Donald Trump offered access to RNC voter database
The Republican National Committee has compiled information on roughly 250 million Americans (names, voting record, and other data), and it's offering that database to each of the Republican Party's 17 declared presidential candidates - including, it seems, to Donald Trump.
According to Yahoo Politics, the RNC reached out shortly after Trump's June 16 kickoff speech to offer his campaign access to its data. Trump's camp responded this week, an RNC official told Yahoo. His attorneys are currently reviewing the agreement, and the RNC believes Trump will ultimately sign on.
Thus far, 11 of the 17 GOP contenders have decided to accept the RNC's offer. Trump's campaign declined to comment for this story.
The data could be particularly useful to Trump, whose unlikely campaign has caught fire among parts of the conservative base and attracted an avalanche of media coverage, but has lagged in putting together the robust infrastructure and organization that many of his rivals enjoy.
That lag was underscored Thursday when Trump's campaign announced the selection of veteran GOP operative Michael Glassner as its political director - a job that most of the other campaigns had long since filled.
Moreover, Trump was recently denied access to a similar database compiled by the political operation of Charles and David Koch, two billionaire industrialists who have used their fortune to fund a network of conservative advocacy groups.
The RNC has emphasized that it will offer its data to any major Republican candidate. Party officials have been critical of the notion that an outside organization - like, say, the Koch empire - could determine which GOP candidates deserve the kind of institutional help such data would provide.
"It's very dangerous and wrong to allow a group of very strong, well-financed individuals who have no accountability to anyone to have control over who gets access to the data when, why and how," RNC chief of staff Katie Walsh told Yahoo last month.
Trump is currently taking a break from the campaign trail to attend a golf tournament at one of his courses in Scotland. He'll be back in the U.S. by next week, however, as he prepares to debate the other GOP candidates in Thursday night's Fox News primary debate - the first of the 2016 cycle.
Trump, who's been routinely lobbing bombs at the rest of the GOP field since he jumped into the race, promised to keep his bombast in check on the debate stage: