tests all came back negative for food pathogens, toxins or outside contamination.”

In August, Soylent introduced the snack bar, priced at $24 for a box of 12. But two weeks ago, the company recalled the bars and offered full refunds after customers wrote online that they’d vomited, or experienced nausea or diarrhea after eating them. And in September, Soylent said that it was halting new orders on an energy drink, called Coffiest, after the product was not delivering the advertised amounts of Vitamins A and C.

The setbacks don’t seem to be a major deterrent for faithful Soylent customers, who by last year had placed more than six million orders for the meal-replacement products. Soylent fans have ordered so much of the powder that the company said recently it didn’t have enough inventory to fulfill its subscription-based customers. Soylent said that less than 0.1 percent of customers were sickened by the powder, but did not immediately respond to an email inquiry on Friday that asked for the total number of illnesses reported.

// posted by montag @ 1:39 PM 0 Comments

When Twitter reported its third-quarter results on Thursday, an answer started to emerge: The company has to go it alone — and do it by slimming down and stemming losses so that it can ultimately make money.

Twitter said it planned to cut 350 jobs, or roughly 9 percent of its global work force, as it tries to revamp the company and become profitable. The earnings also showed budding signs of progress, as user growth and revenue rose more than Wall Street had anticipated.

At the same time, Twitter is beginning to pare back businesses it no longer views as central. The company said it would discontinue the mobile app Vine, the application for sharing six-second videos that Twitter acquired and introduced in 2013. While Vine gained early traction with young users, the app did not reliably make money.

“We see a significant opportunity to increase growth as we continue to improve the core service,” Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, said in a statement. “We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth.”

In a conference call with analysts on Thursday, Mr. Dorsey also swept aside any questions about the takeover discussions around the company. His focus, he said, was bringing Twitter to profitability as soon as next year.

// posted by montag @ 1:37 PM 0 Comments

Officials in Florida and Virginia filed voter fraud charges against three people in apparently unrelated cases on Friday, just 11 days before American voters cast ballots in the hotly contested presidential race.

The charges targeted a Florida woman and a Virginia man accused of filing bogus voter registration forms and a Florida woman alleged to have tampered with absentee ballots she was opening at the Miami-Dade Elections Department.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has charged in recent weeks that the election will be rigged in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton, though he has shown no proof for these claims and many Republicans have called them unfounded.

Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle in Florida said that 74-year-old Gladys Coego, had been working as an absentee ballot opener when a supervisor allegedly saw her changing ballots that had been left blank to support a mayoral candidate. Prosecutors said that Coego admitted to marking the ballots, and was charged with two felony counts of marking or designating the ballot of another.

"The integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures work," said Christina White, the county's election supervisor, in a statement.

Separately, 33-year-old Tomika Curgil was charged with five felony counts of submitting false voter registration information for allegedly handing in forms filled out by fictitious voters while working on a voter-registration drive for a medical marijuana advocacy group.

A Virginia man was also charged with submitting falsified forms while working for a voter-registration campaign, state prosecutors said.

Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, was arraigned on two felony counts of forging a public record and two counts of voter registration fraud.

A man in Texas, where early voting started on Monday, was arrested on Monday on charges of electioneering and loitering near a polling place, public records show.

// posted by montag @ 1:22 PM 0 Comments

A cadre of loosely-organized Donald Trump supporters concerned about a rigged election and voter fraud plan to be in Charlotte – one of a handful of major U.S. cities where grassroots volunteers say they’ll be conducting exit polling.

The effort is part of longtime Republican political consultant Roger Stone’s “Stop the Steal” movement. The “Stop the Steal” tax-exempt political group – whose website logo features an outline of Trump’s face – bills itself as being “devoted to maintaining the integrity of our electoral process.”

Trump has repeatedly said the 2016 election is “rigged” and he has claimed reporters and Democratic political operatives are in cahoots against him. “Stop the Steal” recruits volunteers to poll departing voters and, on its website, the group warns of “election theft through manipulation of the computerized voting machines.”

North Carolina voting locations use a mix of electronic machines and paper-only ballots. The electronic voting method, which is used in Mecklenburg County, also produces a paper trail, called a “real time audit log.” And, machines aren’t allowed to have Internet connections.

Stone’s group says it has an “emergency committee” in place to inspect software used in voting machines. Stone recently told The Guardian at least 1,300 volunteers have signed up to visit polling places across the country, including Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas and Cleveland.

If Trump supporters who are worried about election fraud show up at polling places in Charlotte, they’ll be expected to follow the same rules as everyone else, says Michael Dickerson, director of elections in Mecklenburg County.

All campaigning near polling places and exit polling must be done outside a 50-foot buffer at precincts, according to North Carolina state law.

“The voter does not have to stop and answer. There’s no harassment of voters – that will not be tolerated,” Dickerson said.

Dickerson said Thursday he had not heard of “Stop the Steal’s” plans in North Carolina. The group’s motivation doesn’t concern him any more than “the overall comments of a rigged election,” he said.

Mecklenburg County and election officials statewide, Dickerson said, are committed to running open and honest elections.

// posted by montag @ 1:03 PM 0 Comments

Federal regulators have approved unprecedented new rules to ensure broadband providers do not abuse their customers' app usage and browsing history, mobile location data and other sensitive personal information generated while using the Internet.

The rules, passed Thursday in a 3-to-2 vote by the Federal Communications Commission, require Internet providers, such as Comcast and Verizon, to obtain their customers' explicit consent before using or sharing that behavioral data with third parties, such as marketing firms.

Also covered by that requirement are health data, financial information, Social Security numbers and the content of emails and other digital messages. The measure allows the FCC to impose the opt-in rule on other types of information in the future, but certain types of data, such as a customer's IP address and device identifier, are not subject to the opt-in requirement. The rules also force service providers to tell consumers clearly what data they collect and why, as well as to take steps to notify customers of data breaches.

“It's the consumers' information,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “How it is used should be the consumers' choice. Not the choice of some corporate algorithm.”

In the near term, what consumers see and experience on the Web is unlikely to change as a result of the rules; targeted advertising has become a staple of the Internet economy and will not be going away. But the regulations may lead to new ways in which consumers can control their Internet providers' business practices. That could mean dialogue boxes, new websites with updated privacy policies or other means of interaction with companies.

// posted by montag @ 1:59 PM 0 Comments

U.S. voting rights advocates scored a string of courtroom victories this year that rolled back some of the nation's most restrictive voting laws. Now they face another challenge: making sure those rulings are not undermined by officials who oversee elections at the local level.

With early voting already under way ahead of the Nov. 8 election, local officials in several states are trying to enforce restrictions that have been suspended or struck down in court, civil rights advocates say. In some cases, the action appears to be the result of bureaucratic confusion. In other cases, they appear to be actively resisting the law.

"There are still too many places where voting is going to be difficult and confusing, not easy and straightforward," said Leah Aden, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

The foot-dragging by local officials adds another element of uncertainty to what already promises to be a volatile election.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that states with a history of racial discrimination don't have to win approval from the U.S. Justice Department when they want to change the way they conduct elections - the first time the Deep South will be free of federal oversight since 1964.

That same ruling has also hobbled the Justice Department's ability to dispatch observers to potentially troublesome spots, raising concerns that it will be harder to deal with any problems that unfairly stop voters from casting their ballots.

Voters in 14 states will also face new voting restrictions, from scaled-back early voting hours to photo-identification requirements, according to New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Roughly 10 percent of eligible voters do not have a government-issued photo ID, including a disproportionate share of minority, poor, student and elderly voters.

Voting rights advocates have managed to roll back some of those restrictions in Texas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Kansas, Ohio and Wisconsin, potentially making it easier for millions of people to vote in states that have the potential to determine the outcome of the election.

Not all court challenges have been successful. Civil rights groups in Arizona have failed to defeat a new law that makes it illegal for them to collect absentee ballots by hand, a popular practice in Hispanic and Native American neighborhoods. Republican legislators said the law was needed to combat fraud, though they could cite no examples.

// posted by montag @ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

Jason Chaffetz, the Utah congressman wrapping up his first term atop the powerful House Oversight Committee, unendorsed Donald Trump weeks ago. That freed him up to prepare for something else: spending years, come January, probing the record of a President Hillary Clinton.

“It’s a target-rich environment,” the Republican said in an interview in Salt Lake City’s suburbs. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”

If Republicans retain control of the House, something that GOP-friendly maps make possible even in the event of a Trump loss, Clinton will become the first president since George H.W. Bush to immediately face a House Oversight Committee controlled by the opposition party. (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama lost Congress later in their presidencies.)

And other Republican leaders say they support Chaffetz’s efforts — raising the specter of more partisan acrimony between them and the White House for the next four years.

“The rigorous oversight conducted by House Republicans has already brought to light troubling developments in the [Hillary] Clinton email scandal,” the office of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said in a statement to The Washington Post. “The speaker supports [Oversight’s] investigative efforts following where the evidence leads, especially where it shows the need for changes in the law.”

And the Oversight Committee may not be the only House panel ready for partisan battle. While the Select Committee on Benghazi appears to have finished its work, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a committee member who says Clinton might have perjured herself on questions about her email, said recently that he wants the committee to continue.

If she wins, Clinton would enter office with low favorable ratings and only one-third of voters considering her “honest and trustworthy.” As a result, Republicans are not inclined to give her a political honeymoon. To many of them, a Clinton victory would mean that Trump threw away an election that anyone else could have won.

// posted by montag @ 2:01 PM 0 Comments

Though a victory by Mrs. Clinton is far from a foregone conclusion, what does seem clear is that the frustrations and anxieties that fueled Mr. Trump’s rise will not be fleeting. And a defeat of Mr. Trump — which he has already darkly alluded to as part of a plot to disenfranchise his supporters — could further inflame those on the right whose goal all along has been to disrupt the country’s political system.

Some of the loudest voices on the right seem poised to channel that anger into one of their favorite and most frequent pursuits: eating their own.

Some in the deeply factionalized Republican Party, including Mr. Trump and some of his senior aides, are already fanning the flames for a revolt against the House speaker, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, once Congress reconvenes after the election. Mr. Trump, who has lashed out at the speaker for being critical of him, has privately said that Mr. Ryan should pay a price for his disloyalty, according to two people close to Mr. Trump who insisted on anonymity to describe internal campaign discussions.

Mr. Trump made his frustrations plain on Tuesday. “The people are very angry with the leadership of this party, because this is an election that we will win, 100 percent, if we had support from the top,” he said in an interview with Reuters. (He hastened to add: “I think we’re going to win it anyway.”)

Mr. Trump’s role in a postelection Republican Party is far from clear. Though some of his senior advisers have discussed the possibility that he would continue to be a vocal and visible antagonist to Mrs. Clinton — much as Sarah Palin was to President Obama — it is unclear that he would have any interest in doing so.

// posted by montag @ 1:31 PM 0 Comments

While Donald J. Trump repeatedly claims that the election is “rigged” against him, voting rights groups are increasingly battling something more concrete in this year’s ferocious wars over access to the ballot box: Despite a string of court victories against restrictive voting laws passed by Republican legislatures, even when voting rights groups win in court, they are at risk of losing on the ground.

In an election year when turnout could be crucial, a host of factors — foot-dragging by states, confusion among voters, the inability of judges to completely roll back bias — are blunting the effect of court rulings against the laws.

Last month in Texas, a federal court that invalidated that state’s voter ID law in July ordered recalcitrant state officials to change their public education campaign on new ID rules. The reason: Critics complained that the campaign muddied the central point of the court’s ruling, that voters without a state-approved ID could simply sign an affidavit to cast a ballot. In Kansas, the chief elections official, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, agreed last month to add nearly 20,000 properly registered voters to the state’s rolls only after being threatened with contempt of court.

And this month in North Carolina, plaintiffs complained to a judge that early-voting plans in five populous counties, including Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, embraced some of the same discriminatory practices that federal courts had outlawed this summer. That came after two senior Republican Party officials advised local elections boards in emails to choose polling places and voting hours that inconvenience minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.

To Barry Burden, who directs the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, such spats mirror a growing and worrisome use of election rules as tools to win elections, not run them fairly.

“When competition filters into making the rules themselves, it’s a recipe for disaster,” he said.

The courts’ effort to loosen voter ID laws “in practice so far has not fixed problems for voters facing special burdens to produce identification,” Richard L. Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law professor and elections expert, wrote in The Wisconsin Law Review last month.

The Republicans who devised the laws call them both fair and necessary. In federal court, lawyers for Wisconsin have called its election rules “voter friendly” compared with those of many states, and said the court’s voter ID order was so lax that any excuse for lacking proper identification documents, including that “the DMV is haunted,” was sufficient.

But the crux of the Republicans’ argument is less whimsical: Tough election laws, they argue, are needed to keep Democrats from stealing elections. “What I find is that leaders of the other party are against efforts to crack down on voter fraud,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, said in March. Numerous studies and surveys of voting show the opposite: Election fraud is rare, and the in-person fraud that the laws could prevent is virtually absent.

Wisconsin, too, has been hauled into court for failing to obey a judge’s order. On Oct. 7, after Judge James D. Peterson of Federal District Court read articles in The Nation and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel documenting problems with the ID program, he summoned state officials to explain themselves.

The officials acknowledged flaws in the ID-issuing process and promised to fix them. But barely two weeks earlier, they had maintained in a report to the court that the ID process was running smoothly and that clerks in motor vehicle offices had been trained to deal with applicants.

That claim was belied when Molly McGrath, the national coordinator for the voting rights group VoteRiders, dispatched her mother to request help in getting an ID at 10 motor vehicle offices across the state. Few could navigate the application process. “They’re changing things so quick that it’s hard for us to keep up,” one clerk told her. Another, apparently unaware of the court’s order to issue IDs promptly, told her that “nothing’s guaranteed.”

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

“This year, it appears anything is possible, but a Clinton victory in Texas remains extremely unlikely,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science fellow at the Baker Institute of Rice University in Houston.

But some Democrats, pointing to the recent polls, see it differently. They predict a large turnout by black and Latino voters. And they have become energized as the Clinton campaign has opened offices and run TV ads in Texas and as local Republican-to-Democrat defections have made the news. Lauren Parish, a Republican judge in East Texas, said on Friday that she was leaving the party and becoming a Democrat because she saw “no way of reconciling my Christian beliefs with the manner in which the Republican Party is conducting itself.”

Gilberto Hinojosa, the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said of Mrs. Clinton, “I think she can carry Texas.”

“We’re looking at this cleareyed, but we have never been this close in a presidential election, at least for many years,” he said. “This election may be different because Republicans irresponsibly nominated someone who is just so far out there in every aspect.”

Lionel Sosa, 77, a Republican media consultant in San Antonio who created ads for Ronald Reagan and other Republicans, said he would vote for Mrs. Clinton, calling it a “protest vote.”

State Representative Richard Peña Raymond, a Laredo Democrat who is the Texas political director for the Clinton campaign, said that as Mr. Trump has angered women, Mexican-Americans and moderate Republicans, he has helped Mrs. Clinton gain support.

“The longer this campaign keeps going, the less support Trump has in Texas and the more support Hillary has in Texas,” he said. “Each day is a good day for Hillary and it almost appears like each day is a bad day for Trump. I don’t think it’s specific to Texas.”

// posted by montag @ 1:35 PM 0 Comments

Several factors could explain the sentencing disparity between the two rape cases.

For one, the father from Glasgow in eastern Montana pleaded guilty to only one count of incest to receive a lighter sentence. Two other counts were dismissed as part of the plea deal.

Rene Lopez, of Fresno, was found guilty by a jury of 186 felony charges, including 22 counts of rape of a minor and 163 counts of rape. The trial lasted 11 days, court records show.

Lopez could have received a much lighter sentence.

Prosecutors offered him a plea deal twice, the Fresno Bee reported. The first offer could have secured him a prison sentence of 13 years, at most; the second, 22 years. But Lopez rejected both offers and chose to go to trial instead.

According to the Fresno Bee, Lopez raped his then-teenage daughter from May 2009 to May 2013. She was raped two to three times a week, on Christmas and other holidays.

In a statement explaining his decision, McKeon, the Montana judge, said the victim’s mother and grandmother wrote letters asking for the defendant to not be sent to prison, the Associated Press reported. While his actions were horrible, the man has two sons who love and need him, the women wrote.

Nobody spoke on the victim’s behalf, according to the AP.

In Montana, prosecutors did not challenge a psychosexual evaluation’s findings that the defendant could be safely treated and supervised in the community, the AP reported.

McKeon explained that although the plea agreement recommended a sentence of 25 years, it also provided for a lesser sentence depending on the results of the psychosexual evaluation. Under Montana state law, defendants may not face the mandatory 25-year prison sentence for incest involving children age 12 and younger if an evaluation finds that they can be rehabilitated.

Montana’s sentencing policies “encourage and provide opportunities for an offender’s self-improvement, rehabilitation and reintegration back into a community,” McKeon wrote in his statement, according to the AP.

A clinical social worker also testified that the defendant is not likely to commit a similar crime if properly treated. Public defender Casey Moore said the man is remorseful and has cooperated with law enforcement,

// posted by montag @ 2:13 PM 0 Comments

The Las Vegas Review-Journal became the first major newspaper to endorse Donald Trump for president this election season, stating that, while the candidate has flaws, he'll bring needed disruption and change to Washington.

"Mr. Trump represents neither the danger his critics claim nor the magic elixir many of his supporters crave," the paper said in its endorsement. "But he promises to be a source of disruption and discomfort to the privileged, back-scratching political elites for whom the nation's strength and solvency have become subservient to power's pursuit and preservation."

Trump tweeted, "Thank you Las Vegas Review Journal" with a link to the editorial.

The paper was bought by Sheldon Adelson last year, a major Republican donor who is also another billionaire linked to casinos. It remained unclear who bought the newspaper at the time of the deal, but many speculated whoever it was – that person really wanted to own this newspaper.

Soon after, it was reported that Adelson bought the Review-Journal for a whopping $140 million.

"Suspicions about his motives for paying a lavish $140 million for the newspaper last month are based on his reputation in Las Vegas as a figure comfortable with using his money in support of his numerous business and political concerns," the New York Times reported in January.

The Review-Journal has a circulation of about 98,000 daily, 119,000 on Sundays and "remains a prime target for anyone seeking to influence voters in Nevada," The Post's media critic Paul Farhi wrote.

// posted by montag @ 1:11 PM 0 Comments

For much of the year, Democrats viewed Jason Kander as a perfect Senate candidate running in the wrong state.

A charismatic former military intelligence officer and Missouri’s current secretary of state, Mr. Kander, 35, faced an entrenched Republican incumbent in a place where Donald J. Trump seemed destined to win.

Then Mr. Kander released a television ad last month in which he put an AR-15 assault rifle together blindfolded while reciting a script about gun rights, and started assailing his rival, Senator Roy D. Blunt, on his lobbyist ties.

Suddenly, it was game on. Mr. Kander’s poll numbers soared. So did the panic among Republicans trying to save Mr. Blunt, and possibly their Senate majority.

Mr. Kander’s ascent is the starkest demonstration of the volatile and at times confounding dynamics of the battle for control of the Senate, with at least six races in a statistical dead heat just over two weeks before Election Day.

Surprisingly, Democrats have improved their chances in places like Missouri and North Carolina, where they seemed to have no shot just six months ago, while they have all but given up in Ohio and pulled their money out of Florida, where prospects had seemed bright. Republicans continue to cling to hope in New Hampshire, Nevada and Pennsylvania, despite what looks like faltering support for Mr. Trump in those states.

“With two weeks to go, control of the Senate is up for grabs,” said Nathan Gonzales, editor of The Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. “If Republicans can break even in the tossup states, they have a chance to maintain control. But if the landscape shifts just a couple of points against Republican candidates, Democrats will capture the majority.”

In perhaps the oddest quirk of a decidedly erratic year, Mr. Kander may be benefiting from Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment message. Mr. Blunt, who has served in Congress since 1997 and whose family is chockablock with lobbyists, is the archetypal boogeyman Mr. Trump has attacked in his assault on Washington insiders.

Mr. Kander often finds Trump and Clinton supporters at his campaign events — people who fight among themselves, he said, even as they share support for him.

// posted by montag @ 1:26 PM 0 Comments

On July 8, 2014, the first day that retail stores began selling marijuana in Washington state, Holmes went to Cannabis City in Seattle and plopped down $80 for two 2-gram bags of weed. Then he went back to his office and put the drugs on his desk, not realizing that even though his purchase was legal under state law he had just violated the city’s drug-free workplace policy.

“It was a completely inadvertent violation, but it was a violation nonetheless,” said Holmes, who apologized and fined himself $3,000, donating the money to Seattle’s downtown emergency services.

If prosecutors can’t keep up with the maze of competing marijuana laws these days, one might forgive regular folks who feel a little hazy about them.

And workplace attorneys say the issue promises to become even more puzzling for employers and employees alike on Nov. 8, when voters will decide whether to allow or expand legal access to marijuana in nine more states.

Pot backers hope that all or most of the ballot measures pass, making 2016 the point of no return in the long drive to end federal marijuana prohibition. On Nov. 9, recreational marijuana could be legal in states that represent nearly a quarter of the U.S. population.

As a result, larger companies with multistate operations will have the most homework, scrambling to figure out how to deal with employees who work in jurisdictions with differing marijuana laws.

“The labyrinth of laws are going to become even more complicated and complex,” said Tad Devlin, a professional liability partner at Kaufman Dolowich and Voluck in San Francisco who counsels employers and insurers on marijuana issues in the workplace. “What it’s going to do is create more uncertainly and potential for dispute claims and even litigation.”

// posted by montag @ 12:45 PM 1 Comments

Short of troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago, the California National Guard enticed thousands of soldiers with bonuses of $15,000 or more to reenlist and go to war.

Now the Pentagon is demanding the money back.

Nearly 10,000 soldiers, many of whom served multiple combat tours, have been ordered to repay large enlistment bonuses — and slapped with interest charges, wage garnishments and tax liens if they refuse — after audits revealed widespread overpayments by the California Guard at the height of the wars last decade.

Investigations have determined that lack of oversight allowed for widespread fraud and mismanagement by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets.

But soldiers say the military is reneging on 10-year-old agreements and imposing severe financial hardship on veterans whose only mistake was to accept bonuses offered when the Pentagon needed to fill the ranks.

“These bonuses were used to keep people in,” said Christopher Van Meter, a 42-year-old former Army captain and Iraq veteran from Manteca, Calif., who says he refinanced his home mortgage to repay $25,000 in reenlistment bonuses and $21,000 in student loan repayments that the Army says he should not have received. “People like me just got screwed.”

In Iraq, Van Meter was thrown from an armored vehicle turret — and later awarded a Purple Heart for his combat injuries — after the vehicle detonated a buried roadside bomb.

The problem offers a dark perspective on the Pentagon’s use of hefty cash incentives to fill its all-volunteer force during the longest era of warfare in the nation’s history.

Even Guard officials concede that taking back the money from military veterans is distasteful.

“At the end of the day, the soldiers ended up paying the largest price,” said Maj. Gen. Matthew Beevers, deputy commander of the California Guard. “We’d be more than happy to absolve these people of their debts. We just can’t do it. We’d be breaking the law.”

Facing enlistment shortfalls and two major wars with no end in sight, the Pentagon began offering the most generous incentives in its history to retain soldiers in the mid-2000s.

It also began paying the money up front, like the signing bonuses that some businesses pay in the civilian sector.

// posted by montag @ 2:00 PM 0 Comments

Donald Trump delivered a message Saturday to the women who have accused him of sexually molesting them over the years: Prepare to be sued.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania on Saturday, Trump called the women's accusations falsehoods bent on damaging his campaign in its final weeks.

"Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign," Trump said during a speech in which he also rolled out his plans for his first 100 days in office. "Total fabrication. The events never happened. Never. All of these liars will be sued after the election is over."

So far, nearly a dozen women have spoken publicly about Trump groping or kissing them in the past.

Many of Trump's accusers have come forward this month after the release of a 2005 audio recording in which Trump can be heard making lewd comments and boasting about groping women.

On Saturday, another accuser is set to make a public statement about Trump groping her.

// posted by montag @ 1:54 PM 0 Comments

If the 15 warplanes on board the Admiral Kuznetsov join the bombardment of Syria, the carrier will have its first active combat role since it was launched more than three decades ago as part of a last gasp by the fading Soviet Union to challenge American naval power.

That is seemingly the intent of the carrier’s current mission — the latest move by President Vladimir V. Putin to flex Russian military muscle abroad and project power anywhere in the world by dispatching a floating air base.

“It is part of Russia signaling that it is back on the world stage, that it is once again a maritime power,” said Magnus Nordenman, the director of the trans-Atlantic security initiative at the Atlantic Council, a think tank in Washington.

In addition, the battle group adds to Russia’s military leverage in diplomatic negotiations with the United States and other Western powers over the future of Syria. Russia has also repeatedly used the Syrian war as a kind of infomercial for its weapons sales.

For the moment, Russia has suspended combat operations in Aleppo, Syria, to give rebel fighters and civilians a chance to escape the siege. Driving the opposition from Aleppo would pave the way for Mr. Assad to rule over some manner of rump state; there is little optimism for a permanent truce.

“The deployment is mainly intended to park an 800-pound gorilla off Syria’s coast to intimidate all comers,” said Cliff Kupchan, the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a Washington-based political risk consultancy.

Many military analysts see the Admiral Kuznetsov as merely a 200-pound gorilla, and consider it a gamble to play gunboat diplomacy with a lumbering tub fit for the scrap heap. The latest excursion is only the eighth long-distance mission for the aircraft carrier, which has been something of a lemon from the start.

“I would sum up its history as ‘tortured,’” Mr. Nordenman said.

The carrier underwent repairs from 1996 to 1998, from 2001 to 2004, and in 2008, and its deck and electronic plant were replaced in the past two years, according to Russian news reports.

It is expected back in dry dock after the Syria deployment because its propulsion system needs to be replaced.

Whenever it went to sea over the years, the Admiral Kuznetsov was prone to accidents.

The United States Navy came to its aid during one Mediterranean training exercise in 1996, when the machinery used to distill fresh water from seawater malfunctioned, leaving its crew of nearly 2,000 sailors with a severe shortage of fresh water. The carrier polluted the Irish Sea at one point with a gigantic oil spill, and a fire on board killed a crew member in 2009.

The technology used to launch airplanes is considered obsolete. Most modern carriers fling their fighter jets skyward with a kind of catapult, allowing them to carry a full contingent of fuel and weapons. Planes launched from the Admiral Kuznetsov wobble aloft from a sort of ski jump, forcing them to take off without a full load.

The warship will hug the Syrian coastline, allowing planes to perform bombing runs and return to the ship’s deck before running out of fuel, according to an unidentified source cited by the Tass news agency.

The deployment will include the first of the new MiG-29K/KUB fighters, a modernized version of that MiG jet, and the Su-33a, as well as 15 helicopters, according to Tass. “This is a potent force,” said Prokhor Tebin, a Russian who writes a blog about the country’s navy.

// posted by montag @ 1:30 PM 0 Comments

This September, county-level "community bills of rights" in Medina, Portage, Athens and Meigs were removed from these Ohio counties' respective ballots, despite all four gathering enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The bills of rights would have banned fracking-related projects, established enforceable rights for ecosystems and carved out powers for localities to improve state protections for health, safety and welfare. Some, like Medina's, would have halted construction on the fiercely contested NEXUS fracked-gas pipeline.

But as a result of the removal of these measures from local ballots, no votes will be cast. They were removed by county boards of elections working closely with the Secretary of State to apply stringent pre-election requirements.

It is a virtual repeat of 2015, when the Ohio Supreme Court sided with Secretary of State and gubernatorial hopeful Jon Husted in a decision that effectively pulled four county-wide initiatives -- in Medina, Fulton, Meigs and Athens counties -- from their ballots, ahead of the November 2015 elections.

The 2015 court battle came after Husted claimed "unfettered authority" to determine the legality of local initiatives before they go to a vote. It was a baseless legal argument that flew in the face of established legal precedent that defines a secretary of state's role in the ballot process as procedural, and which protects petitions from legal or constitutional challenges before citizens get a chance to vote. The court struck down Husted's proclamation but sided with him on a technicality -- and the initiatives were removed.

Decisions, such as this, which sidestep the democratic process, maintain predictable "investment climates" for the oil and gas industry, and perpetuate the illusion of consensus and the notion that somehow issues regarding the oil and gas industry are democracy-immune. The industry -- wary of a domino effect -- does not want the thought that oil and gas extraction can be governed by citizen-crafted law to spread, for fear that if it does, it will do so rapidly. The very concept of putting fracking to a vote is dangerous to the oil and gas companies' agenda. It is why they worked so hard to squelch attempts at 2016 statewide anti-fracking ballot measures in Colorado and Michigan.

This is not the first fracking-related standoff in recent Ohio history. Since 2012, Ohioans working with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund have passed community bills of rights in Yellow Springs, Broadview Heights, Oberlin and Athens, and proposed over a dozen more that either failed at the ballot or were removed from the ballot before votes could take place.

Heading into 2016, activists, seemingly undeterred by the 2015 setback, crafted new initiatives with painstaking attention to detail on the "form of government" requirement. Some went so far as to explain how county coroners would be compensated under the new charters.

But their efforts were not enough to satisfy Husted or the local county boards of elections. Ultimately, all four county measures were removed from the ballot for not delineating every single specific responsibility of all county officials.

Husted appoints all the county boards of elections. In one county, he tapped Ohio Gas Association President Jimmy Stewart. And this spring, Husted organized a fundraiser with the Ohio Oil and Gas Association. Husted has also earned infamy for his attacks on early voting and trimming of the state's voter registration rolls.

// posted by montag @ 1:33 PM 0 Comments

A central plank of their strategy is to prove that the industry can tame itself without the need for additional government intervention. By distancing themselves from payday lenders and other businesses whose predatory tactics have drawn regulatory fire, online lenders hope to avoid a similar crackdown.

The up-and-coming industry, which offers fast access to loans for consumers and small businesses, is trying to recover from a difficult summer. Renaud Laplanche, the founder of Lending Club, one of the largest online lenders matching potential borrowers with would-be investors, resigned in May over the mishandling of some loans. Soon after that, several companies, including Lending Club, Prosper Marketplace and Avant, announced that they were cutting jobs because of falling demand from investors.

At the same time, consumer advocates have increased warnings that a lack of federal oversight of the lenders could leave some borrowers with unduly high fees or shut out of the market altogether.

But the lenders are beginning to regroup. They have hired lobbyists, mingled at a slate of financial technology conferences and appeared eager to tell their story before lawmakers and regulators start drafting new rules.

“At a minimum, you want policy makers to understand the nuts and bolts of your business, so they give you a fair shake,” said Brandon R. Barford, a partner at Beacon Policy Advisors, a Washington research firm.

Last year, a group of firms and small-business experts called the Responsible Business Lending Coalition published a “bill of rights” for borrowers of small-business loans and other credit products. Dozens of lenders representing community development financial institutions and online companies have signed on to the agreement, which calls for clear disclosures, no hidden penalty fees and high confidence that a borrower will be able to repay the loan, among other provisions.

// posted by montag @ 1:18 PM 0 Comments

Service of some major internet sites was disrupted for several hours on Friday morning as internet infrastructure provider Dyn said it was hit by a cyber attack that disrupted traffic mainly on the U.S. East Coast.

Social network Twitter (TWTR.N), music-streamer Spotify, discussion site Reddit and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down on Friday morning.

Amazon.com Inc's (AMZN.O) web services division, one of the world's biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

It was unclear who was responsible for the Dyn attack, which the company said disrupted operations for about two hours.

// posted by montag @ 12:56 PM 0 Comments

Until just a few months ago, Evan Bayh was working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Now the chamber is working as hard as it can against him.

In a campaign twist with significance in the battle for the Senate, the nation’s leading business lobby is going all out to defeat Mr. Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana trying to reclaim his old seat. The chamber is doing so despite the fact that Mr. Bayh, considered a business-friendly centrist, was on the chamber payroll as recently as June and made appearances on the organization’s behalf after leaving the Senate in 2011.

The chamber’s decision to attack its former ally has angered Senate Democrats to no end because capturing the Indiana seat is a crucial element of their plan to take back the Senate majority. Democrats’ efforts to persuade the chamber to stay out of the race as a demonstration of bipartisanship were rebuffed. The result has strained ties with Democrats, who might be chilly to future overtures from the chamber, particularly if they are running the Senate.

“The fact that the U.S. Chamber has spent millions against Evan Bayh, a pro-business candidate who has even served on some of their advisory boards, rips away any pretense of bipartisanship,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, in line to be Democratic leader, said in a statement. “The national headquarters is a totally partisan place and has dramatically hurt their ability to work with our caucus in 2017.”

// posted by montag @ 1:44 PM 0 Comments

As Mr. Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, meet on Wednesday for their final debate, in which foreign policy is slated to be a main topic, a look at his wholesale reframing of this set of issues reveals much about Mr. Trump’s improbable rise.

Studies show that most voters rank foreign issues low on their list of concerns, but they do listen and use those issues as a window through which they judge candidates’ values and ideology.

Mr. Trump has exploited this dynamic, offering ideas that experts consider unworkable, but that tap into some voters’ desire for a strong-handed leader. Foreign policy, some research suggests, provided an ideal medium for this message.

Typically, candidates cannot reach the national stage without first proving their fitness to certain institutions that care deeply about foreign policy: the news media that vets them, the parties that provide them with crucial support, the policy makers they will need once in office.

Because foreign policy is so complex and most voters do not follow its particulars as closely as they do domestic issues, those institutions play an outsize role in shaping the bounds of acceptable debate.

But Mr. Trump, a celebrity who largely self-financed his primary campaign, was able to bypass this process, hacking the politics of foreign policy to his considerable advantage — and in ways that could outlast his candidacy.

All candidates wrap their policy agendas in simpler values, such as strength or inclusiveness, or stories of heroes and villains, Professor Saunders said, “as a way of crafting a narrative that voters who don’t follow the details can grab on to.”

That is especially true for foreign policy, she said, because it is so complex.

Mr. Trump seems to have reversed this process, beginning with the narrative and values he wishes to convey, then designing policies to maximize his message’s effect.

Because foreign policy requires difficult trade-offs, conventional candidates are limited in how emotionally appealing they can make their plans while keeping them workable. They also need to appease the hard-nosed policy experts or party officials those candidates rely on to get elected — and, eventually, to govern. But Mr. Trump was under no such constraints.

The result: Mr. Trump’s foreign policy is not a foreign policy at all, but rather a vessel for reaching voters on a purely ideological level.

// posted by montag @ 1:36 PM 0 Comments

Here, he has made direct appeals since August to recruit voters as poll monitors on Election Day and has pointed specifically at Philadelphia as a city beset by voter fraud.

Despite offering little evidence for any of his claims, his “rigged” election message is resonating with his followers in this traditional battleground state where Democratic rival Hillary Clinton has opened up a wide lead. But his calls for poll watchers on Nov. 8 is drawing a mix of confusion, concern and tepid support.

In some cases, Trump’s talk of fraud appears to have made some of his own followers more resigned to an election loss, even though independent studies show U.S. voting chicanery is exceptionally rare and certainly never on a national scale.

Since Aug. 8, when Trump first urged supporters in the state to “watch other polling places and make sure that it’s 100-percent fine,” civil rights groups have expressed fears that some supporters will take the idea too far by forming roaming, vigilante-style crowds intimidating voters.

Trump supporter Mark Bowman, 53, says he isn’t the type to attend a political rally or put campaign stickers on his car. And he isn’t confident the election results will be correct.

“I hate to say it, but I don’t have a lot of faith,” Bowman said. “Voter fraud is rampant especially in the cities.”

But, in a comment echoed by nearly two dozen Trump supporters in the state’s reliably Republican central regions, he said he thinks nothing can be done to stop it and that becoming an amateur poll watcher is a step too far.

“What authority do I have to confront someone?” said the resident of Shermans Dale, a rural community of about 5,000 people. “Your average citizen, you’re going to end up in a confrontation with someone. You’re going to end up in a bad situation.”

// posted by montag @ 1:24 PM 0 Comments