Making of the President 2016

@timkaine Cannot believe how often the moderator interrupts #Pence vs the other guy…so obvious @FoxNew So true!

Donald Trump’s experience in business had taught him that management changes are sometimes required for continued success. The management team that brings a corporation into existence as entrepreneurs may not be the same management team required as seasoned professionals to take a corporation public.

Trump applied this discipline to his presidential campaign. As he had hired Paul Manafort to replace Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager, the time also came to evaluate if Manafort was the best choice for the general election contest against Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton.

On Friday, August 19, 2016, Paul Manafort resigned, signaling a shake-up in the Trump campaign at the top. The Clinton-supporting press had been pushing a campaign against Manafort almost from the moment he was hired by Trump, arguing that Manafort had accepted money under the table for consulting with Ukraine’s ruling political party during the administration of Manafort’s main client, former president Viktor F. Yanukovych. “Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau,” the New York Times reported on August 14, 2016. “Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.”2 When Manafort first joined Trump, replacing Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager, the New York Times had tried to portray Manafort as a supporter of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and Putin’s decision to give Yanukovych asylum in Russia after being deposed in 2014. The goal of Clinton-supporters from the time Manafort joined the Trump campaign was to assign Manafort responsibility for Trump’s alleged admiration for Putin and all things Russia.3 Despite the questionable documentation for these allegations and the absence of criminal charges against Manafort in Ukraine, the mainstream media persisted in publishing these accusations.4

Clinton crony and dirty trickster Sidney Blumenthal, and most probably Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk, engineered Manafort’s demise by pedaling bogus charges against Manafort through Ukrainian intelligence. Pinchuk’s ties to Hillary go back to the Ukrainian military coup of February 2014, when it surfaced that Pinchuk, a vocal proponent of Ukraine’s European integration, made huge contributions to the Clinton Foundation, while Hillary Clinton was the US secretary of state. Between 1999 and 2014, Ukrainian donors with ties to Pinchuk contributed almost $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, pushing England and Saudi Arabia to second and third places respectfully.5 In 2008, Blumenthal was the first “Birther,” supplying Hillary Clinton with information that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii to use in the 2008 Democratic Party primary contest that year. Blumenthal is also the same man who invented the lie that the attack on our mission in Benghazi was caused by an anti-Islamic video shown online in Turkey. Sid was caught trying to line his pockets in a Libyan side deal that he never disclosed to Hillary Clinton when he was urging the toppling of Gaddafi. Blumenthal thinks he’s Ted Sorensen but he’s actually Al Capone.

When Ukrainian intelligence found nothing legitimate regarding Manafort’s entirely legal campaign services in three democratically held elections they simply had Ukrainian intelligence create a co-ledger with correspondence to no known financial transfer records. There is no evidence admissible in a court of law that Manafort accepted any illegal payments. The “ledger” found at some party clubhouse was most likely fabricated by the Ukrainian Intelligence Service. Recognizing that the mainstream media refuses to see through the baseless and unfounded charges against him, Paul Manafort, not wanting to become a distraction or feed the entire Russian-Putin-Trump canard, resigned. Manafort did what Cory Lewandowski should have done when accused of manhandling a female reporter. He put the good of Donald Trump and his campaign first. That’s what a real pro does!

The entire spin by the Clintonistas that Trump and Manafort are somehow in bed with Putin and the Russians is ridiculous. Trump has never met Putin. They have no relationship whatsoever, but their paths have crossed on several occasions. Putin dislikes Manafort because he pushed Yanukovych to have Ukraine join the EU. This is the “New McCarthyism.” The Clintons and their vassals essentially accuse Trump and Manafort of treason against their own country when in fact it’s Bill and Hillary who have profiteered in the Ukraine, not to mention that they took millions from oligarchs and foreign interests aligned with Putin.

At the same time, the mainstream media ignored documentation provided in emails made public by WikiLeaks that John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, shielded from government regulators and the American public the shares of stock he received as a member of the board of a company that received millions from a Putin-connected Russian government fund at the time of Secretary of State Clinton’s “reset” with Moscow. On October 13, 2016, WND senior staff writer Jerome R. Corsi cited Podesta emails made public by WikiLeaks to prove Podesta received 75,000 shares of common stock from Joule Unlimited Technologies, a US energy company tied to Joule Global Holdings B.V., a company in the Netherlands cited in the Panama Papers offshore banking probe as a conduit for money laundered by the Russian government.6

Podesta then transferred these shares to a holding company he owned in Utah, Leonidio Holdings LLC, that was under the control of Podesta’s daughter, Megan Rouse, who lives in Dublin, California, and operates Megan Rouse Financial Planning from her home in the suburb of San Francisco Bay. Joule Global Stichting and Joule Global Holdings figure prominently as a client of the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which is at the heart of the Panama Papers investigation into offshore money-laundering operations on a massive international scale. Russian entities that funneled money to Joule and its related companies, and ultimately to Podesta, include Viktor Vekselberg, a controversial Russian billionaire investor with ties to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

Vekselberg owns the Renova Group, a multibillion-dollar private Moscow-based Russian conglomerate with interests in oil, energy, and telecommunication held in Russia, Switzerland, Italy, South Africa, and the United States. He is a board member of Rusnano, the Russian State Investment Fund, as well as president of the Skolkovo Foundation, named for Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Rusnano made a multi-million-dollar investment in the Massachusetts-based Joule Unlimited, owned by Joule Global Holdings B.V. in the Netherlands and Joule Global Stichting, the ultimate controlling entity. WND received documentation, much of it in Russian, from a trusted international banking source showing the Russian government was transferring money to the Clinton Foundation through a regional Russian bank, Metcombank, located in the Sverdlovskava region in the Ural Mountains Federal District of Russia. Metcombank is the bank Vekselberg is using to make transfers to the Clinton Foundation.7

The money was passed through the Moscow branch of Metcombank via Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City, ending up in a private bank account at Bank of America that is operated by the Clinton Foundation. From Russian sources, WND was able to document that the final beneficiary of Metcombank is Vekselberg, who owns 99.978 percent of the bank via Renova Holding Ltd. and Renova Assets Ltd. Both are controlled by Vekselberg along with a chain of offshore companies from Cyprus, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands—all of which figure prominently in the offshore banking money-laundering operations documented in the Panama Papers. A report titled “From Russia with Love,” issued by the Government Accountability Institute headed by “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer documented in August 2016 that the payments to Podesta appear related to a scheme devised for the transfer of advanced US technology to Russia, including both military technology and solar energy technology as part of Secretary Clinton’s “reset” program with Russia, in a move that greatly enhanced Russia’s military capabilities.8

In the shakeup of his top campaign staff, Trump hired as chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, the chairman of the Breitbart News website, as well as Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster who had chaired a pro-Cruz political action committee, to be his new campaign manager. The campaign announced Conway would also assume the role Corey Lewandowski had played, traveling with Trump on the campaign trail. Manafort, who announced that he planned to stay on as chief strategist, welcomed the appointment of Bannon and Conway, made three days before he resigned.

The change in management of the campaign from Lewandowski to Manafort signaled the need for a professional manager with expertise managing delegates to get Trump through the final primary battles and the Republican National Convention successfully to win the nomination. With that mission completed, the handoff from Manafort to Bannon and Conway signaled Trump’s view that the campaign had now entered a new phase—the third and final phase—which was the general election contest in which Trump faced Clinton one-on-one for the presidency. The Khan controversy left no doubt that the steps Manafort had taken to get Trump on a more scripted message, using a teleprompter to read speeches professionally crafted in advance, was the first step in corralling what Lewandowski had characterized as “letting Trump be Trump.” Now, in the general election phase of the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump clearly needed more messaging discipline, which he hoped to obtain from Bannon, as well as more discipline on the campaign trail, which he hoped to obtain from Conway.

The Clinton-supporting mainstream media immediately began demonizing Bannon and Breitbart.com as promoting an anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, pro-white supremacy “alt-right” radical ideology that the mainstream media saw as reinforcing Trump’s appeal to Middle America. In turn, pro-Clinton partisans saw Bannon and residents of Middle America “clinging to their guns and Bibles” as fundamentally racist, sexist, xenophobic, anti-Islam, anti-LGBT, and isolationist in their anti-globalist opposition to free-trade measures and the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and China. 9

At a fundraising event on Friday, September 7, 2016, Hillary Clinton was recorded on video making one of the most defining and detrimental statements of her presidential campaign. The remark was part of her prepared speech to the “LGBT for Hillary Gala” fundraiser in New York City, where singer Barbara Streisand was scheduled to perform.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said to what the New York Times reported was a combination of applause and laughter.10 “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

Clinton continued, with a knowing smirk on her face: “Donald Trump has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn marriage equality. And if you read the ones he says he’s likely to appoint, he’s not kidding. In fact, if you look at his running mate, his running mate signed a law that would have let businesses to discriminate against LGBT Americans. And there’s so much more that I find deplorable in his campaign—that he cozies up to white supremacists, makes racist attacks, calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities. You can’t make this up. He wants to round up and deport 16 million people, calls our military a disaster. And every day he says something else that I find so personally offensive, but also dangerous.”

This statement turned out to be Hillary’s defining attack on Trump. As far as Hillary and her supporters on the far-left were concerned, Trump was unqualified to be president simply because he did not agree with the far-left’s politically correct perspective on a wide range of social issues and problems, ranging from illegal immigration through same-sex marriage. In the lexicon of the far-left, anyone who would dare say “illegal alien”—a proper legal description of what the far-left insists must be referred to as “undocumented workers”—must be castigated as a miserable human being determined to engage in hate speech. That Donald Trump refused to accept the far-left’s definition of political correctness was key to his appeal to the silent majority throughout America. Fundamentally, Hillary’s argument was that anyone who did not reject Trump and vote for her was part of an evil “basket of deplorables,” according to the far-left’s politically correct definition of right and wrong.

That Hillary would call the majority of Trump’s supporters “deplorable” revealed to Middle America her fundamentally elitist attitude. That Hillary would characterize anyone who did not support her candidacy as despicable, revealed the intolerance that has come to dominate the Democratic Party against those who dared to disagree. The New York Times report noted that by Saturday morning #BasketofDeplorables was trending on Twitter, as thousands of Trump supporters began changing their Twitter usernames to include “Deplorable,” along the theme of “Deplorable Me.” The fact that Hillary Clinton, in her arrogance, believed that her political perspective on social issues carried the certainty of a Papal decree on a doctrine of faith was broadly interpreted across Middle America as an insult. Was it possible that Hillary and the far-left supporting her candidacy had become so detached from political reality in Middle America that she actually thought she could win by disparaging the very people whose votes she needed in November to defeat Trump?

“Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hardworking people. I think it will cost her at the polls!” Trump tweeted when he learned what Hillary had said.11

Following Hillary’s speech, singer Barbara Streisand—a diehard Hillary Clinton supporter—performed a parody of the Stephen Sondheim song, “Send in the Clowns,” which changed the words so she could sing of a “sad, vulgar clown,” delighting the audience at the LGBT fundraiser by ridiculing the Republican nominee. “Is he that rich, maybe he’s poor, ’til he reveals his returns, who can be sure?” Streisand sang to an applauding crowd, according to the Associated Press report on the event. “Something’s amiss, I don’t approve, if he were running the free world, where would we move?” Streisand continued: ”And if by chance he gets to heaven, even up there, he’ll declare chapter 11. This sad, vulgar clown. You’re fired, you clown.” Hillary Clinton encouraged her supporters at the LGBT fundraiser to “stage an intervention” if they should be so unfortunate as to have any friends considering the possibility of voting for Trump. “That may be one conversion therapy I’d endorse,” Clinton said. “Friends don’t let friends vote for Trump.”12

Immediately, Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” remark was compared to the game-changing gaffe Mitt Romney made at a fundraiser, when he was recorded saying that 47 percent of the people, who are dependent upon government and don’t pay taxes, will vote for President Obama, “no matter what”13 Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, Trump said this was Hillary Clinton’s 47-percent moment. “I think it was far worse,” Trump told Hannity. “Let’s see what happens, but there are a lot of very angry people. People are really upset that she would feel that way. That’s her true feeling.”14 A Washington Post/ABC News survey asked people whether “it’s fair or unfair to describe a large portion of Trump supporters as prejudiced against women and minorities.” More than twice as many registered voters thought this approach was out of bounds, 65 percent, as said it was fair game, 30 percent.15

The Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri specifically claimed that I had manufactured Hillary’s health issues. The idea that I had created a false narrative regarding Hillary’s health was undercut by her haggard physical appearance, light campaign schedule, trouble walking up three steps, and, eventually, her collapse in 70-degree weather on 9/11. Voters would learn more about Hillary’s health problems as the campaign unfolded.

Then on Labor Day, Monday, September 5, 2016, concerns over Hillary Clinton’s health resumed when Clinton labored through a severe coughing fit during a speech in Cleveland, Ohio, followed by another coughing attack she experienced later in the day during a press conference on her airplane. Just moments after being introduced by her running mate, Tim Kaine, Hillary went into the first coughing episode at Lake Easter Park. “Every time I think about Trump, I think I’m allergic,” Hillary quipped, trying to divert attention from the coughing fit that interrupted her speech. People in the crowd began shouting, “Get her some water,” as Clinton fought to regain her composure. Later, on her campaign airplane, a staffer handed Clinton a glass of water as soon as she began coughing. As Clinton struggled to say, “Excuse me,” Fox News broke away from the press conference and went back to the studio broadcast. None of the major television networks covered Clinton’s Labor Day coughing fits.16

On Sunday, September 11, 2016, Trump and Clinton, both self-described “New Yorkers,” paused their campaigns to attend in person the 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center twin towers.17 Clinton abruptly left the ceremony early, around 9:30 a.m., as she began to feel faint, according to reports her staff later gave the press. A dramatic video, widely broadcast after the incident, showed Hillary, supported by staffers approaching a black SUV to leave the 9/11 ceremony, stumbling badly, as two security men who appeared to be Secret Service, grabbed her to lift her into the vehicle as she appeared to lose consciousness and possibly even faint.18 Two NYPD officers told NBC news that Clinton “fell ill and may have fainted” just before she left, while Fox News reported Clinton had experienced some type of “medical episode.”19 The video clearly showed Hillary’s knees buckling, such that security staff lifting her into the SUV had to prevent her from falling to the pavement. Photographs taken of the sidewalk after the SUV departed show a shoe Hillary left behind as she was helped into the vehicle.

Instead of being rushed to a local hospital for a medical examination, the SUV departing Ground Zero rushed Hillary to the apartment of her daughter, Chelsea, on New York’s Lower East Side. About two hours later, Hillary emerged from the apartment building, walking on her own. Clinton waved at the gathered crowds saying, “It’s a beautiful day in New York.” Asked whether she was “feeling better,” Clinton responded, “Yes, thank you very much.” Clinton’s campaign issued a statement, saying Clinton left the 9/11 ceremony early because she felt “overheated” and was suffering from dehydration. After leaving Chelsea’s apartment in New York City, Clinton returned to Chappaqua, New York, where Bill Clinton was waiting, having not attended the ceremony. In Chappaqua, Clinton’s personal physician Dr. Lisa R. Bardack examined her later that day, issuing the following statement: “On Friday, during follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough, she was diagnosed with pneumonia,” Bardack said. “She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now re-hydrated and recovering nicely.”20

According to the National Weather Service, the temperature during the 9/11 ceremony was 79 degrees with 54 percent humidity at 9:51 a.m. in Manhattan, hardly the type of sweltering summer weather that typically leaves people feeling overheated to the point of fainting. TMZ emailed Clinton’s spokespeople and asked why the campaign did not disclose the pneumonia when they first issued a statement saying it was dehydration, despite the fact Dr. Bardack’s statement suggested the campaign had known about the pneumonia diagnosis for two days before the 9/11 ceremony at which Clinton apparently suffered a health episode and fainted. TMZ reported Clinton’s campaign did not respond to their question.21

Clinton had been photographed arriving at the 9/11 event wearing a pair of cobalt blue sunglasses, identified as Z1 cobalt blue lenses manufactured by Zeiss that are typically prescribed by physicians to prevent seizures associated with epilepsy. The lenses are designed to block most of the red spectrum of light, considered the most likely to induce seizures in people who have photo-sensitivities associated with neurological diseases that include epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. Photographs from the event show Hillary walking toward Ground Zero with her left wrist in upward position, held by a woman assisting her who appears to be monitoring continuously Hillary’s pulse as she walks. As observed by Russ Vaughn writing in the American Thinker, Hillary’s right hand being held to her chest, “an abnormal posture for a walking human but a common one for those with Parkinson’s, who employ it to mask both tremors and unnatural finger positioning and movement of the fingers, as well as a phenomenon called pill-rolling most usually associated with that disease.”22

On Tuesday, September 6, 2016, the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who writes a blog aptly named The Fix, objected to the extensive coverage the Drudge Report was giving to Clinton’s Labor Day coughing incidents.23 “The simple fact is that there is zero evidence that anything is seriously wrong with Clinton,” he insisted. “If suffering an occasional coughing fit is evidence of a major health problem, then 75 percent of the country must have that mystery illness. And I am one of them.”24 Clinton’s fainting episode on 9/11 pushed even a strong Clinton supporter like Cillizza over the top. In his blog on September 11, 2016, Cillizza changed his tune. “Clinton may be totally fine—and I certainly hope she is,” Cillizza began, reversing his position on Clinton’s health issues. “But we are 58 days away from choosing the person who will lead the country for the next four years, and she is one of the two candidates with a real chance of winning. Taking the Clinton team’s word for it on her health—in light of the episode on Sunday morning—is no longer enough. Reasonable people can—and will—have real questions about her health.” Cillizza continued to note what he had written the previous Tuesday was no longer operative. “A coughing episode is almost always just a coughing episode,” he continued, explaining his reversal. “But when coupled with Clinton’s ‘overheating’ on Sunday morning—with temperatures something short of sweltering—Clinton and her team needed to say something about what happened and why the press was in the dark for so long.”25

After the health episode Hillary experienced on 9/11, several physicians went public, expressing their concern that Hillary should submit to a professional medical examination by qualified neurological specialists to determine if her medical problems were related to something more serious than pneumonia.

On September 12, 2016, Jerome R. Corsi reported at WND.com that two physicians—one who suspects Clinton has Parkinson’s disease and one who does not—both agreed that Clinton is suffering from a serious neurological disease that should disqualify her from being president.26

Theodore “Ted” Noel, a retired anesthesiologist in Orlando, Florida, with thirty-six years’ experience and a background in critical care medicine explained to WND why he was so convinced that Hillary Clinton has Parkinson’s disease and produced several videos arguing that point.

In sharp contrast, Dr. Daniel Kassicieh, DO, a dual board certified osteopathic neurologist and a leading headache specialist who directs the Florida Headache and Movement Disorder Center in Sarasota, Florida, told WND in an exclusive telephone interview that he is equally convinced Hillary Clinton does not exhibit any of the characteristic features of patients with Parkinson’s. Kassicieh noted the concussion Hillary Clinton suffered in December 2012 that led to a serious blood clot requiring hospitalization may also have caused her to suffer post-concussion syndrome, with symptoms including confusion, headaches, and dizziness, and the long-term consequence of mental impairment and loss of memory that could be precursors of dementia. “An individual who suffers from post-concussion syndrome is not medically qualified to be president,” Kassicieh explained. “Minimal cognitive syndrome can be a warning precursor to dementia.”

For his part, Noel argued that Parkinson’s is a progressive disease that would immediately disqualify Clinton from running for president if her campaign ever were to allow an independent medical examination to be conducted by a qualified team of neurological specialists. “Parkinson’s disease is a progressive disease from which there is no medical cure,” Noel argued, buttressing his conclusion that should Clinton’s campaign acknowledge she has the disease, her presidential bid would be over. But he hedged, commenting that even if he was wrong and Clinton was suffering from some brain disorder other than Parkinson’s, he still insists that Clinton is suffering from “a major neurological process that almost certainly renders her incapable of performing effectively the duties of the president.” Noel produced a sixteen-minute video, in which he explains the evidence that led him to conclude Clinton is suffering from Parkinson’s. The video received more than 4 million views in the seventeen days between when he first posted it on YouTube on August 29, 2016, and Hillary’s “health episode” suffered in New York City on September 11, 2016, during the campaign.27

“Parkinson’s disease involves a clinical diagnosis,” Kassicieh insisted. “There is no clinical test that you can perform that proves a patient has Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s patients have a very characteristic appearance to them, such that you can almost look at them and tell they have Parkinson’s. Hillary doesn’t display the behaviors and facial features characteristic to Parkinson’s disease sufferers.” Kassicieh was equally certain Clinton does display characteristics of other neurological diseases, noting as evidence of this conclusion Clinton’s gait disorder, her persistent falls, her memory problems that Kassicieh observed seem to be getting worse with time, as well as this persistent cough that Kassicieh notes is a recurring symptom. “Those, I believe, are important medical problems, but not problems consistent with Parkinson’s disease,” he insisted. “Still, I believe Hillary has suffered multiple dizzy spells and I think she has suffered more falling instances and concussions than her campaign staff has admitted,” he continued. “The problem with concussions is that they are cumulative. The brain does not recover completely from concussions, so particularly in older individuals, like Mrs. Clinton who is 68 years old, multiple concussions are an even more serious problem, given that memory problems can signal mental cognitive impairment that could lead to dementia.”

On September 22, 2016, a Tampa, Florida, ABC News reporter Sarina Fazan asked Hillary Clinton whether she would be willing to take neurological exams in the wake of recent health concerns. ABC News reported Clinton laughed off the question. “I am very sorry I got pneumonia,” Clinton said. “I am very glad that antibiotics took care of it and that’s behind us now. I have met the standard that everybody running for president has met in terms of releasing information about my health.” Clinton insisted she saw no need for neurological tests. “The information is very clear, and the information, as I said, meets the standards that every other person running for president has ever had to meet.”28

Trump vs. Clinton, First Presidential Debate, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York, Monday, September 26, 2016

The New York Times summed up the first presidential debate as a solid win for Hillary Clinton. “Hillary Clinton dominated a final series of debate exchanges with Donald J. Trump about national security and gender, telling voters they could not trust her opponent with nuclear weapons and warning that he does not respect women,” New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Matt Flegenheimer wrote.29

Criticism from conservatives focused on the moderator NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt. Brent Bozell, the president of the Media Research Center, issued a statement following the first debate that attacked Holt for bias. “Lester Holt clearly heard the cries of his colleagues in the liberal media to be tough on Trump and ease up on Hillary loud and clear,” Bozell wrote. “Holt continually challenged, fact-checked, and interrupted Trump and not once challenged Hillary. Holt pounded Trump repeatedly on the birth certificate controversy, his position on Iraq, his tax returns, and whether or not Hillary looked presidential.” Bozell felt that as tough as Holt was on Trump, he went easy on Clinton. “Where were the questions on the Clinton Foundation or Benghazi or her email server?” Bozell asked. “These are the questions that drive right to the heart of whether Hillary is ready to be president and yet viewers tuning in tonight heard nothing about these important issues. Lester Holt failed in his role as a moderator. Period.”30

The major fireworks of the evening occurred toward the end of the debate, when Holt asked Trump about Hillary’s qualifications to be president. “Mr. Trump, Secretary Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major party earlier this month,” Holt began. “You said quote, ‘she doesn’t have a presidential look.’ She’s standing here right now. What do you mean by that?” The question had all the earmarks of a “gotcha” set-up that was designed to trap Trump, while serving up to Clinton a softball she could knock out of the park.

“She doesn’t have the look. She doesn’t have the stamina,” Trump answered. I said she doesn’t have the stamina. And I don’t believe she does have the stamina. To be president of this country you need tremendous stamina.”

This didn’t satisfy Holt. The quote was, “I just don’t think she has a presidential look.” Holt pressed.

Trump refused to be baited into answering the question on the basis of appearance, an obvious trap that could paint Trump as a sexist. “Wait a minute, Lester, you asked me a question,” Trump objected. “Did you ask me a question? You have to be able to negotiate our trade deals. You have to be able to negotiate, that’s right, with Japan with Saudi Arabia.” Trump persisted, arguing that the demands of the presidency might tax Hillary, without specifying why he felt that way. “I mean, can you imagine we’re defending Saudi Arabia and with all of the money they have we’re defending them and they’re not paying … all you have to do is to speak to them. You have so many different things you have to be able to do and I don’t believe that Hillary has the stamina.”

Holt again interrupted, insisting Hillary needed to respond. The sequence handed over to Hillary had the appearance of pre-arrangement.

“Well, as soon as he travels to one hundred and twelve countries and negotiates a peace deal, a cease-fire, a release of dissidents, and opening of new opportunities and nations around the world or even spends eleven hours testifying in front of a congressional committee, he can talk to me about stamina,” Hillary responded, delivering the refutation her staff had urged to Trump’s attacks in stump speeches that Hillary lacked stamina—a question the Hillary camp clearly wanted to put to rest, especially after her fainting episode in New York on September 11, 2016.

Trump attacked Hillary on making “bad deals,” specifically referencing Iran and the $150 million the Obama administration had agreed to pay Iran as a condition of finalizing the negotiations.

As Holt started to ask his final question, Hillary interrupted, delivering her sexism attack, the second punch of the two-punch response she wanted to deliver on Trump for having dared raise the “stamina issue.”

Hillary cut in aggressively, “Well, one thing Lester, is you know, he tried to switch from looks to stamina but this is a man who has called women pigs, slobs, and dogs … and someone who has said pregnancy is an inconvenience to employers,” When Trump tried to object, Hillary barely paused to take a breath, “who has said women don’t deserve equal pay unless they do as good a job as men and one of the worst things he said was about a woman in a beauty contest, he loves beauty contests, supporting them and hanging around them. And he called this woman Miss Piggy,” Hillary said, looking pleased she got a chance to deliver the attack on script. “Then he called her Miss Housekeeping because she was Latina. Donald, she has a name.”

“Her name is Alicia Machado and she has become a US citizen and you can bet she’s going to vote this November,” Hillary said, without providing the audience in the auditorium or the 84 million watching on television any more detail than the woman’s name, the fact she was Hispanic, and the suggestion Trump had wronged her.

Trump sensed the set-up. He began by objecting to all the negative advertising the Clinton campaign had launched against him. “I was going to say something extremely rough to Hillary, to her family, and I said to myself I can’t do it. I just can’t do it. It’s inappropriate, it’s not nice,” Trump said. “But she spent hundreds of millions of dollars on negative ads on me—many of which are absolutely untrue. They’re untrue and they’re misrepresentations. And I will tell you this, Lester, it’s not nice and I don’t, I don’t deserve that. But it’s certainly not a nice thing that she’s done. It’s hundreds of millions of ads and the only gratifying thing is I saw the polls come in today and with all of that money, over $200 million spent and I’m either winning or tied.”

Holt ignored Trump’s response, determined to get in his final question, asking each nominee whether they were willing to accept the outcome of the election as the will of the voters. This too seemed a bit too convenient, as if Holt were reading from a script in which the question was crafted to advance a Clinton narrative the Clinton-partisan mainstream media would certainly parrot in post-election coverage, should Trump launch an Al Gore-type challenge to the Election Day vote totals.

Hillary answered by suggesting Trump would do damage to “our democracy” if he refused in advance to agree to forego challenges to the vote totals on Election Day. “Well, I support our democracy,” Hillary began her answer, suggesting the concept of “democracy” was equated to not challenging an Election Day result. “And sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but I certainly will support the outcome of this election. And I know Donald is trying very hard to plant doubts about it but I hope the people out there understand this election’s really up to you. It’s not about us so much as it is about you and your families and the kinds of country and future you want. So I sure hope you will get out and vote as though your future depended on it because I think it does.”

Given the extent to which Clinton and her supporters objected to the Election Day result that made Trump president-elect, there is no doubt this question and Hillary’s answer were designed to promote a developing Clinton meme designed to force Trump to eliminate in advance his legal rights to question a general election outcome, even if Trump had probable cause to believe it was fraudulent. Remember, at the time of the first presidential debate, in late September, the polls gave every reason for Hillary to believe she would win in a landslide.

Trump reacted as if the question were an out-of-context surprise. “I want to make America great again,” he commented. “We are a nation that is seriously troubled.” Then, recovering, he discussed deporting eight hundred people, “perhaps they pressed the wrong button, or perhaps worse than that, it was corruption.” In struggling to understand just what he was being asked and why, Trump seemed to sense his answer ought to involve “pressing the wrong button” and “corruption”—key issues in the concern over Democratic Party voter fraud that the GOP suspected given the Democrats unyielding opposition to voter ID laws, as well as their insistence that non-citizens should be allowed to vote.

In response to a question Holt posed over hacking and cyber security, Clinton also hit Trump over Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggesting that Trump had encouraged Putin to hack into Democratic files. “But increasingly, we are seeing cyber-attacks coming from states, organs of states,” Clinton answered. “The most recent and troubling of these has been Russia. There is no doubt now that Russia has used cyber-attacks against all kinds of organizations in our country.” From there, Clinton again advanced a meme that was to become a post-election Democratic narrative—that Putin stole the election for Trump by leaking hacked documents from the DNC and from Hillary’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. “And I am deeply concerned about this. I know Donald’s very praise-worthy of Vladimir Putin, but Putin is playing a really tough, long game here,” Hillary continued. “And one of the things he’s done is to let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee.”

Trump reacted as if he thought Clinton’s answer to the cyber security question was preposterous. “As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said,” Trump said, when he finally got a chance to respond. “We should be better than anybody else and perhaps we’re not. I don’t think anybody knows that it was Russia that broke into the DNC. She’s saying, ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.’ I don’t—maybe it was. I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed who weighs four hundred pounds, ok?” Trump had not fully caught onto the attack Clinton and the Democrats had prepared. To counter the damage already done by WikiLeaks and Julian Assange’s release of DNC documents that forced Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign, Clinton and the Democrats wanted to put the blame on Trump, claiming the Russians were somehow in cahoots with Trump, implementing a plan devised in Moscow to rig the election against Hillary. Trump was shocked not only because he considered the idea of such a plot preposterous, but also at the audacity of Hillary to advance the conspiracy theory as reality without a shred of evidence proving Russia’s culpability, let alone Trump’s complicity.

The article that appeared in Vogue the next day, Tuesday, September 27, 2016, entitled “Who is Alicia Machado? The Beauty Queen That Trump Once Fat-Shamed,”31 suggested the Alicia Machado attack was pre-arranged between the Clinton campaign and a more-than-willing mainstream media player well in advance of the first presidential debate. “For the majority of Americans, Machado’s name will not ring a bell. But almost every Venezuelan, myself included, remembers when the former Miss Venezuela won the title of Miss Universe in 1996. (After all, beauty pageants are somewhat of a national sport over there.),” Vogue author Patricia Garcia wrote. “We also could never forget how humiliating it was to see Machado later fat-shamed in front of international press by Trump.” Vogue explained that Machado, who was twenty when she earned her crown, went from 117–118 pounds to 160–170 pounds—a weight gain that induced Trump to call her “an eating machine.” The story told by Vogue was that Trump then shamed Machado by “parading her in front of 90 media outlets while they photographed and filmed her working out next to a trainer.” Vogue ended the article by noting Machado had just posted on Instagram that she intended to vote for Hillary on November 8. “I’m so proud and inspiration (sic) to be a U.S. Citizen! I’ll be Voting! All my power and my support with my next president @hillaryclinton. Miss Housekeeping and Miss Piggy can vote @realdonaldtrump. Touché, Alicia.”

Predictably, Trump responded. On Tuesday, September 27, 2016, Trump called the “Fox and Friends” morning show at Fox News. “I know that person. That person was a Miss Universe person,” Trump said. “And she was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible,” he said. ”She was a Miss Universe contestant and ultimately a winner, who they had a terrifically difficult time as Miss Universe. She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem. We had a real problem. Not only that, her attitude. This was many years ago. So Hillary went back into the years and found the girl and talked about her as if she was Mother Teresa and it wasn’t quite that way, but it’s okay.”32 Trump’s appearance on Fox News the day after did little to counter the two-minute video the Clinton campaign had prepared to release to the press an hour after the first debate ended. “He was very overwhelming. I was very scared of him,” Machado said in Spanish on the video. “He’d yell at me all the time. He’d tell me ‘you look ugly’ or ‘you look fat.’ Sometimes he’d ‘play’ with me and say ‘Hello Miss Piggy, hello Miss Housekeeping.’”33

As if on cue, extreme liberal Michael Barbaro of the New York Times jumped on the “Miss Piggy” bandwagon. For twenty years, Alicia Machado has lived with the agony of what Donald J. Trump did to her after she won the Miss Universe title: shame her, over and over, for gaining weight,” Barbaro wrote with coauthor Megan Twohey in the New York Times’ morning edition the day after the first debate. “Private scolding was apparently insufficient. Mr. Trump, who was an executive producer of the pageant, insisted on accompanying Ms. Machado, then a teenager, to a gym, where dozens of reporters and cameramen watched as she exercised,” Barbaro and Twohey continued. “Mr. Trump, in his trademark suit and tie, posed for photographs beside her as she burned calories in front of members of the news media. ‘This is somebody who likes to eat, Mr. Trump said from inside the gym.”34

This was not the first time Barbaro and Twohey had quoted Alicia Machado. She was also included in an article the pair coauthored, entitled “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Private,” published in the New York Times on May 14, 2016.35 Barbaro and Twohey’s subtitle revealed their agenda: “Interviews reveal unwelcome advances, a shrewd reliance on ambition, and unsettling workplace conduct over decades.” Based on what the New York Times claimed were fifty interviews conducted over six weeks, the newspaper portrayed Trump as a woman-abusing sexist, citing incidents and verbal exchanges Trump told the New York Times were invented. “A lot of things get made up over the years,” Trump told the reporters. “I have always treated women with great respect. And women will tell you that.” The New York Times assisted Hillary by printing the sensational, typified by this excerpt Barbaro and Twohey penned: “This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president: degrading, impersonal, performed. ‘That must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees, he told a female contestant on The Celebrity Apprentice. Rosie O’Donnell, he said, had a ‘fat, ugly face. A lawyer who needed to pump milk for a newborn? ‘Disgusting,’ he [Trump] said.”

Yet, the Clinton campaign, in portraying Alicia Machado as the victim, had failed to tell the whole story. “The Venezuelan beauty queen who made headlines two years ago for putting on weight after being crowned Miss Universe is back in the news,” the Associated Press reported on January 23, 1998. “A lawyer for a man who was shot outside a church in November said Friday that Alicia Machado, 21, was seen driving the car in which her boyfriend sped away from the scene of the shooting. Francisco Sbert Mousko suffered brain damage when two bullets punctured his skull outside a church where his dead wife was being eulogized.”36 The Associated Press next reported on February 5, 1998, Machado had threatened to kill Judge Maximiliano Fuenmayor after he indicted her boyfriend for attempted murder.37 The Daily Mail reported Machado was not indicted because there was insufficient evidence to prove the claim. But the indictment for threatening to kill a judge and for being an accomplice to murder, if it had led to a criminal trial would have carried a jail term of up to eighteen months had Machado been found guilty.38

But the Machado real-life saga does not even end there. In 2005, the Philadelphia Phillies major league baseball star, outfielder Bobby Abreu, broke off his engagement with Machado after she went on a reality television show in Mexico and had sex on camera with a fellow cast member playing her housemate. After her success in Hispanic soap operas on television, Machado appeared nude for a Mexican edition of Playboy in 2006. Mexico’s attorney general claimed Machado had a child with narco-cartel drug lord José Gerardo Álvarez Vázquez, aka, “El Indio,” as reported by the Mexican newspaper El Economista in an article published in 2010.39

On Saturday, October 1, 2016, the New York Times hit Trump on what the Hillary campaign had anticipated would be a major tax scandal. “Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by the New York Times show,” a team of four reporters including Megan Twohey wrote in the article’s lead paragraph.40 The newspaper failed to disclose who had leaked Trump’s 1995 income tax return and the Clinton campaign did not raise the same fuss Hillary had raised charging the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee emails because Putin wanted Trump to win. Instead, the New York Times published without comment or explanation a photocopy of the line showing the $916 million loss lifted from the 1995 tax returns obtained by the newspaper.

“The 1995 tax records never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan,” the newspaper reported. “Tax experts hired by the Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period.”

The New York Times noted that the $916 million loss could have eliminated any federal income taxes Trump may have owed otherwise on the $50,000 to $100,000 he was paid for each episode of The Apprentice, or the roughly $45 million he was paid between 1995 and 2009 when he was chairman or chief executive of the publicly traded company Trump created to assume ownership of his troubled Atlantic City casinos. “Ordinary investors in the new company, meanwhile, saw the value of their shares plunge to 17 cents from $35.50, while scores of contractors went unpaid for work on Mr. Trump’s casinos and casino bondholders received pennies on the dollar,” the article noted.

In response to the article, Trump wrote a letter to the New York Times saying, “The only news here is that the more than 20 year-old alleged tax document was illegally obtained, a further demonstration that the New York Times, like establishment media in general, is an extension of the Clinton Campaign, the Democratic Party, and their global special interests.”41 The letter pointed out that Trump “is a highly-skilled businessman who has a fiduciary responsibility to his business, his family, and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required.” Importantly, the New York Times had failed to prove that Trump had violated any law, reporting accurately instead that federal tax law in 1995 allowed Trump to carry forward the $916 million loss to reduce taxable income in future years—all precisely what Trump did. Trump’s letter also pointed out that Trump in the years under question had paid hundreds of millions of dollars in property taxes, sales and excise taxes, real estate taxes, city taxes, state taxes, employee taxes, and federal taxes, along with very substantial charitable contributions.

“Mr. Trump knows the tax code far better than anyone who has ever run for President and he is the only one who knows how to fix it,” Trump’s response letter to the newspaper continued. “The incredible skills Mr. Trump has shown in building his businesses are the skills we need to rebuild this country. Hillary Clinton is a corrupt public official who violated federal law; Donald Trump is an extraordinarily successful private businessman who followed the law and created tens of thousands of jobs for Americans.”

The Clinton campaign immediately called the New York Times report a “bombshell,” calling once again for Trump to release his full income tax returns, something Trump had successfully resisted doing throughout the presidential campaign. Trump surrogates New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani explained the story was “very good” for the GOP nominee because it showed the “genius of Donald Trump.” Quickly, the New York Times story flopped. “I pay my lawful tax and [Trump] paid his lawful tax,” he said. “If he did not take advantage of those tax deductions or advantages that he has he could be sued,” Giuliani explained. “His obligation is to make money for his enterprises and save money for his enterprises. It would be insane for him not to take advantage.”42

Why was the New York Times so far to the left in its editorial policies that it imagined there was a moral obligation to pay income taxes that, according to IRS rules, you do not legally owe? The federal courts since Helvering v. Gregory, decided in 1935, have held to Judge Learned Hand’s famous statement “there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible,” establishing the principle that “tax avoidance”—a legal scheme to pay the minimum federal income tax required—is not a crime, while “tax evasion”—an illegal scheme to avoid paying federal income tax owed is a criminal offense. Without admitting embarrassment, the New York Times, some thirty days after the first article, shifted ground to argue the real offense was that Trump, to gain the $916 million loss carry-forward, had used “a tax avoidance maneuver so legally dubious that his own lawyers advised him that the Internal Revenue Service would most likely declare it improper if he were audited.”43 Yet, the problem persisted. The New York Times, in the second article published on October 31, 2016, was forced a second time to admit Trump had done nothing illegal. The maneuver Trump used had not been outlawed by Congress until later, after 1995. In other words, the New York Times was forced to admit that Trump’s 1995 tax return, obtained surreptitiously by the newspaper, revealed no criminal activity—attesting instead only to the adroitness with which Trump, along with his tax attorneys and tax accountants, had utilized federal income tax law to his financial benefit.

This is another story that backfired on the Clinton campaign. That Trump lost $916 million in 1995 and managed to turn it into a tax-loss carry-forward convinced millions of Americans that nobody really needed to see Trump’s income tax returns, just as Trump had maintained. At Trump’s level of wealth, the tax law is so complicated that the average person is not qualified to read, much less understand, his income tax filings. Moreover, that Trump survived nearly $1 billion in losses in 1995 convinced millions of Americans that he had to be the billionaire he claimed to be. How else could he have survived a loss of that magnitude without declaring bankruptcy? Finally, if Trump could manage to get out of a personal debt of that magnitude, maybe he was the exact right choice to turn around a $10 trillion debt Obama had accumulated in just eight years by doubling the amount of national debt accumulated by all previous US presidents combined.

Pence v. Kaine, Vice Presidential Debate, Longwood University, Farmville, Virginia, Tuesday, October 4, 2016

In the opinion of many political commentators, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine’s aggressiveness in the first and only vice presidential debate managed to get him characterized as a “scary clown” on Twitter, as he interrupted Republican Governor Mike Pence a total of seventy times during the ninety-minute debate, with Pence somehow managing to maintain his statesmanlike composure to stick to the ideas he wanted to communicate.44 Even the Los Angeles Times scored the vice presidential debate a win for Pence.45 Predictably, the partisan New York Times called the debate for Kaine, writing as follows: “Mr. Kaine challenged Mr. Pence repeatedly to defend statements or proposals made by Donald J. Trump during his chaotic and improvisational presidential campaign, forcing Mr. Pence to filibuster and dodge for minutes on end.”46

When the moderator, CBS News reporter Elaine Quijano, wasn’t interrupting Pence herself, she frequently appeared to lose control, as Kaine interrupted Pence repeatedly, forcing Pence to insist on time to explain his positions properly. Here is an interesting sequence at the beginning of the debate:

PENCE: But I will also tell you that it’s important in this moment to remember that Hillary Clinton had a private server in her home that had classified information on it …

QUIJANO: And I don’t—thirty seconds is up.

PENCE: … about drone strikes, e-mails from the president of the United States of America were on there.

QUIJANO: Right.

PENCE: Her private server was subject to being hacked by foreign …

(CROSSTALK)

QUIJANO: I’d like to ask you about Syria, Governor.

PENCE: We could put cybersecurity first if we just make sure the next secretary of state doesn’t have a private server.

(CROSSTALK)

KAINE: And all investigation concluded that not one reasonable prosecutor would take any additional step. You don’t get to decide the rights and wrongs of this. We have a justice system that does that. And a Republican FBI director did an investigation and concluded that …

(CROSSTALK) QUIJANO: All right, we are moving on now. Two hundred fifty thousand people …

PENCE: If your son or my son handled classified information the way Hillary Clinton did …

QUIJANO: … one hundred thousand of them children—Governor …

PENCE: … they’d be court martialed.

KAINE: That is absolutely false and you know that.

PENCE: Absolutely true.

KAINE: And you know that, Governor.

QUIJANO: Governor …

PENCE: It’s absolutely true.

QUIJANO: Gentlemen, please.

KAINE: Because the FBI did an investigation.

QUIJANO: Gentlemen.

KAINE: And they concluded that there was no reasonable prosecutor who would take it further. Sorry.

QUIJANO: Senator Kaine, Governor Pence, please.47

Kaine began the debate by noting he and his wife were the parents of a Marine, adding, “the thought of Donald Trump as commander-in-chief scares us to death.” Pence, who also has a son who is a Marine, responded with his opening statement, “For the last seven-and-a-half years, we’ve seen America’s place in the world weakened. We’ve seen an economy stifled by more taxes, more regulation, a war on coal, and a failing health care reform come to be known as Obamacare, and the American people know that we need to make a change.”

In response to the next question asking Kaine if questions about Clinton’s emails or the Clinton Foundation are responsible for 60 percent of voters not trusting Hillary, Kaine praised Hillary’s past as a civil rights lawyer with the Children’s Defense Fund, before ripping into Trump. “Donald Trump always puts himself first,” Kaine said. “He built a business career, in the words of one of his own campaign staffers, ‘off the backs of the little guy.’ And as a candidate, he started his campaign with a speech where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, and he has pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.” Kaine suggested Trump, in contrast to Clinton, wanted America to return to an era of racial segregation. “It is so painful to suggest that we go back to … think about these days where an African-American could not be a citizen of the United States,” Kaine continued. “And I can’t imagine how Governor Pence can defend the insult-driven selfish “me first” style of Donald Trump.”

When Quijano asked Pence a corresponding question, positing that 67 percent of voters feel Trump is a risky choice, while 65 percent do not feel Trump “has the right kind of temperament” to be president, Pence began by pointing out that Kaine was advancing the Clinton strategy of running an insult-driven campaign. “Well, let me—let me say first and foremost that, Senator, you and Hillary Clinton would know a lot about an insult-driven campaign,” Pence responded. “It really is remarkable. At a time when literally, in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, where she was the architect of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, we see entire portions of the world, particularly the wider Middle East, literally spinning out of control. I mean, the situation we’re watching hour by hour in Syria today is the result of the failed foreign policy and the weak foreign policy that Hillary Clinton helped lead in this administration and create. The newly emboldened—the aggression of Russia, whether it was in Ukraine or now their heavy-handed approach…”

Kaine interrupted, saying snidely, “You guys love Russia. You both have said …” Pence ignored Kaine, finishing his sentence, “… their heavy-handed approach.” Kaine immediately retorted, advancing the Clinton narrative on Russia, “You both have said—you both have said Vladimir Putin is a better leader than the president.” When Quijano tried to intervene, insisting the subject of Russia would be asked in a moment, Kaine pressed ahead with his attack on Russia, ignoring Quijano’s intervention as monitor. Kaine insisted, “These guys have praised Vladimir Putin as a great leader. How can that …” The transcript then indicates Pence and Kaine spoke over one another in crosstalk. Quijano addressed Kaine, “Yes, and we’ll get to that, Senator. We do have that [the subject of Russia] coming up here. But in the meantime …”

Kaine’s attacks on Trump were insistent and repetitive. Note how many times he brings up the subject of Mexico. About a third of the way into the debate, Kaine assaulted Trump with a litany of what he considered unacceptable, politically incorrect statements. “And I just want to talk about the tone that’s set from the top. Donald Trump during his campaign has called Mexicans rapists and criminals,” Kaine said. “He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs, disgusting. I don’t like saying that in front of my wife and my mother. He attacked an Indiana-born federal judge and said he was unqualified to hear a federal lawsuit because his parents were Mexican. He went after John McCain, a POW, and said he wasn’t a hero because he’d been captured. He said African-Americans are living in Hell. And he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that President Obama is not a U.S. citizen.” But Kaine didn’t stop there. “If you want to have a society where people are respected and respect laws, you can’t have somebody at the top that demeans every group that he talks about,” he continued. “And I just—again, I cannot believe that Governor Pence will defend the insult-driven campaign that Donald Trump has run.”

A few minutes later, Kaine picked up the Mexican theme again. “When Donald Trump says Mexicans are rapists and criminals, Mexican immigrants, when Donald Trump says about your judge, a Hoosier judge, he said that Judge Curiel was unqualified to hear a case because his parents were Mexican, I can’t imagine how you could defend that,” Kaine said, adding little to his previous assaults on Trump. Again, a few minutes later, Kaine returned to the subject of Mexico. “We have different views on—on refugee issues and on immigration. Hillary and I want to do enforcement based on, are people dangerous?” Kaine asked. “These guys say all Mexicans are bad.” Finally, Pence had enough. “That’s absolutely false,” Pence objected. Finally, as the debate was concluding, Pence decided to take Kaine on directly, refuting him on his Mexico attack. Here is that exchange:

KAINE: When Donald Trump says women should be punished or Mexicans are rapists and criminals …

PENCE: I’m telling you …

KAINE: … or John McCain is not a hero, he is showing you who he is.

PENCE: Senator, you’ve whipped out that Mexican thing again. He—look …

KAINE: Can you defend it?

PENCE: There are criminal aliens in this country, Tim, who have come into this country illegally who are perpetrating violence and taking American lives.

KAINE: You want to—you want to use a big broad brush against Mexicans on that?

PENCE: He [Trump] also said and many of them are good people. You keep leaving that out of your quote. And if you want me to go there, I’ll go there.

Even CNN’s Dan Merica was critical of Kaine, writing a Tweet that said, “Undecided voter in Ohio says, ‘Kaine came off like a jerk’ tonight. Adds that he ‘reinforced’ some of the negatives about Clinton.” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus issued a statement describing Kaine as having “desperately flailed away with empty platitudes and constant interruptions.”48

On Friday, October 7, 2016, two days before the second presidential debate, the Washington Post reported the newspaper had obtained a video showing Donald Trump bragging “in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone, saying that ‘when you’re a star, they let you do it.’”49 While the newspaper did not disclose how the eleven-year-old video had been obtained, the video clearly captured Trump talking with Billy Bush, then host of “Access Hollywood,” on a bus with the show’s name written across the side, arriving on a Hollywood set to tape a segment with Trump. Billy Bush, a well-known radio and television host, is a member of the Bush family, with his uncle (the brother of his father) being former President George H. W. Bush. Billy’s cousins are with former President George W. Bush and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and Trump can be heard boasting about kissing women and grabbing women by their sexual organs. The video does not show Trump making the remarks in the key part of the conversation with Bush.

When the Washington Post made the video public, Trump issued a short video statement saying, “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize.” He continued to insist that his “foolish” words were much different from the words and actions of Bill Clinton who Trump accused of abusing women, with Hillary acting as an accomplice, abusing her husband’s sexual victims to silence them. “I never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not,” Trump said. “I’ve said and done things I regret, and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am.”

Trump insisted he is not today the same person recorded in the eleven-year-old video. “I’ve traveled the country talking about change for America, but my travels have also changed me,” Trump continued. “I’ve spent time with grieving mothers who have lost their children, laid-off workers whose jobs have gone to other countries, people from all walks of life who just want a better future. I have gotten to know the great people of our country, and I have been humbled by the faith they have placed in me. I pledge to be a better man tomorrow, and I will never, never let you down.” Trump tried to inject some perspective into the discussion. “Let’s be honest, we’re living in the real world,” he commented. “This is nothing more than a distraction from the important issues we are facing today. We are losing our jobs, we are less safe than we were eight years ago, and Washington is totally broken. Hillary Clinton and her kind have run our country into the ground.” In closing, Trump tried to distinguish his words of sexual abuse from the Clinton’s actions. “I’ve said some foolish things,” Trump admitted. “But there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women. Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims.”

Anticipating Trump’s counterattack, the partisan pro-Clinton mainstream media went on offense. Erin Gloria Ryan, writing on Slate.com, described Trump as having “a long history of getting caught demeaning women,” bragging on the video about “nonconsensually groping women.”50 On October 7, 2016, after the story broke, Hillary Clinton posted a Tweet, saying, “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become president.” Clinton’s running mate, Senator Tim Kaine, told reporters in Las Vegas that the audio of Trump’s comments “makes me sick to my stomach.”51

The release of the Billy Bush video, along with the attack launched by Alicia Machado, strongly suggest a Clinton campaign planned attack on Trump’s “disgusting” and “sexist” comments about women, launched with the willing complicity of the partisan mainstream media. Only a few days earlier, on Monday, October 3, 2016, the Associated Press in New York reported that in his years hosting The Apprentice, Donald Trump “repeatedly demeaned women with sexist language, according to show insiders who said he rated female contestants by the size of their breasts and talked about which ones he’d like to have sex with.”52 The AP claimed to have interviewed more than twenty persons, including former crew members, editors, and contestants, who described “crass behavior” by Trump behind the scenes of the long-running show. The AP acknowledged the Trump campaign had issued a denial. “These outlandish, unsubstantiated, and totally false claims fabricated by publicity hungry, opportunistic, disgruntled former employees, have no merit whatsoever,” said Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman. “The Apprentice was one of the most successful prime-time television shows of all time and employed hundreds of people over many years, many of whom support Mr. Trump’s candidacy.” The AP noted Hicks declined to answer specific questions that were emailed and declined an interview request.

On Sunday night, October 9, 2016, prior to the start of the second presidential debate, Trump invited the press to a pre-debate press conference. The press who showed up were surprised to find Trump hosting a panel of three women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or rape—Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick. On November 14, 1998, Bill Clinton settled for 850,000 dollars the Paula Jones lawsuit in which Bill Clinton’s long-time extra-marital paramour Paula Jones agreed to drop the sexual harassment lawsuit she had pursued after “more than 4 ½ years of scorched-earth legal warfare.”53 Kathleen Willey has alleged Bill Clinton in the Oval Office sexually assaulted her on November 29, 1993.54 Juanita Broaddrick, a former nursing home administrator, alleged that Bill Clinton, when he was Arkansas Attorney General, sexually assaulted her in a hotel room in April 1978.55 Fox News noted Trump posted the video of the press conference in St. Louis, Missouri, to his Facebook page less than 90 minutes before the second debate was scheduled to begin.

The point of the press conference was not to argue Bill Clinton’s well-known history of marital infidelity to his wife, Hillary. The point was that Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick have all accused Bill Clinton of criminal sexual assault and rape. In addition, all three women have argued that Hillary Clinton is equally guilty for her husband’s sexual crimes, in that she is an accomplice-after-the-fact—an enabler—who regularly attacks and threatens Clinton’s sexual assault victims in order to silence them.

“This is NOT about infidelities, indiscretions, adultery, girlfriends or consensual sex,” Willey emphasized in an open letter she wrote to CNN in May 2016. “This is about Bill Clinton’s multiple sexual assaults and rapes for over 40 years and Hillary Clinton’s threatening, bullying, intimidating and terrorizing all of the women who have suffered at his hands. It’s as simple as that.” After Willey was subpoenaed to testify in the Paula Jones case, Hillary set out to terrify her into silence. “So I was viciously assaulted after that event in the Oval Office by Clinton allies in the media and by goons who actually threatened the lives of my children to try to silence me two days before I was to be deposed, under oath, in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment case, four years later,” Willey wrote in her open letter to Chris Cuomo. “She [Hillary Clinton] directed them to commit an even worse offense than that, a heinous act of which I have barely spoken,” Willey noted, still not ready to make public this particular horror Hillary Clinton visited upon her. “My lawyer and I tried to fight that subpoena for months. It was a story that I never intended to tell anyone.” Even recalling what she went through testifying in the Paula Jones case, Willey re-experiences the fear she felt then. “The threatening acts of terror continued for months. My pets went missing or died mysteriously way before their time,” Willey detailed in her open letter. “My car was vandalized, I discovered a stranger at my basement door at three A.M. one morning. Strange and threatening phone calls never seemed to stop. Someone broke into my house in the middle of the night while I was asleep upstairs.”56

Other victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual crimes are hammering Willey’s point home. Not only is Hillary Clinton an enabler, she is also a co-conspirator,” Dolly Kyle, the childhood sweetheart of “Billy” Clinton and someone who knows the sordid history of the former first couple better than almost anyone,57 “If Juanita Broaddrick had filed criminal charges after Billy raped her in 1978, Hillary could have been charged as an accessory after the fact because she threatened Juanita afterward,” Kyle commented. “‘Enabler’ is the most polite thing you could call Hillary.” The viciousness of Hillary’s attacks on Kyle kicked into high gear when Kyle decided to give a deposition in the Paula Jones case, going public with the details of her decades-long sexual affair with Bill Clinton. “Hillary and Billy’s later attempts to destroy me ran the gamut from planting false stories in national publications to pretending that I didn’t exist,” Kyle writes. “Billy would later lie about me under oath in a federal lawsuit, and he would suborn perjury to get another person to lie about me too.” Kyle insisted Hillary knew exactly what she was doing. “I’m not sure I ever discovered the full extent of Hillary’s attacks on me because she used various publications to do her dirty work of discrediting me,” Kyle finally concludes: “There appears to be no limit to what Hillary will do to destroy her perceived enemies. I wonder how long it will take her female supporters to realize that they are not her ‘longtime friends’ any more than I was. They are votes for her, pure and simple.”58

Also present was Kathy Shelton. Hillary Clinton had defended the man who had raped Shelton when she was only twelve years old. On May 10, 1975, Shelton, riding her bicycle, encountered Alfred Thomas Taylor, who drove his truck into a ravine and raped Shelton while beating her, calling the child a “bitch,” saying “you like it, you know it,” as he raped her. Taylor, unable to afford a private attorney, was represented by Clinton. Breitbart.com reported that in her defense, Clinton raised questions about the credibility of the victim, asking the court to order Shelton to undergo a psychiatric examination from a doctor selected by the defense.59 “I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing,’ wrote Clinton. ‘I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body.” The twelve-year-old girl also “exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way,” argued Clinton.

Breitbart further reported the crime lab that analyzed Taylor’s blood and semen-stained underwear tossed out the soiled section after testing it, and Clinton brought the remnants to a famous New York City forensic expert, who said not enough blood remained for the defense to test it again. Clinton told the prosecutor about her meeting with the forensics expert. Breitbart.com noted that Shelton survived the attack that left her in a coma. Unable to bear children, the rape affected Shelton the rest of her life, as she became addicted to drugs for a period of time and avoided men after the attack. In 2014, a video surfaced showing Clinton discussing the case in a mid-1980s interview with journalist Roy Reed, in which Clinton can be seen saying, “He took a lie detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs,” while she can be seen clearly and heard loudly, laughing about the case. The tape is available in the Special Collections Department of the University of Arkansas libraries.60

Fox News commented that Trump said little at the press conference outside of introducing the four women. “These four very courageous women have asked to be here and it was our honor to help them,” Trump said. Fox News also noted that when a member of the media attempted shouting a question at Trump near the end of the video, about whether he felt he was entitled to touch women inappropriately because he was famous, Paula Jones responded: “Why don’t y’all ask Bill Clinton that?”61

Trump managed to get the four women seated in the audience for the second debate, the story quickly became Bill Clinton’s guilty-looking face as he frowned, looking defeated, sneaking surreptitious glances at his accusers in the audience out of the corner of his eye.62

Trump vs. Clinton, Second Presidential Debate, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, Sunday, October 9, 2016

The first question CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Donald Trump after opening statements zeroed in immediately on the Billy Bush video controversy. “We received a lot of questions online, Mr. Trump, about the tape that was released on Friday, as you can imagine,” Cooper commented. “You called what you said locker room banter. You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”63

Trump jumped in, objecting to the way Cooper framed his question. “No, I didn’t say that at all,” Trump responded. “I don’t think you understood what was—this was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.” Trump pivoted to ISIS, arguing that in a world where ISIS is chopping off heads, there are more serious issues to discuss than some sexually inappropriate comments Trump made more than a decade ago.

This did not satisfy Cooper who wanted to press Trump to affirm or deny that he had done more than talk inappropriately about women. “Just for the record, though, are you saying that what you said on that bus 11 years ago that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?” Cooper asked in his follow-up question. Trump responded that he had great respect for women. Cooper would not let up. “So, for the record, are you saying you never did that?” Cooper asked a third time. Again, Trump responded, “I’ve said things that, frankly, you hear these things I said. And I was embarrassed by it. But I have tremendous respect for women.” Again, not satisfied he got the answer he wanted, Cooper rephrased, asking a fourth time, “Have you ever done those things.” Trump answered the questions, denying he had carried out his words in actions. “And women have respect for me,” Trump said one more time. “And I will tell you: No, I have not.”

Clinton, when it came her time, tore into Trump over the video with what appeared a scripted and rehearsed attack, with Hillary taking the moral high ground, completely ignoring the women who had accused her and her husband of being accomplices in a history of serial assaults that went back to the time Bill Clinton was Arkansas attorney general. What was clear from the start of the second debate was that Cooper was in line with the mainstream media, taking their direction for the narrative of the presidential race from the Clinton campaign.

The problem Clinton had not fully appreciated was the extent to which sexual mores have changed over recent decades. In the 1950s when women could expect to be pinched in office building elevators, General Dwight D. Eisenhower had to leave behind his wartime driver and mistress, Kay Summersby.64 At the conclusion of World War II, Eisenhower returned to his wife, Mamie, fully appreciating the political reality that a divorced man in the 1950s could not be elected president. In the 1960s, a compliant staff and lapdog mainstream media suppressed all coverage of President Jack Kennedy’s serial, almost continuous episodes in marital infidelity. Regarding Trump, granted, earlier in his adulthood Trump might have been guilty of the type of male “locker room” bravado in his dealings with women that was not uncommon until recently. But, unlike the Clintons, there were no women who had successfully sued Donald Trump over the years with accusations of sexual assault or abuse.

In 2016, the Clintons may have outplayed the calculation they made with the Monica Lewinsky affair that the public would simply excuse their treatment of Bill Clinton’s rape and sexual abuse victims. A feminist at heart, Clinton failed to appreciate the impact of comedian Bill Cosby being forced to undergo a criminal trial and face felony aggravated indecent assault charges from a 2004 case involving an employee at his alma mater, more than a decade after Cosby was first publically accused of sexual misconduct.65 This, however, did not deter Hillary. Clinton remained determined to make sex the centerpiece of her campaign, painting Trump as a woman-hater, while elevating herself as the champion of women, seeking to be the first woman president. The second debate was the highpoint of that strategy—a strategy evidently concocted by the Clinton campaign with the willing cooperation of CNN after the Billy Bush video had surfaced.

“Well, like everyone else, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the last 48 hours about what we heard and saw,” Clinton began, evidently feeling no hypocrisy in what she was about to say. “You know, with prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them on politics, policies, principles, but I never questioned their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different. I said starting back in June that he was not fit to be president and commander-in-chief. And many Republicans and independents have said the same thing.” Clinton again affirmed the far-left presumption that their politically correct definition of all things right and wrong empowered them to declare those who disagreed as morally degenerate, possibly even as criminals; but certainly as inferior or outright stupid, requiring thought reform intervention before being allowed loose on society. In making her pronouncement, Clinton failed to cite the section of the Constitution that set the definition of who is morally fit to be qualified to run for president.

“What we all saw and heard on Friday was Donald talking about women, what he thinks about women, what he does to women,” Hillary continued. “And he has said that the video doesn’t represent who he is.” This was Hillary’s launching point to repeat a whole series of attacks on various Trump statements the far-left considered so politically incorrect as to deserve derision. “But I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is,” Hillary plowed forward. “Because we’ve seen this throughout the campaign. We have seen him insult women. We’ve seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to ten. We’ve seen him embarrass women on TV and on Twitter. We saw him after the first debate spend nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal terms.”

Hillary concluded her moral condemnation of Trump, as if she were certain all listening had no option but to agree with her. “So, yes, this is who Donald Trump is,” she said, winding up her diatribe. “But it’s not only women, and it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be our president, because he has also targeted immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims, and so many others. So this is who Donald Trump is. And the question for us, the question our country must answer is that this is not who we are. That’s why—to go back to your question—I want to send a message—we all should—to every boy and girl and, indeed, to the entire world that America already is great, but we are great because we are good, and we will respect one another, and we will work with one another, and we will celebrate our diversity.” As far as Hillary was concerned, Trump’s crime was less that he said sexually inappropriate things about women, than that Trump dared to challenge the sacred cows of the Democratic Party’s modern far-left ideology. “These are very important values to me, because this is the America that I know and love,” Hillary insisted, as if she were re-formulating the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence. “And I can pledge to you tonight that this is the America that I will serve if I’m fortunate enough to become your president.” How could any reasonable person disagree?

When Trump finally got a chance to respond, he pointed out that Hillary’s far-left ideology was nothing more than a fine castle in the air, made of words that Hillary and Democrats had never been able to deliver to their compliant constituencies in fact. “It’s just words, folks,” Trump retorted. “It’s just words. Those words, I’ve been hearing them for many years. I heard them when they were running for the Senate in New York, where Hillary was going to bring back jobs to upstate New York and she failed,” Trump continued. “I’ve heard them where Hillary is constantly talking about the inner cities of our country, which are a disaster education-wise, jobwise, safety-wise, in every way possible. I’m going to help the African-Americans. I’m going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities.” Trump drove his point home. “She’s done a terrible job for the African-Americans,” he insisted. “She wants their vote, and she does nothing, and then she comes back four years later. We saw that firsthand when she was United States senator. She campaigned where the primary part of her campaign …” Perhaps afraid that Trump was making too many points, ABC News host Martha Raddatz interrupted, suggesting she had some online questions she wanted to ask. “So, she’s allowed to do that, but I’m not allowed to respond?” Trump asked.

Immediately, Radditz went back to questioning Trump about the Bush video, wanting to know what had changed in Trump since he walked off that bus at age fifty-nine. “Were you a different man or did that behavior continue until just recently?” she asked, adding that Trump had two minutes to answer. “It was locker room talk, as I told you,” Trump answered, repeating what he had told Cooper when Cooper asked his versions of what amounted to the same question. “That was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it,” Trump continued. “I am a person who has great respect for people, for my family, for the people of this country. And certainly, I’m not proud of it. But that was something that happened.”

Then Trump took the chance to return fire, stressing in the debate what his pre-debate press conference had made clear. “If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse,” Trump insisted. “Mine are words, and his was action. His was what he’s done to women. There’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women. So you can say any way you want to say it, but Bill Clinton was abusive to women.” Next, Trump expanded the attack to Hillary, arguing she was an accomplice to Bill’s sexual crimes. “Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously,” Trump said. “Four of them here tonight. One of the women, who is a wonderful woman, at 12 years old, was raped at 12. Her client she represented got him off, and she’s seen laughing on two separate occasions, laughing at the girl who was raped. Kathy Shelton, that young woman is here with us tonight.” This set up the distinction Trump wanted to draw, making it clear there was proof the Clintons had committed sexual crimes while there was no proof he had ever done so. “So don’t tell me about words,” Trump said with emphasis. “I am absolutely—I apologize for those words. But it is things that people say. But what President Clinton did, he was impeached, he lost his license to practice law. He had to pay an $850,000 fine to one of the women. Paula Jones, who’s also here tonight.” Trump began to get an audible, positive audience reaction. “And I will tell you that when Hillary brings up a point like that and she talks about words that I said 11 years ago, I think it’s disgraceful, and I think she should be ashamed of herself, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said, completing his argument. The transcript showed the debate was interrupted by audience applause at this point.

Raddatz, keeping the debate on script, turned to Clinton, giving her a chance to respond.

“Well, first, let me start by saying that so much of what he’s just said is not right, but he gets to run his campaign any way he chooses,” Clinton said, completely ignoring the arguments Trump had just made concerning the Clinton’s proven sexual crimes. “He gets to decide what he wants to talk about. Instead of answering people’s questions, talking about our agenda, laying out the plans that we have that we think can make a better life and a better country, that’s his choice,” Clinton said, determined not to acknowledge Paula Jones or the other three women present at the debate. “When I hear something like that, I am reminded of what my friend, Michelle Obama, advised us all: When they go low, you go high.” This too drew audience applause, but applause noticeably weaker than Trump had gotten. Neither of the moderators rebuked the audience for applauding for Clinton as they had done when the audience applauded for Trump.

Then, Hillary changed gears, attacking Trump once again for a series of politically incorrect statements during the campaign, arguing that from the perspective of her far-left ideology, Trump should be somehow disqualified from running for president. “And, look, if this were just about one video, maybe what he’s saying tonight would be understandable, but everyone can draw their own conclusions at this point about whether or not the man in the video or the man on the stage respects women. But he never apologizes for anything to anyone,” Clinton said, shifting the ground of the discussion. “He never apologized to Mr. and Mrs. Khan, the Gold Star family whose son, Captain Khan, died in the line of duty in Iraq. And Donald insulted and attacked them for weeks over their religion,” she said. “He never apologized to the distinguished federal judge who was born in Indiana, but Donald said he couldn’t be trusted to be a judge because his parents were, quote, ‘Mexican.’ He never apologized to the reporter that he mimicked and mocked on national television and our children were watching. And he never apologized for the racist lie that President Obama was not born in the United States of America. He owes the president an apology, he owes our country an apology, and he needs to take responsibility for his actions and his words.” So, in Hillary’s judgment, Trump was to be condemned because he failed to deliver what all far-left demagogues constantly demand—an apology, to be taken as an admission of guilt, for the crime of daring to disagree with the far-left’s self-evident truths that the Democrats of today want to force all Americans to believe without question.

Trump asked Clinton if she wanted to apologize to her fellow Democrats for what the WikiLeaks dump of Democratic National Committee emails revealed of how Debbie Wasserman Schultz had stacked the primaries against contender Bernie Sanders, so as to make lock-certain that Hillary Clinton would be the party’s nominee. Once Hillary mentioned that he should apologize, Trump got wound up.

“But when you talk about apology, I think the one that you should really be apologizing for and the thing that you should be apologizing for are the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted, and that you acid washed, and then the two boxes of e-mails and other things last week that were taken from an office and are now missing,” Trump argued. “And I’ll tell you what. I didn’t think I’d say this, but I’m going to say it, and I hate to say it. But if I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception. There has never been anything like it, and we’re going to have a special prosecutor.” Trump drove the point home. “When I speak, I go out and speak, the people of this country are furious. In my opinion, the people that have been long-term workers at the FBI are furious,” he continued. “There has never been anything like this, where e-mails—and you get a subpoena, you get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena, you delete 33,000 e-mails, and then you acid wash them or bleach them, as you would say, very expensive process.” Trump concluded by saying Hillary was a disgrace adding that she “ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

Clinton objected that everything Trump had just said was false. “Last time at the first debate, we had millions of people fact checking, so I expect we’ll have millions more fact checking, because, you know, it is—it’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Clinton said. Trump retorted, saying spontaneously, “Because you’d be in jail.” Again the audience applauded, drawing Cooper to reprimand those in the auditorium that they should not talk loud or applaud. “You’re just wasting time,” Cooper chided the audience.

Not even the New York Times could declare Clinton the winner of the second debate. Commenting that Clinton “in a comparatively subdued performance” had argued that she was an experienced public servant while Trump was unfit to be president.66 Without doubt, Trump was much stronger in the second debate, taking the arguments directly to Clinton, attacking her on both her email scandal and Clinton Foundation financial scandals, while counter-attacking on Clinton’s “war on women” presumption of the high moral ground. After the second debate, there was no doubt the Clinton campaign had calculated that Clinton needed to win overwhelmingly the votes of women if she were to have a chance to be elected president. The campaign strategy seemed to be to double- and triple-down attacks on Trump over the cavalier way he had treated women verbally earlier in his life. According to her, Trump was disqualified based on Hillary’s “war on women” criteria, while she should win on these same criteria, on feminist grounds if nothing else, simply because she aspired to be the first woman president.

But the Clinton campaign did not let up, producing throughout October a list of women who came forward to allege Trump had sexually abused them, with the accusations covering a span of more than three decades, from the early 1980s to 2013.67 The trouble with the accusers was that none could explain why they were only coming forward now, when Trump was the GOP nominee for president, and none had any convincing proof. The accusers were further undermined as various investigators came forward with evidence that the women had been offered large sums of money to attack Trump in what began to appear “a completely fabricated hoax” perpetrated by Clinton-supporting political operatives to undermine Trump’s campaign.68 Trump attacked his accusers as liars, threatening to sue the media for publishing false reports. “These vicious claims about me of inappropriate conduct with women are totally and absolutely false,” he said at a lively West Palm Beach, Florida rally held October 13, 2016. “These claims are all fabricated, they’re pure fiction, and they’re outright lies. These events never, ever happened, and the people that said them meekly, fully understand.”69

On October 7, 2016, Julian Assange at WikiLeaks began the first drop of 2,060 emails and 170 attachments from the “Podesta Email File”—a cache of more than 50,000 emails that WikiLeaks had obtained surreptitiously from John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, a controlling member of the Podesta Group, a major progressive Washington-based lobbying firm, as well as the founder and chair of the Center for American Progress, a major progressive Washington-based think-tank.70 In a drip-drip fashion, WikiLeaks released up to 5,000 emails a day from the “Podesta Email File,” with the last email drop occurring after the November 8 election. The emails proved to be highly damaging to the Clinton campaign, given the multiple revelations coming out through emails written by key participants in the Democratic National Committee, the Clinton presidential campaign, as well as emails authored by principals in the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s top associates in the State Department when she was secretary of state. Clearly, those writing the emails had never planned that their emails might become public, given the unfiltered comments, criticisms, advice, suggestions, and objections voiced as the emails’ content.

Among the most damaging contents of the WikiLeaks “Podesta Email File” were transcripts of the speeches Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs in 2013—Clinton had been paid as much as 225,000 dollars per speech—that contained statements so potentially damaging that Clinton had refused to release the transcripts when pressed to do so by Trump during the campaign.71 The speeches contained many compromising statements proving Clinton had supported Wall Street both as US senator from New York, and as secretary of state, and as a result enjoyed a high level of coziness with Wall Street top donors. She acknowledged that Dodd-Frank was passed for “political reasons,” because “if you were an elected member of Congress and people in your constituency were losing jobs and shutting businesses and everybody in the press is saying it’s the fault of Wall Street, you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.”72

Particularly damaging were revelations in the released WikiLeaks Podesta emails that show the Washington mainstream media press corps coordinating and cooperating with the Democratic Party and Clinton’s presidential campaign. Here is how Politico reported on mainstream media’s well-known reporters being “snared in Podesta’s flypaper,” and as a result “suffering an abundance of embarrassment for their shameless buttering-up and apparent coziness with their inside sources in Clintonworld”:

Reading the emails, we witness CNBC/New York Times contributor John Harwood slathering Podesta with flattery, giving him campaign advice and praising Hillary Clinton. In another email, the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin offers Podesta a “heads up” about a story she’s about to publish, providing a brief pre-publication synopsis. CNBC’s Becky Quick promises to “defend” Obama appointee Sylvia Mathews Burwell.

New York Times Magazine writer Mark Leibovich (who wrote a famous book lambasting permanent Washington’s courtship rituals) asks Clinton’s press secretary, Jennifer Palmieri, for permission to use portions of an off-the-record interview with the candidate. Palmieri withholds only a couple of comments and concludes her email to Leibovich, “Pleasure doing business!,” giving it a creepy, transactional vibe. Politico reporter Glenn Thrush sends Podesta a chunk of his story-in-progress “to make sure I’m not fucking anything up.” Beyond WikiLeaks, a January 2015 Clinton strategy document obtained by the Intercept describes reporter Maggie Haberman—then at Politico and now at the New York Times—as someone the campaign “has a very good relationship with,” and who had been called upon to “tee up stories for us before” and had never disappointed.73

Breitbart.com reported that several top journalists and television anchors RSVPed “yes” to attend a private off-the-record gathering at the home of Joel Beneson, the chief campaign strategist for Hillary Clinton, two days before she announced her candidacy for president. Breitbart noted the guest list for an early dinner event at the home of John Podesta in Washington was limited to reporters expected to cover Clinton on the campaign trail.74 Among the media outlets compromised by being invited to dinner events with Podesta and other top Clinton aides were from NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, People, the New Yorker, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and Politico. Among the compromised journalists named were: Amy Chozick, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Pat Healey, and Gail Collins of the New York Times, as well as George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer of ABC.75 “Leaked emails show that Hillary Clinton’s campaign officials boasted about getting favorable news coverage from compliant journalists, received political advice from cozy reporters and circulated the names of journalists who were ‘friendly’ to the candidate,” noted the Washington Times. “Whatever other revelations lurk in the huge cache of campaign emails being published by WikiLeaks, one thing is clear: Clinton campaign officials clearly exude an air of confidence that much of the mainstream media are in the bag for their candidate and hostile to Republican rival Donald Trump.”76

One of the most damaging of the WikiLeaks revelations in the “Podesta Email File” was proof Donna Brazile had been tipping off the Clinton campaign about questions Clinton was going to be asked in upcoming debates. Brazile, a longtime Clinton confidante had become a publicly important political operative supporting Clinton’s campaign. She had been a CNN commentator before taking leave to be appointed as the interim Democratic National Chairman after WikiLeaks revelations forced Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign. As the Washington Post reported on October 31, 2016, Brazile had tipped Clinton off in an email dated March 5, 2016, addressed to Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, entitled “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.” In the body of the email, Brazile wrote, “Her family has lead poising and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the [people] of Flint [Michigan].”77 Earlier in the month, Brazile had denied tipping off Clinton’s campaign even after an email published by WikiLeaks proved otherwise. Brazile told Jennifer Palmieri in advance that Clinton would get asked, during a town hall hosted by CNN on March 13, 2016, a question about whether Ohio and 30 other states should join the rest that have abolished the death penalty? The question was going to be premised on data from the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty that shows since 1973, 176 people on death row were later set free. Brazile had put as the subject of her email to Palmieri, “From time to time I get the questions in advance.”78

On October 31, 2016, CNN formally accepted the resignation Brazile had submitted earlier in the month when WikiLeaks made the first of the two self-incriminating emails public. “We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor,” Lauren Pratapas, a network spokeswoman, said in a statement. “CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate.”79 The New York Times article commentated that the Brazile episode “has cast a harsh spotlight” on the cable news practice of paying partisan political operatives to appear as on-air commentators. The newspaper pointed out that CNN had received criticism previously for hiring Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s first campaign manger, after he was fired by the Trump campaign, but still kept on the payroll in a consultative role as an informal advisor, receiving what the Trump campaign had characterized as severance pay.80 What the Brazile incident proved to the American public was that the Clinton campaign had taken coordination with the mainstream media to a new level. Brazile’s emails proved Hillary had received advance word about the content of televised debates that were then presented to the American people as if they were impartial and unbiased.

In the hours before the third and final presidential debate, attorneys for Danney Williams, the thirty-year-old who has for decades claimed to be the black son of Bill Clinton, were in Las Vegas to announce their intention to file a paternity suit demanding DNA evidence from the former president.81 They claim that Clinton, actively blocked by Hillary Clinton for political reasons, has failed to make good on child support obligations since Danney was born. “Today I have authorized my attorney’s George V. Gates IV of New Orleans and Bruce Fein of Washington, DC to file a suit in New York State where my father lives to get a judge to order a court supervised test,” Williams said in a statement released at the press conference.

Williams has been trying since at least 1999 to be acknowledged as the out-of-wedlock son of former President Bill Clinton and a black prostitute in Little Rock, Arkansas. “I have no doubt that I am Bill Clinton’s son,” Williams declares at the beginning of the new video. “It was common knowledge in Arkansas where I grew up. Everywhere I went, people would point and say, ‘There’s Bill Clinton’s son. He looks like Bill Clinton, doesn’t he? Look at him, Danney Williams is a black Bill Clinton.’”82 Conservative documentary filmmaker Joel Gilbert, produced a 12-minute video entitled, “Banished: The Untold Story of Danney Williams,” as well as a series of comparison photographs showing the physical resemblance. Posted to YouTube on October 11, 2016, Gilbert’s video received more than 3 million views by Election Day.83 Overall, it was viewed 36 million times on more than twenty-four platforms.

“I always felt bad about Bill Clinton not wanting to be in my life,” Williams says in the video. “Was it because I was black? Was there something wrong with me? It made me think sometimes even of suicide. It’s not fair and it has been hurtful.” Danney discusses openly that after his mother was sent to prison for drugs, his Aunt Lucille Bolton raised him. “My sister is Bobby Ann Williams, Danney Williams’ mother,” Aunt Lucille explains, appearing in the new video via SKYPE. “My sister was a prostitute and she hung around the streets on 17th and Main [in Little Rock]. She met Bill Clinton on the streets on some 13 occasions. About 5 or 6 months she had dated Bill Clinton and everything; she said she was pregnant by Bill.” But even today, he has no doubt he is Bill Clinton’s son. “I tell my children, yes, it is real. Bill Clinton is my father and I’m going to make sure you meet him one day,” Danney explains in the video. He ended the video with a plea: “Hillary, please do not deny I exist. I am your stepson. Chelsea is my sister. And Bill is my father.”

Sophisticated polling showed that African American voters overwhelmingly believed that Danney Williams was indeed Bill Clinton’s abandoned son. Beyond the physical resemblance, focus groups showed that black voters found Danney’s aunt and mother credible. Hillary had little connection to black voters as it was. Her cheerleading for the 1994 crime bill resulted in the incarceration of an entire generation of young black men for the nonviolent crime of possession of small amounts of drugs. The Clinton law provided harsher mandatory sentences for possession of rock cocaine than it did for powdered cocaine, thus targeting poorer African Americans and favoring wealthy white people. Governor Bill Clinton went to the Federal courts in Arkansas to argue for racial profiling by the good-ole boys in the Arkansas state police.

We realized the mainstream media would never cover Danney Williams or his claims, although some Republican surrogates did manage to blurt it out on cable TV before being silenced by moderators from CNN and Fox. In fact, we never really cared whether any white person learned of Danney Williams and the truth of his existence. This is a classic case of the proper application of new media.

Gilbert’s video left few dry eyes. By geo-targeting Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Miami, Charlotte, Fayetteville, and Philadelphia, and further selecting targets based on preferences in music, age range, black culture, and other urban interests, the odds were overwhelming that eighteen-to-thirty-year-old African Americans had watched the compelling cinematic work. YouTube briefly suspended Danney Williams’ account in an effort to censor him, but reinstated him after vigorous protests. Then, alternative hip hop group Freenauts, inspired by Danney’s viral story, produced a catchy rap anthem calling out Hillary and Bill for their hypocrisy. The video had 5 million viewers on WorldStarHipHop.com alone, and was picked up by Hip Hop Weekly, Drudge Report, InfoWars.com, and many black media outlets.

The Clintons had orchestrated an extraordinary rouse claiming that a DNA test conducted by the Star tabloid magazine in 1999 had proved that Bill Clinton was not Danney Williams’ father. Crusading investigative journalist Dr. Jerome Corsi, however, had discovered that the DNA test allegedly utilized by the Star in the analysis had, in fact, come from a written report of the Special Counsel to the Clinton impeachment proceeding, Ken Starr. There was no new test done. “I don’t remember ever seeing any laboratory test that was done on Clinton’s DNA,” Phil Bunton, former editor-in-chief of the Star told WND. “We never published anything. But we got a lot of phone calls from several people in the media, including the New York Times, wanting to know when we were going to get the DNA back,” Bunton continued. “We thought it was going to turn out to be his son, but when the DNA came back there was no story there even to write.” Corsi determined that while the testimony of the FBI agents in the report claimed that two different and legally required DNA tests had been conducted, the report curiously contained only one test.

As Slate, Snopes.com and the New York Daily News all reported, the Starr report only included the results of only one of the two tests required to establish paternity. It included a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) but did not include the FBI lab’s test refraction fragmented length polymorphism (RFLP). In other words, an accurate DNA test to determine paternity requires two different DNA tests. The Starr report included only the PCR data, which rendered any determination of paternity inconclusive.

Without an actual sample of Clinton’s blood, or other bodily fluids, the Star could not conduct the more reliable test, a “refraction fragmented length polymorphism” test, or “RFLP,” that would have allowed a qualified laboratory to run a spectrograph of Clinton’s DNA to be placed side-by-side with the results of a RFLP test conducted on Williams’ bodily fluids. As reported by the Los Angeles Times on January 12, 1999, instead of publishing an article detailing any laboratory results the Star magazine may have obtained, Burton simply told news reporters who called him that, “There was no match, nothing even close.” On October 3, 2016, Snopes.com, an Internet “fact checking” source generally favorable to Democrats, examined the question of whether or not Bill Clinton was Danny Williams’ father, only to conclude not that the charge was “false,” but that the charge was “unproven.”84

“Danney Williams looked incredibly like Bill Clinton—the hair and everything. At the time, we really thought we had a winner. When Gooding told me it wasn’t a match, I wouldn’t have taken any interest in looking at the report.” So, after hearing back from Gooding, Bunton decided not to publish anything, disappointed he couldn’t prove Bill Clinton was Danny Williams’ biological father. So, instead of publishing an article, Bunton simply decided to tell reporters calling that the results “weren’t even close.” “I really thought it was going to come up a match,” he stressed. “The story was all over Arkansas that Bill Clinton had a relationship with this woman and there was some preacher running around Little Rock saying the child was Bill’s, but that was as far as we got.”

Noted forensic experts Dr. Henry Lee pointed out that only a comparison of the two tests could determine paternity. Without them, the Star report lacked sufficient data to reach any conclusion, including ruling out the possibility that Bill was Danney’s father. Making the entire matter more curious is the fact that the Star was owned by Clinton crony Robert Altman, a major Clinton donor and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, who was forced to resign in the Whitewater scandal when he improperly tipped the Clintons off to a Federal investigation. Corsi also determined that Clinton mad-dog lawyer David Kendall was serving as general counsel to the Star when this rouse was perpetrated. Corsi interviewed the Star editor who admitted he had never seen a written DNA report of any kind. Nonetheless, Howard Kurtz, then of the Washington Post, and the Associated Press, dutifully reported that a DNA test had disproved Danney Williams’ claims, which was clearly a lie. Megyn Kelly would repeat this myth mindlessly when a Trump surrogate attempted to raise the issue on The Kelly File.

Well-spoken, Williams appealed first to former President Clinton for a voluntary DNA sample, then appealed to Monica Lewinsky, who still owns the notorious semen-stained blue dress, and thus a real Bill Clinton DNA sample. Ms. Lewinsky never responded. But both efforts generated substantial national press for Danney Williams. Williams’ attorneys are currently preparing to file a paternity suit in the Arkansas courts.

Though there was no definitive DNA test, in the end it didn’t matter. Black voters by the millions had heard the story and were convinced. This was a legitimate campaign to dampen African American support for Hillary Clinton, based on facts that the mainstream media refused to report. In the end, a six-point shift among blacks in markets targeted with Danney Williams videos likely had a profound impact on the outcome of the election.85

The Daily Caller reported, that “while Obama absolutely dominated among blacks, beating Romney 93-7, Clinton only beat Trump 88-8. Lower overall turnout among black voters, a shift that may have been decisive, propelled Trump to small victories in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that seemed out of reach for him just days ago.”86

This issue of voter turnout was critical. We were convinced that Hillary was vulnerable among black voters. In July 2015, the Cook Report noted how turning out the black vote was likely the key to Hillary Clinton’s ability to win and how failure to match Barack Obama’s totals among blacks in 2012 might impede her path to victory.87

• “It’s tough to overstate just how critical black voters have become to today’s Democratic coalition, particularly when it comes to the Electoral College. Deconstructing exit poll data from 2012, African-American voters accounted for Obama’s entire margin of victory in seven states: Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Without these states’ 112 electoral votes, Obama would have lost decisively. African-Americans also accounted for almost all of Obama’s margin in Wisconsin. All of these states, except Maryland, will be crucial 2016 battlegrounds.”

• “To be sure, a return to pre-2008 African-American turnout levels wouldn’t necessarily doom a Hillary Clinton candidacy, but it would leave her with a whole lot less margin for error in a host of swing states. For example, in Virginia, what if the African-American share of the vote had been 18 percent instead of 20 percent in 2012? We estimate Obama would have won by 1.6 percent, rather than 3.9 percent. In Ohio, what if it had been 13 percent instead of 15 percent? We estimate Obama would have won by 0.8 percent, not 3.0 percent. In Pennsylvania, what if it had been 11 percent instead of 13 percent? Obama’s edge would have shrunk from 5.4 percent to 3.4 percent.

• “We can’t predict how much better or worse a Hillary Clinton will do among African-American voters—or white voters for that matter—without knowing who she will face in November. However, it’s also clear that the African-American coalition is THE critical keystone for a Democratic Electoral College victory, which means we should be spending as much time, if not more, looking at their engagement in the election as we do the growing Latino vote.”

Donald Trump carried four of the six designated “crucial 2016 battlegrounds” (Ohio, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania). His ability to win depended on winning all four of them as well as holding North Carolina, which Obama carried narrowly in 2008 and which flipped narrowly to Romney in 2012. Also key and not mentioned among the prospective battleground states was Wisconsin.

Prior to the election, several studies noted that pre-election voter turnout by blacks was lower in several key battleground states than in 2008, suggesting Hillary Clinton was not generating the same level of enthusiasm as Barack Obama had.88 This was the Danney Williams affect.

• “African-Americans are failing to vote at the robust levels they did four years ago in several states that could help decide the presidential election, creating a vexing problem for Hillary Clinton as she clings to a deteriorating lead over Donald J. Trump with Election Day just a week away. As tens of millions of Americans cast ballots in what will be the largest-ever mobilization of early voters in a presidential election, the numbers have started to point toward a slump that many Democrats feared might materialize without the nation’s first black president on the ticket.”

The Times article specifically called attention to Florida and Ohio—both states where Trump eventually won (by bigger margins than in the three rust-belt states that put him over the top).

• “In Florida, which extended early voting after long lines left some voters waiting for hours in 2012, African-Americans’ share of the electorate that has gone to the polls in person so far has decreased, to 15 percent today from 25 percent four years ago…. African-Americans are underperforming their participation rates from 2012. Daniel A. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, compared the early voting so far in minority-heavy Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Broward Counties with that in 2012. He found that of those who have cast ballots this year, 22 percent were black, 40 percent were white and 31 percent were Hispanic. In 2012, the breakdown was 36 percent black, 35 percent white and 23 percent Hispanic. ‘If the Clinton campaign doesn’t ramp it up,’ Professor Smith said, “Florida will be in doubt.”

• “In Ohio, which also cut back its early voting, voter participation in the heavily Democratic areas near Cleveland, Columbus and Toledo has been down, though the Clinton campaign said it was encouraged by a busy day on Sunday when African-American churches led voter drives across the state.”

The Times accurately noted Clinton showing more strength in Colorado and Nevada and that she could win the election even if she lost North Carolina, Florida and Ohio. But the potential turnout issues in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan were never mentioned.

A local newspaper, Florida Today also noted the lower pre-election turnout in Florida among African American voters.89

• “Low turnout among black voters in Florida could be a real problem for Hillary Clinton and down-ballot Democrats. Overall turnout is up, but the percentage of black votes is “way down” compared to 2012…. Clinton’s problem isn’t just that turnout isn’t as high among the 1.7 million black voters in the state. The roughly 80-85 percent support she’s getting from African Americans is well below the 95 percent Obama got in 2012.”

In general, post-election studies about the black vote and Trump’s victory have stressed the failure of Hillary Clinton to get the vote out. In this interpretation by the Philadelphia Tribune, the election takes on the spin more of Clinton losing than Trump winning.90

• “In terms of the Black vote, the new turnout numbers present a disturbing picture of a Black electorate not reaching its full political potential. Initial exit polling data show that Black voter turnout was 12 percent of the overall voting population in 2016, just 1 percentage point less than what it was in 2012. In 2012, Black voter participation had actually surpassed white voter participation, as it represented 13 percent of the overall national vote, matching its proportion to the population.”

• A deeper look at turnout numbers by the Tribune reveals a grim portrait of an African-American electorate possibly more bruised than initially thought. Out of 131,741,500 total ballots counted on election night, 15,008,980 of those were Black voter ballots when factoring in the 12 percent Black turnout data point in exit polling. But, in 2012, there were 16,938,006 Black voter ballots counted out of a total of 130.3 million ballots nationally. That translates into an alarming 11.4 percent reduction in Black votes between the two presidential election cycles.

Liberal columnist Al Hunt looked at Pennsylvania returns and blamed Clinton’s loss in the state on failure to garner the levels of support Obama had received.91

• “She won Pittsburgh and Philadelphia by the margins anticipated. But in Philadelphia there were almost 100,000 fewer voters than four years ago. Clinton also dominated the four suburban counties—including Chester, which the Republican Mitt Romney carried in 2012 and where Melania Trump campaigned right before the election—by more than Obama did. But turnout was up less than expected.”

• “There were Democratic strongholds where Trump’s performance was impressive. He came close in Scranton, which Obama and native son Joe Biden won by 16 percentage points in 2012. And he won in Wilkes-Barre and Erie, which Obama had carried easily.”

• “The Pennsylvania exit polls are revealing. They show Clinton underperforming Obama among voters younger than 30. Worse from her perspective, those voters comprised only 16 percent of the overall tally, compared to 19 percent in 2012. More telling, blacks, who voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, were only 10 percent of the electorate, down from 13 percent last time. If black voters had made up 12 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate, she probably would have won the state.”

The New York Times did a study of Wisconsin, specifically black voting in Milwaukee, and found a community largely unenthusiastic for Hillary.92

• “Wisconsin, a state that Hillary Clinton had assumed she would win, historically boasts one of the nation’s highest rates of voter participation; this year’s 68.3 percent turnout was the fifth best among the 50 states. But by local standards, it was a disappointment, the lowest turnout in 16 years. And those no-shows were important. Mr. Trump won the state by just 27,000 voters.

• “Milwaukee’s lowest-income neighborhoods offer one explanation for the turnout figures. Of the city’s 15 council districts, the decline in turnout from 2012 to 2016 in the five poorest was consistently much greater than the drop seen in more prosperous areas—accounting for half of the overall decline in turnout citywide.

• “The biggest drop was here in District 15, a stretch of fading wooden homes, sandwich shops and fast-food restaurants that is 84 percent black. In this district, voter turnout declined by 19.5 percent from 2012 figures, according to Neil Albrecht, executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission. It is home to some of Milwaukee’s poorest residents and, according to a 2016 documentary, ‘Milwaukee 53206,’ has one of the nation’s highest per-capita incarceration rates.”

In analyzing the Times article, New York magazine noted how the lower-educated black community in Milwaukee in general was less outraged by the alleged picture of Trump as a racist and as a consequence weren’t compelled to vote against Trump and for Hillary over his public comments.93

• “The African-American Milwaukee voters were less outraged by Trump’s bigotry and misogyny than many optimistic Democrats expected them to be. Over and over, Democrats and journalists stated and wrote confidently that Trump’s outrageous statements about minority groups would fire up and turn out the Democratic base, making Trump’s uphill battle even steeper. It didn’t happen.”

The day after the election, the website Michigan Live noted that Trump’s narrow victory in the state based on lack of support for Hillary in Detroit and Flint. 94

• “Unofficial results show Clinton couldn’t come close to Obama’s performance four years ago in areas of the state with the highest percentages of black voters, including metro Detroit—Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Those counties accounted for 37 percent of the state’s overall vote Tuesday, November 8, and 55 percent went to Clinton. Obama took 69 percent of the same region’s vote four years ago.”

• “That enthusiasm gap showed itself in Genesee County, anchored by the city of Flint, which is 56 percent black. Clinton’s margin of victory was 52-42 percent—a 19,000 vote advantage, but not close to Obama’s performance in 2012 against Republican Mitt Romney—a 63-35 percent win and 57,000-vote cushion.”

• In Wayne County, which is 39 percent black and includes voters from the city of Detroit, Clinton won 66 percent of the vote—less than the 80 percent Obama won over Romney and the result was more than 10,000 fewer votes for the top of the Democratic ticket there. “That is a huge difference,” said Susan Demas, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics. “African American turnout (was) down, rural white turnout for Trump was up, and that was enough to put the state in play or win it for Trump.”

• “Saginaw County, including the city of Saginaw, favored Trump 47 to 46 percent, making the GOP leader the first Republican to win Saginaw County since 1984, when Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale as part of a national landslide. The percentage of voter turnout overall was down in Saginaw County—from more than 65 percent in 2012 to 60 percent this year. Turnout in precincts on the East Side of the city of Saginaw Tuesday ranged from 41 to 51 percent—areas that are predominantly black and Hispanic.”

Indisputably, voters who became aware of Danney Williams and his plight were less likely to vote for Hillary. Black voters found Danney’s aunt’s account of being turned away when she attempted to take the infant to Hillary Clinton, entirely credible. Two different Arkansas state troopers admit that they delivered Christmas presents to Danney at his mother’s home. This, too, went viral in a video in which Trooper Larry Patterson tells of a State official driving a car with Arkansas government plates that left an envelope with seven crisp one-hundred-dollar bills at the beginning of every month. Facebook told the tale.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump had been appealing to the African American vote, questioning whether the Democrats under President Obama had produced any meaningful economic changes to improve their lives during the eight years of his presidency. “What do you have to lose?” Trump repeatedly asked in appealing for African American voters to switch party allegiances and vote Republican in 2016. While the Clintons did their best to ignore the Danney Williams scandal, as has been shown, the story was widely circulated in the African American community, both through Joel Gilbert’s viral video and with the introduction of the rap song and video that celebrated Danney’s saga. While the Danney Williams story may not have alone converted the majority of African American voters into Republicans, the media attention it received, along with the lack of economic progress and the Clinton crime bill, together were sufficient to reduce enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton in the African American community. This depressed black voter turnout, which was critical to Trump’s ultimate victory in the election.

Some of you may not know who Christian Josi is but he ran the Clinton Rape T-shirt campaign for me, which Alex Jones then kicked off into the stratosphere. Yes, it was a crude guerilla tactic, but it was the only way to break through the mainstream media black-out of Bill Clinton’s sexual assaults and Hillary’s role as an accessory after the fact by running the terror campaign/cover-up.

Christian is the most reluctant, yet one of most gifted, political operatives out there—next to me, of course. That’s why I like him. He had great success in politics at a very young age and then ‘accidentally’ became a famous jazz singer. He even wrote a book about Hillary Clinton before writing books about Hillary Clinton was cool. The whole deal has left him sort of messed up in the head, frankly. Which is probably what makes him good. Difficult, temperamental, but good.

Successful political “black ops” involve truth and levity. Alone, either of these can be ineffective, but together they are powerful weapons for conveying a message that will have an impact.

Alone, truth is not enough. It’d be nice if it were, but that’s not the world in which we live. People are busy and have a lot of distractions. The truth is often filed away with names of high school teachers’ names and where you left your keys.

Attaching truth to something else, especially humor or shock, makes it stick. The odds are much higher that you can remember a joke you heard in high school rather than the name of the person who told it to you.

When it comes to the Clintons, there is almost too much opposition research to use. Oddly, it almost works to their advantage. If people are bombarded by information on too many subjects it just becomes noise; a choir all singing different songs. To effectively message things you want to “stick,” you have to be selective and relentless. Know what you want to get across and hammer it, over and over again.

Choosing what to message is as important as the how. With the Clintons, what to choose? Some Clinton scandals would be covered by the mainstream media, if only out of necessity. All of their coverage of Hillary couldn’t be positive, journalists had to at least pay lip-service to the concept of objectivity.

The email scandal, the pay-for-play aspect of the Clinton Foundation, Bill’s philandering, these would get ink on their own. Not much, but as much as the media would ever allow, and only in the left’s context: quick, dismissive mentions to say they “checked that box” and couldn’t be accused of ignoring these stories.

As Hillary was running to break the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” in the world, it was unlikely the media would spend any time investigating, let alone reporting, the extent of Bill’s personal perversions, which made that aspect of their existence ripe for the picking.

The allegations of sexual assault and rape against Bill Clinton were well known to people who paid attention to politics in the 1990s, but even then the media did all they could to hide the stories of Juanita Broaddrick.

While the media unfairly morphed the name Paul Jones into a late-night punch line, there were millions of voters unaware of the stories of Jones and Broaddrick. They needed to be educated. With Juanita Broaddrick, these problems do not exist.

The horrific account of Bill Clinton’s rape of Broaddrick in a hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1978 was not widely reported when she came forward in 1999. Ignored by all but one mainstream media outlet, NBC News sat on their exclusive with Broaddrick until after Clinton’s impeachment trial for perjury regarding his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky failed to remove him from office. Airing only once, anyone who missed the segment, missed her story.

In the 16 years since the Clintons left the White House the progressive left set out to change the culture even more than they had, especially with young people on college campuses. Drunken hook-ups, once a rite of passage, became the sole responsibility of the man, even if he was drunk too and didn’t initiate the activity. Moreover, they made the accuser a hero who must be believed, no matter what.

Emma Sulkowicz, a student at Columbia University who became known as “mattress girl” because she carried the mattress she claimed she was raped on to every class across campus after the university found no proof of her account of rape. Sulkowicz was held up as a champion of women’s rights, and still is today by many on the left.

The false Rolling Stone story “A Rape On Campus” also had campus leftists demanding the accuser, “Jackie,” be believed even after she was exposed as a fraud and the story was retracted.

This mentality, especially with millennial voters, made the rape of Juanita Broaddrick the best, most fertile ground for weaponization against the Clintons.

In November of 2015, Hillary Clinton really solidified this choice when she tweeted, “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” Once she said they “deserved” to be believed, the obvious question was: Did Hillary believe Juanita?

When asked this question at a public forum a month later, Clinton said, “Well, I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved on evidence.”

Since Bill had never spoken about, let alone denied, Broaddrick’s claims, and most people had never heard them, coupled with Hillary’s original absolutist declaration of absolute belief, the choice was clear: voters who didn’t know this bit of the Clinton’s history had to be educated on it.

Since the best message is a simple message, the Bill Clinton “RAPE” t-shirt was born from my fertile mind. Modeled after the “HOPE” posters from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Clinton “RAPE” shirt became reality when I baited the press in Cleveland. It was an immediate hit.

Soon after it was printed, the shirt started showing up at Clinton rallies. This wasn’t an accident.

Alex Jones offered $1,000 to anyone who could get on TV wearing the shirt and $5,000 to anyone who wore the shirt to a Clinton rally and could be heard shouting “Bill Clinton is a rapist!” Jones paid out more than $125,000!

It may seem crude, but it was effective. People at Clinton rallies across the country started yelling, “Bill Clinton is a rapist” on live TV. This forced the media to cover it. True, they usually did so with their voices dripping with contempt, but they had to give it context. They had to mention Juanita Broaddrick.

At least some of the people who didn’t know who she was searched her name and discovered the story Democrats and the media were so desperate to keep hidden. With women and millennials in particular, the woman who’d jumped on the bandwagon of “deserving to be believed” was shaded by the shadow cast by her husband’s own actions.

Hillary underperformed with women, particularly white suburban women, and millennials on Election Day in no small part, I think, because Juanita Broaddrick. And voters became aware of the Juanita Broaddrick story because of that shirt and the effort to get it and her story out there.

News outlets that would have been all too happy to ignore Juanita’s story yet again had no choice but to do their jobs. Political operatives found themselves having to defend the indefensible when it came to the husband of their candidate.

For all that was said about Donald Trump and what he’d said about women, the specter of Bill Clinton’s treatment of Juanita Broaddrick hung over it all. Were it not for that shirt and the effort to get it out there, there is no doubt no one in the mainstream media would have mentioned Juanita Broaddrick’s name.

Bringing Juanita Broaddrick to the forefront of the national consciousness brought with it all the other Clinton women Hillary’s campaign did not want to talk about. A simple t-shirt and a last minute stroke of brilliance called the RAPE WHISTLE put a billion-dollar campaign on its heels, and eventually on its back.

In the final weeks we released the official Clinton Rape Whistle. Dozens of “whistle blowers” started disrupting Clinton rallies. Because the whistles were plastic, they slipped easily through the US Secret Service’s metal detectors.

Trump vs. Clinton, Third Presidential Debate, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, Sunday, October 16, 2016

In the third and final presidential debate, the drama involved an attempt by moderator Chris Wallace, Fox News Sunday anchor, and Clinton to get Trump to forego in advance any legal challenges of voter fraud he might make should he lose the election on November 8.

As the last debate was set to begin, CNN reported that an NBC/Wall Street Journal had her beating Trump by 11 percentage points nationally. The poll showed Clinton leading by 20 points with women, while Trump was only ahead by 3 points with men. Fully one-third of the respondents said the Billy Bush video disqualified Trump from being president and that he should drop out of the race.95 As far as Hillary’s campaign was concerned, it was time to begin planning her transition to the White House. Five days after the last debate, on October 21, 2016, Politico reported that Clinton’s secretive transition team had “hit the gas pedal,” hiring staff and culling through résumés, while quietly reaching out to key Democrats.96

At the beginning of the second hour of the third debate, Wallace asked Trump the key question: “But sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact one of the prides of this country, is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner, not saying that you are necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country, are you saying that you are not prepared now to commit to that principle?”97 In asking the question, Wallace obviously was ignoring the 2000 challenge Al Gore launched to George W. Bush, with Gore rescinding his concession speech to demand a vote recount in Florida.

“What I’m saying now is that I will tell you at that time,” Trump said, careful not to compromise any legal options he might have available to him should he lose. “I will keep you in suspense, okay?”

Without waiting for Wallace to ask her the same question, Clinton jumped in to attack Trump, not saying whether or not she would accept a losing vote without launching a challenge to the election. “Chris, let me respond to that because that is horrifying,” Clinton said, castigating Trump. “You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him,” Clinton went on, portraying Trump as a sore loser. “The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case,” Clinton continued, seizing the opportunity to portray herself as the victim. “He said that the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus, he lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him,” she said, delivering what sounded like prepared and rehearsed remarks. “Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.”

Calmly, Trump interjected, “Should have gotten it,” referring to the Emmy. The audience responded with laughter.

Again, Clinton did not wait for Wallace to ask her a question. Instead, she just continued her diatribe against Trump. “This is a mindset,” Clinton insisted, asserting that she now could somehow read Trump’s mind. “This is how Donald thinks. And it’s funny but it’s also really troubling.” This set up what was to be Hillary’s punch-line, namely, that if Trump questioned the outcome of the election, he would be undermining “our democracy”—a statement Hillary considered obvious, even though the United States is technically not a democracy, but a constitutional republic. “This is not the way our democracy works,” Hillary pontificated, continuing her lecture against Trump. “We’ve been around for two hundred and forty years. We have had free and fair elections. We have accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them. And that is what must be expected of anyone standing on the debate stage during a general election. President Obama said the other day when you are whining before the game even finished …”

But Hillary continued, completing her sentence, as if there had been no audience interruption. “… it just shows you’re not up to doing the job,” she said, working up to the conclusion of her diatribe. “And let’s be clear about what he is saying and what that means. He is denigrating. He is talking down our democracy. And I for one am appalled that someone, the nominee of one of our two major parties, would take that kind of position.”

Trump had heard enough and he was not prepared to have Clinton demean him. “I think what the FBI did and what the Department of Justice did, including meeting with her husband, the attorney general, in the back of an airplane on the tarmac in Arizona—I think that is disgraceful,” Trump said. “I think it is disgraceful.” Earlier in the debate, after Hillary accused Trump of wanting to close the Social Security system, Trump got in a comment, “Such a nasty woman.”

Ignoring the various policy issues discussed during the debate, CNN’s headline read, “Donald Trump refuses to say whether he’ll accept election results.” Reporting for CNN, Stephen Collinson expressed astonishment at Trump’s stance on the issue.98 “The comments at the Las Vegas showdown marked a stunning moment that has never been seen in the weeks before a modern presidential election,” Collinson wrote. “The stance threatens to cast doubt on one of the fundamental principles of American politics—the peaceful, undisputed transfer of power from one president to a successor who is recognized as legitimate after winning an election,” CNN continued, implying Trump had cut his own throat by refusing to accept losing on Election Day. “Trump’s debate performance could doom his chance to win over any remaining undecided voters at this late stage in the campaign,” Collinson continued. “His comments about the election results came during a debate in which he spoke of ‘hombres,’ language that could offend Latinos. And he referred to Clinton as a ‘nasty woman.’” The CNN article noted Trump had “doubled down” on his comments about the election, saying during a rally in Delaware, Ohio, that he would accept the results “if I win.”99