As you’ve no doubt noticed, the big Clinton leads of early and mid-August have faded to a significantly tighter race in the beginning of September. That point was (for Clinton supporters) unpleasantly punctuated yesterday morning by a CNN/ORC poll which showed Trump leading Clinton by 1 point in a direct head to head match-up. There were actually four polls yesterday: Trump +1, Clinton +2, Clinton +3 and Clinton +6. We don’t know yet whether the CNN poll is an outlier or the trend. (Another poll out this morning has Clinton +2). But there’s another point I want to flag about the instability of the polls – specifically the big multi-state surveys from Ipsos-Reuters and WaPo/SurveyMonkey.
The TPM Electoral Scoreboard now stands at Clinton 268, Trump 186. There’s been quite a bit of volatility in the numbers of late, both nationally and statewide. At the moment, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin are all in the toss up category. Clinton remains in a dominant position and just shy of 270 electoral votes because she has small leads in Virginia and North Carolina, two states that weren’t even swing states before the Obama era.
Over the last few days, as I’ve been writing about the Trump/Bondi story, I’ve had a number of people tell me someone should FOIA (or its Florida equivalent) the documents about Bondi’s office’s investigation or review of Trump University. But over the long weekend, I actually found an article from June by Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell, who’s literally been on the case from the very beginning in the fall of 2013. Back in June of this year, when the Trump-Bondi story flared up for the second time during the campaign, Maxwell put in just such a request. After a few weeks he got a big stack of paper, almost 8,500 pages, the upshot of which is that it didn’t seem like Bondi’s office had really looked into the matter much at all. In fact, most of the paper dealt with staff putting off reporters asking what her office was doing about Trump University and its collateral and related scams or telling cheated Floridians to try Google to get their money back.
I think one of the reasons I’ve been successful over the years running TPM is that I have a great imaginative capacity to grasp the surreal, bizarre and moronic in our politics. But this new development may be outpacing even my abilities. The hacker who identifies himself as Guccifer 2.0 has “leaked” hacked emails from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) to The New York Observer. What they reveal is about as surprising and scandalous as the sky being blue. But we’ll get to that in a second. Guccifer 2.0 claims to be a Romanian national but is widely believed to be a Russian national connected to the Russian security services. (Here at Motherboard and Ars Technica and The New York Times are a few articles that discuss the issue.) And what is The New York Observer? That’s the New York business and society paper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner (Ivanka’s husband). So yes, a hacker who everybody assumes is tied to Russian intelligence has leaked hacked Democratic emails to Trump’s son-in-law’s paper. Sounds totally legit, right?
And yes, even though it was just another freakish and perhaps sarcastic aside, let’s not forget that Trump begged Russia to hack more Clinton campaign emails to help fight the good fight against Crooked Hillary.
It sounds like the latest defenestration at Fox News was like a scene out of The Godfather, admittedly without bullets. But still.
Greta Van Susteren’s husbands says there “might be litigation in the future” tied to Greta’s departure from Fox News.
We’ve been talking over the last couple days about the apparent contradiction between Donald Trump’s statement that he never talked to Pam Bondi about his contribution or Trump University. Now Politico has gone to Trump for clarification. And Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks says there’s no contradiction. “His comments were in reference to any discussion about Trump University — not the donation,” Hicks told Politico.
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Last night TPM Reader AL sent in a timeline for the Trump/Bondi story in the key months from August to October 2013. I’ve verified the details and the links. So I’m including the timeline here after the jump.