Donald Trump was chastised as a “disgrace” and a “sociopath” on Friday when, during a meeting at Trump Tower with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he began to brag about his “very good” relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant for President Putin, declaring he “is allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation.”

On Thursday, Putin issued “what could be construed as a threat to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine,” BBC News reported.

Claiming he has a good relationship with President Zelenskyy, Trump then boasted, “I also have a very good relationship, as you know, with President Putin, and I think, ahh, if we win we’re going to get it resolved very quickly.”

Trump was referring to Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine, which has caused a reported one million casualties and deaths combined.

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Zelenskyy interjected, wryly, “I hope we have more good relations with us.”

Trump appeared to laugh off the remark, declaring, “you know it takes two to tango.”

“The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded in the grinding 2½-year war has reached roughly one million, a staggering toll that two countries struggling with shrinking prewar populations will pay far into the future,” The Wall Street Journal reported last week.

White House correspondent S.V. Dáte, responding to the video (below) wrote that “the the coup-attempting criminal on the right tried to extort the man on the left as part of his scheme to cheat in the 2020 election.”

Alexander Vindman, the (now) retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and former Director for European Affairs for the U.S. National Security Council (NSC), whose congressional testimony on Trump’s alleged extortion of Zelenskyy led to his first impeachment weighed in.

“Only a sociopath would think like this,” he wrote. “Zelenskyy, the President of a nation fighting for survival, having suffered endless tragedies, stands next to @realDonaldTrump and Don says he has very good relations with the dictator, unprovoked aggressor, Putin who inflicted those terrible things on Ukraine.”

Attorney Daniel Miller wrote, “It’s a tragic state of affairs where the life of one of the most heroic people on the planet could depend on one of the most cowardly in just a couple of months. For the sake of our people, for the Ukrainian people, and so many more, we cannot let Trump win this election.”

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U.S. Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO) added, “When Trump was president he embarrassed the U.S. like this regularly. What a mockery and disgrace. Ukraine and our allies shouldn’t be treated like this.”

The Lincoln Project’s Jeff Timmer added, “No matter what any of us may think we know or suspect, the breadth and depth of Trump’s betrayal of the United States will astonish the beejeezers out of us all once it is all finally exposed and the histories written.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Trump: I have a very good relationship with President Putin

Zelenskyy: I hope we have more good relations with us

Trump: Oh, ha ha I see pic.twitter.com/5vgHy0xT0t

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 27, 2024

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The alleged Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance, reportedly obtained by Iranian hackers and sent to several media outlets that refused to publish it, has now been published.

Assuming the document is genuine, it sheds light on JD Vance, Donald Trump, and their campaign, offering important insights—not so much about Vance’s positions or liabilities, but about the thoroughness of the vetting process for a vice-presidential candidate running alongside a 78-year-old Donald Trump, whose health and fitness for office have long been strongly questioned.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein, a reporter formerly at The Intercept, obtained a copy of the dossier and decided to publish it in its entirety on Thursday. He says he decided to publish the dossier because “it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”

“If the document had been hacked by some ‘anonymous’ like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know,” Klippenstein argued.

After he published it, Klippenstein’s Twitter account was “temporarily suspended,” according to The Verge, though the reason for the suspension is not entirely clear. He remains suspended, as of publication time. Around the same time on Thursday, coincidentally, a federal grand jury indicted several Iranian nationals for hacking-related charges involving Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to Politico.

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Several journalists have explained why they would not publish the dossier, and others, like the Columbia Journalism Review, have examined the issue. Judd Legum, founder of Popular information, wrote on Tuesday that “Popular Information will not publish or excerpt the Trump campaign materials…The materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.”

He adds that the documents “may be embarrassing or problematic to members of the Trump campaign. Some of the documents have news value. But the stolen materials do not provide the public with any fundamental new insight about Trump or his campaign. So, on balance, the relevant factors argue against publication.”

Others disagree.

Boing Boing, founded in 1988, reported: “You can finally read the Trump campaign’s dossier on J.D. Vance. Boy does J.D. Vance hate Trump.”

Which begs the question, why did Donald Trump decide to invite him to be his vice-presidential running mate, and why did Senator Vance accept?

“The dossier serves as a massive compilation of all the times Vance has shat on Trump—a truly staggering collection lies therein and it would take a savant to figure out if any of the remarks are previously unreported. He calls Trump a liar, a fraud, a failure, too ambivalent about Nazis. He does not believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. He believes in evolution,” Boing Boing reported. It adds, Vance holds “a near-total contempt for Trump himself that extended to countless insults and accusations of rape, racism and all the rest of it.”

Vanity Fair on Tuesday reported, “The work itself is incomplete; the 271-page rundown on Vance is inexplicably missing Vance’s now infamous ‘childless cat ladies’ comment from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, said one reporter. The file does include Vance’s comments from 2016 in which he called Trump ‘an idiot’ and privately compared him to Hitler.”

The Bulwark on Friday agreed: “what stands out is not what’s in the 271-page file, but what was left out.”

Assuming the document is real and the final version, the Trump campaign’s vetting appears to have been inaccurate, insufficient, and sloppy. It was either unable or uninterested in executing one of the most basic requirements of a campaign: vetting.

In addition to his “childless cat ladies” claim, Vance has been chastised for suggesting America should “punish” people for not having children. His belief that children should be given the “right” to vote – but those rights should go to their parents, so parents have more votes than non-parents, and that politicians should have to have children, have been denounced. Vance’s own Congressman, a Democrat, has said the Senator’s “views and beliefs” do not represent the people or values of his district, and called the campaign he’s running “one of the cruelest, most chaotic, and downright weirdest.”

Overall, Vance has become “one of the least popular vice-presidential picks this century,” according to ABC News, which reports he is “more unpopular than Sarah Palin.”

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In the section titled “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES” is this summary:

“JD Vance’s political journey has been marked by notable shifts and contradictions, making his stance on Donald Trump a subject of intrigue and critique.
“During the 2016 election, Vance openly opposed Trump, announcing his intention to vote third party and expressing doubt about Trump’s effectiveness. His critical views extended to likening Trump to heroin and dismissing the ‘MAGA’ movement as a ‘quick high.’ Described as a ‘never Trumper,’ Vance declared his opposition on public platforms, asserting that Trump was not the ideal candidate for white-working class voters. In 2016, Vance aligned himself with Trump’s accusers, tweeting about allegations of sexual assault and implying a skepticism of Trump’s honesty. He connected racism and xenophobia to Trump’s base of support, emphasizing racial resentment among Trump’s followers.
“Vance’s association with the American Enterprise Institute, an organization critical of Trump, adds another layer to his political affiliations. As a former writer for FrumForum, run by known ‘never Trumper’ David Frum, Vance’s connections to Trump-antagonists become more apparent. Despite initial moderate Republican and Democratic tendencies, Vance shifted his stance, actively supporting Trump’s policies and encouraging votes for him in the 2020 election.
“Vance’s political evolution raises questions about the consistency of his views and the influences shaping his positions.”

Whether the dossier reflects the full scope of Vance’s vetting by the Trump campaign is unknown. Some political analysts, like Dana Houle, suggest that the dossier may have been repurposed for the 2024 campaign.

The dossier is “old,” writes Houle a former Democratic congressional campaign manager and chief of staff, in a lengthy social media thread.

“It wasn’t prepared fresh for Trump in 2024. There are several cites that say the source website was accessed in April or May 2021. Other than a few pages it doesn’t include anything from his Senate campaign. I think this was prepared for some entity making decisions about the 2022 Senate race. Maybe it was originally done by Vance’s campaign or the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or some superPAC deciding on endorsements and where to commit resources for independent expenditure campaigns in fall 2022. It’s really heavy on loyalty to Trump, so maybe it was done by &/or for the RNC, or for the Make America Great Again PAC, to inform Trump’s endorsements.”

“My guess–definitely a guess–is this document was prepared before the 2022 election,” Houle continues, “most likely prior to Vance announcing his candidacy. Then, in February, it was pulled off the shelf and hastily updated with a few important policy areas, in particular litmus test issues like whether he’s suitably pro-Russian RE Ukraine, & whether he’s sufficiently anti-abortion to mollify from Christian Right. But, in general, this is lazy cookie-cutter basic research, but lacking any but a small amount of analysis of his Senate record or his campaign.”

“It’s certainly not the kind of research that would be used by a pre-Trump presidential campaign vetting a running mate.”

“Another possibility,” Houle offers. “When Trump started to look at running mates they were probably asked for information about their finances, legal record, etc., and Vance may have just turned over his 2021 self-oppo research, either updated by him or by the Trump people.”

Attorney, author, and writer Craig Calcaterra remarked the dossier serves “as a 271-page reminder of just how thoroughly Vance has traded in his principles for power. Just page after page documenting how utterly phony that guy is.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris is heading to the nation’s southern border to talk about her immigration policies as her opponent, Donald Trump, continues his attacks on immigrants. The Democratic presidential nominee on Friday will travel to Douglas, Arizona, a must-win battleground state, where she is expected to call for more funding and other resources for border security agents including tools to help battle deadly fentanyl. Harris will also target Donald Trump for killing a massive and historic bipartisan border and immigration bill earlier this year.

Politico reports, “Harris will ‘argue that American sovereignty requires setting rules at the border and enforcing them.'”

“She’ll call for more resources for border patrol agents to do their jobs,” and “propose new detection machines for fentanyl at border entry ports.”

“She’ll ‘reject the false choice between securing the border and creating an immigration system that is safe, orderly, and humane,’ and “decry ‘Trump’s failures as president to address this challenge and his recent efforts to kill bipartisan solutions to it’ — and say that ‘the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games.'”

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Ahead of her trip the Harris campaign released this video of Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blaming Donald Trump for killing the border bill:

Mitch McConnell: We spent months working on a bipartisan bill to secure the border, but Trump didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all. He told us to kill the bill pic.twitter.com/sHBaAa0gY2

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 27, 2024

The Harris campaign also released a new, hard-hitting ad attacking Trump on the border:

New Harris ad on the border:

“Kamala Harris has never backed down from a challenge. She put cartel members and drug traffickers behind bars.”

Features her plan to hire thousands of new border agents and stop fentanyl smuggling

Running in Arizona and other battleground states pic.twitter.com/PvWTcddB3c

— Ian Sams (@IanSams) September 27, 2024

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U.S. Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona who was on Harris’s vice presidential short list, will join her Friday.

Sen. @CaptMarkKelly: I am going down to the border with Vice President Harris on Friday and will talk with her about an issue she cares about. She worked with us to try to pass a bipartisan border security bill, but Donald Trump would not allow my Republican colleagues to pass… pic.twitter.com/uHfeGoJ4nw

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 26, 2024

“With Harris visiting the border today,” The New Republic’s Greg Sargent wrote, “I’m hoping that we see some sort of full-throated condemnation of Trump’s attacks on legal immigrant populations and a broader defense of immigration as an affirmative good for the country. That can coexist w/an emphasis on border security.”

Nationally, Harris leads Trump by 2.8 points, according to FiveThirtyEight‘s current polling average (as of publication time.) In Arizona, Trump is leading Harris by just .8%, according to FiveThirtyEight, But a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll released Friday shows Vice President Harris beating Trump in Arizona by six points, 48% to 42%.

On immigration, Harris has improved over President Joe Biden’s double-digit deficit against Trump. But she still trails him by three to eight points, USA Today reports.

Later on Friday, Vice President Harris is expected to deliver remarks from the border (watch live below when it happens.)

Watch all the videos above or at this link.

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