Republican presidential candidate reportedly hires local advisers in bid to court votes of Americans living in Israel • Trump accuses CNN of bias in Twitter rant • Russia denies interfering in U.S. elections following leaked DNC emails that hurt Clinton.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is set to visit Israel at the height of his election campaign
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Photo credit: AP |
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is in the process of creating an Israeli campaign in a bid to secure the votes of the hundreds of thousands of Americans living in the country, Channel 10 News reported Monday.
The move by Trump, who is famous for his small campaign staff, is a clear indication of the importance of the absentee ballot in Israel.
The move by Trump, who is famous for his small campaign staff, is a clear indication of the importance of the absentee ballot in Israel.
Trump's campaign staff in Israel, which will consist of Jewish Israelis, will be appointed by this weekend and is set to begin work on his campaign in the coming days, the report said.
Trump also announced he will fly to Israel at the height of his election campaign. He canceled an earlier visit that was scheduled for January.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would not interfere in the election and does not plan to endorse any presidential candidate.
Russia, on the other hand, has faced increasing scrutiny following the hack of U.S. Democratic party emails. On Tuesday, the Kremlin dismissed the allegations as absurd, saying unidentified individuals were trying to cynically exploit fear of Russia for electoral purposes.
It responded after cybersecurity experts and U.S. officials said there was evidence that Russia had engineered the release of sensitive Democratic party emails in order to influence the Nov. 8 presidential election.
The emails, released by activist group WikiLeaks over the weekend, appeared to show favoritism within the Democratic National Committee for Hillary Clinton and prompted the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
President Vladimir Putin has tried to avoid giving the impression he favors any U.S. candidate, but has hailed Republican Party nominee Donald Trump as being "very talented."
Russian state TV, which hews closely to the Kremlin's world view, has left little doubt, however, that Moscow would prefer Trump. It casts Clinton, whom Putin accused of stirring up protests against him in her role as U.S. Secretary of State in 2011, as a warmonger.
"We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the U.S. election campaign," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters when asked about the leaked emails.
"This is not breaking new ground, this is an old trick, which is being played again. This is not good for our bilateral relations, but we understand that we simply have to get through this unpleasant period."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said earlier on Tuesday he had raised the hacking issue at a meeting in Laos with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
"I don't want to use four-letter words," was Lavrov's only response to reporters when asked whether Russia was responsible for the email hack.
Earlier this month, Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Trump, visited Moscow, where he gave a lecture complaining that Western governments had often had a hypocritical focus on democratization in the post-Soviet world.
Analysts say the Kremlin would welcome a Trump win because the billionaire U.S. businessman has repeatedly praised Putin, spoken of wanting to get along with Russia, and has said he would consider an alliance with Moscow against the Islamic State group. Trump has also suggested he might abandon NATO's pledge to automatically defend all alliance members.
Trump, who has complimented Putin and Russia -- who many analysts consider an enemy, if not rival, of the U.S. -- on numerous occasions, is known for his strong distaste for the media.
On Monday afternoon, Trump focused his ire on CNN, attacking the channel's news coverage and accusing the network of being the "press shop for Hillary Clinton" in a total of six tweets.
He commented that "people believe CNN these days almost as little as they believe Hillary. ... That's really saying something!"
Later on Monday, he returned to the subject again with three new tweets accusing the network of biased coverage.
It is unclear if Trump personally posted the messages or if a campaign staffer posted them under his name.
Some of the anti-CNN tweets were posted at the exact same time the network was televising an interview with a high-profile Clinton critic -- Pat Smith, the mother of an American who was killed during the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. But Trump made no mention of that.
The tweets came just a couple of hours before CNN was due to release a new national poll about the presidential race, leading to speculation that perhaps Trump was pre-emptively assailing CNN in an attempt to discredit the poll results.
The timing was also noteworthy because Trump has been playing defense for days amid widespread coverage of Khizr Khan's anti-Trump speech at the Democratic National Convention.
Khan, the father of a Muslim-American Army captain slain in Iraq in 2004, repudiated Trump and paid tribute to his son in the Thursday night speech.
Khan's speech -- and Trump's critical comments about the Khan family -- have been a top story on CNN and other channels ever since.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that he does not watch CNN, but his tweets seem to hint otherwise.
On July 17, he said, "I don't watch [CNN]," but one week later, after the Republican convention, he wrote, "The CNN panels are so one sided, almost all against Trump. Fox News is so much better and the ratings are much higher. Don't watch CNN!"
Then the Democratic convention happened and Khan's speech made news. On Sunday evening Trump tweeted, "Wow, it is unbelievable how distorted, one-sided and biased the media is against us. The failing [New York Times] is a joke. CNN is laughable!"
On Monday morning he tweeted a fresh complaint about Khan "viciously" attacking him at the same time Khan was on CNN.
Then on Monday afternoon, shortly before taking the stage at a town hall event in Ohio, Trump lashed out in his tweetstorm of sorts. "CNN anchors are completely out of touch with everyday people worried about rising crime, failing schools and vanishing jobs," he wrote.
Trump also asked, "When will we see stories from CNN on Clinton Foundation corruption and Hillary's pay-for-play at State Department?"
CNN has published numerous investigations into Clinton controversies, including issues involving the family foundation and connections between foundation donors and State Department activities. So have many other news outlets.
At the rally on Monday afternoon, Trump said he is refusing to grant any interviews with CNN, calling the channel's reporting dishonest, and saying Fox News has been better.
For more than a month, Trump has been appearing regularly on Fox and eschewing most other TV network interview requests.
Accusations of media bias tend to rally Trump supporters to his side.
Monday's tweetstorm was just the latest salvo in a year-long anti-media campaign by Trump. The GOP nominee has taken media criticism to new heights -- or new lows, depending on your perspective. He frequently uses the news media as a foil during his speeches and interviews.
Last week, he aroused a crowd by falsely claiming that CNN had turned off its camera in the back of the room.
The anti-media messaging, while effective with Trump's base of supporters, may get in the way of his other general campaign themes.
Journalist Justin Green of the Independent Journal called Trump's CNN complaints "exhausting" in a tweet on Monday.
He noted that "seven out of Trump's 15 tweets in last 24 hours have been about CNN."
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