September 23, 2016 | No Comments
Hillary Clinton’s campaign on Friday held a conference call urging reporters to “lift up the lies” it expects Donald Trump will tell at Monday’s debate. Capitol Hill Republicans leaked news that former Clinton aide Cheryl Mills had been granted partial immunity in the FBI’s email investigation.
Democrats and Republicans alike are aiming to influence the debate before the candidates take the stage, with Clinton officials targeting Trump’s slipperiness with the facts and Republicans taking aim at Clinton’s struggles with transparency.
And in their own ways, both sides are aiming to make the debate a referendum on which candidate American voters can trust.
“Donald Trump has shown a clear pattern of repeating provably false lies and hoping no one corrects him,” Clinton’s communications director Jennifer Palmieri said in a statement Friday. “Voters and viewers should keep track: any candidate who tells this many lies clearly can’t win the debate on the merits.”
The trust issue continues to be the major stumbling block for both candidates. A recent CBS/NYT poll showed that 63 percent of likely voters believe Clinton is not honest or trustworthy, and 60 percent of voters who view Trump as untrustworthy.
As a pre-buttal to the debate, the Clinton campaign laid out seven lies that they say Trump should be fact-checked on in real time, including his claim that he has always opposed the war in Iraq (a statement left wholly unchallenged by NBC host Matt Lauer in a presidential forum earlier this month).
Meanwhile, Republicans expressed outrage at the latest news from inside the FBI’s investigation of Clinton’s email use at the State Department. The immunity deal for Mills and another former Clinton aide, Heather Samuelson, were narrow and covered only their handover of laptops used in 2014 when they were sorting Clinton’s work-related and personal emails. It did not cover any of their statements to the FBI.
But that didn’t stop the outrage from those trying to prevent Clinton from winning the White House. “The fact that Hillary Clinton’s top aide and attorney was granted immunity by the FBI is shocking,” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. “We now know it wasn’t mere IT staffers that were given a pass, but individuals at the highest levels of this dangerous scheme that jeopardized national security.”
Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who remains on his campaign’s payroll, tweeted; “Who needs this if NO laws broken?”
Clinton campaign officials downplayed the revelation, calling it old information from a closed case that was being leaked for political reasons. “House Republicans are trying to make something out of nothing by rummaging through the files of a Justice Department investigation that was closed months ago, and leaking selective details three days before the first presidential debate,” said Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon. They predicted the Mills revelation would be a “non-factor” by Monday night, and noted that cable news wasn’t even picking up the story on a busy news day filled with cell phone footage of a fatal police shooting in Charlotte, N.C.
Some Clinton allies, however, worried that Lewandowski wasn’t completely wrong in his assessment — that the previously undisclosed immunity deal, however narrow, fed into the narrative that the Clintons try to hide information in the hopes of gliding past it. “How is it not like pneumonia?” said one Clinton ally worried it gave the appearance of wrong-doing. “It leads to the interference that her top aides needed it. Why did they keep it a secret?” And the ill-timed leak guaranteed that Clinton will not cross the finish line of the election, now just 46 days away, shaking free of the email scandal.
But Clinton’s debate prep team, insiders said, has already been anticipating that Trump will grill her hardest on her emails, and don’t expect the tidbit of new information to change the narrative. One longtime Clinton ally familiar with the process said the candidate typically spends most of the time in debate prep “working and reworking the answers to the difficult questions.” In this case, the ally said, that section would include “anything to do with the Foundation, anything to do with your illness, and everything to do with your email.”