Trump unleashes attacks on his party

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The “shackles” gone, Donald Trump stepped up his fierce attacks on his own party leaders Tuesday, promising to teach Republicans who oppose him a lesson and fight for the presidency “the way I want to.”

“I’m just tired of nonsupport” from leaders of the party he represents on the presidential ticket, Trump said Tuesday evening on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” He saved special ire for House Speaker Paul Ryan, who told Republicans on Monday he’ll no longer campaign for Trump with four weeks to go before Election Day.

“I don’t want his support, I don’t care about his support,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, hacked emails show that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was slow to grasp the seriousness of the controversy over her use of a homebrew email server and believed it might blow over after one weekend.

Two days after The Associated Press was first to report in March 2015 that Clinton had been running a private server in her home in New York to send and receive messages when she was secretary of state, her advisers were shaping their strategy to respond to the revelation.

Among the emails made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks was one from Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill, who optimistically suggested that the issue might quickly blow over.

“Goal would be to cauterize this just enough so it plays out over the weekend and dies in the short term,” Merrill wrote on March 6, 2015.

It did not, and became the leading example of Clinton’s penchant for secrecy, which has persisted as a theme among her campaign critics and rivals throughout her election season. Clinton did not publicly confirm or discuss her use of the email server until March 10 in a speech at the United Nations, nearly one week after AP revealed the server’s existence.

WikiLeaks began releasing Friday what it said were years of messages from accounts used by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. He has acknowledged his emails were hacked. Podesta warned that messages may have been altered or edited to inflict political damage but has not pointed to any specific case of this.

Trump, with his campaign floundering and little time to steady it, reverted to the combative, divisive strategy that propelled him to victory in the GOP primary: Attack every critic – including fellow Republicans. Those close to Trump suggested it was “open season” on every detractor, regardless of party.

“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump said in a tweet that brought new concern – near panic in some cases – to a party trying to stave off an all-out civil war before Nov. 8.

In another series of tweets, the Republican nominee called Ryan “weak and ineffective,” Sen. John McCain “very foul-mouthed” and “disloyal” Republicans “far more difficult than Crooked Hillary.”

“They come at you from all sides,” Trump declared. “They don’t know how to win – I will teach them!”

Rage against fellow Republicans from the face of the 2016 GOP exposed a party slipping from mere feuding into verbal warfare with advance voting already underway in roughly half the states. Polls suggest Trump is headed toward a loss of historic proportions if he doesn’t turn things around.

His scorched-earth approach, days after his sexual predatory language caught on tape triggered a mass Republican defection, threatened to alienate even more supporters.

“Fighting for the sake of fighting is not really very helpful,” said former Trump adviser Barry Bennett.

The Clinton campaign was still preoccupied with emails months after Merrill’s message. In May 2015, Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon alerted other staffers that the Justice Department was proposing to publish Clinton’s work-related emails by January in response to requests by news organizations. Fallon, a former Justice Department spokesman, wrote that unspecified “DOJ folks” told him there was a court hearing planned soon in the case. The name and email address of the person who shared the information with Fallon had been deleted.

Trump on Tuesday called Fallon’s email “unbelievable,” and his supporters said it showed collusion between the Obama administration and Clinton’s campaign.

The dates of court hearings would have been publicly posted in advance on the court’s docket. Fallon did not respond to a request for comment from AP. The Justice Department declined to discuss Fallon’s email.

It wasn’t immediately clear who hacked Podesta’s emails, though U.S. intelligence officials last week blamed the Russian government for a series of breaches intended to influence the presidential election.

Podesta said Tuesday that the FBI told him it was looking into the breach as part of its ongoing investigation into the hacking of Democratic organizations by Russian intelligence. He said Russia may prefer Trump’s policy positions, but he also suggested the motive could be “Mr. Trump’s deep engagement and ties with Russian interests in his business affairs.”

Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak dismissed the accusations as untrue.

“We are watching very carefully the election campaign in this country,” Kislyak said at a discussion of bilateral affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s campus in Washington. “We don’t interfere [in] the internal affairs of the United States, neither by my statements nor by electronic or other means.”

The messages stolen from Podesta’s account describe how Clinton’s closest advisers considered responding to key events during the campaign, including the discovery of her email server and her congressional testimony over the deadly 2012 attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

In emails from March 2015, Merrill suggested a strategy – ultimately nixed by Clinton herself – of having comedian Larry Wilmore and Bill Clinton joke during an event for the Clinton Global Initiative charity in Coral Gables, Florida, before having Clinton join them on stage.

Merrill laid out the scenario in emails to Podesta and other aides: “Wilmore could sit down with WJC and Chelsea and say something like ‘Thanks for having me here, it’s a pleasure. And I should tell you, I just emailed HRC (I hear she’s a big emailer), and asked if she’d join as well. [Laughter].”’ He added that Hillary Clinton could then walk out “to applause.”

“It would be just light-hearted enough while giving her the opportunity to address this seriously, be a little conciliatory as discussed, and then get back to a discussion about CGI etc.,” Merrill wrote in the email.

In the end, Hillary Clinton’s team drafted talking points Clinton used at the news conference at the United Nations.

Clinton said she “fully complied with every rule that I was governed by” and that “there is no classified material” among her work-related emails.

Both of those statements were later proved false.

The State Department’s internal watchdog concluded in an audit released that Clinton ignored clear written guidance that her email setup broke federal record-keeping rules and could leave sensitive material vulnerable to hackers. The FBI’s recently closed investigation concluded that more than 100 emails exchanged through Clinton’s private server contained information that was later determined to be classified.