President Donald Trump waged a war against former Vice President Joe Biden, claiming he would make the country dangerous and decimate the suburbs. It wasn't a campaign issue that Biden was campaigning on, but somehow, Trump managed to make things worse for himself.
MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace went through the findings from Monmouth University Polling Institute showing that all of Trump's campaign efforts to blame Democrats for spurring criminal behavior was unsuccessful.
In January, issues like crime or "law and order" weren't even registering on the list of campaign issues. Now, thanks to Trump, it's a key issue, and he's losing on it.
A whopping 65 percent of Americans consider "law and order" to be a "major problem," but 52 percent of Americans think Biden is better suited to fix it. The same poll showed that 61 percent of Americans think Trump has made the situation "worse."
Speaking to MSNBC on Monday, conservative Bulwark founder Charlie Sykes equated it to Trump trying to claim he was a firefighter after spending four years as an arsonist.
"I will point out a New York Times/Siena poll at least shows, you know, before we dismiss this, shows that there might be still a little softness among some of the blue-collar, Biden support on this issue," said Sykes, noting a vulnerability, but concluding that it was certainly a hit for Trump."
He went on to say that Trump had an opportunity to appear as a leader and bring people together, but he decided to make it into a campaign issue and further divide Americans.
"When it goes into Kenosha it turns it into a prop when he begins to justify and defend vigilante action," said Sykes. "He is a figure of chaos and division and I think that's what's really hurting him. Also, I think in the last week, what we've seen is that the focus of the campaign has shifted to these other failures. First of all, Joe Biden did address this effectively, but Donald Trump wanted this to be what we talked about, as opposed to the coronavirus, as opposed to the fires out west. And I think that as you start to see the shift of the focus of this campaign, it's going to be harder and harder for Donald Trump to use this as the way. He really did think for a while that this was going to be the wedge issue that might bring Joe Biden down, but I think he's mishandled it."
President Donald Trump has been accused by many in the mental health community of not being fit to serve as the president of the United States.
The "Duty to Warn" campaign was formed out of hundreds of experts who were concerned about what they were seeing in public from the president.
When the campaign took to Twitter Monday afternoon to announce the decision by a Trump-appointed judge to dismiss a mask mandate, Trump retweeted them, despite the campaign's efforts.
The accident may do more to spur criticisms that he isn't mentally capable of handling his job, given he can't read a full tweet.
Detectives offered a $100,000 reward Monday for information leading to the capture of a fugitive who brazenly shot two US sheriff's deputies at close range as they sat in their car.
The officers targeted Saturday in the Compton neighborhood of Los Angeles -- a 24-year-old man and 31-year-old woman -- were in critical condition, but LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva said he was hopeful they would pull through.
"Fortunately, they were spared any injury to a vital organ that would have jeopardized their life immediately," Villanueva told KNX Newsradio, adding that both officers faced a long road to recovery.
He said investigators were working around the clock "to identify and arrest these cowards," referring to the gunman and a suspected getaway driver.
Surveillance video of the incident shows the suspect -- described as an African American aged between 28 and 30 -- approach the patrol car from behind and fire through the passenger side window.
The female office was struck in the jaw and arms. Her partner was hit in the forehead, arms and hand.
The unexplained shooting, in a neighborhood with a high crime rate and a history of tension between the police and black community, drew media and political attention toward the dangers police face on the job and away from the national Black Lives Matter campaign focused on police shootings of African Americans.
"These are real people doing a tough job, and it just shows the dangers of the job, in the blink of an eye," Villanueva said after the shooting.
President Donald Trump, who has campaigned on his support for police and rejection of Black Lives Matters concerns, retweeted the stark video of the shooting and wrote: "Animals that must be hit hard!"
"If they die," Trump wrote of the police officers, "fast trial death penalty for the killer. Only way to stop this!"
"This cold-blooded shooting is unconscionable and the perpetrator must be brought to justice," Trump's Democratic election rival Joe Biden said in a Twitter statement.
"Violence of any kind is wrong; those who commit it should be caught and punished."
Villanueva lashed out on Monday at protesters who showed up Saturday night at the hospital where the two officers are being treated, with some reportedly shouting "death to the police" as they tried to force their way into the emergency room.
"They were chanting that they wish the deputies died," Villanueva told KNX. "And I don't even know how to be begin to describe that, other than repulsive, reprehensible."
Two people were arrested during the protest outside the hospital, including a journalist for NPR who was accused of "interfering with a lawful arrest."
Authorities said the reporter --Josie Huang -- had failed to identify herself as a member of the press but video from her cell phone has contradicted that assertion.
1. Though Woodward reports there was no evidence the election registration system malware had been activated, this sounds scary. Should people be worried?
Yes, we should be worried. Four years ago, Russia managed to penetrate systems in several states but there’s no evidence that they “pulled the trigger” to take advantage of their penetration. One possibility is that they simply saw no need, having successfully “hacked the electorate” by damaging Hillary Clinton’s candidacy through selective dumps of hacked documents on Wikileaks.
We know that VR Systems, a contractor that worked for several Florida counties, was hacked, and we know that there were serious problems in Durham County, North Carolina, during the 2016 election, including software glitches that caused poll workers to turn away voters during parts of Election Day. Durham county was also a VR Systems customer.
I know of no post-election investigation of the problems in Durham County that was conducted with sufficient depth to assure me that Russia was not involved. It remains possible that they did pull the trigger on that county, but it is also possible that the problems there were entirely the result of “normal incompetence.”
2. How does this change what we knew previously about Russian efforts to hack U.S. election systems?
The specific counties compromised in Florida were never officially revealed. Previous leaks indicated that Washington County was one of them. Now we know that St. Lucie was the other.
Furthermore, previous reports mostly said that the systems had been penetrated. Woodward is saying that malware was installed on these machines. I am not sure whether I should interpret his use of terms in their narrow technical sense, but there is a significant difference between penetration, as in “they got the password to your system, broke in and looked around,” and installing malware, as in “they got in and made technical changes to the operation of your system.”
The latter is far more serious because voters could have been removed from registration rolls and therefore prevented from casting ballots, and that’s what I gather Woodward is describing.
3. How have attempts to hack U.S. election systems changed since 2016?
I do not have inside knowledge of what’s going on now, but my impression is that the Russians are getting more subtle. The basic Russian tactics of four years ago were only moderately subtle. Dumping all the stolen Democratic National Committee files on Wikileaks wasn’t subtle, but some of the narrowcasting of targeted misinformation on social media was brilliant, if utterly evil. For example, using Facebook, Russian propagandists were able to target prospective voters in swing states with disinformation tailored for them.
My impression is that they’re getting better at disinformation campaigns. I think it’s safe to assume that they’re also getting better at digging into the actual machinery of elections.
4. Have efforts to defend U.S. election systems against hackers improved?
On the social media front, there has certainly been improvement. The obvious “sock puppet farms,” large numbers of fake accounts controlled by a single entity, that Russia was running on U.S. social media are far more difficult to run these days because of the way the social media companies are cracking down. What I fear is that the country is defending against the attacks of four years ago while not really knowing about the attacks of today.
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to lead to a large increase in mail-in ballots like this 2020 primary election ballot in Philadelphia.
In the world of actual election machinery, the U.S. has made a little progress, but COVID-19 has thrown a monkey wrench in the system, forcing a massive shift to postal ballots in states that permit this. That means that attacks on polling-place machinery will be generally less effective than in the past, while attacks on county election offices remain a real threat.
5. What keeps you awake at night going into the 2020 presidential election?
Oh dear. The list is long. Everything from crazies on the loony fringe of American politics shooting at each other in response to election results they don’t like, to people living in such closed media bubbles that we are effectively two different cultures living next door to each other while believing entirely different things about the world we live in.
Between those extremes, consider the possibility of results appearing to be reversed after polls have closed. If there is a demographic split between the vote-in-person crowd and the vote-by-mail crowd, election night results could go one way, while in states like Iowa, where postal ballots received six days after the election get counted if there is proof they were mailed on time, the final results could go another way.
Then, add in the possibility of hacked central tabulating software in key counties, and there’s plenty to lose sleep over.
Hurricane Sally was churning slowly towards the coast of the southern US states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday as a Category 1 storm.
The National Hurricane Center said the storm in the Gulf of Mexico was packing maximum sustained winds of around 90 miles (150 kilometers) per hour.
At 1800 GMT, it was located 160 miles southeast of Biloxi, Mississippi, and heading in a west-northwesterly direction at seven mph.
It was expected to make landfall late Tuesday or early Wednesday.
Governor John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, which is still recovering from Hurricane Laura, which made landfall as a Category 4 storm, said Sally could impact the southeast part of the state and told residents to be prepared.
"Be smart and be safe," he tweeted.
The governors of Alabama and Mississippi both declared a state of emergency ahead of the approaching storm.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves said Hurricane Sally was expected to make landfall around Biloxi at 2:00 am (0600 GMT) on Wednesday.
"The storm surge projections continue to be worrisome with anywhere from five to eight feet (1.5 to 2.4 meters) of coastal surge," Reeves said.
"We are continuing to be very concerned about the amount of rainfall," he said, adding that some areas could be drenched in as much as 20 inches of rain.
Sally is one of five active tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean.
The others are Hurricane Paulette, tropical storms Teddy and Vicky and tropical depression Rene.
According to meteorologists, the only other time there were five active tropical cyclones in the Atlantic at the same time was in September 1971.
Hurricane Paulette, a Category 2 storm, pounded the island of Bermuda on Monday with strong winds and heavy rains, according to the NHC.
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré was interviewed by MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin on Monday about the state of hurricane recovery in Louisiana as Hurricane Sally bears down on the state.
Honoré was widely praised for his role in responding to Hurricane Katrina, which occurred after the George W. Bush administration had been criticized for mistakes in their initial response to the disaster.
"We are following breaking news at this hour," Mohyeldin said. "Right now Hurricane Sally is Category 1 storm and taking aim at the gulf coast. Hurricane warnings have been issued in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, some areas are expected to get an average of 8 to 16 inches of rain
"Sally will arrive just two weeks after Hurricane Laura blew through Louisiana," he noted.
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Honoré discussed the state of the Hurricane Laura recovery.
"Laura is hard," Honoré said.
"The grid is broke. It is broke at the level of what we saw in Puerto Rico," he said. "And the recovery is going to be three months, maybe, to get the power back on in most places. And maybe longer with 300 water systems that are down."
"This is a hard recovery, it's painful," he added.
NBC News reported that the Department of Justice Inspector General is investigating what happened with the sentencing guidelines surrounding Roger Stone's case.
The report recalls DOJ prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky testified before Congress that he was told by the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to request a "lighter" sentence for Stone due to his personal relationship with President Donald Trump.
"Zelinsky said the U.S. Attorney, Timothy Shea, was 'receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break, and that the U.S. Attorney's sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations,'" said NBC News.
Attorney General Bill Barr stepped in, saying that the sentencing recommendations from the DOJ weren't acceptable and were "too high" and told the prosecutors to rewrite the sentencing document. Prosecutors resigned instead.
According to an NBC source, Zelinsky's testimony helped trigger the Inspector General's Office to investigate.
Stone was convicted of seven felonies, but Trump commuted the sentence his long-time friend right before he was slated to go to prison.
A whistleblower complaint filed Monday alleges an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center is responsible for an exorbitant number of hysterectomies being performed on migrant women, apparently without consent and for unclear reasons.
Systematic forced sterilization is a crime against humanity according to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
The whistleblower complaint, filed on behalf of a nurse at Irwin County, Georgia, ICE Detention Center (ICDC), also charges “jarring medical neglect,” Law & Crime reports, "including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus."
One detainee said: “When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies.”
The whistleblower said there is one gynecologist in particular who is performing the hysterectomies at an alarming rate.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” said Dawn Wooten, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”
“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”
One detainee “was originally told by the doctor that she had an ovarian cyst and was going to have a small twenty-minute procedure done drilling three small holes in her stomach to drain the cyst,” the whistleblower complaint alleges.
“The officer who was transporting her to the hospital told her that she was receiving a hysterectomy to have her womb removed. When the hospital refused to operate on her because her COVID-19 test came back positive for antibodies, she was transferred back to ICDC where the ICDC nurse said that the procedure she was going to have done entailed dilating her vagina and scraping tissue off. “
"Another nurse then told her the procedure was to mitigate her heavy menstrual bleeding, which the woman had never experienced. When she explained that, the nurse responded by getting angry and agitated and began yelling at her.'"
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a Dept. of Homeland Security agency.
Video posted to Twitter of protest in Sacramento, California, shows a car swerving into the throng of anti-Trump demonstrators, hitting one person and knocking him back before the car speeds off.
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The incident occurred as President Donald Trump visited the city for a briefing with local and federal fire and emergency officials on the state's wildfires.
According to KCRA reporter Vicki Gonzalez, one protester was taken away in an ambulance.
When Steven Spielberg called up Aaron Sorkin and asked him to write a movie about the 1968 Chicago anti-war riots -- and the extraordinary trial that followed -- the "West Wing" creator had no idea it would launch in such divisive times.
That meeting was in 2006, and the "The Trial of the Chicago 7" finally debuts on Netflix next month with a mouth-watering ensemble cast including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Sacha Baron Cohen.
During that long stretch, "the world just kept more and more mirroring the events of the movie," said Sorkin, who took over directing duties after Spielberg dropped out.
"This was before Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd. This was before that. The similarities... are chilling," Sorkin told the Toronto film festival Monday, referring to African Americans killed by US police.
"The movie was relevant when we were making it -- we didn't need it to get more relevant. But it did."
The film depicts how in 1968 -- with opposition to the Vietnam War mounting, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinated -- stone-throwing demonstrators clashed with club-wielding policemen as the stench of tear gas filled the air.
In the ensuing trial, hippie defendants used humor, costumes and even song to condemn the political establishment, as a powerful judge ordered a Black Panther leader gagged and chained to his chair.
"What we're seeing today, once again, is the demonization of dissent," Sorkin told an online talk.
"We had been looking back at 1968... and saying, 'That was awful. But thank God we got through that. And we're better, we don't have to do that again'," he added.
"It's like building a house, having it almost finished. And then a gust of wind comes and knocks it down."
Hundreds were arrested in the 1968 Chicago riots that took place during the Democratic Party convention, overshadowing the doomed nomination of Hubert Humphrey and symbolizing a deep divide in the American people.
A clip from Sorkin's movie shown at Toronto evoked demonstrators chanting: "The whole world is watching."
This summer, the United States was gripped by massive nationwide protests over police killings of African Americans, with the "Black Lives Matter" message resonating around the world.
In the extraordinary real-life trial that followed the 1968 Chicago protests, all seven defendants were acquitted of conspiracy but five were convicted of crossing state lines to incite riots and later won on appeal.
They were also cited for contempt of court almost 200 times. The citations were thrown out.
"The Trial of the Chicago 7" launches in select theaters September, and on Netflix from October 16.
Toronto, North America's biggest film festival, is taking place mainly online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. It runs until Sunday.
Michael Caputo, the top spokesperson for the Dept. of Health and Human Services, went on a wild, paranoid, late night rant Sunday, posting to his personal Facebook page claims about the "deep state," "sedition" at the CDC, "shadows," and claiming, "when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin."
“I don’t like being alone in Washington,” Caputo, a former top spokesperson for the Kremlin, said in a live video, according to The New York Times.
He described “shadows on the ceiling in my apartment, there alone, shadows are so long,” and "then ran through a series of conspiracy theories, culminating in a prediction that Mr. Trump will win re-election but his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., will refuse to concede."
“And when Donald Trump refuses to stand down at the inauguration, the shooting will begin,” he said. “The drills that you’ve seen are nothing.”
“If you carry guns, buy ammunition, ladies and gentlemen, because it’s going to be hard to get.”
“You understand that they’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going.”
“Remember the Trump supporter who was shot and killed?” Caputo also said. “That was a drill.”
Mr. Caputo on Sunday complained on Facebook that he was under siege by the media and said that his physical health was in question and his “mental health has definitely failed.”
Caputo also "said without evidence that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was harboring a 'resistance unit' determined to undermine President Donald Trump."
On Monday Caputo deleted his personal Twitter account. A search did not turn up his personal Facebook account.
Caputo came under tremendous fire last week when it was reported he and his team successfully pressured CDC scientists to allow them to change critical information on weekly coronavirus reports in an effort to help President Donald Trump.
Another 'Karen' video is circulating on social media, this time showing a woman saying that she's calling the police on a Black man in her neighborhood, who also happens to be a U.S. Census Bureau worker.
During the confrontation, the man filming the video tells the woman that he's simply minding his own business. Nevertheless, the woman complains that he's "in front of my neighbor's house" and tells him to leave because he doesn't "have a reason to be here."
The woman also accuses the man of trying to "make a political statement."
When police arrive on the scene, one of the officers can be heard saying the woman "does this all the time" due to "psychiatric issues."
President Donald Trump on Monday asserted that he expects the Earth to begin cooling despite a scientific consensus that the planet is getting warmer overall.
At a roundtable in Sacramento to discuss wildfires, Wade Crowfoot of the California Natural Resources Agency told Trump that temperatures in the state had recently broken records.
"We're seeing this warming trend make our summers warmer, but also our winters warmer as well," Crowfoot explained. "We want to work with you to really recognize the changing climate and what it means to our forests and actually work together with that science. That science is going to be key. Because if we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and say we think it's all about vegetation management, we're not going to succeed in protecting Californians."
"It will start getting cooler," Trump announced. "You just watch."
"I wish science agreed with you," Crowfoot replied.
"Oh, well, I don't think science knows," Trump remarked.
