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WASHINGTON (AP) —
Donald Trump recently showed up at a gathering of Iowa conservative Christian voters with a copy of the Bible in hand.
"See, I'm better than you thought," he said. Then came a black-and-white photograph from his confirmation to further prove his Christian cred.
"Nobody believes this," he said to laughs. "What went wrong?"
As the Republican presidential front-runner and billionaire businessman tries to maintain his lead in early polls with rivals gaining, Trump is increasingly courting a wing of the Republican Party that might seem antithetical to his brand: evangelical Christians.
After initially declining the invitation, Trump spoke Friday in front of several hundred social conservative leaders at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit in Washington. He joined a speaking program that includes Republican rivals with long records of dedication to religious causes — among them, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist pastor, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who wants his colleagues to risk a government shutdown to block funding to Planned Parenthood.
Trump brought his Bible along once again, and briefly addressed his faith between attacks on his rivals and Democrats.
"I believe in God. I believe in the Bible. I'm a Christian," he said. He ended by bemoaning the increased use of the term "Happy Holidays" in place of "Merry Christmas" as a sign that Christianity is under attack. As president, he said, he'd reverse the trend.
In many ways, Trump's brand as the bombastic, thrice-married billionaire showman would seem an ill-fit among religious conservatives. He once held a reputation as a womanizing playboy, previously supported abortion rights and appears to spend more time calling into Sunday morning talk shows than attending church.
Trump likes to boast about the Bible being his favorite book, but he has refused to quote his favorite biblical verse when asked what it was. He raised eyebrows in June when he said at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, that he has never asked God for forgiveness and described Communion as "when I drink my little wine, which is about the only wine I drink, and have my little cracker."
"I love them. They love me," Trump, a Presbyterian, said of evangelicals last month in Greenville, South Carolina. "I love the evangelicals, and it's really shown in the polls."
Some evangelical leaders are skeptical.
Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said Trump's candidacy is fundamentally opposed to Christian values.
"When one looks at the very serious moral character questions, from Trump's involvement in the casino gambling industry all the way through to his attitude toward women, Donald Trump is the embodiment of everything that evangelical Christians have been standing against in American culture," he said.
Social conservatives are eager to have "a conversation" with Trump about his previous support for abortion rights, among other positions most conservatives strongly oppose, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and host of the gathering.
"He's had some positions in the past which obviously raise questions that he's going to have to have a conversation about at some point," Perkins said. "But the intrigue of Donald Trump is that he is unconstrained by the so-called forces of political correctness."
On Monday he's set to host a group of evangelical pastors and bishops from across the country for a private meeting and prayer session at Trump Tower in New York.
Several attendees, including Pastor Lionel Traylor of Jackson, Mississippi, said evangelical voters are particularly drawn to Trump's direct style and his strong defense of Christians at a time "when Christianity is under attack." Trump has frequently made reference to attacks on Christians abroad and said that he will be a champion for religious liberty, including defending Christmas.
Trump's relationship with evangelical leaders goes back far longer than he's been running for president.
According to previously reported tax documents, the Donald J. Trump Foundation has given to numerous Christian causes in recent years, including $100,000 to the Billy Graham Evangelist Association in 2012, as well as ministries as far away as Debra George Ministries in Texas and the Ramp Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Monday's gathering is also not the first of its kind at Trump Tower.
"I found him to be a humble man," said Dr. Darrell Scott, the senior pastor of New Spirit Revival Ministries in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, who met Trump at a similar gathering of pastors about four years ago. He's now helping to organize Monday's gathering along with televangelist Paula White.
Scott said he was especially taken aback by how Trump ended their first meeting.
"He said, 'Pray for me that God leads me in the direction that he wants me to go in,'" recalled Scott. "I was flabbergasted. He stood up and he bowed his head and he closed his eyes and we prayed."
Monday's gathering is expected to open with a prayer service and include discussion of issues affecting the preachers' communities, said Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen, who struck up a friendship with Scott.
"Many of them know Mr. Trump personally and have had private conversations with him over the years," Cohen said, adding: "And despite the fact that some of their views might be different, they certainly respect the fact that he speaks openly, he speaks from his heart, and he's willing to listen."
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials said Friday, adding to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.
The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military's U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began before Clinton entered office and continued into her first days at the State Department. They largely pertained to personnel matters and don't appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said, but their existence challenges Clinton's claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
Republicans have raised questions about thousands of emails that she has deleted on grounds that they were private in nature, as well as other messages that have surfaced independently of Clinton and the State Department. Speaking of her emails on CBS' "Face the Nation" this week, Clinton said: "We provided all of them." But the FBI and several congressional committees are investigating.
The State Department's record of Clinton emails begins on March 18, 2009 — almost two months after she entered office. Before then, Clinton has said she used an old AT&T Blackberry email account, the contents of which she no longer can access.
The Petraeus emails, first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department's inspector general, challenge that claim. They start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private email address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 emails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.
The officials weren't authorized to speak on the matter and demanded anonymity. But State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed that the agency received the emails in the "last several days" and that they "were not previously in the possession of the department."
Kirby said they would be subject to a Freedom of Information Act review like the rest of Clinton's emails. She gave the department some 30,000 emails last year that she sent or received while in office, and officials plan to finish releasing all of them by the end of January, after sensitive or classified information is censored. A quarter has been made public so far.
Additionally, Kirby said the agency will incorporate the newly discovered emails into a review of record retention practices that Clinton's successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, initiated in March. "We have also informed Congress of this matter," he added.
These steps are unlikely to satisfy Clinton's Republican critics.
The House Benghazi Committee plans to hold a public hearing with Clinton next month to hear specifically about what the emails might say about the attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11, 2012. And the Senate Judiciary Committee's GOP chairman said he wants the Justice Department to tell him if a criminal investigation is underway into Clinton's use of private email amid reports this week that the FBI recovered deleted emails from her server. The Senate Homeland Security Committee also is looking into the matter.
Clinton has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. "When I did it, it was allowed, it was above board. And now I'm being as transparent as possible, more than anybody else ever has been," she said earlier this week.
In August, Clinton submitted a sworn statement to a U.S. District Court saying she had directed all her work emails to be provided to the State Department. "On information and belief, this has been done," she said in a declaration submitted as part of a lawsuit with Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group.
The Clinton campaign didn't respond immediately to a request from The Associated Press for comment, but on Twitter, Brian Fallon, the Clinton campaign's press secretary, wrote Friday: "We always said the emails given to State dated back only to March 09. That was when she started using http://clintonemail.com ."
Clinton has been dogged for months by questions about her email practices. She initially described her choice as a matter of convenience, but later took responsibility for making a wrong decision.
Separately Friday, State Department officials said they were providing the Benghazi-focused probe more email exchanges from senior officials pertaining to Libya. The committee broadened its scope after examining tens of thousands of documents more specifically focused on the Benghazi attack.
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Sophie Cruz's brief encounter with Pope Francis during his parade in Washington this week appeared to be the kind of spontaneous moment that is so endearing about this pope: an initially hesitant young child wrapping an arm around his neck as he offers a kiss and a blessing.
But for 5-year-old Sophie, the moment unfolded as perfectly as it was scripted by members of a coalition of Los Angeles-based immigration rights groups. They had been preparing for nearly a year for the young girl from suburban Los Angeles to make a dash for the popemobile to deliver a message about the plight of immigrant parents living in the country illegally.
They had even pulled off a similar public-relations coup a year ago in Rome using a 10-year-old girl with the pope.
"We planned to do this from the moment we learned he was coming to the States," Juan Jose Gutierrez of the Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition told The Associated Press. "We have been working for a while now trying to sensitize the American public that dealing with immigration is not just dealing with the people who came in without proper documents but that we also have ... countless children whose parents are undocumented."
Gutierrez said the group decided to use the children of immigrants to represent their push for immigration reforms to the pope, a staunch supporter of immigrants. "We have been looking for children to make the case that we as adults have been making for years," he said.
Sophie was selected for the Washington trip because she "impressed us all so much that we felt she would be our best spokesman," Gutierrez said. If she had been unsuccessful in Washington attracting the pope's attention, he said, she would have traveled with the group to New York and then Philadelphia to try again.
Sophie refused to the leave the pope's side Wednesday until a bodyguard took a handwritten letter and a T-shirt.
Her note to Francis detailed fears that her parents, immigrants from Mexico who don't have legal status in the United States, could be deported. But their risk of being deported is slight under the Obama administration's policies, which focus on deporting serious criminals.
"I believe I have the right to live with my parents," Sophie told the AP after her moment with the pope. "I have the right to be happy. My dad works very hard in a factory galvanizing pieces of metal. All immigrants just like my dad feed this country. They deserve to live with dignity. They deserve to live with respect."
Gutierrez said Sophie crafted her own letter to the pope and wasn't prompted what to tell reporters who caught up with her later.
"She didn't have anyone coaching her," Gutierrez said. "She just spoke from her heart. It all came from her."
The same group, which includes members of the Hermandad Mexicana Transnacional, orchestrated an equally successful effort in Rome last year with 10-year-old Jersey Vargas, who pleaded with Francis to urge President Barack Obama to free her immigrant father from a Louisiana detention center. Following Jersey's encounter, a relative helped post bond for the jailed dad.
The group traveled to Washington with Sophie and her 36-year-old father, Raul, and sent Sophie to the popemobile with a bright yellow T-shirt with a message in Spanish asking Francis to "rescue DAPA." The message referred to Obama's now-stalled program Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Legal Permanent Residents. It would allow millions of immigrants living in the country illegally to apply for permission to legally stay and work here. A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the effort in February as part of a lawsuit by 26 states challenging it.
Sophie and her supporters were preaching to the choir with Francis. In his remarks at the White House before the parade, the pope said, "As the son of an immigrant family, I am happy to be a guest in this country, which was largely built by such families." And in a historic speech to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, he urged lawmakers to respond to the migration crisis in Europe and U.S. immigration issues "in a way which is humane, just and fraternal."
As stage-managed as Sophie's effort was, that the pigtailed-5-year-old was able to wriggle her way onto the parade route along Constitution Avenue and get the pope's attention required a lot of luck considering the massive security entourage surrounding the pontiff.
When Sophie made her first moves toward Francis' modified, open-air Jeep, a uniformed officer appeared to start walking her back to her father and others in her group still behind a security barrier. A different, suit-clad security agent also appeared to shoo the young girl, who appeared hesitant as the officials approached, before Francis himself beckoned her to the side of his Jeep.
Gutierrez said Sophie's success came from a "combination of factors, one being in the right spot at the right time." He added that he thinks Francis may also have remembered Jersey.
"When he saw this little girl," Gutierrez said, "he had to have known in his heart that this was another important message in the form of a little girl."