Circle the wagons

Clinton allies circle the wagons against Trump speech

By Gabriel Debenedetti

Donald Trump’s team spent Tuesday trying to prove that his political operation was professionalizing after it replaced its campaign manager. Reporters were bombarded with rapid response press releases during Hillary Clinton’s afternoon speech, there was news of hires in the early evening, and even news of the (pending) launch of lyingcrookedhillary.com minutes later.

If Clinton’s allies have their way on Wednesday when Trump delivers his long-awaited anti-Hillary speech, that won’t be enough.

A constellation of groups in the presumptive Democratic nominee’s political orbit is prepping a wide-ranging response to Trump’s downtown Manhattan speech — originally slated for New Hampshire last week before getting postponed following the Orlando mass shooting — that will include a series of memos, rapid response releases, and calculated silences designed to paint the Republican as both corrupt and a peddler of conspiracy theories.

Recalling Trump’s relative silence when Clinton attacked him in her first dedicated anti-Trump speech in San Diego earlier this month — they hope it will paint the picture of a prepared campaign squaring off against a floundering one.

While the Clinton camp itself is not planning to any specific push against Trump’s morning address at the Trump SoHo — it prefers to maintain a posture of not responding to each of Trump’s frequent Clinton barbs -- people close to the anti-Trump operation are hoping that her own economic policy speech here in North Carolina will provide enough of a contrast to send a message to voters.

The Clinton Foundation, however, is poised to respond to what it deems false allegations about its operations  — likely about its foreign fundraising practices — on social media, and also to distribute positive stories and first-hand accounts of its work, foundation officials told POLITICO. The group has gone out of its way to circulate its last annual report, for example, which is full of such narratives.

Rapid response group Correct The Record will take the lead on the political side while Priorities USA Action, the big-money pro-Clinton super PAC that’s swamping swing states with anti-Trump television ads, is not expected to launch any specific response.

“Donald Trump’s campaign is melting down,” writes Correct the Record founder David Brock in a three-and-a-half page memo seen by POLITICO that the group is set to distribute widely on Wednesday morning.

“Even the campaign’s attempt to ‘pivot’ on June 9th was an unmitigated disaster. As his family painfully watched at his side, Trump used a teleprompter to give the worst speech of his campaign,” Brock continues, detailing recent reports of political issues with the Trump’s campaign, from his lack of cash to tepid Republican support, and pegging the beginning of the decline to the presumptive GOP nominee’s mid-May revelation that he had hoped for a housing market crash in 2006 so he could profit.

Clinton forces are anticipating a glut of attacks from Trump, ranging from allusions to Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual indiscretions to lines about the attack in Benghazi in September 2012. Hillary Clinton’s private email arrangement at the State Department is also expected to be in Trump’s crosshairs.

Two other groups with ties to Brock — Democratic opposition research firm American Bridge and liberal media watchdog Media Matters For America — will also get in on the action, he said. Bridge is set to run out a memo of its own detailing Trump’s suspect foreign ties from Azerbaijan to Mexico, and the group will blast out rapid response press releases during the speech. Media Matters, meanwhile, will note instances when Trump’s attacks appear to come from books like “Clinton Cash” or “Crisis of Character” that have received considerable pushback and fact-checking queries.

Brock’s Correct The Record missive, which will be joined by the group’s real-time fact-checking during Trump's speech, is itself an extensive prebuttal.

“Here is what we know about this morning: Trump will be depending on widely-discredited sources like right-wing books Clinton Cash, which was panned by many for a lack of evidence and many errors, and Crisis of Character, which has been denounced by Secret Service veterans because the author was too low-ranking to have seen any of what he claims. Trump will also lie about Hillary Clinton today as he has lied about her before. There have been at least a dozen fact checks calling out Trump for lying about Clinton — on the issues, on the polls and on Benghazi. You name it; he’s lied about it,” Brock writes, calling the real estate developer a “practiced conspiracy theorist."

The memo ends with a detailed list of Trump’s business ties, connecting him to entities ranging from former Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Qaddafi to Russian President Vladimir Putin to the mafia.

“Throughout his career, Trump has both sought to curry favor with sworn enemies of the United States and surrounded himself with convicted criminals,” Brock says.