On accepting loss, Trump won't say

LAS VEGAS -- Donald Trump declined to say during Wednesday night's debate whether he would accept the results of the presidential election if he lost.

"I will tell you at the time," Trump told the moderator, Fox News' Chris Wallace, after Wallace asked whether Trump would follow the American tradition of accepting the results of presidential elections. "I will keep you in suspense."

Democrat Hillary Clinton interjected.

"Chris, let me respond to that," Clinton said. "That's horrifying."

[INTERACTIVE: Video highlights from presidential, vice presidential debates]

Trump has spent the days leading up to third and final presidential debate warning voters that the election will be "rigged."

His debate comments contradicted pledges by his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, as well as his daughter, Ivanka.

Wednesday's contest quickly shifted from a calm, policy-focused face-off into a bitter and deeply personal confrontation. Trump repeatedly called Clinton a "nasty woman," while the Democrat panned him as "unfit" to be commander in chief.

Clinton, who began the debate with a lead in nearly all battleground states, forcefully accused Trump of favoring Russia's leader over American military and intelligence experts after the Republican nominee pointedly refused to accept the U.S. government's assertion that Moscow has sought to meddle in the U.S. election.

"It's pretty clear, he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States," Clinton said, noting that Russian hackers had been blamed for releasing internal Democratic emails, apparently in an effort to help Trump's cause.

"You're the puppet," Trump responded. "She doesn't like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way."

Both Clinton and Wallace pressed Trump about the email hacking, which U.S. intelligence agencies have blamed on Russia.

Trump denied any relationship with Putin and said he would condemn any foreign interference in the election. But he notably refused to accept the intelligence community's assessment that Russia was involved in the hacking of Democratic organizations. The Clinton campaign also has said the FBI is investigating Russia's involvement in the hacking of a top adviser's emails.

Earlier, Trump had seemed to back off a key piece of his policy platform, giving up on the idea of a mass deportation of illegal aliens.

The promise of mass deportation had been a bedrock part of Trump's campaign during the GOP primaries. But during the debate, Trump offered another plan: He would first round up "the bad ones" among illegal aliens.

"All of the drug lords, all of the bad ones -- we have some bad, bad people in this country, who have to go out," Trump said. "Once the border is secured, at a later date," he said, he would make a decision about what to do with other illegal aliens.

Clinton said Trump's plan to deport all illegal aliens is not in keeping with the nation's ideals and would "rip our country apart."

"I don't want to rip families apart," she said. "I don't want to see a deportation force that Donald has talked about in action."

Clinton also mocked Trump for visiting Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto but not raising another key issue of his campaign: a plan to build a border wall, and to make Mexico pay for it by imposing controls on money remitted by Mexican immigrants.

"Didn't even raise it," Clinton said. "He choked."

Trump said his meeting with Pena Nieto had been pleasant, and he thought he would have good relations with Mexico as president. "Under her plan, you have open borders," Trump said, citing an excerpt from an email from WikiLeaks, the source of which has been identified as hackers affiliated with Russia. "People are going to pour into our country."

Clinton defended her statement, saying she had been referring to open movement of energy and the electrical grid. She then sought to turn the debate to the WikiLeaks releases themselves.

"Will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this, and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage in this election?" she said.

"That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders," Trump replied.

High court, abortion

The candidates clashed repeatedly over their drastically different visions for the nation's future. Trump backed Supreme Court justices who would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, while Clinton vowed to appoint justices who would uphold the decision legalizing abortion, saying, "We have come too far to have that turned back now."

The next president may be faced with one or more vacancies on the high court once in office and partisans on both sides have seen the court as a test for the candidates. The issues that may go before the court in the coming years include the right to an abortion, limits on campaign spending and restrictions on firearms ownership.

"The Supreme Court needs to stand on the side of the American people, not on the side of the powerful corporations and the wealthy," Clinton said early on in the debate. "The Supreme Court should represent all of us."

Trump, in turn, declared the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion would be overturned by his judicial nominees.

"That will happen automatically, in my opinion. Because I am putting pro-life justices on the court," Trump said, in response to a question from moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. Trump said he wanted to leave the decision about whether to legalize abortion to states. He then described the practice sometimes referred to as partial-birth abortion. "You can take the baby and rip the baby out of womb on the ninth month."

Clinton vowed to appoint justices who would uphold the ruling legalizing abortion, and she gave an emotional defense of her stance on allowing termination of pregnancies late-term.

"You can regulate [abortion], if you are doing so with the life and the health of the mother taken into account," she said. She also called abortion "one of the worst possible decisions that any woman or her family has to make."

She cited forced abortions in China and other practices she's seen while secretary of state. She derided the "scare rhetoric" on the topic that Trump used.

Clashing on trade, Trump said Clinton had misrepresented her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, noting that she had originally called it the "gold standard" of trade agreements. Clinton shot back that once the deal was finished, it didn't meet her standards. "I'll be against it when I'm president," she said.

On foreign policy, Clinton reasserted her opposition to sending a large-scale U.S. troop presence to the Middle East to defeat the Islamic State group. She's backed a no-fly zone in Syria, which would mark an expansion of the current U.S. strategy.

In the closing moments of the debate, Clinton addressed her proposal to preserve Social Security and Medicare. Her plan, she noted, would raise taxes on the wealthy, including her and Trump. And then she added of the businessman, who in the 1990s took nearly a $1 billion write-off for business losses: "Assuming he can't figure out how to get out of it."

As she continued talking Trump interjected, "Such a nasty woman." Clinton let the comment roll off her and continued pressing her case.

denials, accusations

The 90-minute contest in Las Vegas came just under three weeks before Election Day and with early voting underway in more than 30 states.

The businessman entered the final debate facing a string of sexual-assault accusations from women who stepped forward after he denied in the previous contest that he had kissed or groped women without their consent.

Those allegations came after the release of a 2005 Access Hollywood video in which Trump bragged about kissing and groping women against their will because of his celebrity status. Many of the women said they were compelled to speak out after hearing Trump during the previous St. Louis debate deny that he had ever forced himself on women.

Trump denied the accusations anew Wednesday night, saying the women stepping forward "either want fame or her campaign did it."

"I didn't even apologize to my wife because I didn't do anything," Trump said.

Clinton said Trump "thinks belittling women makes him bigger. He goes after their dignity, their self-worth." She avoided answering a question about her husband's infidelities.

Trump's campaign invited three women who accused former President Bill Clinton of unwanted sexual contact and even rape to sit in the audience for the second debate. Leslie Millwee a former Arkansas reporter who claimed in an interview this week with Breitbart News that she was sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton three times in the 1980s, was among them.

The former president has never been charged with crimes related to the encounters, though he did settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit.

Trump also invited Malik Obama, the president's half brother and an avowed Trump supporter, and Pat Smith, the mother of an American killed in the 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic buildings in Benghazi, Libya, during Hillary Clinton's term as secretary of state.

Trump has leaned on an increasingly provocative strategy in the campaign's closing weeks, including contending the election will be rigged, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud in U.S. presidential contests.

After the debate, Trump's allies struggled to defend his refusal to say he will honor the results of the election should he lose. Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, at first responded to questions about the comment by saying he "would accept the results because he'll win the election."

"What he's saying is we have to see what happens," she said later.

Conway rejected the outcry over Trump's comment, saying it's "not fair" to suggest Trump is undermining the prospects of a peaceful transfer of power.

Earlier Wednesday, Conway broke with Trump and said she does not believe there is pervasive voter fraud.

"No, I do not believe that," she said. "So absent overwhelming evidence that there is, it would not be for me to say that there is."

Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Lisa Lerer, Catherine Lucey, Josh Lederman, Hope Yen, Julie Bykowicz and staff members of The Associated Press; by Jose A. DelReal, David A. Fahrenthold and John Wagner of The Washington Post; and by John McCormick and Mark Niquette, Alison Vekshin, Terrence Dopp, Jennifer Jacobs, Kevin Cirilli and Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 10/20/2016