Trump again lashes at ex-beauty queen

Tweets ‘unhinged,’ Clinton declares

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stops at the grave of President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, during a visit Friday to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., as he campaigned in the state.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump stops at the grave of President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, during a visit Friday to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., as he campaigned in the state.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Donald Trump again ridiculed a former beauty queen Friday for her "disgusting" sexual past and then encouraged Americans to watch a "sex tape" that he said would support his case.

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AP

Hillary Clinton speaks to supporters during a campaign stop Friday in Coral Springs, Fla.

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AP

Donald Trump tosses a hat to supporters after a campaign rally Friday in Novi, Mich.

"Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?" Trump posted on Twitter in the wee hours of Friday morning. That was a reference to 1996 Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, a Venezuela-born woman whose weight gain Trump has said created terrible problems for the pageant he formerly owned.

Trump's campaign accused the media and Hillary Clinton of colluding to set Trump up for fresh condemnation, to which Clinton retorted, "His latest Twitter meltdown is unhinged, even for him."

Machado took to Facebook to say that the Republican presidential nominee's tweets were part of a pattern of "demoralizing women." She called them "cheap lies with bad intentions."

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Planned Parenthood said the tweets showed that Trump's "misogyny knows no bounds." And Democratic presidential nominee Clinton said they showed anew why someone with Trump's temperament "should not be anywhere near the nuclear codes."

What kind of a man, Clinton asked, "stays up all night to smear a woman with lies and conspiracy theories?"

Trump asked voters not to believe news stories about his campaign that cite anonymous sources. "There are no sources, they are just made up lies!" he tweeted.

But some of Trump's allies seemed at a loss for words over the candidate's actions.

"He's being Trump. I don't have any comment beyond that," said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a top supporter. Generally chatty and occasionally critical of Trump, Gingrich said that Trump sometimes does "strange things," but that Clinton lies. "I'll let you decide which is worse for America."

But Trump's inner circle followed his lead and refused to concede any missteps. Trump didn't mention the tweets Friday evening as he rallied supporters in Michigan. Instead, he returned to Twitter to invoke Clinton's ad from her 2008 campaign that portrays her as the best candidate to pick up an urgent call at the White House at 3 a.m.

"For those few people knocking me for tweeting at three o'clock in the morning, at least you know I will be there, awake, to answer the call!" Trump wrote.

The Machado matter

Machado has been thrust into the campaign since Clinton noted Monday in the season's first presidential debate that Trump had mocked Machado publicly for gaining weight after she won the Miss Universe pageant. On Tuesday, Trump said Machado's "massive" weight gain had been "a real problem."

Clinton's team circulated videos featuring Machado accusing Trump of destroying her self-confidence, and arranged for reporters to interview her just as early voting opened in a handful of states. Clinton's spokesman said she called Machado on Friday to thank her for her courage.

Trump spokesman Jessica Ditto said, "This is the single biggest coordinated media attack in history."

Trump's tweet about a "sex tape" referred to footage from the Spanish-language reality show La Granja -- The Farm -- in 2005 in which Machado was a contestant and appeared on camera in bed with a male contestant. The images are grainy and do not include nudity, though Machado later acknowledged in the Hispanic media that she was having sex in the video.

Clinton's campaign has highlighted Machado's status as a new U.S. citizen and her plans to cast her first vote as an American for the former secretary of state. But spokesman Jennifer Palmieri said Clinton did not help Machado become a U.S. citizen.

To discredit Machado, Trump's allies also have pointed to news reports of an incident in 1998 in Venezuela, in which Machado was suspected of having driven a getaway car for her then-boyfriend after he shot someone. She later reportedly threatened the judge in the case. No charges were ever filed against her, and earlier this week she called those reports "speculation."

Taking to Instagram on Friday, Machado wrote in Spanish: "The Republican candidate and his campaign team are again generating attacks, insults and trying to revive defamations and false accusations about my life. All of this with the purpose of intimidating me, humiliating me, and unbalancing me once again. The attacks that have surfaced are smears and cheap lies generated with bad intentions that don't have foundation and that have been spread by sensationalist media."

On her way to Coral Springs, Fla., on Friday, Clinton called Machado and thanked her for the "courage" she's shown, campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said. The call reportedly lasted about five minutes.

'We'll see what happens'

The social-media salvos are part of an ongoing struggle for Trump and his aides on how to coordinate a cohesive strategy against Clinton. While some pushed for an attack highlighting former President Bill Clinton's infidelities, others said Trump should focus his criticism on the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server to handle government business while she was in the State Department.

Trump expressed an openness to launching the personal attacks, telling NH1 News "we'll see what happens" at the next debate Oct. 9.

In regard to Monday's debate, Trump has complained about moderator Lester Holt of NBC, whom Trump has accused of favoring Clinton. He has also suggested that Google conspired to hide bad reviews of Clinton and that his microphone on the podium Monday was purposely defective.

"I had to put up with the anchor and fight the anchor all the time on everything I said," Trump said at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Thursday. "What a rigged deal."

The debate commission put out a one-sentence statement Friday saying that, "There were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall."

It made no mention of the audio for the television broadcast, which was seen by about 84 million people, and the statement gave no other details.

The next debate will be a town-hall-style format in which audience members ask questions of the candidates.

Among the other candidates jockeying for a spot on the stage that evening is Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, who has so far lacked the poll numbers needed to qualify him for the debates. But Johnson in recent days has gained the attention of a handful of editorial boards across the nation.

He picked up another newspaper's endorsement Friday, with the Chicago Tribune's editorial board throwing its support behind him.

"Libertarians Gary Johnson of New Mexico and running mate William Weld of Massachusetts are agile, practical and, unlike the major-party candidates, experienced at managing governments. They offer an agenda that appeals not only to the Tribune's principles but to those of the many Americans who say they are socially tolerant but fiscally responsible," the Tribune wrote in an editorial.

Except for endorsing Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012, the Tribune has endorsed only Republican presidential candidates for the past 169 years. Friday's endorsement is the latest in a string of conservative and nonpartisan editorial boards not endorsing Trump.

In the editorial, the Tribune said it cannot endorse Trump and will not endorse Clinton.

"We reject the cliche that a citizen who chooses a principled third-party candidate is squandering his or her vote," the editorial states.

"Trump has ... neither the character nor the prudent disposition for the job," the editorial states. The editorial board calls Clinton "undeniably capable," but says it is concerned about her plans to expand federal programs, and questions her honesty and trust.

Hacker activity

Meanwhile, a Homeland Security Department official said Friday that hackers have targeted the voter registration systems of more than 20 states in recent months.

The official who described detecting the hacker activity was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject and spoke on condition of anonymity. It was unclear, the official said, whether the hackers were foreign or domestic, or what their motives might be. ABC News earlier reported that more than 20 states were targeted.

The FBI last month warned state officials of the need to improve their election security after hackers targeted systems in Illinois and Arizona. FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers this week that the agency is looking "very, very hard" at Russian hackers who may try to disrupt the U.S. election.

The FBI has detected a variety of "scanning activities" that are early indications of hacking, Comey told the House Judiciary Committee this week.

The FBI held a conference call Friday with the state- and municipal-level officials who run elections in the battleground state of Florida. Meredith Beatrice, a spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, called it an "informational call related to elections security," but a person on the call who was not authorized to discuss it and requested anonymity said authorities had seen evidence of someone probing a local elections website.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson spoke to state election officials by phone last month, encouraging them to implement existing technical recommendations to secure their election systems and ensure that electronic voting machines are not connected to the Internet.

Two of the attempted hacks involved efforts to mine data from the Arizona and Illinois voter registration systems, said Kay Stimson, a spokesman for the National Association of Secretaries of State. She said that in Arizona a hacker tried to probe voter registration data, but never infiltrated the system; in Illinois, hackers got into the system, but didn't manipulate any data.

These systems have "nothing to do with vote casting or counting," Stimson said in an email. "While it is theoretically possible to disrupt an election by infiltrating a voter registration system, their compromise would not affect election results," and there are system controls in place to catch any fraud.

Information for this article was contributed by Josh Lederman, Steve Peoples, Jill Colvin, Catherine Lucey, Sigal Ratner-Arias, Tami Abdollah, Gary Fineout, Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press; by Jose A. DelReal of The Washington Post; by Jennifer Jacobs, Kevin Cirilli, Sahil Kapur, Ben Brody, Elizabeth Titus, Margaret Talev and Christine Jenkins of Bloomberg News; and by Sarah D. Wire of Tribune News Service.

A Section on 10/01/2016

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