Hillary Clinton looks to counter debate night attacks on emails
The last presidential debate was only ten days ago, but a lot has changed since then, CBS News’ Nancy Cordes reports from Las Vegas.
In the meantime, more than half a dozen women have accused Donald Trump of making unwanted sexual advances and Hillary Clinton has largely held her fire about that. But her aides said that’s likely to change Wednesday night.
Clinton arrived in Las Vegas Tuesday afternoon and immersed herself in more debate prep, despite her opponent’s taunts.
“She is home sleeping and I am working. So that’s the way it is,” Trump told rally-goers in Grand Junction, Colorado Tuesday. “That’s the way it’s going to be in the White House too -- she’d be sleeping, I’d be working.”
Clinton aides say she is working -- on how she’ll rebut Trump’s argument that the election is somehow rigged against him.
“He wants to blame somebody else and that’s what losers do,” Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton’s communications director, told reporters Tuesday.
Palmieri says Clinton will argue Trump is just trying to distract voters from new allegations of sexual assault.
She also expects that hacked campaign emails will come up tonight.
In one, posted by WikiLeaks this week, campaign chair John Podesta admitted, last September, that the campaign had “taken on a lot of water” over the email scandal and that “a lot has to do with [Clinton’s] instincts.”
In another email released Tuesday, he described Bernie Sanders as a “doofus” for criticizing an international environmental agreement.
The latest strange twist: The government of Ecuador confirmed Tuesday night that it had temporarily blocked internet access for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks who has been living in asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy since 2012.
Ecuador said it cut off Assange because WikiLeaks had released documents “impacting on the U.S. election campaign,” adding “this temporary restriction does not prevent the WikiLeaks organization from carrying out its journalistic activities.”
Those activities include releasing roughly 50,000 of Podesta’s emails between now and election day.
Clinton aides say they those these emails come up Wednesday night, because she wants to make the case that Russian hackers are trying to meddle with the election and that Donald Trump, she says, is egging them on.