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PITTSBURGH — Hillary Clinton did on Saturday night what she hasn’t since the start of the general election: She went after a Republican not named Donald Trump.

Onstage at a gym rally in Pittsburgh’s Taylor Allderdice High School with her running-mate Tim Kaine, Clinton took aim at Sen. Pat Toomey, who is locked in a tight race with Democrat Katie McGinty.

It was the first time Clinton, who has been courting support from Republicans in the race against Donald Trump, has devoted a major part of her stump speech to a down-ballot GOP candidate.

“Look at Katie’s opponent,” Clinton told a crowd of 1,800. “He still refuses to stand up to Donald Trump. Now, a lot of Republicans have. They have had the grit and the guts to stand up and say, ‘He does not represent me.’”

Toomey has refused to endorse both Clinton and Trump, but has only said he won’t vote for the Democrat. “I am not endorsing him and I remain unpersuaded,” he recently told reporters.

“Pat Toomey heard Donald attack a grieving Gold Star family, heard Donald call Mexican immigrants rapists, he heard him say terrible things about women, heard him spread the lie that our first black president wasn’t really born in America,” Clinton went on. “Now how much more does Pat Toomey need to hear? If he doesn’t have the courage to stand up to Donald Trump after all this, can you be sure he’ll stand up for you when it counts?”

The line of attack was one Democrats, led most recently by President Obama, have adopted up and down the ticket against Republicans who have yet to disavow Trump, particularly in some of this year’s most closely watched Senate races.

Clinton, however, has been late to embrace the rhetoric, after crafting a general election message that aimed to distance Trump from his own party, casting him as something distinct from rank-and-file Republicans.

Earlier this month, even as her aides signaled she would start to hold Republicans “accountable” for their nominee, Clinton shied from the message on the stump. Despite the campaign’s preview, for instance, the candidate never mentioned the name of Rep. Joe Heck, the Republican running to succeed Sen. Harry Reid.

On Saturday, however, Clinton herself affirmed the new strategy aboard her campaign plane, taking questions with Tim Kaine before taking off for a rally in Philadelphia. “As we’re traveling in these last 17 days, we’re gonna be emphasizing the importance of electing Democrats down the ballot,” she said, “and in particular, as I said today, we are strongly supportive of Katie McGinty.”

Her focus on the McGinty-Toomey race in part reflects the campaign’s solid standing here in Pennsylvania against Trump, allowing Clinton to shift her attention to Democrats’ efforts to secure a majority in the Senate. It’s not clear whether Clinton will go after Republicans in states where her chances are more uncertain, such as Ohio and North Carolina, which are both states whose college-educated white voters may provide her with the margin of victory. (At a rally in Cleveland on Friday, Clinton appeared alongside Democratic challenger Ted Strickland, but did not weigh in on the race or mention his opponent, Republican Sen. Rob Portman.)

Clinton suggested she was less concerned with Trump in the final weeks of the campaign, however, telling reporters, "I debated him for four and a half hours. I don’t even think about responding to him anymore. I’m gonna let the American people decide between what he offers and what we offer."

Priorities USA, the main super PAC backing Clinton, has adopted a similar approach as the Clinton campaign in two states where the campaign has a more comfortable lead, New Hampshire and here in Pennsylvania.

The super PAC is currently airing ads against Toomey over comments Trump made about abortion earlier this year, and against Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte on the subject of whether Trump is a role model for children.

Clinton has shown a heightened interest in recent weeks in shifting power in the Senate. Here on Saturday, appearing with Kaine for the first time since their post-convention swing this summer through Pennsylvania and Ohio, Clinton assailed Republicans in the Senate who are, she said, “beholden to the special interests.”

“If they’re gonna continue to do the work of those that are already privileged in America, then I want to make sure that they don’t come back to Washington after the next election.”

LINK: How A Decision In May Changed The General Election

Clinton campaigning on Saturday.

Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Images

If Hillary Clinton pulls off a victory in Arizona next month, Democrats believe it will be due in part to one of the red state’s key voting blocs: Native Americans.

The campaign has worked for months to win support in Navajo Nation, the Native American territory with the largest population of not just any in the state, but the country. On Friday, Clinton secured the endorsement of the territory’s president, Russell Begaye, in what has been an aggressive effort to engage the 100,000 Navajo Nation members who live in Arizona and could sway the vote against Donald Trump.

“Tribal communities have swung a lot of elections in Arizona,” said Charlie Galbraith, a member of Navajo Nation and a political adviser to both the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. “In an election that will be razor thin, getting out the vote in Navajo Nation could turn the state blue.”

Approximately 25% of Arizona is native land, with a total of 22 tribes making up about 10% of the state’s population, Navajo Nation being the largest and most politically active. Of the 160 organizers now in Arizona for the DNC and the campaign, a Clinton official said, 25 are dedicated to tribal communities.

Galbraith helped facilitate the Begaye endorsement. “We’d been working on this one for a long time,” he said, adding that only rarely does Navajo Nation’s president weigh in on an election. (The endorsement is from Begaye himself, not the nation as a whole, which would require a vote of the tribal council, according to Galbraith.)

Over the weekend, Navajo Nation Vice President Joanthan Nez also endorsed Clinton during a Democratic Party bus tour through the region in Arizona and New Mexico, part of a DNC-led series of get-out-the-vote trips through the country, making stops at field offices, churches, universities, and community centers.

Native American support could make the difference in a state like Arizona. The campaign has studied races like Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick’s in 2012, where on reservations she won by a margin of 28,000 votes, a Clinton official said.

Members of the Clinton team said they had yet to observe much outreach on the part of the Trump campaign to Native American communities in Arizona or elsewhere.

“As far as I know, they’ve made no effort to engage Indian country,” said Galbraith.

Begaye, the Navajo Nation president, endorsed Bernie Sanders over Clinton in the Democratic primary. While the Vermont senator struggled with black and Latino voters, he found fierce support in Begaye and other leaders. (He was a guest in the “Tribal Suite” at the Democratic National Convention this summer, visiting with tribal leaders from Arizona, New Mexico, and California.)

Clinton aides said they see Sanders as a key validator with members of Navajo Nation. His visit last week to Arizona was geared toward Native American voters in Flagstaff, an official said. (Sanders devoted a sizeable share of his time to the Arizona primary this spring, though he lost by nearly 18 points.)

Bernie Sanders holds a town hall event at the Navajo Nation casino in Flagstaff, Arizona in March.

Nancy Wiechec / Reuters

Michelle Obama, the campaign’s “not-so-secret weapon” and “rockstar” surrogate, as spokesman Brian Fallon referred to her on Sunday, also made a recent showing in Arizona, drawing a crowd of about 7,000 to the convention center in Phoenix. Should Clinton win there, the state’s Latino voters will likely be a key determinant, but Clinton staffers are looking for every available voter.

The campaign, meanwhile, has tailored get-out-the-vote events to the state’s 22 tibes, working to highlight Clinton’s plan for Indian country, which focuses on improving health care and stemming drug and alcohol addiction rates on reservations.

Trump has drawn unfavorable headlines this year for speaking in offensive terms about Native Americans, including for repeatedly calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and for comments he made in the ’90s about Indian casinos.

Clinton strategists still don’t see Arizona, which has been considered a toss-up state, as a sure bet. Recent polling puts Clinton and Trump within one or two points of one another. But aides have also floated a possible visit by the candidate to the state before the end of the election, and are scrambling now to build a real operation there now that a victory might be within reach.

“The reality of the situation,” Fallon said, “is we have so many different paths to victory that you will see us spread our time and resources over a series of states.”

As soon as Friday, the justices of the Supreme Court could decide if they will hear the appeal in a critical case about whether Gavin Grimm, a transgender male student, can be barred in his Virginia school district from using the boys restroom.

The justices first considered whether to take the case on Oct. 14, but took no action, leaving LGBT advocates — and Grimm — in waiting.

The case in question concerns Gloucester County School Board, an Education Department policy, and the widely covered issue of transgender people and bathrooms. But the underlying question of whether existing law — specifically, sex-discrimination bans — protects against gender identity-based discrimination has been moving forward in the courts and administrative agencies for years now.

As the election season clock ticks down to election day, the legal fight over transgender protections is reaching a crescendo. During the Obama administration, officials have undertaken a revolutionary application of those existing laws to affirm the rights of transgender individuals, spurring a rapid shift within the federal government as the culture, too, changes. Meanwhile, as the petition pends before the Supreme Court, there were three federal district court actions on transgender rights this past week alone — one of which led the Justice Department on Thursday afternoon to announce that it will be taking the matter to a federal appeals court.

What is going on?

It is a “legal correction,” Chai Feldblum says of the move to recognize protections for transgender people under sex discrimination laws.

Feldblum is the first out lesbian commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), nominated to the five-member board in President Barack Obama’s first year in office. She has advanced the effort to protect transgender people — as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual people — from discrimination under existing civil rights laws.

The story of how Grimm’s case reached the justices is, in many ways, the story of Feldblum’s work over the past five years — and of the fight taken up by a woman named Mia Macy.

In October 2011, Alex Pacheco was fighting a discrimination case against Freedom Buick GMC Truck in Texas. Pacheco — a transgender woman — claimed that she had been fired from her job after she asked to begin presenting at work as a woman.

The truck dealership argued that Pacheco couldn’t claim that the company had violated the law — even if it had discriminated against her. The dealership argued that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 simply doesn’t protect transgender people from discrimination.

Pacheco, however, received some unexpected support in her case: The EEOC weighed in on her behalf.

Chai Feldblum

courtesy of EEOC

Five years ago this week, the federal commission submitted in a court filing for the first time that “disparate treatment of an employee because he or she is transgender is discrimination ‘because of … sex’ under Title VII.” The short filing in a federal court in Western Texas went mostly unremarked upon at the time — and, ultimately, was never accepted for filing because the court took the action the EEOC was seeking without even needing to consider the commission’s brief. The dealership later settled the case with Pacheco, ending the legal fight before it went any further.

It was, however, the beginning of a tectonic shift at the independent agency that has propelled civil rights law for LGBT people since.

A month later, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta issued a significant opinion in a case brought by Vandy Beth Glenn, a transgender woman who was fired from her editor’s job with an office of the Georgia General Assembly, she alleged, because she was transgender.

“An individual cannot be punished because of his or her perceived gender-nonconformity. Because these protections are afforded to everyone, they cannot be denied to a transgender individual,” Judge Rosemary Barkett wrote for the court. “The nature of the discrimination is the same; it may differ in degree but not in kind, and discrimination on this basis is a form of sex-based discrimination that is subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause.”

While echoing some other appeals courts in recent years, these moves approached but did not reach the result Feldblum — a former Georgetown law professor — was seeking: full coverage of all anti-transgender discrimination under existing law.

Instead, the brief and the decision explained how a 1989 Supreme Court case about sex stereotyping — Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins — meant that anti-transgender discrimination was covered under Title VII when the plaintiff could show that the discrimination resulted from a type of sex stereotyping.

“It really just used where the courts had gone up to that point,” Feldblum said of the Pacheco brief. “It was not a statement of per se coverage” — she said of the complete coverage she saw appropriate for all gender identity-based discrimination under current sex discrimination bans. “[T]he commission,” she said, “was well-situated to deliver [that statement].”

Soon enough, the EEOC was given the chance to do just that. The opportunity arose when a transgender woman claiming she was discriminated against in her attempt to work for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was told she could not bring a claim under Title VII, because she is transgender. The woman was Mia Macy, and she asked the EEOC to review the denial.

“I didn’t know the legal wording that would be later used, but I knew it was wrong,” Macy told BuzzFeed News of the experience of having her job offer rescinded once an ATF lab learned of her transition.

“I had spent my life as a cop, defending the law, early on in the military … always doing everything that you’re supposed to do, and then, here’s a person who tells me, ‘I think you were discriminated against, but what you were discriminated against isn’t covered,’” she said of the initial rejection of her case by the agency.

It was hard for her to find a lawyer to take on the case, she said, with many of the leading LGBT legal groups turning her down. She eventually found the Transgender Law Center — a relatively small organization — willing to take her case.

The EEOC agreed to review the agency’s rejection of her complaint, and its new approach to these cases exploded into public view in April 2012 — when the commission ruled in favor of Macy. The bipartisan commission unanimously decided that Macy should be permitted to make a case that she was discriminated against in hiring by the ATF because she was transgender.

“[T]he Commission hereby clarifies that claims of discrimination based on transgender status, also referred to as claims of discrimination based on gender identity, are cognizable under Title VII’s sex discrimination prohibition,” the decision stated — a reversal of the agency’s prior policy.

“The legal overreach happened when the EEOC and the courts … carved out, essentially, an LGBT exception to sex discrimination law.”

The decision meant that all federal employees could bring workplace discrimination claims using this interpretation. It also meant that the EEOC would use that understanding of the law in its field offices, which are responsible for investigating all private workplace discrimination complaints. Now transgender people could bring discrimination complaints because of alleged anti-transgender discrimination. It was, as reported at the time, a transgender breakthrough.

“The federal sector opinions,” Feldblum explained of cases like Macy’s that result from federal employees’ discrimination complaints, “became the vehicle for analyzing that issue in-depth and writing what I certainly hoped was a persuasive opinion explaining why the gender stereotyping theory translated into per se coverage for gender identity discrimination in every case — without having to bring up specific examples of the employer believing the person violated some gender stereotype.”

The EEOC’s moves, along with support from a handful of court rulings, would press the Obama administration itself forward on transgender issues — or, in some cases, provide further backing for moves that agencies seemed interested in making on LGBT rights.

“I don’t think that I anticipated … what other agencies would do and how quickly they would do it,” Feldblum said of the effect of the Macy ruling. “I certainly was aware of the potential breadth of the protection because of the hundreds of laws that prohibit discrimination based on sex that are implemented by lots of federal agencies.”

The Department of Health and Human Services adopted the Macy ruling, she said, “even way before they issued their regulations” implementing the Affordable Care Act.

The next summer, the Department of Education and Justice Department reached a settlement with the Arcadia Unified School District in California in a complaint brought by a transgender student. Although the settlement made clear the decision could not be considered a departmental policy, it laid out a view of the law that echoed — and cited — the Macy decision. Over the next years, Education began a series of steps that moved toward a policy of enforcing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to protect transgender students from discrimination.

Education wasn’t alone. The Justice Department, in addition to signing off on the Arcadia settlement, also — as the department responsible for ATF — made a final decision in favor of Macy in her complaint, concluding that “the ATF discriminated against [Macy] based on her transgender status, and thus her sex,” and finding that discrimination violated Title VII.

By 2014, several agencies — including the Office of Personnel Management and the Department of Housing and Urban Development — had adopted the Macy definition of sex discrimination as including anti-transgender discrimination.

The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) was one of the later agencies to adopt the Macy reasoning — in connection with its enforcement of the executive order that bans federal contractors from discriminating. The adoption of Macy mattered because, although advocates had been pressing Obama to sign an executive order providing specific LGBT protections for the millions of employees of federal contractors, senior White House officials had informed the advocates weeks before the Macy decision that the the order was not happening at that time.

Advocates thought that a longstanding agreement between the EEOC and the OFCCP to coordinate the enforcement efforts of Title VII and the executive order meant the OFCCP would quickly apply Macy. Nonetheless, it took more than two years before the agency did so. Even then, the decision came a day after Obama announced that he would be issuing the executive order specifically barring sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination by federal contractors.

"I would not be concerned at all if they take the case. I think this needs to go to the Supreme Court."

In the time since, both the Justice and Education departments expanded their application of the Macy reasoning even further to include their enforcement of civil rights laws — an incredibly significant shift that has led to many of the current court fights over transgender rights.

The Justice Department announced in December 2014 that it would support transgender discrimination claims in affirmative litigation it is authorized to bring under Title VII, and did so in a case a few months later, brought against Southeastern Oklahoma State University.

Of the effect the ruling has had, Feldblum was direct: “I really felt that the legal analysis would stand on its own, and I think history has borne that out.”

To those who have criticize her effort as “legal overreach,” Feldblum got exercised.

“Well, actually, we were engaged in legal correction when we issued Macy,” she said. “The legal overreach happened when the EEOC and the courts first considered charges from transgender people and gay people and carved out, essentially, an LGBT exception to sex discrimination law. That was legal overreach.”

Her work on these issues, as Feldblum sees it, is getting rid of discrimination written into sex discrimination law when rampant government-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people made it so that the “agency and the courts could not apply the words as written.”

The EEOC itself later did more of that work, following up on the Macy decision with a further ruling that specifically found that discrimination in restroom and locker room usage, among other workplace realities, was prohibited under Title VII.

In that complaint, brought by Tamara Lusardi — a transgender woman working for an Army research center in Huntsville, Alabama — the commission found that Lusardi was “subjected to disparate treatment on the basis of sex when she was denied equal access to the common female restroom facilities.”

Notably, the commission added that “co-worker confusion or anxiety” can’t be the justification for discrimination in the workplace.

On May 13, the Education Department issued guidance to local school districts nationwide that schools should apply Title IX regulations in a way that would protect against anti-transgender discrimination.

“When a school provides sex-segregated activities and facilities, transgender students must be allowed to participate in such activities and access such facilities consistent with their gender identity,” the guidance read.

Mia Macy

courtesy of Mia Macy

In response, however, Texas and about 20 other states have attempted to stop enforcement of the guidance — bringing lawsuits that are ongoing against the Obama administration.

In September, the federal judge hearing the Texas-led case agreed with the states, issuing a sweeping, nationwide injunction, halting enforcement of the Education Department’s guidance and, potentially, many of the other administration pro-transgender policies. After further briefing, US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor reiterated the nationwide scope of his injunction earlier this week.

On Thursday, the Justice Department notified the court that it would be appealing the injunction — setting up a high-profile fight over the policies in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.

By time the Education guidance was issued and the Texas case was filed, however, another situation had turned the issue into a national firestorm: North Carolina’s March passage of HB2 — a law that includes a provision barring many transgender people from using public and other governmental restrooms that match their gender identity.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal sued the state and University of North Carolina. The state’s governor, Pat McCrory, sued the Department of Justice. Then, on May 9, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch held a news conference to announce that the Justice Department would be suing the state of North Carolina over the anti-transgender provision.

“We see you,” Lynch said directly to transgender people, “we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward.”

For Mia Macy, years removed from the decision in her case, that was the moment that got to her.

“When I saw Lynch stand up at the podium and say she’s going to challenge these states, I cried. I was on my knees, and I was crying,” she said. “My wife had just woken up because she had to go to work and I paused the TV, and she came in, and I played it, and we were both crying because — it’s never been about my name — it was this magical feeling that, I didn’t think in my lifetime that I would see it.

“I seriously thought this was going to be something maybe 20 years down the road.”

And yet, as conflicting rulings across the country continue — this past week alone, there were conflicting federal court actions in Texas, Illinois, and Ohio — a Supreme Court showdown, sooner or later, is almost inevitable.

"When I saw Lynch stand up at the podium and say she’s going to challenge these states, I cried."

The first possible way that could happen is in Gavin Grimm’s challenge to the Gloucester County School Board’s policy banning him from using the boys’ restroom. Grimm — backed by the ACLU — had sued so that he could use the restroom in his high school. After initially losing at the trial court, the federal appeals court for the region had backed Grimm.

The Supreme Court put that ruling on hold while it considers whether to take the school board’s appeal of the case. Now everyone is waiting to see what the Supreme Court does.

And while Grimm’s ACLU lawyers urged the justices not to take the case — a decision that would mean the appeals court ruling in his favor would stand — Feldblum said it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the justices do take it.

“I would not be concerned at all if they take the case. I think this needs to go to the Supreme Court,” Feldblum said. “It takes four justices to grant cert. If four justices think the court below was correct but that it’s important for this to be the law of the land, and especially if those four justices make the calculation that they have five justices to affirm the court below, they could well take the case.”

Even if the justices do agree to hear the case, however, isn’t likely to reach the ultimate question of whether Title VII, Title IX, and other “sex” discrimination bans include a ban on anti-transgender discrimination.

Grimm’s case can be, and was, resolved at the lower court in a more narrow way. The court ruled that the Obama administration’s guidance supporting transgender coverage was permitted under the regulations implementing Title IX because those regulations were ambiguous on the point. Because they are ambiguous, the Obama administration could adopt the position backing transgender inclusion.

That issue — referred to by a prior Supreme Court case as Auer deference — is something that, completely aside from transgender issues, some conservatives have been trying to urge the Supreme Court to revisit. The court has appeared unlikely to have the votes to do so, however, making it unlikely that the justices would take this case simply to resolve the concerns over Auer deference.

As to the larger issue of transgender people’s protections under existing civil rights laws, it would — in the regular course of things — perhaps make sense for the Supreme Court to decide whether an administration can interpret the laws to protect transgender people before deciding whether they are required to do so.

“This is not unusual for the law — to develop in sort of sequential moves,” Feldblum explained. “What’s written in one opinion — the words on that opinion — could end up being very important to a decision in an opinion a year later. Clearly, the Windsor case [striking down the Defense of Marriage Act] coming two years before the Obergefell case [striking down state marriage bans nationwide] is a classic example of that.”

The unknown factor is the uncertainty surrounding the vacancy on the court. The justices could be waiting to see what happens with the election before deciding what to do with the case — a move that could push off any news about the case until at least Nov. 10.

For now, though, everyone waits.

Holding the case, however, has a real-world effect: Until the court decides what it is doing with Grimm’s case, the stay issued by the justices this summer remains in effect — as does the school board’s policy banning Grimm from using the boys’ restroom during his senior year in high school.

It’s become a familiar routine by now: Trump supporters haranguing the press at rallies, booing them and screaming at them.

“Tell the truth!” and “CNN sucks!” have become staples at nearly every Trump rally. On Saturday night, a new and foreign accusation came to the fore: “Lügenpresse!”

The term, which means “lying press” in German, has a history dating back to the mid-1800s and was used by the Nazis to discredit the media. In recent years, it has been revived by German far-right anti-immigrant groups. And on Saturday, it made an appearance at a Trump rally in Cleveland, Ohio.

After the rally finished, one man approached the press pen and shouted insults, accusing the media of being in the tank for the Clintons and being “bought and paid for.” Another man, wearing a Make America Great Again hat and holding a sign with the same slogan, walked up beside him and began yelling at the press that we were “lügenpresse,” adding that the phrase means “lying press” in German. The first man started shouting it too, then turned to the second and made a self-deprecating remark about not pronouncing it right.

The traveling press was quickly hustled out of the venue and on toward the next rally; I didn’t have a chance to ask the man his name, or how he came across this term. I tweeted the video I shot of the two men and left it at that, not realizing how quickly and widely the moment would be circulated.

Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is considered one of the leaders of the alt-right, was able to shed some light on this for me.

“I see ‘lying press’ and ‘Lügenpresse’ all over the place,” Spencer said in an email. “It’s typical Alt Right: serious... ironic... and with a sly reference to boot.”

Spencer said the term had been in use in American alt-right circles for “a year, at the least.”

The website Occidental Dissent, one of the nodes of alt-right online commentary, frequently uses the term, and the #lugenpresse hashtag on Twitter is fairly active and largely used by alt-right Twitter accounts:

Breitbart News reported favorably on the term in an interview earlier this year with the leader of the German far-right group PEGIDA, writing, “It will come as no surprise to many that the mainstream media would lash out against a word that highlights their own, intentional failings. But [Lutz] Bachmann’s PEGIDA has popularized the term to the point where it has become a pillar — even a rallying cry — for the nationalist, populist movements across the continent.”

A panel of German linguists, in response, named "Lügenpresse" the worst word of 2014.

The alt-right has been emboldened this year by Trump’s rise; the chairman of Breitbart News, who has spoken of his website being a home for the alt-right, is now Trump’s campaign CEO, and Hillary Clinton’s speech tying Trump to the alt-right launched the movement to new heights of notoriety. The embrace of a term like “lügenpresse” is, as Spencer says, classic alt-right; the proud “shitlords” of the movement take pride in embracing edgy terminology, the more anti-PC the better.

The fact that the term is now being bandied about at Trump rallies is yet another sign of the alt-right’s increasing influence, though it’s still unclear how many people actually identify as alt-right — the number is likely relatively small.

Meanwhile, the hatred toward the press among the larger population of Trump supporters grows increasingly pronounced nearly every day. In these final weeks of the campaign, at nearly every rally, Trump riles up his audience against the press as reporters sit in the media pen, easy targets for vitriol. Reporters disembarking the press bus at Trump’s rally in Naples, Florida, on Sunday, the day after the “lügenpresse” incident, were immediately greeted by boos and shouts of “Tell the truth!”

Theo Wargo / Getty Images

Jay Z is set to hold a get out the vote concert for Hillary Clinton in Ohio aimed at mobilizing black voters, three sources told BuzzFeed News.

While the date of the concert has not yet been confirmed, a Clinton aide confirmed that it will be held in Cleveland.

The concert — perhaps the centerpiece of the “closing argument” strategy built to turn out this group — would be a major coup for the Clinton campaign, which has struggled to excite young black voters. It's a key part of the coalition they need to build to defeat Trump in several battleground states, but especially Ohio where she has trailed more consistently than in most swing states. High turnout among younger voters of color would make it virtually impossible for Trump to win.

Senior Democrats, meanwhile, have signaled publicly that Clinton has indicated staff should do whatever it takes to turn out young black voters and the concert is viewed as one of the last major voter mobilization moves the campaign will make before election day.

In 2012, he performed a show along with Bruce Springsteen in Columbus for President Obama's reelect campaign, at which the president spoke. Jay Z himself has been particularly outspoken on police violence, an issue of importance to young voters going to the polls.

He's a validator on the issue, who's interpolated references to Trayvon Martin in a well-received freestyle, and more recently, after the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, released statement a song via his streaming service Tidal called “Spiritual.”

A Democratic source familiar with the concert said they wouldn't be surprised if Cleveland Cavaliers star Lebron James made an appearance after endorsing Clinton earlier this month.

Jay Z and Beyoncé long ago endorsed Clinton and chopped it up with Bill Clinton during the Philadelphia Music Festival on Labor Day weekend.

The Clinton campaign has a series of concerts in the works in the remaining weeks of the campaign aimed at turning out voters. The National, Ohio natives, will play in Cincinnati next month, and Jennifer Lopez, whose pop tune "Let's Get Loud" often plays at Clinton rallies, is doing a similar GOTV concert in Miami, Florida aimed at Latino voters on Oct. 29.

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

David Axelrod, Barack Obama's former top strategist and a current CNN commentator, said Monday that Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta's hacked WikiLeaks emails were "embarrassing" and "irritating" for the campaign. Axelrod maintained, however, that Clinton was likely to defeat Donald Trump on Nov. 8.

"I don't think there's any campaign in existence that would want all of its internal fulminations and discussions" revealed, Axelrod told conservative personality Laura Ingraham on her radio show. "I was disparaged in a couple of them."

Axelrod told Ingraham that the emails were unlikely to disqualify Clinton with voters and she was in strong position to win the presidency. "I can't recall any candidate who had a lead like this this close to the election and didn't win," he said. Recent polls show the race even tightening in deep red Texas, but Axelrod doesn't expect Clinton to capture the Lone Star state.

Axelrod said the media coverage of Trump's past had been fair, but, "You can make the case that there are places in the media where there is a pile on on Trump." Both candidates have issues that "are worthy of discussion," he claimed, and Clinton's ability to establish trust among voters is a key "issue she'll have to deal with."

Axelrod acknowledged that campaigning was not Clinton's strong suit, as Clinton herself has admitted, but said that the candidate was at her best in smaller discussions. "She's not a natural campaigner in these big arenas."

BuzzFeed News; Getty

Outside a Trump event in New Jersey a couple of weeks ago, a truck driver named Alex Pniewski took a break from yelling “WikiLeaks” at the top of his lungs to argue with me about WikiLeaks.

Pniewski told me the hacked emails revealed sweeping corruption. I responded that they basically told us things we already knew. I had spent that morning reading other people’s emails — a hard thing to feel good about, but who said reporting came with clean hands? They showed Clinton’s aides being cautious and disciplined, and they buttressed years of reporting on soft influence trading around the Clinton Global Initiative.

As the leaks have piled up, though, they revealed one truth about the Clintons’ world, something that has long been said privately but rarely laid so bare: the deep cultural difference between Bill Clinton’s freewheeling circle and Hillary Clinton’s more disciplined and professionalized aides. And underneath that is the difference between a politician who fought his way to power by any means necessary and one whose own political career began in the White House.

Those revelations turn in particular on emails by and about Bill Clinton’s former body man, Doug Band. Band parlayed his physical proximity in the White House into a role at the center of everything Clinton critics find distasteful about how the family enriched themselves and their aides afterward. Band had a major supporting role in the biggest Clinton Foundation scandal — its embrace of a grifter, Raffaello Follieri — and founded a consulting firm called Teneo to connect big money to political power. Alec MacGillis captured in a 2013 profile just what it was that made many of Hillary Clinton’s aides dislike Band:

There’s an undertow of transactionalism in the glittering annual dinners, the fixation on celebrity, and a certain contingent of donors whose charitable contributions and business interests occupy an uncomfortable proximity. More than anyone else except Clinton himself, Band is responsible for creating this culture. And not only did he create it; he has thrived in it.

WikiLeaks emails drawn from the second half of 2011 reveal this conflict in devastating detail, and also reveal the degree to which Chelsea Clinton was the one who brought the party to a halt.

In one email, Band complains of “acting like a spoiled brat kid who has nothing else to do but create issues to justify what she's doing.” In another, he appears to blame a colleague's serious personal problems on the former first daughter.

In a December 2011 email first reported by Politico, Chelsea Clinton reported “serious concerns” about Teneo’s dealings, which were “precipitating people in London making comparisons between my father and Tony Blair's profit motivations.”

Another Clinton aide, she wrote, had worked for Teneo “and then recently stopped because she was so upset, partly because of what Doug and [his partner at Teneo] Declan [Kelly] asked her to do/pretend was happening for their clients at Davos.”

By January 2012, Band clearly knew Chelsea had done him in. He forwarded a polite email from her to Podesta with this complaint:

“As they say, the apple doesn't fall far,” he wrote — a shot at which parent, it was not clear. “A kiss on the cheek while she is sticking a knife in the back, and front.”

Band declined to comment on the episodes; a Clinton spokesperson didn’t respond to an inquiry about them, though the campaign has broadly refused to confirm that the emails are real and stressed that they were made public in what US intelligence officials believe was a Russian intelligence operation.

Everything that has been whispered in the Clintons’ circle for years, and that MacGillis got as close as anyone at reporting out in 2013, is laid pretty bare by WikiLeaks. And for all the real discomfort the email leaks have caused, Band has obviously sustained the most damage.

And the answer has to do with the generations of Clinton family power, of which there are, say, two and a half.

Bill Clinton fought his way from Arkansas to the presidency. Few politicians who fight their way up from nowhere do it with entirely clean hands. Even Obama, who rose so fast that he wound up doing relatively little of this, had the help of a crooked developer named Tony Rezko. Clinton made deals and helped friends, which is what you do when you’re building a political empire. That’s a practice that requires a retinue of dealmakers and enforcers, and Band embodies a style of self-made political power that was the source of occasional scandal in the Clinton White House. (Remember the donors in the Lincoln Bedroom?)

There is a different kind of path to power. George W. Bush inherited two generations’ of favors and connections, along with family wealth. There was less pressure on him to indulge in nickel-and-dime favor trading, or to embarrass himself to get rich. He was already rich, already had a bank full of favors.

Chelsea Clinton has, of course, taken that latter path. Her career, through a Clinton friend’s hedge fund and a preposterously compensated TV job, is the sort that you can only inherit. And the emails make clear that she was appalled by Band and what he represents. Her disgust could not have served her mother better: She purged Band and brought in the white shoe law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett to clean up the Clinton Foundation, no doubt saving the campaign untold reports of exchanges of money for access and at least the hint of influence.

The remaining question is to which of those generations Hillary Clinton belongs? On one hand, she fought her way up from Arkansas with Bill. The old-school, hustling Clinton fundraiser Terry McAuliffe has always been close to her campaigns, and she too allowed criminals to get close to her when they were useful.

On the other hand, her personal political career is more like George W. Bush’s than like her husband’s: The family network, led by Rep. Charlie Rangel, ushered her into a Senate seat. And when she left office, she kept her distance from Band’s glitzy, transactional sphere. She cashed in, instead, with a book and with paid speaking, which is the pure exchange of money for proximity, and only the illusion of influence.

Both of these styles of politics — the grubby transactionalism of the self-made, and the white-glove rent-seeking of the aristocrat — can surely be seen as corrupt. The Bushes’ and latter-day Clintons’ ease in leveraging power for wealth and more power seem to have outraged some Americans as much as evidence of Donald Trump’s personal dishonesty and allegations that his businesses committed actual fraud.

This is in some way in the deep DNA of politics: You can have outsiders and tolerate the price they paid to rise, or you can have comfortable elites, a generation or two away from having really dirty hands. Pick your poison, and even consider that the flavor of corruption isn’t the only reason to support or oppose a candidate.

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MANCHESTER, N.H. — “You do know I could do this all day?”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren stated the obvious on Monday afternoon as she held nothing back here during a campaign rally with Hillary Clinton, unleashing a blistering rant on Donald Trump, his alleged instances of sexual assault, and his statement during the last presidential debate last week that Clinton is, as he put it, a “nasty woman.”

"Donald Trump disrespects — aggressively respects — more than half the human beings in this country," said Warren, speaking alongside Clinton and Senate candidate Maggie Hassan outside an ivy-covered hall at Saint Anselm College.

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Warren then launched into one of her fiercest tirades against Trump:

He thinks that because he has money, he can call women fat pigs and bimbos. He thinks that because he's a celebrity, he can rate women from one to 10. He thinks that because he has a mouthful of Tic Tacs, he can force himself on any woman within groping distance.

Well, I’ve got news for you, Donald Trump, women have had it with guys like you. And ‘nasty women’ have really had it with guys like you. Get this, Donald, nasty women are tough, nasty women are smart, and nasty women VOTE. On Nov. 8, we nasty women are gonna walk our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives for ever.”

Clinton, seated with Hassan to Warren's right, couldn't help but laugh as the Massachusetts senator's voice rose with each line, crowd cheering along. Warren, one of Clinton's most active surrogates, is perhaps Trump's biggest antagonist in the Democratic Party, figuring out early on how best to rally Democrats against him.

"She gets under his thin skin like nobody else," Clinton said Monday.

The joint appearance, their second of the campaign, came as Clinton faces fresh scrutiny over revelations contained in the thousands of stolen emails from campaign chairman, John Podesta, made pubic in staggered releases on WikiLeaks. The emails reveal Clinton's paid speeches to financial firms and show strategists deliberating over the candidate's position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Warren delivered her familiar lines on Wall Street — "corporations are not people," she yelled into the mic — but did not comment further on Clinton's liberal bonafides.

The senator instead used Monday's New Hampshire event to hammer into Trump and the Republican incumbent Senate candidate here, Kelly Ayotte, who withdrew her support for the GOP nominee after news of his lewd comments about women.

"For more than year, Donald Trump has made headlines almost every day — and where has Sen. Kelly Ayotte been?" she asked the crowd of 4,000 people.

The line of attack — tying Republicans to their nominee — is one Democrats have employed against down-ballot candidates in the final weeks of the race. Clinton has been more reticent to take on the fight against Republicans running for House and Senate, spending months instead casting Trump as more extreme than the GOP.

"Donald Trump, calls Latinos rapist and murderers — Kelly stuck with him. Called African-Americans thugs, and Kelly stuck with him. Trump attacked a Gold Star family, and Kelly stuck with him. Trump compared himself to dictators and praised Vladimir Putin. Kelly stuck with him. Trump even attacked Kelly Ayotte, and called her weak — and Kelly stuck with him!" Warren said to laughter.

"Now Donald Trump's not doing so well, and Kelly is running as fast as she can away from him. I will say one thing. Donald Trump sure has made Kelly Ayotte dance. Day one, she loves him. Day two, hates him. Day three, she's back with him."

"Boy," Warren said, "spins around and around."

Clinton took the lectern after Warren. "I don’t know about you," she smiled, "but I could listen to Elizabeth go on all day."

LINK: A First: Clinton Attacks A Down-Ballot Republican

Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Hillary Clinton's campaign is touting a substantial 99% increase in Latino voting in Florida compared to this point in 2012, with 133,000 Hispanics already casting their ballot in the state, as part of its major focus on getting its base to vote early in key swing states.

The campaign included the figure it called "unprecedented" in its latest field report Monday, as early voting begins in Florida, with the 133,000 votes comprising mail-in and absentee ballots. Last week, it said that in bellwether Pinellas County in Florida, which is 10% Latino, Democrats now maintain a voter registration advantage that’s increased since March.

With Latinos comprising 17% of the state's electorate in 2012, and perhaps being a more important part of Clinton's coalition in 2016, the numbers are very encouraging for the campaign.

Early voting in other states with large Latino populations has also buoyed the campaign's outlook.

In Nevada's Clark County, a major population center that include 75% of the state's residents and is 31% Hispanic, 51,000 people voted on the first day of early voting, with 55% registered as Democrats, while 27% were Republicans.

In Arizona, a traditionally Republican state that in many ways represents the key to a Clinton landslide, the numbers don't look good for Donald Trump, either.

With more than 300,000 votes already cast in Arizona, Democrats lead Republicans by 1,000 votes but trailed Republicans by 20,000 votes at the same point four years ago, the campaign said.

Polls have shown Latinos largely repudiating Trump for his rhetoric and policies throughout the campaign season, but recent polls appear to show Clinton inching up while Trump drops.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week showed Clinton leading Trump 70% to 17% with Latinos nationally, while a Noticias Telemundo/NALEO tracking poll released Monday put the figure at 74% to 15%.

Mark Wallheiser / Getty Images

ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida — Donald Trump has begun openly questioning the veracity of polling and insisting that he is actually winning, even as most polls show him consistently behind nationally and in some key swing states.

Over the course of the day on Monday while campaigning in Florida, Trump has insisted several times that he is actually ahead.

"I believe we're actually winning," Trump told a farmers’ roundtable at a farm in Boynton Beach, Florida. "If you read the New York Times and if you read some of these phony papers — these are phony, disgusting, dishonest papers — but if you read the stuff, it's like what are we doing?"

"The truth is I think we're winning," Trump said.

"What they do is they show these phony polls where they look at Democrats, and it's heavily weighted with Democrats, and then they'll put on a poll where we're not winning, and everybody says, ‘Oh, they're not winning,’" Trump said. "It's a heavily weighted poll with Democrats, like the ABC phony poll that just came out."

A recent ABC News poll showed Clinton with a 12-point lead (50-38) over Trump.

All told, Trump spent nearly three minutes of the farmers roundtable discussing the polls and how he thinks they’re wrong, except for the ones that are favorable to him (he again repeated, "I actually think we're winning”). He has repeatedly cited the Investor’s Business Daily poll showing him 2 points ahead while dismissing other polls.

Later, Trump began his remarks to a first responders roundtable in St. Augustine by again saying that he is in fact winning.

"First of all I think we're winning, I actually think we're winning, despite what you hear from these very dishonest people," Trump said, referring to the media.

Trump did at one point acknowledge on Monday that he is trailing Hillary Clinton, telling a Charlotte, North Carolina, radio show that “I think we’re gonna have — whether it’s Brexit or beyond Brexit, I think we’re gonna have a Brexit situation. You know, that one was behind in the polls, and I guess I’m somewhat behind in the polls but not by much. I mean, in your state, I’m 1 point, 2 points and even in three polls. 1 point, 2 points and even.”

These remarks from Trump were highlighted by his campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who tweeted out Politico’s writeup of the radio hit and who herself has acknowledged that Trump is not currently winning, saying on Meet the Press on Sunday that “we are behind.”

But Trump’s flirtation with reality didn’t last long.

At a boisterous rally in St. Augustine on Monday afternoon, Trump told the crowd: “In case you haven’t heard, we’re winning.”

Trump directed his audience’s attention to the WikiLeaks email dump, which he said shows “how John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats.”

“It’s happening to me all the time,” Trump said.

“You see these polls where they’re polling Democrats,” Trump said. “’How’s Trump doing, oh he’s down.’ They’re polling Democrats.” Trump described this alleged phenomenon as an example of voter suppression.

The 2008 email in question concerned a recommendation to “oversample” regional groups in apparent internal polling. Pollsters oversample minority groups — for instance, young voters — when they want large enough samples to be representative for analysis.

Trump has again and again in recent weeks warned his supporters about a system that is rigged, and has repeatedly said that the election itself is being rigged. In Trump’s telling, the polls are all part of the vast conspiracy to bring him down — and by extension, his supporters. Trump lumps in the media as part of this conspiracy and has intensified his rhetoric against the press recently, portraying them not only as his enemies but as the enemies of his supporters.

“The media isn’t just against me, they’re against all of you,” Trump told the crowd in St. Augustine. “Like Hillary Clinton they look down one the hard working people of the country. The media is intolerant condescending and even contemptuous of the people who don’t share their elitist values.”

Trump’s rhetoric has led to increased aggression against the press at his rallies, with supporters at nearly every rally now loudly booing the reporters in attendance, screaming “tell the truth!” and “CNN sucks!”

Mark Wallheiser / Getty Images

Donald Trump told a New Hampshire radio station Monday that the latest woman to come forward and allege sexual misconduct was an adult film actor who had probably "been grabbed before."

"One said, 'He grabbed me on the arm.' And she's a porn star,” Trump said in an interview with Jack Heath on WGIR's New Hampshire Today. “Now you know, this one that came out recently, 'He grabbed me and he grabbed me on the arm.' Oh, I'm sure she's never been grabbed before."

Trump was referring to Jessica Drake, who alleges Trump kissed her without her consent. She also alleges that Trump, or someone on his behalf, offered her $10,000 and the use of his private jet to come to his suite.

"These are stories that are made up," Trump told Heath. "This is total fiction. You'll find out that, in the years to come, these women that stood up, it’s all fiction. They were made up. I don't know these women. It's not my thing to do what they say.”

Drake is the 11th woman to have come forward alleging that Trump kissed or groped them without their consent.

Donald Trump hugs a flag Monday in Tampa, Florida.

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

Donald Trump on Tuesday called for an investigation into President Obama, claiming he knew about the private email server Hillary Clinton used while secretary of state.

Trump made the comment in an interview with Reuters, saying the president "stuck up for Hillary, because he didn't want to be dragged in. Because he knew all about her private server."

"This means that he has to be investigated," Trump added.

Trump has made Clinton's private email server a central part of his campaign, referring for months to the former secretary of state as "Crooked Hillary." More recently, he has promised that if he is elected he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton. Trump has also expressed outrage at recent rallies that Clinton was allowed to run for president in the first place.

"Hillary Clinton threatens the foundations of democracy," a camouflage hat-wearing Trump told a cheering crowd Tuesday in Sanford, Florida.

The interview with Reuters, however, appears to mark the first time Trump specifically called for an investigation into Obama over the server.

The White House has said that Obama did not know details about the set up of Clinton's private email server, Reuters reported.

Trump also told Reuters on Tuesday that Clinton's plans for Syria — which is being ravaged by civil war and is experiencing a refugee crisis — could "lead to World War Three."

"What we should do is focus on ISIS," Trump said. "We should not be focusing on Syria."

The Republican nominee has made Syria a major part of his stump speeches as well, saying that Clinton would expose the US to terrorism by increasing the number of refugees the US takes in. He repeated this point Tuesday in Florida, saying of the refugees that "we have no idea where they come from, no idea who they are and Crooked Hillary wants to have that increased by 550 percent."

"Tell you what, you vote for her you're crazy," Trump said at the Tuesday rally. "She is the worst."

LINK: Trump On Jessica Drake Allegations: "Oh, I'm Sure She's Never Been Grabbed Before"

LINK: Elizabeth Warren Rants Against Trump

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

WASHINGTON — Sharila Taylor, a black Republican candidate for state representative in Cleveland, wants to talk to voters about her ideas reentry, entrepreneurship, early childhood development, and urban development.

In turn, they want to talk to her about Donald Trump.

In the final two weeks of the election, dozens of black Republican down-ballot candidates are running to keep seats on city councils, in state houses and trying unseat incumbents. But Donald Trump's erratic behavior on the campaign trail — particularly his black outreach and slipshod rhetoric about black voters — poses a severe challenge to black Republicans who need black votes and are fixtures in communities that are primarily black.

It's a philosophical challenge to the Republicans, loyal conservatives who are mired in — and perhaps resigned to — a battle to preserve majorities in the House and the Senate, or especially in even more local races in states, but who have to deal almost daily with every last outlandish thing Trump says.

But Trump’s campaigning also carries a political reality for black Republican candidates fighting hard in majority Democratic districts.

In an RNC-funded initiative taking the Republican message to barbershops, Taylor gave her platform and pitch — and asked for the vote. A barber cutting hair asked a question that amounted to, "What about Donald Trump?"

According to people in the room, it didn't go well.

"I usually don’t speak about Donald Trump, but my reply [there] was, you know, about bringing it back to the state level," Taylor told BuzzFeed News by phone. "We have a lot of the same views on fixing the inner city, bringing back jobs and growth. Not everyone wants a job. Some people want to be business owners. But we have a lot of the same views on fixing the inner city."

The Republican National Committee is jumping in. A Republican source said during a black engagement call last week, senior strategist Ashley Bell said the RNC was coming up with a television ad to highlight the positive happening in black communities, an aspect the Republican nominee has seldom acknowledged.

The messaging of the ad, Bell said according to a source, would note how conservative principles can help lift up the black community.

But candidates wonder if too much damage has been done to the party's brand where they rely on the votes of people who typically lean Democratic. Trump once identified a black man at a rally as, "my African-American." He's referred to black voters as "the African-Americans."

“They are anti-Trump, by and large,” said Lenny McAllister, who is running for Congress in Pennsylvania. “They believe that he is correct in saying that Democrats take the black vote for granted and have done very little to earn it. However, they mostly also believe that he is not the right candidate to ‘bring’ black folks and Republicans together.”

McAllister contends that some of these same voters will vote split ticket — “for the first time ever for some of these folks” — to elect Pittsburgh’s first black congressman, and against Trump.

Meanwhile, Taylor is voting for Trump, but fights away questions about him by saying he can't speak to the issues in local communities affecting voters everyday.

When it comes to Trump, "I honestly try to remind people that it’s about the state-level politicians. What we really need here in Cleveland can be accomplished at the state level."

Glo Smith, who is running for Congress in Florida told BuzzFeed News voters she's undecided in the presidential. "I'm running in Florida's 5th district and that’s where my concern is," she said.

The choice in the election is "a personal issue."

Republicans in Washington say they've been surprised by the amount of support she's gathered as a relative newcomer, but she's asked about Trump all the time.

"I've been told, 'Stay out of the presidential, run your race,'" by Democrats supporting her, Smith said. "I have my own race to run."

Carlos Barria / Reuters

WHITE PLAINS, New York — A cap on federal income has prevented United States Secret Service agents from being paid for hundreds of hours of work on the presidential campaign trail, leaving many agents working overtime for free since as early as spring 2016 during what has been a historically demanding election year for the agency.

The Secret Service is one of the only agencies in the government that routinely pays overtime. But the payments are part of a byzantine structure wherein agents can run up against caps on overtime per pay period or annually — as well a yearly federal cap of $160,300 that limits an agent's salary and overtime combined.

It’s the annual federal cap, officials say, that has posed a problem during this year’s election and become a subject of great ire and frustration inside the agency.

When overtime drives an agent's aggregate income past the $160,300 limit — no matter how early in the year — that agent may no longer earn paid overtime, even as they regularly work long past a 50-hour week, traveling around the clock with the candidates, their families, the Obamas, the Bidens, and the press.

Ask any agent on the campaign trail when they “maxed out” during the course of the year — or hit the federal limit — and they will be ready with an answer: May, April, March, or, for some of the most senior agents in the field, even earlier.

The result? Hundreds of agents working months of overtime for which they will never be paid.

“It’s been an incredible sacrifice,” Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy told USA Today of the demands on agents this year. (Clancy has no power over the federal salary limit, but did waive a $35,000 cap restricting overtime specifically. The measure did not affect maxed-out agents, but did draw attention the high demands of the election year.)

An effort to raise the federal salary cap by about $10,000 in both the House and the Senate — a measure that would alleviate the issue but do little to address the underlying problem in future election cycles — has so far seen little success.

Secret Service officials have struggled to find members of Congress to champion the bills. The Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, a nonpartisan group representing federal agents, has also started to lobby officials in Washington.

Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images

It’s not unusual for agents to work past the federal limit during election years — “but to a much lesser degree,” said Faron Paramore, who serves as the assistant director for government and public affairs at the Secret Service and acts as a congressional liaison.

This election, Paramore said, has been different.

The reason is twofold. First, a hiring freeze about two years ago limited the number of active agents, requiring more work from more people in the field. Second, and most problematic, is the unusual demands of the election year, with an outgoing president and vice president requiring protection along with the candidates, coupled with high-profile events like the conventions and United Nations General Assembly.

The agency was nearly as strapped last year, staffing a September visit from the pope and assigning details in November to Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump, in addition to protection for Bill and Hillary Clinton and eventually Chelsea Clinton.

“It’s really because of the tempo,” said Paramore, citing an “enormous amount of trips” and the high number of leaders and dignitaries under watch.

Of 3,330 active special agents, nearly all of them have been involved to some degree in the election. Approximately a third will go over the federal pay cap, Paramore said.

The work of Secret Service agents this year has required almost daily overtime, particularly during the conventions and in the heat of the general election campaign.

Since Labor Day, the demands of the trail have intensified. Agents on the Clinton detail have all but moved into the Crowne Plaza Hotel here in White Plains, New York, not far from where the candidate returns home nearly every night after a day of campaign events.

The bills to lift the federal salary cap to $170,000 have largely stalled in Congress.

The provision would be retroactive. If adopted in 2017, it would allow agents who worked overtime on the trail after they hit the salary cap to receive some back pay.

It’s unclear if Congress will act on the legislation or if these provisions will make it into the final version of the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act.

“We’ve done everything that we can possibly do,” Paramore said.

Leigh Vogel / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Former Sen. Evan Bayh appears to have spent little time in Senate Armed Services Committee hearings while he was a member between 2003 and his departure from the Senate in 2011, missing more than three-quarters of the influential panel’s meetings, according to Senate records and a copy of his daily schedule obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Bayh, who is once again running for the Senate after a five-year hiatus in the private sector, is considered one of the keys to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the Senate this year. Although initially seen as a likely pickup, his campaign in recent weeks has been dogged by questions about his seriousness after leaked copies of his schedule as a senator appear to show he spent more time fundraising, traveling at taxpayer expense and potentially job hunting than being focused on his job in the Senate.

It wasn’t always supposed to be like this for Bayh, whose father Birch was a popular politician in Indiana, and who came into the Senate as a moderate, business friendly Democrat.

When Bayh took his seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2003, it seemed like the perfect move for a young, handsome first time senator with much higher ambitions.

Already ensconced on the Banking Committee, from which even an average politician could build a massive campaign finance war chest, a seat at the Armed Services table could give a young senator the sort of foreign policy gravitas he’d need to mount a presidential campaign in wartime America. The Bush administration, already at war in Afghanistan, was beating the war drums against Saddam Hussein and Iraq, and the committee was at the heart of the nation’s debate over the nascent war against terrorism.

But the ambitious senator rarely showed up to hearings of the committee, particularly in the run up to the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq. According to attendance data on the committee’s website, Bayh only attended five of the 24 hearings Armed Services held between Jan. 1, 2003, and April 9, 2003, the day Hussein’s statue was toppled in Baghdad. Overall, throughout his career on the committee, the Indiana Democrat would miss roughly 76% of hearings, a figure reported by the Free Beacon earlier this month.

In fact, on the morning of the invasion, the committee held a hearing on that year’s defense authorization bill, a critical piece of legislation that laid out defense spending priorities for fiscal year. But while Bayh would miss the 9:45 a.m. hearing — where then Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham would testify about his department’s atomic energy defense activities — he did make it to an “informal breakfast” held by the Investment Company Institute earlier that morning.

That evening, as the first steps of the invasion of Iraq were raging, Bayh attended a reception — which a Republican charged was a fundraiser — at the home of Jamie Gorelick, who at the time was vice chair of Fannie Mae. The next day, following a members briefing on the war, Bayh and his wife would head out of DC to Vail, Colorado for three days, where he would attend fundraisers and a charity event.

To be sure, lawmakers’ schedules are extremely crowded, and all politicians spend nearly every free moment fundraising or wooing deep pocketed donors. As a result, that has meant every year as they chase campaign funds, most lawmakers miss an increasing number of hearings, votes, and other official meetings.

Nevertheless, a GOP operative argued Bayh’s chronic absences from the committee’s hearings demonstrates the “cavalier approach he has to sending us into a decade-long war” and insisted it is part of a broader pattern of putting fundraising ahead of the official work of a senator during his first stint in the Senate.

But Bayh’s campaign rejected that argument, noting that the leaked schedule does not include everything Bayh did during his tenure and does not reflect his work on national defense and veteran affairs.

“The documents being provided to press by a political opponent of Evan's in the final days before an election are at best incomplete and not reliable sources of information on how his time was spent,” Bayh spokesman Ben Ray said.

“Evan Bayh has worked consistently to support our men and women in uniform and a strong national defense, from fighting for up-armored Humvees in the Senate to his current work on the external advisory board of the CIA. His opponent, Congressman Young, either didn't show or didn't speak at more than 80% of his Armed Services hearings,” Ray added.

However, a Republican acknowledged that Young hasn’t spoken at many hearings, but pointed out he is a relatively new member of the House committee, which is significantly larger than its Senate counterpart. That, combined with the fact that his name comes at the end of the alphabet, has meant he rarely makes the cut to speak during hearings, although he has submitted questions in writing to witnesses that appear before the panel.

Young’s campaign manager, Trevor Foughty, dismissed the Bayh campaign’s assertions, arguing, "As a ten year military veteran, Todd had many friends and Naval Academy classmates who served — and some who died — in Iraq. The only thing more appalling than suggesting Todd doesn’t care about his brothers and sisters in uniform is that Evan Bayh was on a plane bound for a personal ski vacation as those same American troops first entered harm’s way in Iraq.”

George Frey / Getty Images

SALT LAKE CITY — Evan McMullin sat at a conference table in his modest campaign headquarters here one morning last week, struggling to pick which high-profile Republican had most disappointed him this year.

"Can we just say 'all of the above'?" he asked, prompting giggles from the aides scattered throughout the room.

In McMullin's view, the Republican Party's wide-scale surrender to Donald Trump in 2016 had produced too many pathetic failures to rank. “I mean... some of these people said Trump was a fraud and a con man."

At this, Mindy Finn, a former Republican consultant now serving as McMullin's running mate, chimed in from the other side of the table: "Some of them, Trump said their father was involved in killing JFK..."

McMullin replied, "Some of them had their own wives attacked by Donald Trump." The two volleyed back and forth like this for a while, clearly enjoying the game, and then McMullin got to the point.

"How is it that these people are now supporting Donald Trump for president?" he asked. "And what does it say about the Republican Party's ability to offer leadership to this country?"

Bald, wiry, and barely 40, McMullin is not a bomb-thrower by nature. He is polite and mild-mannered, and speaks in the earnest cadence of a Mormon missionary asking for permission to come inside and share a brief message about Jesus. As a Capitol Hill policy wonk, McMullin was a loyal cog in the Grand Old Party until he quit his job in August to launch a presidential protest bid under the #NeverTrump banner. Initially, he said, his campaign was intended as a vehicle of reform, meant only to remind the GOP of its conservative principles. But now, in the final weeks of this havoc-wreaking election, McMullin is scanning the wreckage of the Republican Party, and wondering whether there's anything left to salvage.

"Obviously, it's important to put pressure on the party to make critical reforms," he said. "But candidly, I am really skeptical that that can be successful within a generation." He has become increasingly convinced that the rise of Trump "is just a symptom of a greater disease in the party" — one that can't be cured "within the existing infrastructure."

The candidate's recent surge in state polls here has plunged Utah into an unpredictable three-way race — a unique electoral phenomenon that's attracted a national wave of media attention. If he wins the state, he will become the first independent candidate to be awarded electoral votes in nearly half a century.

But McMullin and his campaign are attempting something much more audacious than a fluke victory in a single state. While no one was watching, they were building an entirely new political party in the desert — and they don't plan to stop when Trump loses.

George Frey / Getty Images

When McMullin first entered the race in August, he was much more circumspect in his criticism of Republicans. Speaking to BuzzFeed News at hotel bar in midtown Manhattan a few hours after announcing his long-shot bid, McMullin sipped Diet Coke and politely dodged questions about his party's appeasement of Trump. Paul Ryan, he said, was "in a tough situation." The former primary candidates who had lined up behind their nominee simply lacked a better option. Ditto the donor class that was filling Trump’s campaign war chest.

McMullin says now that when he set out, he felt obliged to give his fellow Republicans the benefit of the doubt. "I believed they deserved another chance, especially given that there was now a true conservative in the race,” he said. “I think what we naïvely expected is that we might have the support of some of the Republican establishment.”

Instead, McMullin spent the next two and half months listening to frightened lawmakers and calculating donors apologetically explain why they couldn’t break with Trump — a party paralyzed by fear and careerism.

“They’re terrified,” said Rick Wilson, a senior McMullin adviser. “They tell us in meetings, ‘Trump is disgusting, he’s loathsome, he’s terrible for the party, he’s destroying the republic,’ blah blah blah…” — here, Wilson adopted a whiny-toddler tone —“’But I’m scared I can’t say anything because [Trump’s] people might hurt me.’”

“I have seen and worked with a lot of very courageous people in my time,” said McMullin, who spent 11 years working for the CIA. “I have seen a remarkable display of cowardice over the last couple of months in our leaders.”

For him, these craven capitulations have highlighted the need for a new center-right party in American politics — and he’s not alone. A growing chorus of conservative commentators — repulsed by Trump and wary of Trumpism’s spread in the GOP— has begun publicly musing about secession. On ABC’s “This Week,” National Review writer Jonah Goldberg predicted that if Trump continues to exert his toxic influence after Nov. 8, “we are going to see a new party emerge.” In the Wall Street Journal, columnist Bret Stephens wrote, “If I can’t get my Grand Old Party back, I’d rather help build a new one.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, McMullin’s most high-profile endorsements have come from people of this ilk, like Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and talk radio host Erick Erickson.

But of course, 2016 has been a bad year for the kind of wisdom that emanates from green rooms and op-ed pages. And even among anti-Trump conservatives, there is deep skepticism about the prospects of a new third party. (One Republican consultant who plans to vote for McMullin called the idea “crazy.”) What’s more, McMullin’s success in Utah — while unprecedented — has been dismissed by many as a case of Trump-averse Mormon voters simply supporting one of their own.

But McMullin’s team of disaffected Republican strategists is adamant that they’re building something to last beyond this election cycle.

According to his advisers, they’ve assembled serious state organizations across the country on a shoestring budget, enabling them to hustle their way onto 11 state ballots in the space of just 10 weeks. As Trump’s candidacy has imploded, McMullin has sought to take advantage with campaign stops throughout the Mountain West, where he’s often been greeted with large crowds and armies of eager volunteers.

With a bit more time and money (and, perhaps, some slightly less obscure candidates), McMullin’s team believes they could mount competitive campaigns in states and districts all over the map. “We think there’s actually a very vibrant market for our message in the urban northeast and in parts of the south,” said Wilson.

But it is still deep-red Utah where this project could have the most disruptive long-term implications. Sources close to the state party here said Republican officials have watched McMullin-mania with growing alarm. For Trump to lose the most conservative state in the country would be humiliating enough — but a sustained challenge from local third-party candidates modeled after McMullin could pose a much greater threat going forward. Already, Trump’s candidacy has taken a toll on the GOP’s hold on its Mormon constituency: A Pew survey released last month found that fewer than 50% of Latter-day Saints now identify as Republicans.

“Look, if we believed that we could be the force that reforms the Republican Party, we would,” said Wilson. “But you can’t have a conservative movement at home in a party where a meaningful fraction of it is defined by Trumpism.”

George Frey / Getty Images

People began trickling into the suburban school gymnasium outside Salt Lake City just before dusk: Young dads toting diaper bags, wholesome teenagers in BYU T-shirts, and a seemingly endless parade of bouncy toddlers. By the time McMullin finished his backstage press conference — where he took questions from a gaggle that included reporters from Norway and Japan — the audience waiting to greet him had grown to nearly a thousand people.

His speech was not exactly a barnburner, but the crowd was unbridled in its enthusiasm anyway. They cheered when he ticked off his support for traditional Republican causes — pro-life, pro-trade, hawkish on foreign policy— and they cheered even louder when he took on the failures of the current Republican Party. He called for a “new conservative movement” that welcomed Muslims, immigrants, and “people who don’t look like me.”

Ellie Cohen, a recent college graduate who brought her mother to the rally, grew up a staunch Republican, but said that if the GOP doesn’t purge its Trumpian elements after the election, she’ll have to leave the party for good.

“I think that’s the really amazing thing that’s happening in Utah,” Cohen said. “We’re showing the country that we’re not willing to just vote straight Republican if the candidates aren’t representative of who we are … We are going to vote based on our values and morals, not based on party.”

American Media Institute founder and CEO Richard Miniter.

WASHINGTON — A memo shared with BuzzFeed News details a proposal by a conservative-leaning nonprofit offering to produce and publish anti-Clinton articles as news stories in the black press before the election in exchange for a cash donation.

BuzzFeed News reported Saturday that, according to sources familiar with the conversations, the American Media Institute had approached conservative donors to fund right-leaning stories presented as news on a newswire that supplies content to African-American newspapers.

American Media Institute founder Richard Miniter heatedly objected to the story broadly, and specifically objected to the claim of an anonymous source in the original BuzzFeed News article that the project amounted to "voter suppression."

In order to rebut that claim, Miniter shared a detailed memo addressed to John Catsimatidis, a supermarket magnate and former candidate for mayor of New York. Catsimatidis did not respond to a request by BuzzFeed News for comment.

Miniter shared the memo with BuzzFeed News in order to dispel what he described as "journalistic malpractice" and described it as "a straightforward request for a grant for a non-profit news operation."

And, in fact, the memo makes no reference to attempts to discourage voting.

But the memo does, as BuzzFeed News reported, appear closely tied to the November election: In particular, it promises distribution in five "swing states" — Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio — and coverage of "the Clinton record on minority appointments." And it includes a pitch to launch on Monday, Oct. 24, as "many African-Americans are still seeking information about national politics and the economy."

Miniter argued that the memo shows no political agenda. "It doesn’t even mention voting nor does it talk about voter suppression or rightwing propaganda," he said in an email. He said the reference to "swing states" appeared "because that’s what the prospective donor asked us to concentrate our proposal on those five states. We saw no conflict because we believe that the black community in those states would be interested in news on black entrepreneurs, school reformers and so forth."

The memo also offers a window into the American Media Institute's broader pitch to conservative donors, which is that their money is best spent on producing material that can be consumed as "news."

"News is strategic because it starts conversation," Miniter wrote. "Op-eds and ads are defensive and responsive—and provide very little actual information."

Miniter said in the email that reporting on his nonprofit's desire to "start conversations" in the black press before the election ignored the Urban News Service's role in helping "the struggling African-American press."

Miniter also said that, in the end, the program never launched.

"Why malign us for something that has never even happened?"

Read the full document here.

Four-and-a-half years ago, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — an independent federal agency — came to a conclusion that ultimately has had sweeping effects across the federal government and beyond: It ruled that transgender people are protected under the existing civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of sex.

Some agencies quickly moved to use that interpretation.

Others, such as the Department of Labor, moved much more slowly. For years, the department’s compliance office did not adopt a similar interpretation of an existing executive order on sex discrimination. Oftentimes, officials wouldn’t even respond to inquiries on the issue.

The EEOC’s landmark decision came at a pivotal time in the Obama administration for LGBT nondiscrimination efforts: Just weeks before, the White House had announced that the president would not sign an executive order to provide specific protections to federal contractor employees against sexual orientation or gender identity-based discrimination. The decision had upset LGBT advocates, who noted that an executive order like that would provide immediate protections for the roughly 20% of the country’s private workforce employed by federal contractors.

But it wasn't that officials ignored the issue. About a week after the EEOC’s decision interpreting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in fact, a flurry of emails shot back and forth between employees of several offices within the Department of Labor.

The reason: The Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is responsible for enforcing a long-existing executive order that bans federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sex.

The question: Would Labor’s compliance office follow the new ruling and also protect transgender workers from discrimination?

The answer wouldn’t come for more than two years.

In the intervening time, the Labor Department would barely acknowledge the question in public. At first, officials avoided commenting altogether. Then, officials said the department “follows Title VII principles” in enforcement — but would not say what those principles meant when it came to anti-transgender discrimination. Finally, nearly two years later, Labor Secretary Tom Perez spoke up about the issue — only to say that a review of whether OFCCP would be applying the EEOC’s reasoning to the executive order was “ongoing.”

More than 1,400 pages of documents reviewed for the first time by BuzzFeed News indicate that the Labor officials were in regular contact with the White House about the issue — sometimes emailing with the White House staff as decisions were being made about how to respond to media inquiries and other developments. In July 2013, BuzzFeed News had reported that an advocate blamed the White House for OFCCP’s delay at adopting the pro-transgender position. That report was never refuted by either the White House or Labor Department, and it is not contradicted by the new documents.

The documents, provided to BuzzFeed News under a Freedom of Information Act request, illustrate the actual way actual changes often come about in the federal government, especially relevant as the country prepares for a new White House: Policy depends on the responses of people from the president to White House staff to Cabinet members and division heads, all the way down to individual lawyers and spokespeople making recommendations to their bosses.

In response to detailed requests for comment provided to the White House and Labor Department on Tuesday, the Labor Department provided only a generic response.

"This administration has done more to protect and advance the rights of LGBTQ Americans than all previous administrations combined. There is always more work to be done, but we are proud of what we have accomplished in partnership with the LGBTQ community, advocates, allies, state legislators and members of Congress,” spokesperson Dori Henry told BuzzFeed News.

A White House official told BuzzFeed News, “It is not uncommon for the White House to be made aware of high-priority policy developments at agencies, or for the White House to engage on policy issues that implicate multiple agencies. On this particular issue, there was an interagency process that included the White House, the Department of Labor, and other agencies, to ensure that equities of various agencies were addressed. That process took time, as is often the case when multiple agencies deliberate on significant policy issues.” The White House declined to provide any on-the-record response.

Ultimately, in the more than two years of time that passed between the EEOC’s decision in Mia Macy’s complaint and when the Labor Department’s OFCCP provided similar guidance, the federal government awarded more than $1 trillion in federal contracts that were signed without a transgender nondiscrimination requirement.

A QUESTION RAISED

On April 27, 2012, I asked a Labor spokesperson about the implications of the EEOC's April 20 Macy decision for OFCCP’s work. Five minutes later, the spokesperson responded that he was going to “follow-up with OFCCP and other staff on this…”

The next months provided no answer to ever-more specific questions about the issue. The next two years presented an increasingly adversarial process between the Labor Department and an expanding circle of reporters and advocates seeking an answer to the relatively direct question of whether OFCCP would be protecting transgender people under Executive Order 11246, which barred federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

As the result of a series of Freedom of Information Act requests from BuzzFeed News in 2014, the Labor Department on Sept. 30 turned over more than 1,400 heavily redacted documents that were responsive to the request regarding the Macy decision and its consequences for Executive Order 11246. Documents were sought from the office of the Labor Department secretary, as well as from OFCCP. The response provide to BuzzFeed News included information that two other journalists also sought to find information on the department’s inaction through public records requests.

While the Labor Department kept a low profile on the issue throughout much of the time in question, the documents turned over this past month reveal that department staff were involved in regular conversations about the issue, had been considering the question prior to the Macy decision, and were in communication with the White House about the issue at several key moments during the time the issue remained unresolved.

None of this information has been made publicly available previously. While heavily redacted and, thus, leaving many questions unanswered, the documents — including senders, recipients, and subject lines — shine unprecedented light into the way a sub-agency’s decision to pursue an expected path took more than two years.

Via assets.documentcloud.org

A week after the first reporting on the Macy decision was published, Deborah Greenfield — a lawyer in the Office of the Solicitor, the Labor Department’s lawyer — sent an email about the “EEOC’s decision about transgender discrimination” to Donna Lenhoff, a senior civil rights adviser in OFCCP; Mary Beth Maxwell, a senior adviser to then-Labor Secretary Hilda Solis; and Carl Fillichio, a public affairs staffer for the department. The chain continued with extensive back and forth on May 1 — while the request for comment was pending.

A few days later, Georgetown Law professor Nan Hunter sent an email to one of the Labor officials with an attached report: “The Relationship Between the EEOC’s Decision that Title VII Prohibits Discrimination Based on Gender Identity and the Enforcement of Executive Order 11246.” The text of the email was redacted, but the memo concluded that “the [Macy] decision will almost certainly impact the enforcement of Executive Order 11246.”

A copy of the unredacted email was provided to BuzzFeed News by Hunter. Her comments to the agency went even further, writing of the memo, “It concludes that the law is quite clear that OFCCP should follow the interpretation of sex discrimination — i.e., that it includes gender identity discrimination ­— in its enforcement of EO 11246.”

AN EARLIER COMPLAINT

The next day, the first story reporting on the question of how OFCCP would handle this question was published in Metro Weekly — with no comment provided by the Labor Department.

According to the documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Labor officials repeatedly discussed that story, referencing the “Johnson complaint” multiple times.

The “Johnson complaint” was a discrimination complaint brought by a transgender woman who had worked for a federal subcontractor outside of the US and sought protection under Executive Order 11246.

Via assets.documentcloud.org

In a memorandum dated July 15, 2011, the OFCCP’s director was given an in-depth report on the very question of whether the executive order should be read to protect transgender people. (BuzzFeed News was unable to contact Johnson. For that reason, we have redacted the identifying information in the memorandum in red.)

“Because the state of the law is in conflict about whether Title VII extends to transgendered [sic] individuals, whether those individuals are protected under E.O. 11246 is ultimately a policy call for OFCCP,” the report concluded. Strikingly, the memo specifically highlighted that, while the EEOC allowed for a “sex stereotyping claim for transgendered [sic] individuals,” it had not yet, at that point, “interpret[ed] Title VII as providing broader protection based on an individual’s status as a transgendered [sic] person.”

That “broader protection” came nine months later in the Macy decision.

Far from being caught off guard by the issue, in other words, OFCCP and Labor Department lawyers had, less than a year earlier, considered the issue and questions in depth — and referenced it internally in the days after the Macy decision. Until this FOIA request was fulfilled, however, no Labor Department officials had ever acknowledged the existence of this analysis.

AVOIDING ANSWERS

The week after the publication of the initial Metro Weekly article about OFCCP in May 2012, Lenhoff — the OFCCP civil rights adviser — sent around an email that included discussion of a “draft response to media inquiry about the impact of Macy on our interpretation of EO 11246.”

The email also referenced “prep for WH meeting Wednesday” — the first apparent interaction between the White House and Labor Department on the matter.

The “draft response,” however, never became an actual response that spring or summer. After that scheduled White House meeting, in fact, OFCCP officials generally did not respond to requests for comment. At times when new staff members were reached, they told BuzzFeed News that they would look into the question but never provided further follow-up.

A month after the Macy decision, Tico Almeida of the group Freedom to Work made clear that some LGBT advocates were focused on the question as well. In a June 20, 2012, email left unredacted, Almeida notes “the need for the Department of Labor to interpret Executive Order 11246 consistent with the EEOC’s decision in the historic Macy case holding that discrimination based on gender identity or expression violates Title VII’s requirement that employers not discriminate based on sex.”

The email — in which Almeida said he would be raising the issue with then-Labor Secretary Hilda Solis at an upcoming dinner — prompted extensive internal discussion among Director Shiu; her civil rights adviser, Lenhoff; her special assistant, Parag Mehta; and Greenfield, the department’s deputy solicitor.

Throughout the summer and fall there were other similar internal discussions, including an acknowledgement in mid-June that the question remained “outstanding” — but BuzzFeed News was given no answer.

After Obama’s re-election in November 2012, other LGBT groups began weighing in. On Dec. 6, 2012, the ACLU’s Ian Thompson wrote to Director Shiu requesting a meeting in early January 2013 to discuss “what the Department is doing/plans to do” to protect transgender workers “consistent with the EEOC’s ruling in Macy.” The invitation was sent on behalf of the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and Center for American Progress.

Via assets.documentcloud.org

Days later, Lenhoff was provided a 15-page legal memo — which she forwarded to Shiu, other OFCCP staff, and senior officials in Solis' office — detailing the evolution on the issue of transgender protections under the law.

But an unredacted copy of Lenhoff’s responses to the LGBT organizations' request and a follow-up request made on Jan. 8, 2013, suggest no plans to schedule, let alone hold, any such meeting.

Both of her responses acknowledged receipt of the email, then stated, “We’ll get back to you.”

WHITE HOUSE INVOLVEMENT

On May 7, 2012, just as Labor Department officials were beginning to deal with the fallout from the Macy decision, they also were discussing “prep” for a meeting with White House officials.

After that White House meeting, Labor Department and OFCCP officials — who had been cooperating with and responsive to a media request for comment — largely stopped responding to requests for comment on the matter.

As pressure continued on Obama to sign the federal contractor executive order to provide specific protections against sexual orientation and gender identity-based discrimination, the Labor Department stayed silent regarding questions about whether OFCCP would be protecting transgender employees of federal contractors under Macy’s reasoning in the meantime.

Six months after Obama’s second inauguration, there was still no answer from the Labor Department. On July 19, 2013, BuzzFeed News published a report in which Almeida, the LGBT advocate, claimed that the White House had “forbidden” the Labor Department from protecting transgender workers under the executive order.

Although neither the White House nor the Labor Department provided comment for the article, the rationale made obvious sense. It would be difficult to square a White House unwilling to issue a new executive order providing specific LGBT protections with a Labor Department that was protecting against gender identity discrimination in the existing executive order.

Gautam Raghavan, the White House LGBT liaison at the time, forwarded the BuzzFeed News article to the Labor Department’s Maxwell, who then forwarded it — along with redacted comments — to several other staff in the secretary’s office and in OFCCP.

Donald Trump is taking his recent proclamation that "we love the Hindus" to the airwaves, as he continues to court Indian-American voters with a new ad.

youtube.com

Trump, who recently attended an event with Bollywood stars organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition, is airing a new ad on Indian-American TV channels that splices together footage of his speech from the event with pictures of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and of the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

"The Indian and Hindu community will have a true friend in the White House," he says in the ad. "We will defeat radical Islamic terrorism."

Trump also borrows a variation of a slogan Modi used during his campaign in India. "Ab ki baar Trump sarkar," he says in the ad. It means "This time a Trump government."

The ad opens by wishing viewers a Happy Diwali, the biggest festival of the year for Hindus which is this weekend. It closes with Trump saying, "We love the Hindus. We love India," before the disclaimer saying it's paid for by the Trump campaign.

Shalli Kumar, an Indian-American donor to Trump and chairman of his Indian-American Advisory Council, told BuzzFeed News Wednesday evening that the ad was running on all Indian-American channels 20 times a day. He declined to disclose how much the campaign is spending on the spot.

Kumar and his wife have given nearly $900,000 to a joint fundraising committee benefitting Trump and the Republican National Committee.

Donald Trump attends the Republican Hindu Coalition's Humanity United Against Terror Charity event.

Kena Betancur / Getty Images

"We wanted to reach out to Hindu-Americans to let everybody know that he loves Hindus, he loves India and he is looking forward to getting that message out that he identifies with Hindus," Kumar said.

It opens with the Diwali message because "if he's doing an ad at this time, it would be impolite not to wish Happy Diwali," Kumar said.

Asked which vendor had produced the ad, Kumar responded that the Indian-American Advisory Committee put the ad together. "We had most of the footage because it was take from the event itself. We just took footage from there."

Kumar said he helped Trump practice the Hindi slogan for the ad. "He said this sentence about 15 times. He spoke better than David Cameron did when he did the same thing in 2015."

Trump's campaign, which has not publicly announced the ad, did not immediately respond for comment.

LINK: Republicans Plan A Night of Bollywood Stars — And Donald Trump

LINK: Trump Pitches Himself As The American Modi

Tami Chappell / Reuters

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Wednesday that she still planned to vote for Donald Trump despite what she called an "embarrassing" election that "has really turned my stomach upside down."

Speaking at a news conference about her efforts to help aid South Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, Haley resigned herself to a choice between two candidates whom she found personally distasteful.

"This is no longer a choice for me on personalities because I'm not a fan of either one. What it is about is policy," said Haley, who gave a ringing endorsement of Marco Rubio during the Republican primary. "I think I've been really clear. This election has really turned my stomach upside down. It has been embarrassing for both parties. It's not something the country deserves, but it's what we've got."

Haley, who said in May, “I have great respect for the will of the people, and as I have always said, I will support the Republican nominee for president” and appeared at the Republican National Convention in July, added that she based her vote on policy decisions.

"I come back to say that the best person based on the policies and dealing with things like Obamacare still is Donald Trump," Haley told reporters. "That doesn't mean it's an easy vote, but that does mean that I'm watching out for the people of South Carolina."

“As a governor of this state, knowing what our state’s needs are and knowing the processes that are going to take place, there’s a few things that worry me,” Haley noted. “One of the things is who the directors are going to be put into place at those agencies because it's we’ve had to deal with the EPA, whether it’s been the National Labor Relations Board, whether it’s been any of the mandates from Health and Human Services that have passed down, along with education — all of those issues came into play in South Carolina, and they caused us a lot of heartache.”