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Vice-presidential debate: Trump has 'Mt Rushmore' of dictators, says Kaine – live
Vice-presidential debate live: Trump has 'Mt Rushmore' of dictators, says Kaine
(35 minutes later)
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Kaine says Trump didn't pay taxes on 9/11
Fact check: abortion
Question about Syria. Russian-backed Syrian forces and Russian forces are bombing Syrian civilians. Should the United States get involved.
Pence says Syria is a mess. “We’ve got to begin to lean into this with strong, broad-shouldered American leadership. It begins by rebuilding our military...
Pence calls for the establishment of safe zones in Syria, working with Arab partners and an American response to Russian aggression in Syria:
“The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength.. if Russia chooses to continue to strike... the United States should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime.
Kaine hits Trump for Russian ties:
“Donald Trump again and again has praised Vladimir Putin and it’s clear that he has business connections..” Kaine notes Trump fired former campaign operative Paul Manafort over his Russia ties.
“If you don’t know the difference between dictatorship and leadership, then you’ve got to go back to the fifth-grade civics classes,” Kaine says.
Then he says that the NYT tax story suggests Trump did not pay taxes on 9/11 and that Trump would not rebuild the military.
Pence: “Donald Trump would support our troops.”
Kaine: “He doesn’t pay taxes.”
Pence is kind of seized up on this. He hasn’t stopped Kaine from tying non-payment of taxes to non-support of troops.
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Fact check: mass deportations & Syrian refugees
Alan Yuhas
Alan Yuhas
Kaine: Donald Trump supports the mass deportation of 11 million people
Pence: ‘Donald Trump and I would just never support legislation that would punish a woman for making the heartbreaking decision to terminate a pregnancy’
During a 10 November primary debate, Trump expressed support for Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback, the forcible deportation of hundreds of thousands of migrants, sometimes under inhumane circumstances. He was pressed on this support in an interview with O’Reilly, who himself called the operation “really brutal”.
Kaine is correct that Trump suggested women should be punished for having abortions – he then recanted the idea at the end of a day of flip flopping positions. Unlike Pence, Trump has not been pro-life his whole life. In 1999, he said: “I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it. I hate everything it stands for, I cringe when I listen to people debating the subject, but still I just believe in choice.”
“Well, well, I’ve heard it both ways. I’ve heard good reports, I’ve heard bad reports,” Trump told the Fox News host. “We would do it in a very humane way.”
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But Trump has given mixed messages since his early calls for mass deportation, and he has used the phrase “deportation force”. In August of this year, he appeared to have doubts, until finally promising “no amnesty” and a “humane” removal of migrants.
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Kaine: the nuclear deal with Iran has prevented Tehran from developing weapons
Fact check: the Clinton foundation
The nuclear deal with Iran was finalized in July 2015, three years after the end of Clinton’s term as secretary of state, and it does not completely remove Iran’s nuclear program. It removes a reserve of medium-enriched uranium, cuts into its low-enriched uranium, and allows access to international inspectors.
Alan Yuhas
Kaine also appears to exaggerate how quickly Iran could have developed a bomb. During negotiations, intelligence officials and analysts said they believed Iran was two to three months away from bomb capabilities. The terms of the deal extend that “breakout” ability to a year, and have restrictions extending over 10, 15 and 25 years.
Pence: the Associated Press found that more than half of Clinton’s meetings as secretary of state were with donors to the Clinton Foundation
Pence: the US doesn’t know who Syrian refugees are and should block them
The AP story on Clinton’s meetings did not include her meetings with people in the US government and from foreign governments – who were by a huge margin the people she met with while serving as the top diplomat of the United States.
The government has a fairly clear idea about how many people are in the US without legal authorization. Using data from the Census, Department of Homeland Security, Office of Refugee Resettlement and surveys and analysis from Mexico and Latin American countries, the DHS and nonpartisan Pew Research have each been able to estimate the number, and arrived at similar figures in recent years: around 11.3 to 11.5 million people. The margin of error for these figures is generally around a million people at most – not 20 million as Trump says.
The news agency deleted a tweet about the story – virtually verbatim to what Pence said– for lack of context, and AP’s vice president for standards John Daniszewski wrote a blog post about the decision.
Pew and the DHS both try to account for deaths, under-counted groups, arrivals and departures, and have adjusted their calculations based on decades’ worth of research. Both have found that net migration has stabilized in recent years, and that more undocumented Mexicans are leaving the US than entering it. In other words, recent net migration into the US has hovered near its lowest levels of the last 20 years.
Kaine: blocking Syrian refugees is unconstitutional
On Monday, the seventh circuit court of appeals accused Pence of baseless “nightmare speculation” and compared the governor’s attempt to block refugees to an attempt to exclude black people from his state, Indiana. Pence tried to deny 174 refugees resettlement aid, and the case was taken to court.
“The governor of Indiana believes, though without evidence, that some of these persons were sent to Syria by ISIS to engage in terrorism and now wish to infiltrate the United States in order to commit terrorist acts here. No evidence of this belief has been presented, however; it is nightmare speculation,” Judge Richard Posner wrote in the opinion.
#TBT:
Calls to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. are offensive and unconstitutional.
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They’re still talking about counter-terror. Kaine says alliances are crucial.
@mollyesque I never liked Pence in "Mad Men."
That’s why Donald Trump’s claim that Nato is obsolete is so dangerous.
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Pence wants to talk about cyber-security.
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“We have got to bring together the best experience of this country to understand that cyber warfare is the new warfare... It’s important to remember in this moment that Hillary Clinton had a private server in her home... her private server was subject to being hammered.
That’s it! It’s done. Who won? Did Kaine rattle Pence? How did Quijano do?
An investigation concluded that not one prosecutor would take one additional step, Kaine said.
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Pence says that “if your son or my son conducted themselves the way Clinton did, they’d be imprisoned.”
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“That is not true,” Kaine says. “That is not true.”
Many have been asking what kind of pin Tim Kaine is wearing on his lapel tonight.
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Answer: A Blue Star Pin, worn by the families of those who serve in the military, in honor of his son Nat.
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Earlier this year, the North Carolina GOP derided Kaine as “shameful” for wearing the Blue Star Pin, which they wrongly thought was a Honduras flag pin. (Kaine was a missionary in Honduras in 1980).
Pence: 'you've got to err on the side of safety'
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Two different world views on display:
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Pence: “You’ve got to err on the side of the safety of the American people.”
Last question: How would you bring the country together if elected?
Kaine: “By trashing all Syrians? By trashing all Muslims?”
Kaine: Clinton was first lady, senator and now the nominee. I’m surprised all the time by how well people say they worked with her. He names children’s health care and care for 9/11 survivors. “She has a track record of working across the aisle to make things happen.” He mentions he had two Republican- controlled legislatures while governor.
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Pence: Thank you thank you. “This is a very challenging time in the life of the nation. .. an economy that’s truly struggling... more taxes, regulation, Obamacare, war on coal, trade deals that have put American workers in the backseat. “The best way we can bring American workers together is through change in Washington DC... The American people want to see our people standing tall again... and Donald Trump’s entire career has been about building... finding a way... to fight forward. When Donald Trump because president of the United States, we’re going to have a stronger America.
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Kaine: 'focus on danger, not on discrimination'
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Pence says that the Obama administration created Isis by failing to renegotiate a status of forces deal in Iraq. Pence says that the Iran nuclear deal put Iran on the path to a nuclear weapon.
Kaine: Trump wants to punish women for abortion
Kaine says the opposite is true.
Quijano: describe your faith life.
Quijano asks how Trump’s flagship counter-terror proposal, “extreme vetting” for immigrants, doesn’t address the problem of homegrown terror.
Kaine: This question is easy. Irish Catholic, Jesuit, Catholic missionary, people should worship as they please. As state governor, he says, he struggled with Virginia’s death penalty. He opposed it based on religion. “But I know how to take an oath and uphold the law... it was very very difficult to allow an execution to go forward... that was a real struggle” but people of faith can’t just substitute their own views on everyone.
Great question, Pence says, before totally not answering it. He’s talking about Syrian refugees.
Pence: Wonderful question. “My Christian faith is at the very heart of who I am.” We went to church and had grace. “With my wife at my side, we followed the calling into public service.” I have a great deal of respect for senator Kaine’s sincere faith. But the sanctimony of life... out of the blue... ancient principle... God says... great compassion for the sanctity of life.. non-abortion alternatives.. pro-adoption. “What I can’t understand with Hillary Clinton... to support a practice like partial birth abortion... that a child almost born could still have their life taken from them is just anathema to me...Clinton wants to repeal” ban on tax funds for abortion. Still Pence talking here. “I like to spend a little bit of time on my knees every day.”
Kaine says “you’re violating the constitution by blocking people based on their national origin.”
Kaine: “This is a fundamental question... we really feel that it is not the role of the public servant to mandate that for everybody else... we support Roe v Wade... the constitutional right of American woman to... make their own decision about pregnancy. We trust American women to do that. And we don’t think that women as Donald Trump said should be punished.. “ Pence wants to overturn Roe.. “The very last thing that government should do is to make laws that would punish women.” And that “is the
Kaine:
Pence: “Donald Trump and I” don’t favor punishing women for abortion.
Hillary and I want to focus on danger. These guys say all Mexicans are bad. ... Donald Trump said keep them out if they’re Muslim.
Kaine: Trump said he did.
We should focus on danger, not upon discrimination.
Pence: “He’s not a polished politician.”
Kaine promises that a Clinton administration would not conduct an anti-terror policy based on discrimination.
Kaine: The gospel of Matthew says, “From the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks.” So Trump meant it. And he called Mexicans rapists.
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Pence: “Senator, you bring up that Mexican thing again.”
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Kaine: “Can you defend it?”
We take a break from our regularly scheduled fact-checking and live updates to bring you some wacky hand gestures:
Pence: “There are criminal aliens that come into this country...”
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[talk talk]
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Kaine: Why doesn’t Donald Trump trust women to make that choice for themselves?
Kaine says Trump has 'personal Mt Rushmore' of dictators
Pence: Because a society can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable... I couldn’t be more proud to be standing with a pro-life candidate.”
Next question: Is the terror threat worse now or better? Most Americans feel it’s worse.
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Kaine says it’s not as bad, because bin Laden is dead, but we face major challenges.
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Kaine then unloads on Trump for his wild speechifying on foreign policy:
The candidates are asked about their faith. The Guardian’s Stephanie Kirchgaessner has taken a look at their different Catholic-inspired visions:
“Donald Trump can’t start a Twitter war with Ms Universe without shooting himself in the foot,” Kaine says.
Updated
“He said, I have a secret plan,” then he says he knows more than generals, then he says he’d fire the generals:
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He trash-talks the military... he wants to tear up alliances... third, he loves dictators, he’s got kind of a personal mount Rushmore... Trump believes that the world will be safer if more nations had nuclear weapons.
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Pence is rolling his eyes and rocking. “Oh please,” he says. “Did you work on that one a long time, because it had a lot of creative lines,” Pence says.
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“See if you can defend any of them,” Kaine retorts.
It’s all about the
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Benjamins
Fact check: 'open borders' and 'deplorables'
Putin(s)
CLINTON’S CLOSE TIES TO PUTIN DESERVE SCRUTINY:https://t.co/wPYm5vQoyt #VPDebate
Actually, @mike_pence, your running mate did say that. https://t.co/qtAiHWDqsr #VPDebate pic.twitter.com/youtybAqic
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Kaine says that Trump owes $650m including to the bank of China.
Pence is shaking his head and frowning. Pence seems really offended by Kaine saying all this stuff with a smile.
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Pence says that the Clinton foundation lets the Clintons travel the world but we’d know a lot more about it if Hillary Clinton would release 33,000 emails she released.
Kaine is asked whether he would take action if North Korea launched a nuke that could hit the USA.
“You have to take action,” Kaine says. Seems like a solid answer?
"It's inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country." – Mike Pence
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Fact-check: Trump & taxes
Alan Yuhas
Alan Yuhas
Pence: Clinton and Kaine support “open borders”
Kaine: Trump ‘doesn’t pay taxes’
Neither ticket supports “open borders”, which the US does not have. Pence appears to be using the word to denigrate Barack Obama’s support for immigration reform and protection for some undocumented people from deportation. But Obama has deported a record more than 2.5 million people since he took office, including a record 438,421 people in 2013, and increased Border Patrol staff to a record 21,444 agents in 2011; his policy could not reasonably be described as “amnesty” or “open borders”.
Nobody except Trump and his current accountant seem to know for sure whether Trump pays taxes.
Clinton supports reform to let people pass background checks and pay back taxes in order to stay in the US, and she supports Obama’s executive actions to shield some migrants, such as people who were brought to the US as children. Like Obama, she supports the deportation for people with criminal records.
Last weekend Trump’s 1995 returns were published by the New York Times, which had them mailed by an anonymous source and verified by Trump’s former accountant. The documents showed that Trump reported losing $916m in his businesses that year, meaning that he could avoid paying federal income taxes for the next 18 years.
Kaine: Trump has “called Mexicans rapists and criminals … He attacked an Indiana born federal judge and said he was unqualified. … He said African Americans are living in hell.”
Trump has not denied that he paid no federal taxes for nearly two decades, and instead said that avoiding taxes would show that he was “smart”.
Kaine is right that Trump has broadly characterized immigrants in derogatory terms, but Trump also almost always gives himself a way out. On 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy, Trump said: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Earlier in his career Trump did pay a few taxes. A 1981 report to New Jersey’s casino control commission, which reviewed Trump’s taxes from 1975 to 1979, shows that he paid federal income taxes for three of those five years. He did not pay taxes in two of those five years because he lost more money, $3.8m, than he made.
Trump’s claim is patently false, as we and fellow fact-checkers have repeatedly shown, since most migrants leave their homes for work or family and the Mexican government has nothing to do with their emigration. Statistics on crime by noncitizens mostly suggest that Mexican migrants – more of whom are leaving the US than entering – don’t affect overall crime rates.
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Trump has indeed called judge Gonzalo Curiel unqualified because the American judge is “Mexican”, and said that African Americans are “living in hell”.
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Pence: Clinton called half of our supporters “deplorable”
Kaine says the Clinton foundation is great. It provides Aids drugs and helps Americans with opioid addictions. And Clinton as secretary of state took no action on behalf of the foundation.
At a fundraiser Clinton said: “To just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”. This group, she said, included “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people. She later regretted the generalization of “half”.
“The Trump foundation..[he means Trump organization?] is an octopus-like foundation around the world...whose conflicts of interests could only be known if Donald Trump releases his tax returns... it’s not a nonprofit. It’s putting money into Donald Trump’s pockets and the pockets of his children...
Polling suggests that Trump’s supporters are more likely than other voters to express negative sentiments about minorities. Polls also show lower but significant such sentiment among supporters of Clinton. Her generalization pointed to real racial animus, ignored it among her own supporters and showed how difficult it is to attach a number to racism, even while separate polling shows racism is affecting millions in widespread and systemic ways.
The foundation was just fined for an ... illegal contribution and then they tried to hide it.. and the person they donated to was somebody’s office who was trying to investigate Trump University.
Trump’s complaint contradicts his own past remarks. In 2012, after Mitt Romney was lambasted for dismissing 47% of Americans, Trump agreed, telling Fox News: “You do have a large percentage of people that feel they’re entitled.” Last year he similarly dismissed half of all Americans, telling Fox: “We have a society that sits back and says, ‘We don’t have to do anything.’ Eventually the 50% cannot carry, and it’s unfair to them, but cannot carry the other 50%.”
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Kaine: Trump hasn’t apologized to anyone
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Trump has expressed regret for having said “the wrong thing” but not said what that thing was or whom he had caused “personal pain”.
Fact check: Russia, Putin, Crimea and Ukraine
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Kaine says that Trump would go door-to-door, house-to-house, and deport undocumented migrants with a deportation force.
Pence pretends that when Trump said “deportation force” he was just talking about ICE: “We have a deportation force, it’s called immigration and customs enforcement.”
Quijano pushes Pence: Would these migrants be removed?
Pence says, as he has before, that Trump’s plans acknowledges priorities, the first of which is “criminal aliens,” and then visa overstays... these are elements of previous bipartisan plans for reform.
Kaine: “He’s trying to fuzz up what Donald Trump has said. He said we’re building a wall, he said, quote, “they will all be gone”... “We’re a nation of immigrants. .. when Donald Trump says Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals... said Judge Gonzalo Curiel was unqualified because his parent was Mexican, I can’t imagine how you can defend that.
Pence does not try to defend that. He looks at Quijano, waiting for the next question.
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Pence: Trump insults 'small potatoes' compared with 'basket of deplorables'
Next up is immigration reform. Pence says that “Donald Trump has a plan.”
Yes, we know.
Pence describes the plan as increasing border security, helping border patrol, remove “illegal aliens and people who have overstayed their visas,” then we’ll deal with the others.
He doesn’t mention the wall.
Then Pence pivots: “When I listened to the avalanche of insults coming out of senator Kaine...”
“if Donald Trump had said all those things you said he said in the way he said him, he wouldn’t have insulted a fraction of the people Hillary CLinton did when she said we had a basket of deplorables.
That’s small potatoes compared to Hillary Clinton calling a half of Donald Trump’s supporters a basket of deplorables.
Kaine says that Clinton apologized for that remark. Then Kaine asks whether Trump apologized for a long list of bad things that Trump has said and that Kaine has responsibly memorized.
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Fact check: debt and tax returns
Alan Yuhas
Alan Yuhas
Kaine: ‘The debt explosion on the Trump side is much much bigger than anything on the Clinton side’
Kaine: Trump has praised Vladimir Putin and ‘it’s clear that he has business dealings with Russian oligarchs who are dealing with Putin’
Kaine is correct, according to conservative and nonpartisan thinktanks alike. Clinton’s proposed tax plan would add $191bn to the debt over the long term, according to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a conservative thinktank. The Tax Policy Center, however, estimates that she would add $1.1tn in revenue in a decade, though much of that would be offset by increased spending. The Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s plan would add $5.3tn to the debt.
Trump has repeatedly called Russia’s president a “strong leader” and spoken approvingly of this strength and Putin’s polling numbers. For instance, on 18 December 2015 he told MSNBC: “I’ve always felt fine about Putin. I think that he’s a strong leader.”
Kaine: Even Richard Nixon released his taxes
He added: “He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”
Richard Nixon did not release his tax returns while running for president in 1960 or in 1968 – he released them in 1973, after his second term began. In 1968, Nixon only gave a limited glimpse of his to a magazine writer, and only released the returns under pressure from the Watergate inquiry. He released the returns despite an audit by the IRS, which Trump had repeatedly claimed was his reason for not releasing returns.
Last September, he told Fox News: “In terms of leadership [Putin’s] getting an A.” In a 10 March debate, Trump tried to hedge on semantics. “Strong doesn’t mean good,” he said. “Putin is a strong leader, absolutely. He is a strong leader. Now I don’t say that in a good way or a bad way. I say it as a fact.”
You can look at Nixon’s returns at the Presidential Tax History Project. You can look at Trump’s 1995 returns at the New York Times.
Pence also said, as Kaine points out, that it’s “inarguable” that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama.
(PS: If you somehow have access to Trump’s later returns, feel free to send copies along to our offices at 222 Broadway, New York, NY 10038.)
Kaine also said that Putin “has run his economy into the ground, he persecutes LGBT folks and journalists”.
Kaine: Trump and Pence want to privatize social security
The caliber of Putin’s leadership is debatable in and of itself. Russia’s economy under Putin’s 16 years of leadership has become over-reliant on oil and hamstrung by economic sanctions, themselves prompted by Putin’s aggressive military action in Ukraine. The value of the ruble has collapsed, and the Kremlin started hinting that it would start to reach into its reserves. The economy has shrunk to a smaller GDP than Spain, according to the IMF, and Russia’s newly active military is involved in conflicts in Ukraine and Syria that appear to have no resolution in sight. In Ukraine nearly 10,000 people have been killed, and in Syria nearly 500,000. Putin has passed anti-LGBT laws, clamped down on the press, and been accused of murdering opponents, including journalists.
Neither Clinton nor Trump has proposed privatizing Veterans Affairs, though Trump has suggested he would appoint someone with private-sector experience to lead the agency (something Barack Obama did in 2014). Trump has also proposed giving veterans an ID card that they could use outside the federal VA system. Pence, on the other hand, supported a 2005 plan that would have modified the program into a private system.
Kaine: ‘Donald Trump on the other hand didn’t know that Russia had invaded Crimea’
Kaine notes, correctly, that black people are more likely than white people to be arrested and given long sentences. They are also more likely to be shot by police.
Pence: “He knew that.”
Updated
Here’s what Trump told ABC’s This Week in August: “He’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.”
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Host George Stephanopoulos: “Well, he’s already there, isn’t he?”
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Trump: “OK, well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of Nato and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He takes Crimea.”
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Back in 2014, Trump called the invasion of Ukraine “so smart”.
Kaine is back: “There is a fundamental respect issue here.. Trump has called Mexicans rapists and criminals.. He’s called women slobs, pigs, dogs... attacked a federal judge... said McCain wasn’t a hero because he’s been captured... and he perpetrated this outrageous and bigoted lie that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen.”
Pence: ‘That [diplomatic] reset [overseen by Clinton] resulted in the invasion of Ukraine’
Kaine now flips Pence’s accusation from the top of the debate:
This claim strains credulity. Russia invaded Ukraine in the wake of the country’s 2014 revolution, which ousted a pro-Kremlin president who had reneged on a pledge to join an economic pact with the EU.
I can’t believe that governor Pence would defend the insult-driven campaign that Trump has run.
There is an argument, vaguely, that a lack of American or Nato forces in eastern Europe may have encouraged Russia’s actions, but this is speculative at best. Ukraine is not a member of Nato, the history of Crimea and Russia goes back centuries, and the continued war in eastern Ukraine is being fueled by both the Kremlin and local forces.
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Kaine says it’s important to have a conversation about bias.
On to North Korea. How to stop them from developing a missile capable of reaching the USA?
Pence: “Why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African American police officer of implicit bias.”
Pence: we need to rebuild the American military and marshal American forces to build a coalition to fight the problem. “When Donald Trump is president,” Pence says, “we’re going to go back to the days of peace through strength.”
Quijano jumps in, noting that South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott said on the senate floor that he’s been stopped six times for being black.
“All this talk about tax returns, and I get that you’re going to keep bringing it up...” Pence says.
Pence says he has the deepest respect for senator Scott and “we need criminal justice reform nationally.”
Then he opens an attack on the Clinton foundation, which he says accepted tens of millions from foreign donors in a “pay-to-play” arrangement.
They’re back to agreeing. In fact Pence just referred to “institutional bias in criminal justice.” We just shouldn’t assume the worse about law enforcement, Pence says. “Law enforcement is a force for good.”
“The Clintons found a way to create a foundation where foreign governments could donate millions” and then Clinton took meetings with donors, Pence says.
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Relax, everyone. It’s “no contest!”
Pence: 'this is crazy'
.@mike_pence is doing a great job - so far, no contest!
Quijano for Pence: Why would Putin respect a Donald Trump administration.
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Pence: “Strength, plain and simple.”
02:34
Then Pence refers again to “this whole Putin thing” and says America is stronger than Russia in every way.
Pence says his uncle was a cop and he would marvel at his uncle’s sidearm. Police officers are the “best of us,” Pence says.
Pence says that Putin being stronger than Obama is “stating painful facts.”
Pence says, “at the risk of agreeing with you,” I think community policing is a great idea.
Kaine says that Pence said inarguably that “Vladimir Putin is a better leader than Barack Obama... if you mistake leadership for dictatorship...”
Great, everyone agrees! We’re only a half-hour in and everybody agrees.
Pence sharply denies he said that.
Then Pence stops agreeing with the Democrat. He decries “the bad-mouthing of people, who seize upon tragedy to use as a broad brush to accuse law enforcement of institutional bias.”
Pence: “This is the grade school thing again? This is crazy.”
Pence says Clinton has referred to “implicit bias” in law enforcement. “We ought to stop seizing on these moments of tragedy,” Pence says. “Enough of this seizing on every opportunity to demean law enforcement.”
Kaine: “Donald Trump’s sons say that they have all these business dealings with Russia. And that could be explained with tax returns.”
Kaine says people should not be afraid to bring up the issue of bias in law enforcement.
Kaine has brought up Trump’s taxes about 50 times.
“I’m not afraid,” Pence says.
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Fact check: the FBI on Clinton
Fact check: wages and Trump's business
Alan Yuhas
Alan Yuhas
Pence: ‘He’s created a business that’s worth billions of dollars’
Kaine: ‘A Republican FBI director’ concluded that there was no reasonable prosecutor who would charge Clinton with wrongdoing
There is no direct evidence that Trump’s business is worth billions of dollars – the only tax return publicly available, published by the New York Times last weekend, shows that he reported a $916m loss in 1995. Trump could prove the worth of his business by publishing his returns. Forbes estimates Trump is worth $3.7bn, far lower than his claimed $10bn.
FBI director James Comey was George W Bush’s deputy attorney general, and a registered Republican, but is no longer registered with the party. Comey did say that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case,” against Clinton over her use of a private email server while secretary of state. But Comey also excoriated Clinton for “extremely careless” practices, and found that she had spoken falsely repeatedly about the system.
Kaine: Trump would let states decide whether to be rid of the minimum wage
Kaine is correct insofar as Trump has a position on minimum wages, if he’s talking about the federal minimum wage, specifically.
Trump has changed his position on the minimum wage at least three times, including within the span of a single interview. On 26 July, when Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked him where he would set a federal minimum wage, he repeated a stance from May that the US does not need one: “There doesn’t have to be.”
He then immediately changed his position: “Well, I would leave it, and raise it somewhat.” A day later in Florida he said he wanted a $10 an hour minimum wage, up from the current level of $7.25, and confirmed to a reporter: “federal”. He has most consistently said that states should decide a minimum wage.
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Kaine describes a “debt explosion of the Trump plan.”
Pence: 'I'm just trying to keep up'
Next question: law enforcement. Yesterday Trump said the country has race riots every night. Question is, do we ask too much of police officers?
Kaine says that Pence is not even attempting to defend his running mate’s position.
Kaine says, good question. He was mayor of Richmond when there was a high homicide rate there which he cut in half, he says. He says Virginia was a top-ten safe state when he was governor. He says that the key is community policing. Building bonds between communities and the police force.
I’ll defend them one at a time, Pence says.
“That model still works,” Kaine says. Then he hits Trump for backing stop-and-frisk.
“More nations should get nuclear weapons, try to defend that,” Kaine says.
“That would be a mistake,” Kaine says, because it hurts police-community relations.
Pence denies Trump said that. Good thing the Internet hasn’t been invented yet or he might get away with that prevarication.
Kaine: “I’m a gun owner, I’m a strong second amendment supporter. But I’ve got a lot of scar tissue.” He talks about the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. He says closing loopholes in background checks are needed.
Quijano asks about confronting Russia.
“We can support the second amendment and do things like background record checks to make it safer.”
Kaine says that first off, you don’t praise Putin, and the Republican ticket has.
2.30am BST
Pence denies it.
02:30
Trump “praises Vladimir Putin all the time... had a campaign manager with ties to Putin.. who had to be fired... when Donald Trump is sitting down with Vladimir Putin, is it going to be America’s bottom line, or Donald Trump’s bottom line?’
Evan McMullin, the independent you may or may not know is also running for president, has weighed in from far (far) off-stage:
We’d know if he released his tax returns, revealed his business dealings, Kaine says.
Sorry @timkaine, @HillaryClinton did not "revive the hunt for bin laden." I was there.
Pence scoffs.
Ben Jacobs interviewed Evan McMullin last month about his longshot candidacy.
“I know he thinks this is funny,” Kaine says.
2.29am BST
Pence: “I’m just trying to keep up with this insult driven campaign.”
02:29
Kaine: “I’m just saying what your running mate said.”
Fact check: tax cuts and crisis
Pence can’t quite keep up, can he?
Alan Yuhas
Updated
Kaine claims that the Bush era tax cuts were a direct cause of the financial crisis:
at 3.12am BST
The tax cuts signed by George W Bush lowered taxes on income, capital gains and dividends, and had several provisions to help married people, parents and the poor. They greatly benefited the wealthy, and unsurprisingly became a symbol of the way inequality in the US has yawned into a chasm between the rich and everyone else. But while inequality may be a destabilizing force in the economy, the tax cuts themselves were not one of the factors that drove the 2008 crisis.
3.08am BST
A lack of regulation on Wall Street, on the other hand, ranks among the more important causes of the crisis, whose causes include rampant, feckless mortgage lending, irresponsible bundling of those mortgages, and carelessness by ratings agencies and central bankers.
03:08
Kaine: ‘15 million new jobs’ gained in the Obama administration
Cross·talk (/ˈkrôsˌtôk/)
Kaine is cherry picking statistics, and the 15 million figure is not correct in context.
2
Since Obama took office in January 2009 the US has created 10.8 million private-sector jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Clinton is counting back from the depths of the economic recession, in early 2010, which would erase a full year off of Obama’s presidency.
