Campaign 2016 updates: On several occasions in the past 24 hours, Donald Trump has publicly insulted a woman’s looks

(Associated Press)

Donald Trump’s campaign on Friday released a friendly email from a woman who had accused him earlier in the day of sexually accosting her, as well as a statement from the woman’s cousin questioning her motives.

The disclosures came hours after Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” tearfully described darting around a hotel room in 2007 to avoid Trump’s kisses and wandering hands as she sought employment from him.

In the April 14 email to Trump’s assistant released by the campaign late Friday, Zervos described operating a restaurant in Huntington Beach and asked to get in touch with the businessman-turned-reality television star.

“He has witnessed both my highs and lows operating a small business and I am pleased to report that business is good,” Zervos wrote. “… I would greatly appreciate reconnecting at this time. He will know my intentions are genuine.”

The GOP presidential nominee’s campaign also released a statement from John Barry, who is identified as Zervos’ first cousin who lives in Mission Viejo. Barry said he is “shocked and bewildered” by Zervos’ allegations and noted that she repeatedly made “glowing” statements about Trump after appearing on the fifth season of “The Apprentice.”

“I think Summer wishes she could still be on reality TV, and in an effort to get that back she’s saying all of these negative things about Mr. Trump,” Barry said. “That’s not how she talked about him before. I can only imagine that Summer’s actions today are nothing more than an attempt to regain the spotlight at Mr. Trump’s expense.”

During a news conference earlier Friday, Zervos said that in 2007, Trump invited her to dinner but then had her ushered to his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he kissed her repeatedly against her will, placed his hand on her breast and thrust his genitals at her.

She also repeatedly spoke about her past admiration for Trump and having spoken positively about him when diners at her restaurant inquired about Trump during the GOP primary. But she said she grew increasingly anguished and reached out to him by phone and email in April, hoping for an apology.

“Mr. Trump, when I met you I was so impressed with your talents. I wanted to be like you. I wanted a job in your organization,” Zervos said during the news conference. “Instead, you treated me as an object to be hit upon. I was incredibly embarrassed by your sexual advances. … You do not have a right to treat women as sexual objects just because you are a star.”

Trump responded by denying Zervos’ allegations and saying he “vaguely” recalled her from the reality-television show he hosted for more than a decade.

“To be clear, I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” Trump said in a statement.

Zervos is one of several women who have alleged sexual misconduct by Trump in recent days.

A British man who is defending Donald Trump against a recent groping allegation has a colorful history of his own.

Anthony Gilberthorpe, who told the New York Post that he was on a flight where Trump is alleged to have groped a woman more than three decades ago, is a former conservative activist who inserted himself into an investigation of a pedophile ring among top British politicians in 2014.

Gilberthorpe said that he had provided underage boys for top Cabinet members at Conservative Party gatherings in the early 1980s, and that he told then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about it.

He made the claims shortly after the British government launched an inquiry into the alleged ring, three alleged murders and accusations of a coverup. The inquiry ended this year with no arrests and no proof the ring ever existed.

On Friday, the Trump campaign provided a note written by Gilberthorpe to the Post saying he had witnessed an inflight encounter between the GOP presidential nominee and Jessica Leeds and nothing inappropriate happened.

“[I] cannot imagine why she is seeking to make out that Trump made sexual advances on her. Not only did he not do so (and I was present at all times) but it was she that was the one being flirtatious,” Gilberthorpe said.

Leeds, 74, told the New York Times in a report published Wednesday that Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to slip his hand up her skirt in the first-class cabin of the plane as she sat next to him in first class.

On Friday, Trump dismissed the allegation, pointing to her looks.

“Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you,” he said during a rally in Greensboro, N.C.

How do you go from the sullen, seething Donald Trump of recent days to the looser Trump of the GOP primaries? Take away his teleprompters.

The freestyling, expansive style that propelled Trump early on reappeared Friday night, when he gave up on balky prompters and returned to his signature improvisational style.

And improvise he did. He mused on what it would be like to serve in the invented position of secretary of keeping businesses in the United States.

“Boy, would I be good at that job,” he declared.

He quipped that he wouldn’t pay the teleprompter and audio/visual companies that provided malfunctioning equipment at the event, then predicted he’d get negative press for stiffing the contractors.

“You know, it’s very funny. I went through 17 professional politicians, top people. And I went without any teleprompters,” Trump said, recounting his primary wins.

“Then all of a sudden they said, ‘Well now you’re running in the election. You need teleprompters.’ And I like teleprompters, they’re fine. But it’s sort of cooler without it, right?”

It was undisciplined, it was unpredictable, it was a bit hard to follow. It was a brief return to the Trump of the GOP primaries.

(Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images)

Even as her campaign and top surrogates ratchet up their warnings about the turn Donald Trump’s campaign has taken, Hillary Clinton aims to keep her focus in the closing days of the race on the task ahead after ballots are counted.

“I will be asking for your help. I need your help. Not just to win this election but to govern and to heal the divides that exist in our country right now,” she said at a large fundraiser here.

“I want us to start looking after each other again. I want us to find ways to help people who are feeling left out and left behind, and there are too many of them in our country right now.”

With her Republican opponent not only facing new attention-grabbing charges but lobbing new ones of his own, the Clinton campaign seems to have determined that responding to them is best left to others. First among those others: Michelle Obama, whose impassioned speech condemning Trump for a pattern of bullying and mistreating women quickly became a galvanizing moment.

As Clinton traveled to Seattle for the third fundraiser in as many days, it was campaign communications director Jennifer Palmieri who took on Trump for what she said was his “global conspiratorial comments” a day earlier.

“It would be laughable that the Republican nominee for president has allowed his campaign to be overtaken by Breitbart and InfoWars, except it is a very dangerous and cynical thing to do, to try to convince voters of these lies,” she said. “He’s offering destruction in the form of attacks and conspiracy theories.”

Clinton would prefer a debate over issues and she is increasingly disinclined to respond directly to Trump’s approach, Palmieri said. In the coming days her focus will be preparing for the third and final presidential debate Wednesday. It’s her performance in the two previous ones, and not accusations against Trump, that the campaign sees as primarily responsible for her expanding national lead.

“We think that this is the time for her to make clear to everybody that she’s going to be president for all of America,” she said.

That doesn’t mean Clinton will completely ignore Trump. “It’s a shocker to me when I hear some of our fellow citizens, led by my opponent, degrade and demean so many other Americans. It’s heartbreaking really,” Clinton said.

“Bringing people together to solve problems is key to our democracy. There’s no question about it. And I want us to do that in a spirit of mutual respect. Listening to one another. Having each other’s backs.”

She said Trump has also raised concerns among international allies -- and “already done damage to us” on the world stage.

“On both domestic and national security grounds, repudiating his candidacy sends exactly the right message. And that is what we must do on Nov. 8,” she said.

(Sara D. Davis / Getty Images)

Donald Trump denied the latest allegations that surfaced Friday of him accosting women.

Hours after Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” described darting around a Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow to avoid Trump’s kisses and wandering hands as she sought employment from him, the GOP presidential nominee said the meeting never happened.

Trump said he “vaguely” recalled Zervos from the reality-television show he hosted for more than a decade.

“To be clear, I never met her at a hotel or greeted her inappropriately a decade ago. That is not who I am as a person, and it is not how I’ve conducted my life,” Trump said in a statement.

He also denied a report in the Washington Post that he put his hand up a stranger’s skirt and touched her vagina through her underwear at a nightclub in the early 1990s.

Speaking to supporters at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., Trump said Kristin Anderson’s account was not credible because he never sits alone at clubs.

(Los Angeles Times)

As Donald Trump’s standing in polls continues to slide, we’ve updated our electoral map to reflect his diminishing chances of winning the White House.

The big change: Arizona now moves to the “toss-up” column. Until now, we’ve listed the state as “likely Republican,” reflecting the partisan lean it has long had. Arizona has gone to the GOP in nine of the last 10 presidental elections, with Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996 the only exception.

But this year, a combination of shifting demographics and Trump’s unpopularity have changed the picture. Arizona has a growing Latino population that already was starting to change the state’s political complexion before this year. Trump’s unpopularity has shifted things further.

The state’s senior senator, John McCain, who is up for reelection this year, dropped his endorsement of Trump a week ago, after video surfaced of Trump bragging that he could get away with assaulting women. The state’s other senator, Jeff Flake, also a Republican, had never endorsed Trump.

Taking Arizona out of the Republican column reduces Trump’s electoral college vote to 180. Hillary Clinton leads in states with 279 electoral votes -- nine more than needed for victory. The five states we list as toss-ups have 79 electoral votes.

The other move is Utah, which we’ve shifted from solidly red to the “likely” category.

Trump is deeply unpopular with many Mormon voters in the state. Two third-party candidates -- Gary Johnson, the Libertarian, and Evan McMullin, a Republican former congressional staff member running as an independent -- have siphoned many votes away from Trump.

One recent poll for the Deseret News showed the third-party candidates eating so deeply into the GOP vote that Trump and Clinton were tied. Other surveys continue to show Trump ahead in a state that Republicans last failed to carry in 1964, the year of Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide.

We’re keeping an eye on Florida and North Carolina. Recent polls consistently have shown Clinton leading in both states, but by small margins. For now, we continue to list both states as toss-ups, along with Ohio, where polls are mixed, and Iowa, where Trump has held a small lead.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

The subject line was simple: “WJC speeches,” in reference to former President Clinton.

According to purportedly newly leaked emails, obtained and posted by WikiLeaks on Friday, aides to Hillary Clinton appeared to express concerns over the bad optics that could shade the campaign if the former president delivered a scheduled speech to a Wall Street firm.

In the emails WikiLeaks is running, Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, purportedly wanted the former president to cancel a paid speech to the financial services corporation Morgan Stanley, as it was set for around the date Hillary Clinton would be announcing her presidential bid in April 2015.

“I feel very strongly that doing the speech is a mistake -- the data are very clear on the potential consequences,” Mook wrote. “I recognize the sacrifice and disappointment that cancelling will create, but it’s a very consequential unforced error and could plague us in stories for months. People would (rightfully) ask how we let it happen.”

Yet Huma Abedin, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, puportedly wrote that the former first lady did not want her husband to cancel the speech.

Eventually they came to an agreement and Bill Clinton canceled the speech, according to the emails on WikiLeaks.

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Clinton has been castigated by Republicans and even some Democrats for paid speeches she and her husband have delivered to Wall Street firms. So far, Hillary Clinton has not released transcripts of those speeches.

Earlier this month, WikiLeaks revealed details of some of the lucrative speeches Clinton delivered behind closed doors after she left the Obama administration in 2013.

In one excerpt from a speech, Clinton spoke of the need to maintain “both a public and a private position” on politically difficult issues, according to the WikiLeaks documents.

The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails, blaming the Russian government for hacking into Democratic officials’ emails in an attempt to help Donald Trump.

Forget subtlety. In the last 24 hours, Donald Trump, besieged by multiple allegations of sexual assault, has lashed out at his female accusers--and the female presidential candidate he’s running against--with snide attacks on their appearance.

At a Friday afternoon rally in Greensboro, N.C., Trump sought to disprove Jessica Leeds’ account that he groped her on an airplane on the 1980s by asserting she wasn’t attractive enough for such attention.

“Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you,” he told the crowd.

In the same rally, Trump re-upped a newly popular riff denying that he had shadowed Hillary Clinton onstage during their second debate on Sunday, insisting that she was the one walking in his space.

This time, he snuck in a jab about how she looked as she walked past him, saying he “wasn’t impressed.”

On Thursday, as the GOP nominee denied the account of a People magazine writer who said Trump accosted her when she was writing a story about him and his wife, Melania, in 2005.

Trump said the story was not credible, noting she did not write about the alleged incident at the time and asserting “the area was a public area, people all over the place.”

“Look at her. Look at her words,” Trump said, encouraging the audience to evaluate her believability. “You tell me. I don’t think so.”

A former contestant on TV’s “The Apprentice” on Friday accused GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump of making unwanted sexual advances as she sought a job from him.

“Mr. Trump, when I met you I was so impressed with your talents. I wanted to be like you. I wanted a job in your organization,” Summer Zervos, who had appeared on the fifth season of the show, told a news conference in downtown Los Angeles.

“Instead, you treated me as an object to be hit upon. I was incredibly embarrassed by your sexual advances. … You do not have a right to treat women as sexual objects just because you are a star.”

Zervos, who wept as she read parts of her statement, is the latest of several women who have alleged sexual misconduct by Trump to come forward since the release last Friday of a 2005 video in which Trump used vulgar terms to describe groping women.

Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred, who represents Zervos, said many women have contacted her about inappropriate behavior by Trump in the years before he entered politics and won the Republican presidential nomination.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment, but in a campaign appearance Friday, Trump denied the groping allegations as “totally, absolutely false.”

Zervos said she contacted Trump in 2007 seeking a job. They met in New York and he took her phone number, she said. He called before he visited Los Angeles, dubbed Zervos his “O.C. angel” and proposed dinner, she said.

Zervos said she was summoned to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she expected to eat at a restaurant. Instead, she said, she was ushered to Trump’s bungalow.

Trump repeatedly tried to kiss her with an open mouth as she darted around the room trying to evade him, Zervos said. He also put his hand on her breast and thrust his genitals at her, she said.

“Dude, you’re tripping right now,” Zervos said she told Trump, as she sought to stop his advances. “Come on, man, get real.”

She said Trump asked her what she wanted, and that she replied she had come to eat dinner.

As they waited for room service, Zervos said, Trump told her that he didn’t think she had ever known love or been in love. Then she said he turned to business, questioning her as though she was on a job interview.

They shared a club sandwich, and Trump advised Zervos to default on her home mortgage, Zervos said, adding that they arranged to meet the next day at Trump’s golf course in Palos Verdes.

Zervos said she left the hotel stunned by Trump’s behavior, but decided to attend the meeting the following day after speaking with her father.

“I wondered if the sexual behavior was some kind of test and whether or not I had passed,” she said. “Obviously he still wanted to talk to me about a job even though I had turned his sexual advances down.”

Zervos said she went on a tour of the golf course and was eventually offered a job, but for half the salary she had expected. She said she called Trump, upset, and that he told her he couldn’t talk because he was golfing and to never use his private number again.

She said she continued to pursue a job with Trump until he told her he could not afford to hire her as he was laying off thousands of employees.

After Trump ran for president, Zervos, who identified herself as a Republican, said she was often asked about him because of her appearance on “The Apprentice.”

She said she was always complimentary, but felt anguished internally and tried to contact him in April by phone and by email with no success.

Zervos said she decided to speak out after hearing Trump speak crassly about women on the 2005 video that emerged last week, and after hearing him deny during Sunday night’s presidential debate that he had ever touched women against their will.

“I want to be able to sleep when I’m 70 at night,” she said.

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(Evan Vucci / Associated Press)

As fallout continues for Donald Trump in connection with his lewd comments and allegations of sexual assault made against the Republican presidential nominee, another woman has emerged to say that Trump groped her.

Kristin Anderson said she was in a nightclub in the early 1990s when Trump slid his fingers under her miniskirt, moved up her inner thigh and touched her vagina.

“He was so distinctive looking — with the hair and the eyebrows. I mean, nobody else has those eyebrows,” Anderson, who lives in Southern California, told the Washington Post.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but it has vigorously denied the allegations from other women with similar stories.

Anderson, now 46, said she did not contact authorities but told her story to several friends and family.

Earlier this week, the New York Times interviewed two women who recalled Trump kissing and groping them. Trump’s attorneys have threatened to sue the newspaper for libel.

The women said they decided to speak out, years after the alleged misconduct, because Trump had downplayed a recording of him describing such sexual aggressive behavior with women as merely “locker room talk.”

When asked at the debate on Sunday if he’d ever groped women, Trump insisted he had not.

(David Maxwell / European Pressphoto Agency)

President Obama drew up a long list of perceived offenses by Donald Trump on Friday and then judged them derisively in one repeated phrase: “Come on, man.”

Trump has shown no regard for working people, Obama alleged, and now wants to call himself their champion? “Come on, man,” the president said.

Instead of trying to be part of the global elite, he now wants to complain about their rigged system? “Come on, man!”

Ripping a page from Trump’s own playbook, replete with sarcasm and ridicule, Obama mocked the Republican presidential nominee during much of his morning rally here, going off his prepared remarks repeatedly.

“Where am I?” he asked at one point, trying to find his place on the teleprompter.

If you’re tough, Obama said, you don’t make excuses.

If you’re a terrific businessman, he said, you don’t file for bankruptcy repeatedly.

If you run a casino, he went on, you make money.

“Usually the house wins,” Obama said, “unless he owns the house.”

He made a point of punctuating each Trump criticism with an affirmative argument for Hillary Clinton.

But in his closing, riffing on all that’s on the ballot this fall, he said he forgot one big item. Progress is on the ballot, he said. Courtesy, equality, kindness — even democracy itself.

A Bruce Springsteen soundtrack began to play him off stage before he could name Clinton.

GOP vice presidential canddiate Mike Pence fielded a provocative question about an 11-year-old girl and her body image in light of running mate Donald Trump’s demeaning comments concerning women’s looks.

“When I hear those words and look in the mirror, they make me feel bad about myself,” a young girl said, according to WBNS-TV reporter Scott Light of Columbus, Ohio. He said he spoke with her early Thursday.

“What would you say to that 11-year-old girl?” Light asked Pence in an interview later that day.

Pence deflected: “Well, I would say to any one of my kids and any children in this country that Donald Trump and I are committed to a safer and more prosperous future for their family.”

Pence then spun to talk about Hillary Clinton and what he called her “weak” foreign policy. He has also said he trusts his running mate’s denial of recent accusations of sexual assault.

GOP vice presidential nominee Mike Pence had the tough assignment Friday morning of responding to Michelle Obama’s emotional rebuke of Donald Trump’s behavior toward women.

Pence treaded carefully as he sought during an interview on CBS to cast doubt on the address by Obama, a Hillary Clinton surrogate who is immensely popular with the electorate and has connected with female voters more effectively than Clinton herself.

“I have a lot of respect for the first lady and the job that she’s done for the American people over the last seven-and-a-half years,” Pence said. “But I don’t understand the basis of her claim.”

The Indiana governor said he believes Donald Trump’s denial of all the recent accusations of groping and kissing women against their will.

“I do believe him,” Pence said. “When these latest unsubstantiated allegations came forward, he’s categorically denied them.”

Pence alluded, as Trump did on Thursday, to “evidence” that will support Trump as he struggles to answer all the charges of his accusers.

“Well, just stay tuned,” Pence said. “I know that there’s more information’s going to be coming out that’ll back his claim that this is all categorically false. … We’re simply not going to allow the slander and lies emerging from the Clinton political machine and being propagated in the media to distract attention from the real issues affecting the American people.”

Pence was vague about when the “evidence” would be presented. But he offered a more concrete timetable than Trump has offered for releasing his tax returns, another piece of information the campaign said it would release at some unspecified point.

“Frankly I think even before the day is out, there’ll be more evidence publicly that shows and calls into question these latest allegations,” Pence said.

As Donald Trump amps up his hostility toward the press by whipping rally crowds into a frenzy of resentment against reporters and major news outlets, journalists are growing increasingly concerned about their safety and advocates are warning of the consequences.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says a Trump presidency would create an “unprecedented threat to the rights of journalists and to CPJ’s ability to advocate for press freedom around the world.”

The organization cites numerous actions by Trump that have alarmed its board. They range from denying campaign media credentials to outlets Trump does not like, to mocking a disabled New York Times reporter, to Trump’s vows to make it easier to sue news organizations for libel.

“Since the beginning of his candidacy, Trump has insulted and vilified the press and has made his opposition to the media a centerpiece of his campaign,” said a statement from board chair Sandra Mims Rowe. “Trump has routinely labeled the press as ‘dishonest’ and ‘scum’ and singled out individual news organizations and journalists.”

Trump rallies, meanwhile, have become increasingly uncomfortable places for reporters. The crowd regularly chants “CNN sucks” and shouts insults at journalists contained in the press pen – sometimes with the encouragement of Trump, and sometimes on their own initiative.

As reporters left a Trump event on Thursday, the hostility had grown to the point where local law enforcement took the precaution of tasking police in riot gear to monitor the motorcade in which the press and campaign officials were riding as it left the event.

8:40 a.m.: This post was updated to clarify that the police had not escorted the reporters out of the event, but monitored the campaign motorcade. A tweet about the police role was removed.

Following a week of allegations against Donald Trump concerning groping and inappropriate touching and kissing of women, a support group calling itself the National Women for Trump sent out an email to followers with the hashtag #WomenWhoVoteTrump.

Several people responded Friday with the reasons they still plan to vote for the candidate. Here are some of the tweets:

Vice President Joe Biden says Bill Clinton’s misdeeds while in office may not be excusable -- but that that shouldn’t be the point in this presidential race.

“I can’t make any excuses for Bill Clinton’s conduct,” Biden said on NBC’s Meet The Press. “And I wouldn’t attempt to make any excuses for the conduct. But he paid a price for it. He paid a price, he was impeached. And he ... expressed his deep sorrow and acknowledged what he did.”

Biden also said that in the context of this presidential race, Clinton is not on the ballot and his conduct “shouldn’t matter.”

Donald Trump, he argued, has admitted doing worse, and hasn’t apologized.

“This guy … has acknowledged that he has been a sexual predator,” Biden said. “He has acknowledged that he abused his power and, as I said, the textbook definition of what constitutes sexual assault.”

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan may no longer be willing to stump for Donald Trump, but he remains eager to make the case for an unnamed Republican to beat Hillary Clinton.

In remarks Friday before a group of College Republicans in Wisconsin, Ryan is expected to push past Trump’s week of sexual assault allegations and frame the election as a stark choice between two campaigns.

“Beneath all the ugliness lies a long-running debate between two governing philosophies,” Ryan will say, according to excerpts.

“The left does not just seek a continuation of the last eight years, They intend to make it into a reality — an arrogant, condescending and paternalistic reality.”

Ryan publicly split from Trump on Monday, drawing a swift backlash from rank-and-file House Republicans and others who prefer a unified party behind the GOP nominee.

Like so many Republicans, the speaker is trying to navigate a narrow political path, appealing to Trump supporters while not alienating Republicans and other voters who are rejecting the nominee. It is especially difficult as Ryan tries to prevent steep losses in the House, where the GOP majority is increasingly at risk due to Trump’s sagging performance among voters.

Though the speaker said he would no longer defend Trump or campaign for him, he also made it clear he was still endorsing the candidate.

And his prepared remarks Friday sounded almost Trump-like.

“Liberal progressivism is not government for the people. It is government for the elites,” the excerpts said. “You see, when Hillary Clinton says we are ‘stronger together,’ what she means is we are stronger if we are all subject to the state. What she means is we are stronger if we give up our ties of responsibility to one another and hand all of that over to government. But there is no strength in that. Only hubris. Only the arrogance to assume we are better off if we fall in line and bow down to our betters.”

(Brendan Smialowski / AFP/Getty Images)

Wary of any more twists in the presidential race, Hillary Clinton pleaded with supporters to remain vigilant.

“I don’t want anybody to think this election’s over, because it’s been so unpredictable,” Clinton said at a taping of “Ellen” set to air Friday.

“Who knows what could happen. So anybody who’s watching, please turn out and vote.”

The clarity and conviction of Michelle Obama’s speech earlier Thursday was fresh on Clinton’s mind throughout the day.

She mentioned it twice at events in San Francisco earlier in the day. She also tweeted about it, saying she was “in awe.”

It was one of 24 tweets on Clinton’s account related to the first lady’s remarks.

When host Ellen DeGeneres showed a clip of the speech, Clinton said the first lady “put into words what so many of us are feeling.”

“Nobody wants to be associated with this kind of really violent and hateful language,” Clinton said. “It’s not just what Trump has said about women, as terrible as that has been. What he’s said about African Americans and Latinos and Muslims -- he has been so insulting and derogatory.”

Clinton was also in Southern California for a fundraiser Thursday night that featured a performance by Elton John.