Politico

It took Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) four months and three weeks of “careful consideration, of prayer and searching my own conscience” to declare publicly that he would vote for Donald Trump. He made the decision to profit by selling his supporter list to Trump far faster than that. Just six weeks after he dropped out – and more than a month before Sen Cruz would dramatically snub the nominee at the Republican National Convention – the senator quietly began renting his vast donor e-mail file to his former rival, pocketing at least tens of thousands of dollars, and more likely hundreds of thousands, that can be used to bankroll the Texan’s own political future.

An array of civil rights and tech organizations including the NAACP, New America's Open Technology Institute, the Benton Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology are urging NBC anchor and debate moderator Lester Holt (and the other debate moderators) to add a question about affordable broadband. “In the same ways that trains, highways, and telephones have long powered the way we do business and share ideas, internet infrastructure is our country’s economic driver for the 21st century,” they write, “With this in mind, voters must understand the presidential candidates’ plans for broadband access.” Clinton has set a goal of broadband for every household by 2020, while Trump hasn’t addressed the issue.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has paid his family's businesses more than $8.2 million, according to an analysis of campaign finance filings, which reveals an integrated business and political operation without precedent in national politics.

The GOP presidential nominee’s campaign has paid his various businesses for services including rent for his campaign offices ($1.3 million), food and facilities for events and meetings ($544,000) and payroll for Trump corporate staffers ($333,000) who helped with everything from his traveling security to his wife’s convention speech. In all, the Trump campaign’s payments to Trump-owned businesses account for about 7 percent of its $119 million spending total, the analysis found. That’s an unprecedented amount of self-dealing in federal politics. Even the wealthiest of candidates have refrained from tapping their businesses’ resources to such an extensive degree, either because their businesses are structured in a manner that doesn’t legally allow them to do it with flexibility, or because they’re leery of the allegations of pocket-padding that inevitably arise when politicians use their campaigns or committees to pay their businesses or families. Trump, on the other hand, appears to have structured his businesses in a way that lets the campaign use them without legal restriction. And he certainly doesn’t appear to feel any embarrassment about flouting political norms that typically compel candidates to distance themselves from their businesses during campaigns.

In an effort to address the spotty access to broadband in many rural regions, Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) introduced the Public Lands Telecommunications Act.

It authorizes agencies with jurisdiction over public-land management, like the National Parks Service, to collaborate with surrounding communities to build a more comprehensive telecommunications infrastructure. “This approach to improved connectivity has something for everyone: visitors could see improved interpretive services and public safety, land management agencies could practice more efficient land management, and neighboring rural and remote communities will benefit from improved broadband access,” Rep Huffman said.

The Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy group that supports open government and tracks money in politics, announced that it was cutting staff and suspending its data-driven projects and reporting tools. The organization, which launched in 2006 with the express purpose of tracking money in politics, said that it would end its tool building and database maintenance, which are often used by reporters writing about campaign finance and politics.

Michael Klein, the Sunlight Foundation’s board chairman, wrote a post explaining the decision to scale back dramatically. “While we are enormously proud of what Sunlight has accomplished over the past decade, and has come to stand for, we are also aware of the changes time has wrought,” Klein wrote in the post. “We are aware that the robust maturation of technology over the past decade has — happily but substantially — reduced the urgency of Sunlight’s early role as a leading transparency innovator. In addition, the board had to recognize that Sunlight’s initiating objective— to build support for better legislation against and regulation of the power of money in politics— has been significantly limited by the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision.”

In a show of joint defiance, the major television networks collectively voted to pull a camera and erase video of Donald Trump giving a tour of his hotel, a protest of the campaign preventing any editorial presence on the tour. According to members of the traveling press pool, after it was made clear that only still photographers and video cameras would be allowed on the pool, the Washington bureau chiefs of the various television networks convened an emergency conference call and agreed to pull the network camera and erase the footage of the tour. "The pool rules state any event that is pooled with cameras, there has to be a pool producer. Due to the fact we were not granted editorial access, as is customary, that decision was made and the footage was erased," a member of the Trump traveling press said.

The tour of the hotel was to take place after Trump made remarks finally admitting that President Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the United States. Though the event was billed as a news conference to set the record straight on President Obama's birthplace, Trump ignored reporters standing on their chairs, shouting questions. He also made only a brief statement of a few sentences on the controversy, spending much of the time being boosted by campaign surrogates and touting his hotel. And then, when Trump was supposed to take the press on a tour of his new hotel, the editorial producer for the network pool was physically detained. "As the designated pool producer; attempted to go on pooled tour, as is customary. Was physically restrained from accompanying the camera," tweeted ABC producer Candace Smith.

Donald Trump took credit for the public's lack of trust in the media, and called out a New York Times reporter, saying he should have been fired. Speaking to New York Post columnist Fred Dicker on his WGDJ-AM radio show on Sept 15, Trump said of a recent Gallup poll showing public confidence in the media at an all-time low: “I think I had a lot to do with that poll … because I’ve exposed the media. If you look at The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and if you look at others: the level of dishonesty is enormous. It’s so dishonest. I can do something that’s wonderful and they make it sound terrible," Trump said. But just a moment later, Trump said he doesn't know if the distrust in the media helps him because "I respect The New York Times. I respect The Washington Post.” “Everybody is talking about the dishonesty — the total dishonesty — of some of the papers and the media generally. CNN is unbelievably dishonest. They call it the Clinton News Network," Trump said. “I am very proud to say that I think I had a lot to do with that poll number.” Trump also said Times reporter Jonathan Martin "would have been fired" by the late Abe Rosenthal, who was executive editor of the Times in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Donald Trump's presidential campaign is ending its blacklist of news outlets, the campaign has confirmed. The blacklist has been in effect at the Trump campaign for nearly a year, with media outlets left out of official events for perceived slights in how they reported on his campaign. The banned outlets at times included Politico, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and the Des Moines Register. Sometimes journalists for the outlets would be able to attend campaign events as members of the general public, but in several cases they were still removed from the venue when security realized they were press. A Washington Post reporter was once patted down at a Mike Pence event to make sure he did not have a cell phone or laptop on him at an event.

[Commentary] When Donald Trump announced his new campaign CEO in mid-August—Steve Bannon, the pugnacious CEO of the conservative news site Breitbart—the world reacted like wires had been crossed. A figure from the media jumping straight into politics? Even in the world of partisan media, it seemed unusual to give up all pretense of removal from the contest for power to directly pulling the strings. But if it seemed surprising, it shouldn’t have.

Conservative candidates have been able to count on more or less the direct support of networks like Fox for a generation, to say nothing of hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt. And in fact the connection is much, much older than that—older, in fact, than most people assume conservative media is. If you want to understand just how deeply this kind of activism is entwined in the DNA of modern conservative media, you have to go back to 1956, and to the case of a Steve Bannon-esque figure named Clarence Manion, who tried to run his own outsider candidate for president.

[Nicole Hemmer is assistant professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center and co-host of the Past Present podcast.]

NBC's Lester Holt, ABC's Martha Raddatz, CNN's Anderson Cooper, Fox News' Chris Wallace and CBS' Elaine Quijano will moderate presidential and vice presidential debates this fall, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced.

Holt, anchor of NBC's "Nightly News,” will moderate the first debate at Hofstra University in New York on Sept. 26, which will be a traditional debate divided into six segments of 15 minutes each on major topics to be determined by Holt. Quijano, an anchor on CBS' live streaming service CBSN, will moderate the vice presidential debate on Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Virginia, which will be a traditional debate as well — divided into nine timed segments of 10 minutes each. Raddatz, ABC's Chief Global Correspondent and co-anchor of "This Week,” along with CNN anchor Cooper, will moderate a town-meeting style debate on Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis. There, the questions will be posed directly by citizen participants made up of uncommitted voters based on topics "of broad public interest as reflected in social media and other sources." Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday,” will become the first Fox News host to moderate a general election debate since the network's founding. He will host the final presidential debate on Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The format of the final debate will be the same as the first.