Sheldon Adelson Set to Donate $25 Million to Trump's Campaign

In a last-minute effort to bolster Donald Trump's campaign, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is seriously considering giving $25 million to a superPAC aimed at boosting Trump and helping down-ticket Republicans. Previously, Adelson and his wife Miriam gave $10 million to the superPAC. The superPAC was set up by the Ricketts family of Chicago, which owns the Chicago Cubs. (V)

Trump Stiffs His Pollster

Donald Trump doesn't like bad news and also doesn't like paying his contractors, so he decided not to pay his pollster, Tony Fabrizio, the $767,000 that Trump owes him for doing his polling. Fabrizio, a veteran Republican pollster, was hired in May, before Trump's current campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway (who is fundamentally a pollster) was brought on board. When asked to comment on Trump's stiffing his first pollster, the campaign refused to comment. (V)

Trump Avoided Taxes by Stretching a Loophole

People have been wondering for weeks how Donald Trump avoided paying taxes after he declared a $916 million loss in the 1990s. Now the mechanism he used has come out. His casinos were all built with borrowed money. When they failed, ultimately the loans were forgiven. However, a canceled debt counts as taxable income. Trump needed a way to avoid paying taxes on all the "income." The method he chose was to give the creditors partnerships in his now worthless businesses. Technically they didn't cancel his debts, but simply swapped the debt for partnerships. Of course, the key question is how much a partnership with Donald Trump was worth. If it isn't worth much, there is a problem. The IRS will not allow a tax-free swap of $916 million in debt for a partnership worth $1.99. So Trump had to value those partnerships at astronomically high values, which is probably what triggered all of his audits. (V)

Last Four Attorneys General Have Now All Criticized Comey

We already knew that the current Attorney General of the United States, Loretta Lynch, was not supportive of FBI Director James Comey's decision to send a letter to Congress last Friday advising them that new information may have come to light in the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation. Now, her three immediate predecessors have spoken up, and they are even more critical.

Eric Holder, who served as AG immediately before Lynch, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post, in which he declared:

I served with Jim Comey, and I know him well. This is a very difficult piece for me to write. He is a man of integrity and honor. I respect him. But good men make mistakes. In this instance, he has committed a serious error with potentially severe implications.

Michael Mukasey, the final AG of the Bush administration, was equally sharp in a piece written for the Wall Street Journal. He argues that Comey's earlier moves have made a grand jury indictment an impossibility, which renders the new discovery irrelevant. And Mukasey's predecessor Alberto Gonzales said Comey made a serious "error in judgment," and conceded to being, "somewhat perplexed about what the director was trying to accomplish here."

Critiques like these, coming from all parts of the spectrum, are why Politico is now describing Comey as "Washington's punching bag." There are seven other Attorneys General still living (Ramsey Clark, Benjamin Civiletti, Edwin Meese, Dick Thornburgh, William P. Barr, Janet Reno, and John Ashcroft); perhaps the Director can persuade one of them to leap to his defense. (Z)

Girl Who Starred in the "Daisy Ad" Makes a New One

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson made the most famous political ad of all time, the Daisy Ad. Fifty-two years later, the little girl in the ad, Monique Corzilius Luiz, has made a new ad, also about nuclear weapons, in particular Donald Trump's threat to use them. The ad also addresses the question of what safeguards are in place to stop an unstable president from launching nuclear weapons. Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA, appears in the ad to answer that question, saying: "The commander-in-chief is the commander-in-chief," in other words, there is no way to stop a president from using nuclear weapons. It was a clever move to get the star of the original Daisy Ad to appear in this one. (V)

Kasich Votes for John McCain

Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) vowed not to vote for Donald Trump. Yesterday he made good on that promise. He cast his absentee ballot with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) written in as his choice for president. McCain is unlikely to win Ohio, let alone the election, but if Trump is thoroughly discredited by 2020 and Kasich runs for president, he is going to wear this vote as a badge of courage. (V)

Computer Scientists Uncovered a Digital Hotline between Trump Servers and Moscow

In July, a cybersecurity researcher who goes by the pseudonym "Tea Leaves" noticed a strange pattern of communication between Donald Trump's servers and the Alfa Bank in Moscow. He became curious about it and collected some traces on this connection. He tried pinging the Trump server and his pings were rejected, meaning the server was configured in a way to communicate only with a specific set of other servers, including those of the Alfa Bank. He and his colleagues contacted Paul Vixie, who wrote much of the DNS code that makes the Internet work. Their conclusion: There was a secret digital hotline between Trump's servers and those in Russia. What they also discovered is that this hotline was active only during business hours in New York or business hours in Moscow, strongly suggesting it was being used for human communication, not for serving webpages or something automated like that. Also odd was that very large and powerful servers were set up to handle a tiny bit of traffic. Technical experts who have seen the logs have sworn that they are genuine because there are items in them that would be very hard to falsify in a way to fool experts, such as interpacket timing.

What is also interesting is that traffic on the digital hotline between Trump and Russia seemed to correlate with political news. When there was a lot of political news, there was more traffic than when there was little news. On Sept. 21, the New York Times began investigating this matter, and the Trump server was suddenly shut down. Four days later a new DNS entry was created that pointed to the now-restarted Trump server.

Alfa Bank is owned by people close to Vladimir Putin. This isn't the first piece of evidence that Trump has some connection with Russia and Ukraine. His first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, regularly did business with those countries. Trump praises Vladimir Putin all the time. Then there was the DNC hack by the Russians, clearly with the intent of helping Trump. But the nature of the relationship between Trump and Russia is still not clear. (V)

Donna Brazile Gave Clinton a Debate Question in Advance

According to a WikiLeaks dump of more email, interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile gave Hillary Clinton one of the questions for the primary debate with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in Flint, MI. If the allegation is true, she clearly should not have done that. The question was basically: "What are you going to do about the poisoned water in Flint?" Of course, the whole point of having the debate in Flint was to highlight its poisoned water, so Clinton knew very well that the question was coming, and the cheating didn't do much good. Still, CNN has accepted Brazile's resignation as a result of this information. (V)

Brazile Shouldn't Be the Only One to Go

Now that Donna Brazile is out of a job, CNN's stable of political-operatives-turned-talking-heads is down to just Van Jones, James Carville, Jeffrey Lord, Kayleigh McEnany, Paul Begala, David Gergen, David Axelrod, and Corey Lewandowski. So, supplies are limited. Politico's Jack Shafer writes that CNN should not stop with Brazile, and that the whole crew should all be shown the door. His argument is that (former) professional political operatives tend to be risk-averse, and also unwilling to be critical of those individuals who made their careers. The result is that they just tote the water for the red team or the blue team, and do so in a generally uninteresting way:

What transpires during the paid contributor segments isn't journalism. It isn't politics. And it's rarely even entertaining. I'd call it the worst sort of tasteless soy filler, only that would be an insult to soy, which is nutritious. There's no reason outside of pragmatism that justifies their continued employment on the news shows.

Shafer's preferred option: Give that airtime over to actual journalists, who might say something instructive, or may be able to extract useful information from the politicos (who would be limited to unpaid interviews). It's a pretty radical proposal; hopefully, Shafer is not holding his breath. (Z)

Schumer Is Helping Democratic Senate Candidates

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had $20 million in his campaign account at the start of October. He doesn't need it, since he is leading his opponent, Wendy Long, by 40 points. But he would very much like to be the new Senate Majority Leader, so he is donating it to the campaigns of other Democrats in close races. He has given away $8 million so far, including $1.7 million in the past few days. He is focused on races he thinks the Democrat can win (ideally in states where advertising is cheap), among them Wisconsin, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana. He hasn't said whether he plans to spend even more of his stash in the final days. (V)

Democratic Senate Candidates Get a Black Eye

No, not from dealing with Chuck Schumer. Working with him just gives people a slightly icky feeling, and maybe a desire to take a shower. The black eye is courtesy of the Thornton Law Firm, based in Massachusetts, whose employees gave thousands of dollars to Democratic Senate hopefuls. The problem is that each donation triggered a matching "bonus" in the employees' paychecks. In other words, it was a pretty transparent attempt by the firm's ownership to get around campaign contribution limits. Gov. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-FL), Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander (D), Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), and Katie McGinty of Pennsylvania will each be refunding between $20,000 and $50,000. So, that extra money from Schumer is actually going to come in very handy. (Z)

Desperate Times Apparently Call for Desperate Measures

The biggest threat to Donald Trump in Utah (with its 6 electoral votes) is independent conservative Evan McMullin who, as a Mormon, is more palatable to many Beehive State residents than The Donald. One of Trump's supporters, a California-based white supremacist with the very distinctive name William Johnson, is desperately trying to save those 6 EVs. To that end, Johnson is self-funding a robocall attack on McMullin that will go out to 190,000 Utahns.

For the robocall, Johnson is pulling out all the stops. The message claims that McMullin (1) is an advocate of open borders; (2) has two lesbian mothers; (3) supports the legalization of gay marriage; and (4) is himself a closeted homosexual. Needless to say, Johnson has no evidence for any of these claims, but you don't Make America Great Again without breaking a few eggs. Fortunately, there's only seven days left in this election cycle, so time is running out for us to discover new depths to which partisans will go. (Z)

Today's Presidential Polls

SurveyMonkey is largely affirming what we already knew or suspected about most of the country, although Michigan, Wisconsin, and South Carolina probably aren't quite that close. Most of the polling was done before the James Comey's announcement last Friday. (Z)

State	Clinton	Trump	Johnson	Start	End	Pollster
Alaska	39%	47%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Alabama	36%	54%	6%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Arkansas	37%	53%	5%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Arizona	43%	43%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
California	55%	30%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Colorado	44%	39%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Connecticut	51%	39%	4%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
D.C.	87%	4%	4%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Delaware	51%	38%	6%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Florida	46%	43%	3%	Oct 21	Oct 23	Florida Atlantic U.
Florida	46%	45%	5%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Georgia	42%	49%	3%	Oct 25	Oct 27	SurveyUSA
Georgia	44%	46%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Hawaii	52%	31%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Iowa	40%	44%	10%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Idaho	31%	49%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Illinois	53%	34%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Indiana	37%	49%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Indiana	39%	50%	4%	Oct 27	Oct 30	Monmouth U.
Kansas	36%	47%	12%	Oct 20	Oct 28	SurveyMonkey
Kansas	36%	47%	13%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Kentucky	31%	59%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Louisiana	36%	54%	5%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Massachusetts	58%	28%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Maryland	63%	27%	6%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Maine	50%	38%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Michigan	43%	42%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Minnesota	47%	38%	9%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Missouri	39%	46%	10%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Mississippi	42%	47%	5%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Montana	38%	48%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
North Carolina	47%	43%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
North Dakota	32%	55%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Nebraska	33%	51%	10%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
New Hampshire	45%	38%	6%	Oct 26	Oct 30	U. of New Hampshire
New Hampshire	46%	36%	12%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
New Jersey	55%	34%	4%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
New Mexico	45%	33%	18%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Nevada	43%	43%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
New York	57%	33%		Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Ohio	41%	44%	9%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Oklahoma	30%	57%	11%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Oregon	51%	36%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Pennsylvania	49%	38%	4%	Oct 26	Oct 30	Franklin+Marshall Coll.
Pennsylvania	49%	41%	6%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Rhode Island	49%	36%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
South Carolina	42%	46%	6%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
South Dakota	29%	55%	12%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Tennessee	39%	51%	5%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Texas	42%	46%	7%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Utah	30%	33%		Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Virginia	48%	39%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Vermont	51%	25%		Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Washington	53%	34%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Wisconsin	45%	41%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
West Virginia	27%	59%		Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey
Wyoming	23%	62%	8%	Oct 24	Oct 30	SurveyMonkey

Today's Senate Polls

Evan Bayh has had a very bad month; if Todd Young surges too much more, he's going to surge himself all the way to Washington. (Z)

State	Democrat	D %	Republican	R %	Start	End	Pollster
Florida	Patrick Murphy	42%	Marco Rubio*	46%	Oct 21	Oct 23	Florida Atlantic U.
Florida	Patrick Murphy	42%	Marco Rubio*	51%	Oct 25	Oct 27	Siena Coll.
Indiana	Evan Bayh	45%	Todd Young	45%	Oct 27	Oct 30	Monmouth U.
New Hampshire	Maggie Hassan	33%	Kelly Ayotte*	36%	Oct 26	Oct 30	U. of New Hampshire
Pennsylvania	Katie McGinty	47%	Pat Toomey*	35%	Oct 26	Oct 30	Franklin+Marshall Coll.

* Denotes incumbent

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---The Votemaster and Zenger