Presumptuous Politics : Aug 4, 2016

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Millions to Iran Cartoons

Justice Department officials reportedly objected to timing of Iran cash payment

Senior Justice Department officials raised objections to the U.S. flying the equivalent of $400 million in cash to Iran around the time four detained Americans were released this past January, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the paper reported that the money was flown to Iran in an unmarked cargo plane as the first installment in a $1.7 billion settlement of a failed 1979 arms deal.
According to the Journal, Justice Department officials raised concerns that the timing of the transfer would make it appear to be a ransom payment for the detainees. The officials did not object to the settlement itself.
"People knew what it was going to look like, and there was concern the Iranians probably did consider it a ransom payment," a person familiar with the discussions told the Journal.
The Journal also reported that Justice Department officials expressed concerns about both the number of Iranian prisoners freed by the U.S. and the number of sanctions violations cases that would be dropped as part of the two agreements. The report said most of their objections were overruled by the State Department.
A Justice Department spokesperson said Wednesday that the agency would not comment on "internal interagency deliberations." The statement added that the Justice Department "fully supported the ultimate outcome of the Administration’s resolution of several issues with Iran," including the arms deal settlement and the detainees' release.
The State Department has previously denied the cash transfer was connected to the release of the hostages. Late Wednesday, a senior State Department official told Fox News, "This was fully an interagency decision, and that any notion that the State Department had the power to simply overrule is false."
Earlier Wednesday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was "not accurate" to describe the payment as ransom.
"No, it was not," Earnest said. "It is against the policy of the United States to pay ransom for hostages."
Late Wednesday, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command denied the Defense Department had any role in transferring the money to Iran.

Trump sees fundraising surge, amid scramble to close ground game gap

With the political conventions behind them, Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee are scrambling to close their ground game gap with Hillary Clinton – boosting fundraising and concentrating on vital battlegrounds, even as some sources suggest they have a long way to go.
The campaign notoriously has lagged Clinton's in organizational strength, but faces the unavoidable reality that a ticket to the White House requires victory in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
In a sign they're taking the task seriously, the campaign on Wednesday announced $80 million in donations for the campaign and the GOP in July, money that can be used to target their message at these voters. The haul marks a big fundraising surge for the GOP nominee, and comes close to the combined $90 million raked in by Clinton and the Democrats last month.
"The campaign is in good shape. We are organized. We are moving forward," campaign manager Paul Manafort told Fox News' "Happening Now" on Wednesday, saying they've now hired 50 state directors.
The fundraising comes despite a rocky post-convention period for Trump that has included dealing with backlash over the candidate’s feud with Muslim parents whose son was killed in Iraq.
Sources say behind-the-scenes, though, concerns continue to surface that Trump’s ground game isn’t yet strong enough to compete with the Clinton machine.
“It hasn’t been the smoothest ride,” one source with knowledge of Trump’s field operations in the South told FoxNews.com.
Another described the operation as “all over the place.”
But Karen Giorno, a senior Trump adviser and Florida chief strategist, maintains the campaign has a plan in play that includes a coordinated multi-state Trump-RNC push that will challenge Democrats in key states.
She vowed a visible acceleration in the battlegrounds but added it’s “not a one-size-fits-all” plan.
“This is a non-traditional campaign in a non-traditional year,” she told FoxNews.com. “As you look at Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio – each effort is different.”
Florida, which has 29 electoral votes up for grabs, has emerged in the past two decades as one of the most important battleground states in the country. Giorno said Team Trump has “amassed a large army of volunteers and supporters” in Florida, boasting it’s “a well-oiled machine” that is growing.
Soon, she’ll put another 10 people on the payroll – mostly in leadership positions.
Both the Trump and Clinton campaigns are working with their respective national committees -- where Democrats likewise have a staffing edge in some places.
In Florida alone, Democrats maintain a paid team more than twice the size of the Republicans'. The goal of the Clinton camp is to have 100 operational field offices in the Sunshine State.
Last month, it set up shop in Miami.
“Miami — and South Florida in general — are going to be a large part of our strategy for success,” Simone Ward, Clinton’s Florida director, told The Miami Herald. “It is a major [get out the vote] universe for any presidential campaign, and in particular ours.”
In Pennsylvania, Democrats have a field staff of more than 100 while Republicans have 54. In Ohio, Democrats have 70 on staff as of June 11; Republicans have 53.
“Ninety-plus days before a totally winnable election and I’m stunned,” Gary Nordlinger, president of a political consulting firm and adjunct professor at George Washington University’s school of political management, told FoxNews.com, regarding the on-the-ground organizing. “I’m just shocked that Republicans did not learn from their mistakes in 2012.”
Despite campaign promises going into the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to step up their operations this month, staffing on the ground may still be spotty. FoxNews.com called Trump headquarters in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina -- but only in Florida's office in Sarasota did a person answer the phone.
Calls on Aug. 1 -- and again 24 hours later -- to the other three offices either were not answered or not returned when voicemail messages could be left.
An 11:06 a.m. ET call on Aug. 1 to the Pennsylvania branch led to this message: “The person you’ve called has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet.”
To Giorno, the comparisons of staffing numbers are not the best way to size up the rival teams.
“[Clinton’s] playbook is so last century,” she said. “We’re lean and mean and we get to adjust … they have this clunky, old school apparatus.”
Despite the data, Nordlinger says the New York businessman isn’t to blame.
“I’m not laying this at Trump’s feet,” he said. “[The RNC] has had four years to prepare for this.”
But the RNC, too, pushes back on any suggestion their ground game is lacking.
“The RNC has built the most efficient and effective ground game in the party’s history,” RNC spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told FoxNews.com. “We are focused on the entire ticket, working to get all Republicans on the ballot elected to office.”
Walters said the RNC has had staff on the ground in key states since 2011. Currently, there are 489 paid staffers, 4,100 trained organizers and thousands of volunteers in the field.
“In total, we have over 775 total staff dedicated to beating Hillary Clinton,” Walters said. “No other campaign, committee, or organization has been doing this for as long as we have. We are the infrastructure for the entire GOP ticket. And the Trump campaign has embraced that.”

Media trumpeting Trump implosion, but is it real?

This is what a full-fledged feeding frenzy looks like.
With Donald Trump facing the roughest stretch of his candidacy, the media have moved from questioning his sanity to depicting a campaign in disarray and top Republicans still wondering whether they can dump the nominee.
That won’t happen, of course, but it’s an indication of the toxic nature of the coverage and the flood of anti-Trump leaks now washing across the media landscape.
There’s a natural piling-on effect when campaigns go off the rails: The polls dip, the critics step up their rhetoric, staffers start pointing fingers, and the press keeps the vicious cycle going.
But I’ve never seen anything like this.
Things reached the point yesterday morning that CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted: “Longtime ally of Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager: 'Manafort not challenging Trump anymore. Mailing it in. Staff suicidal.'"
And there was this from CNN: “A source tells @DanaBashCNN that some Trump campaign staff are frustrated w/ candidate lately, ‘feel like they are wasting their time.’"
I am told by knowledgeable campaign sources that Manafort is not going anywhere and believes that Trump will be getting back on message.
I am further told that reports of a planned “intervention” with the candidate, led by Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, are false.
And the sources also say that, contrary to media reports, party chairman Reince Priebus is not furious with Trump, though he is disappointed with the nominee’s refusal to endorse Paul Ryan.
Trump and the House speaker appear to have an increasingly tenuous relationship. Trump is also refusing to back John McCain, one of several Republicans who ripped him for his handling of the Khizr Khan controversy.
Manafort told Fox’s Jon Scott that the campaign is “in good shape.”
Asked about reports that outside allies were plotting an “intervention” with the candidate, Manafort said: "This is the first I'm hearing about it," adding that some in the media are “saying untrue things.

Much of this grows out the Khan debacle, which the media seized upon after his Democratic convention speech about his son’s death in Iraq but which Trump then fueled by criticizing a Gold Star family.
That, in turn, revived fears among Republicans that Trump is too busy picking fights with everyone who insults him to run a disciplined campaign. I’m told there is frustration within his campaign that he keeps diverting to side issues, often in response to cable news chatter, rather than staying focused on attacking Hillary Clinton.
Even Gingrich, a close adviser and VP finalist, is criticizing his friend (while also lambasting media bias). “He has not made the transition to being the potential president of the United States, which is a much tougher league,” Gingrich told Maria Bartiromo. He added that “some of what Trump has done is just very self-destructive.”
Along comes ABC’s Jonathan Karl, reporting that “senior party officials are so frustrated — and confused — by Donald Trump’s erratic behavior that they are exploring how to replace him on the ballot if he drops out.”
Good luck with that.
MSNBC ran headlines all day about the Trump "intervention," but there were no signs it would materialize.
All of this has mushroomed into a tsunami of negative media coverage, with very little scrutiny of Clinton, at least right now.
Trump has been at war with the press from the day he got in the race, even as he drew enormous amounts of ink and airtime. But he can't expand his base simply by bashing the media, as satisfying as that may be.
The pundits, especially the ones on the left and right who detest him, are enjoying this latest chance to write him off.
But that has proven dangerous in the past. And campaign narratives, even the most relentlessly negative, have a way of changing at a moment's notice.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.

Fox News Poll: Voters trust Trump on economy, Clinton on nukes

Voters say the top issues facing the country are the economy and terrorism. They think Donald Trump will handle one of them better than Hillary Clinton, while the candidates tie on the other.
A new Fox News Poll on the 2016 election finds more voters trust Trump than Clinton on the economy (+5 points). He also bests Clinton on handling the federal deficit (+5 points). Those are the only issues where he comes out on top.
It’s a draw on “terrorism and national security,” as the candidates receive 47 percent apiece. In May, Trump led Clinton by 12 points on doing a better job on “terrorism” (52-40 percent).
Equal numbers of voters say the economy and terrorism are the most important issues facing the country today (22 percent each). Education is the only other one to receive double-digit mentions (11 percent). Here’s the rest of the list: race relations (9 percent), the federal deficit (5 percent), health care (5 percent), climate change (4 percent), immigration (3 percent), foreign policy (3 percent), and drug addiction (2 percent).
Clinton beats Trump by wide margins on education (+23 points), and on the lower priority concerns: climate change (+31 points), race relations (+28 points), drug addiction (+19 points), foreign policy (+16 points), and health care (+11 points). She also has the advantage on one of Trump’s signature issues -- immigration (+7 points).
Who would do better picking the next Supreme Court justice? That’s a hot topic this election. Voters trust Clinton over Trump by eight points. They also think she’s more likely to “preserve and protect the U.S. Constitution” (+7 points).
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL POLL RESULTS
By a 22-point margin, voters trust Clinton over Trump when it comes to using nuclear weapons (56-34 percent). That’s twice the advantage she held in May (49-38 percent).

Yet voters are more likely to trust Trump to destroy terrorist groups like ISIS (+9 points).
The candidates now tie on restoring trust in government (43-43). That’s a shift since May when Trump had an eight-point advantage (46-38 percent).
Despite Trump’s claim that he understands the concerns of everyday Americans, Clinton bests him on empathy. By a 51-40 percent margin, voters say she’ll do a better job looking out for their family during tough economic times. In June 2012, Barack Obama topped Mitt Romney on this measure by 47-36 percent.
Poll-pourri
How do voters feel about Trump’s praise for Russian President Vladimir Putin? Fifty-two percent of voters say it’s no big deal. For 44 percent, it’s bothersome.
Most Republicans say it’s no big deal (72 percent), while two-thirds of Democrats say it bothers them (66 percent).
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,022 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from July 31-August 2, 2016. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters.