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Voters faced a fresh barrage of misinformation Tuesday, the latest development in a voting period that has been marred by misleading narratives across social media.

Twitter removed a post, shared from a screenshot on Instagram, in which a person falsely claiming to be a poll worker in Erie, Pa., said he had thrown out hundreds of Trump ballots. A far-right influencer falsely claimed on Twitter said that the National Guard had been deployed to Philadelphia and other cities to prevent unrest in the case of a Trump victory.

#Stopthesteal, a hashtag associated with alleged voter fraud and a Democratic theft of the election, was used more than 50,000 times, driven largely by right-leaning influencers including Donald Trump Jr. and Ann Coulter amplifying isolated incidents, according to researchers. One video, in which a pro-Trump poll watcher was mistakenly prevented from entering a Philadelphia polling location, racked up more than 287 million likes, retweets and views across Twitter by the afternoon as evidence of efforts to steal the election, according to researchers.

Late Monday, in a tweet Twitter restricted with a label, President Trump said the Supremes Courts recent decision about Pennsylvania mail-in ballots will induce violence in the streets. He added, Something must be done!

Many of the attempts appeared specifically targeted at voters in swing states, particularly in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. Some, like the presidents, intimated that violence could take place. His statements echoed concerns by elected officials and businesses, which boarded up storefronts before Election Day.

My biggest fear is the potential for physical violence that we didnt have in 2016, said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory and a former Facebook chief security officer, said on a media call Tuesday morning from the Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of misinformation researchers that examined the #Stopthesteal hashtag.

The lead up to the 2020 election has been uniquely influenced by social media, particularly because in-person campaigning has been more limited by the global pandemic. Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Bidens campaigns have spent millions of dollars on social media and other targeted advertising in recent weeks.

But researchers have cautioned that domestic disinformation has also taken on an increased power this election, as groups attempt to spread lies online and even the president uses his Twitter account to share misinformation to his more than 87 million followers.

Facebook, Twitter, Google and Google-owned YouTube, collectively have held more than 100 scenario-planning exercises, launched a spate of new policies including prohibitions on premature declarations of victory and calls to violence, and taken unprecedented enforcement actions, according to the companies.

They have come up with detailed plans on how they will flag whether the election is decided or not, partnering with media outlets to attempt to slow the spread of misinformation. Facebook and Google have banned political and social ads with the close of polls Tuesday, while Twitter has banned them entirely.

They are trying to prevent a repeat of 2016, when in the weeks after the election they discovered that their platforms were abused by Russian operatives who successfully showed disinformation to American voters.

The final day of voting culminates a period in which disinformation has been spread beyond just social media, including in text messages, email and old-fashioned mail.

Across the U.S. voters received an estimated 10 million robocalls in recent days encouraging them to stay safe and stay home, according to researchers.

Throughout Election Day, Twitter labeled some posts as disputed and potentially misleading about an election or other civic process, including several #StopTheSteal posts that suggested fraud was rampant. But many of them remained on the site, unflagged, including a tweet by Trump campaign official Mike Roman that said Democrats were keeping TRUMP WATCHERS OUT to steal the race. The post had gained more than 11,000 retweets by early afternoon.

On Tuesday, officials in Erie County, Pa., disputed the claims in the viral post regarding Trump ballots being tossed. The person making the statements does not work in any way with Erie County, the county said on its Twitter account.

The dissemination of misleading narratives was highly centralized, and, in places, took on the characteristics of a game. A post on 8kun, the anonymous image board at the center of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, advised the use of particular hashtags, from #Watchyourballot to #VoteInPerson to #Trump2020Landslide. The message illustrated the behind-the-scenes coordination that goes into creating the appearance of an online groundswell.

The presidents tweet about violence in Pennsylvania was labeled by Twitter with a notice that voting by mail and voting in person have a long history of trustworthiness, and that voter fraud is extremely rare. It also took actions to restrict the spread of the tweet. But the tweet had already been retweeted more than 55,000 times before the social media company throttled it, according to the Election Integrity Partnership.

Facebook appended a label to the same post on its site about the security of mail balloting. Still, it received internal pushback from Facebooks own employees saying they should do more, according to internal communications viewed by The Washington Post.

The light touch from the worlds largest social network alarmed David Brody, counsel and senior fellow for privacy and technology at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Its really important for the platforms to raise up the authoritative sources and algorithmically downlink conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated rumors, said Brody, warning about the possibility that the presidents words could lead to real-world violence.

The #stopthesteal hashtag gained momentum Tuesday as users and right-leaning influencers spread the banned poll watcher video and other isolated incidents of improper practices or glitches at polling locations, according to First Draft News, a nonprofit that focuses on tackling misinformation. Pro-Trump users had previously popularized the #stopthesteal hashtag during the 2018 midterm election, as part of similarly baseless allegations of wide-scale voter fraud. There were also some signs the hashtag had been promoted by bots.

Zignal Labs, a media intelligence firm, said the hashtag went from just a few dozen mentions at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning to more than 2,000 every 15 minutes by 8:15.

The video of a Trump poll worker wrongfully being denied entry to a polling place in Philadelphia went viral on Twitter with that hashtag and commentary around efforts to steal the election. A local polling judge incorrectly told him that his certificate only worked at one location in the city, when in fact it worked at any.

Kevin Feeley, a spokesman for the Philadelphia City Commissioner Lisa Deeley, said the locations judge of election made an honest mistake in preventing the watcher from entering the location, and the commissioners office acted quickly in informing him of the correct rules.

The poll watcher did not re-enter that particular location, but Feeley said he did gain admittance to another polling location in Philadelphia.

Narratives pushing unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud have been circulating on social media for months, including from Trump, his adult sons, and affiliated outlets and supporters. Stories have been taken out of context, such as a claim that ballots which were found in a ditch in Wisconsin were put there on purpose to hurt Trump.

A video clip of Biden that was deceptively edited to make it appear as if he was admitting to voter fraud racked up more than 17 million views over the past week, according to the left-leaning human rights group Avaaz.

That has led to additional concerns about potential manipulated videos surfacing Tuesday and in the aftermath of voting, in attempts to cast doubt on results.

The Washington Posts Drew Harwell, Cat Zakrzewski and Tony Romm contributed to this report.

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Online lies and misinformation surge on Election Day - Anchorage Daily News

In the next part of this special Byline Times investigation, Nafeez Ahmed delves into a controversial Alt-Right event attended by key figures in a conservative lobbying group with Home Office funding to research Islamist militancy

In November 2017, both Douglas Murray and Dr Alan Mendoza of the prominent conservative think tank the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), spoke at the annual Restoration Weekend, organised by the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.

Held the year after Donald Trumps election, the 2017 Restoration Weekend was a key celebration of the success of Alt-Right nationalists. It was hosted by David Horowitz, who had spent years mentoring President Trumps senior advisor Stephen Miller, regarded as the driving force behind his administrations racist policies including the legal architecture of the Muslim ban.

An email leak revealed that Miller promoted white supremacist conspiracy theories to the Alt-Right publication Breitbart while forging close ties with its then executive chairman, Steve Bannon. In 2013, Bannon attended a Restoration Weekend event along with his Breitbart sponsors Robert and Rebekah Mercer and came up with the idea of installing a new leader into the conservative movement an outsider to shake things up.

Just six months before the 2017 Restoration Weekend, the HJSs executive director Dr Alan Mendoza invited the host David Horowitz onto his YouTube television show to discuss extremism on college campuses. After raising legitimate concerns about anti-Semitism in universities, Horowitz went on to claim that American Muslim student groups are little more than terrorist front groups orchestrated and funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Mendoza nodded as he listened to Horowitzs claims, even though they have been debunked as Islamophobic conspiracy theory.

Horowitz has been described as a driving force of the anti-black movement. Just a week before the event attended by the HJS, Horowitz declared that the countrys only serious race war is against whites.

Many of the attendees joining Murray and Mendoza at the Restoration Weekend read like a Whos Who of Trumpworld white nationalists: the Breitbart columnist Milo Yiannopoulos; the shock-jock reporter Ann Coulter; and international counter-jihad icon Robert Spencer whose publication Jihad Watch was cited 162 times in a manifesto by neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik who killed more than 70 people in Norway in 2011.

Also present was the far-right British commentator Katie Hopkins, who told the conference that in the UK discrimination against whites is institutionalised and systemic. She was joined by James Damore, the engineer fired from Google after sending out an internal anti-diversity memo, claiming wrongly that biological causes explain the under-representation of women in tech.

Other speakers included Gavin McInnes, the founder of Proud Boys, a group designated as extremist by the FBI in 2018. McInnes has published anti-Semitic material and Holocaust denialism via the Canadian media organisation Rebel News and on his own personal platform. At the Restoration event, he began his talk by describing France as a weak country of homos and then boasted about how the Proud Boys regularly beat the crap out of anti-racism protestors using justifiable violence.

Another speaker was Trumps former deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka, previously Breitbarts national security editor. Forward magazine revealed Gorka to be a member of a Hungarian military order which collaborated with the Nazis by helping to deport thousands of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps in 1944. According to the American Jewish advocacy group, Bend the Arc, Gorka co-founded a far-right political party in Hungary with known anti-Semites and wrote several op-eds for Magyar Demokrata, a paper notable for publishing anti-Semitic articles.

These speakers had been announced well in advance of the event, but Mendoza and Murray attended anyway.

Douglas Murray first attended Horowitzs conference in 2011 the year he joined the HJS as an associate director.

His 2017 speech to the key figures around Donald Trump focused on ethnicity and concluded that Europe was in danger of becoming a swamp and a larger version of Mogadishu.

Drawing on his book The Strange Death of Europe, Murrays main theme was the danger of diversity in Europe resulting from the mass movement of foreigners from Asia and Africa into Europe going on for decades. He described ethnic minorities in Europe as different people who have simply walked into that continent.

He particularly singled out Indian and Sudanese people: The first person from, for instance, India to bring Indian cuisine into the UK does an interesting service, vims up the local cuisine. Its not the case that the next 100 Indians who come in, for instance, bring a hundred times more interesting cuisine.

Its not the case that the first Sudanese poet who enters the UK massively brings interest, and that the next 1,000 people who come in from Sudan continue to just bring ever richer versions of the poetry of Sudan.

He then suggested that a wider range of cuisines in Europe due to immigration would be offset with more gang-rape and beheading.

Murray described Europes ethnic minority communities as fundamentally different people whose presence on the continent means it is no longer the same. Europes Muslim minority would, in particular, be very hard to digest compared to other minorities.

He concluded that Europe is committing suicide, or at least its leaders have decided to commit suicide and warned that they were in danger of passing on something like a large version of Mogadishu to the next generation.

Murray observed: Its in the balance there in Britain as it is here. But in the years ahead were all going to be walking through the same swamp.

His speech to the Trumpworld luminaries was the culmination of Murrays previous thinking. In 2013, for instance, he complained about white Britons being abolished due to too many ethnic minorities in London. As Byline Times reported, Murray has previously endorsed a ban on immigration from Muslim countries and, three months before the Trump campaign announced its Muslim ban, Murray told Frank Gaffney (the man cited by the Trump team to justify the policy) that such a measure could be the solution to the Muslim demographic time-bomb.

At this point, the Henry Jackson Society began receiving funding from the UK Home Office for research on Islamist militancy.

From 2015 to 2017 the same year that the HJS attended the Restoration Weekend the Home Office paid more than 80,000 to the organisation to produce research on Islamist extremism, according to the investigative journalism outlet Declassified.

In 2018, the HJS had a staffer working in the office of then Home Secretary Sajid Javid and, since then, the group has influenced a range of Boris Johnsons foreign policies.

In the year they attended the Restoration Weekend, Murray and Mendoza worked closely with the current Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove who is not only a founding signatory to the HJS statement of principles, but from January to June 2017 was a director at the HJS.

In 2016, the HJS paid Gove 2,764 for a visit to New York. A year later, it paid him 492 for a trip to Washington DC to meet Trump administration officials, Congressional representatives and NGOs.

HJS staff have played key roles in influencing the highest levels of Government policy under Johnson, fed into the UKs counter-extremism strategy, and liaised with the Metropolitan Police.

The Cabinet Office, Michael Gove, Douglas Murray and the Henry Jackson Society were contacted for comment. Gove was asked whether he agreed with the HJS participation in the network of white nationalists, and the comments made by his former colleague Murray. No responses were provided.

As Byline Times will report in Part 4 of this special investigation, the influence of the HJS raises serious concerns about the use of a registered charity as a lobbying front for foreign interests, in light of new evidence of its corporate structure and funding.

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Michael Gove's Lobbyists at the Heart of White Nationalist Trumpworld - Byline Times

On the lawn of Jeff Whritenours house in Kinnelon, New Jersey, a sign reads, Presidents are temporary, the Grateful Dead is forever. A few feet away, a flag bearing the iconography of the Grateful Dead flies above a Trump 2020 banner. Passersby often pause for a double-take, no doubt questioning what many would perceive as conflicting messages. After all, the Dead were liberal, pot-smoking hippies of the San Francisco counterculture; musicians inspired by the LSD experience of the 1960s and the Beat Generation. These attributes arent what naturally comes to mind when thinking of Donald Trumps supporters but Whritenour doesnt see it that way.

Im not a big fan of the president, but at the end of the day, Trump is about individual freedom and so was the Dead, says the insurance claims consultant. His take, along with that of an unknown number of Trump-supporting Deadheads, is that the Grateful Deads philosophy was about individual liberties and not telling people what to do.

I aint buyin it, declares Dennis McNally, the Grateful Deads longtime publicist and author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. McNally worked for the band from 1984 to 2004 and feels that the essence of the Grateful Deads music and its core members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann is to be compassionate and tolerant. The capacity for people to compartmentalize their lives is infinite, and anyone who is serious about being a Deadhead and then supports Trump is more or less consciously overlooking the values that he espouses which are bigotry and cruelty.

The Deads lyrics are not a polemic, there is a lot of room for interpretation and disparate perceptions. Further, its difficult to identify a singular theme or collective Grateful Dead political philosophy. Most of their lyrics were written by Robert Hunter, a poet inspired by folk music whose words elicited no mundane meanings but rather formed an authentic journey into an old, ideal, adventurous storybook America. The Dead saw themselves as meta-political, playing concerts at anti-war protests but never supporting any political candidates. In fact, its rare that an original song by the Dead even reference a news event of its time. The Dead have no Ohio in their repertoire.

Courtesy of Jeff Whritenour

That political agnosticism may in fact be what draws Republicans and libertarians to the band. Deroy Murdock, a political commentator and Fox News contributor, saw the Dead over 70 times and uses the song Liberty specifically Hunters lyric to find my own way home as evidence that the Deads values are inherently conservative. Murdock attended Dead shows in the 80s and 90s with other rightist commentators like Ann Coulter and Marc Caputo. The emphasis of individuality, self-expression, and patriotism is appealing to Trump supporters, says Murdock, who prefers to focus on the presidents policy record rather than his public demeanor. Yet, after over four years of nonstop coverage, late-night tweet storms, and questionable leadership, its hard not to focus on Trumps character. Murdock thinks that Garcia, the Deads somewhat reluctant leader, and Hunter would have found Trump amusing. They would have laughed at his antics.

Actually, Hunter is spinning in his grave, says McNally, who worked closely with the late lyricist and Garcia. Steve Silberman, a New York Times best-selling author who co-produced So Many Roads, a boxset of Grateful Dead music, says of Garcia: Could you imagine Jerry supporting a government kidnapping 500 children and losing their parents? I cant.

This isnt to say the band never took a political stance. In the summer of 1989, members of the Dead testified before Congress to raise awareness of deforestation in Malaysia. Garcia lit a cigarette in the non-smoking chamber before Representative Claudine Schneider, a Republican from Rhode Island, stated that her guess would be 90% of Deadheads did not vote. Garcia himself rarely voted, except as Silberman recounts, for Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964. A few years later in 1993, Garcia stood in the oval office wearing sweatpants and sneakers as Vice President Al Gore explained the origins of the Resolute Desk, wearing a three-piece suit. We would have never gone to the White House if a Republican was in office, says McNally.

Garcias small acts of rebellion were indicative of a Grateful Dead philosophy that put great stock in freedom, autonomy, independence and not preaching to the population. Still his reasoning for being invested in the rainforest issue was: I am an earthling on this planet, pointing toward a spirit of caring that is at the core of the Deads philosophy.

Conservative Deadheads have gotten much more stupid and much more programmed, says Silberman, who fears civil war may be imminent with potential polling place violence on election day and Trumps continued spread of Covid-19-related misinformation. He, like countless others quarantined in their homes for months, has found himself returning to the comfort music of his youth, turning to the Deads melodies and sense of community for something more meaningful, as a place to be reborn at every show.

But Silberman also recalls shows in the 70s and 80s where he felt afraid to hold his boyfriends hand in public, worried about being gay-bashed by those in attendance. Homophobia and sexism ran in the Grateful Dead family, he says.

Murdock, who is a Black gay man, insists that the scene was inclusive. He also feels strongly that Trump is not a racist. If he were racist, he would not have ended mass incarceration, states Murdock, falsely, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue at the heart of conservative Deadheads point of view is the desire for little to no government interference in their private lives. Offers Whritenour: We shouldnt focus on Trump the man, but instead the right to do what I want with my time, money, and life.

North Carolina newspaper editor Brian Clary, who attended Dead shows in the 80s and 90s, counters that the peace and love vibe does not square with Trump at all. If anything, he believes Trump-supporting Deadheads are misinterpreting the songs and the culture. The I got mine, you got yours philosophy that [Trumps] supporters are all about is the antithesis of the Grateful Dead.

Among the Deads guiding mantras is Garcias oft-sung line, Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. And while Deadheads may not collectively agree on the greatest Dark Star jam or who was the bands best keyboardist, never mind politics, fans from all walks of life would endorse the fact that American has the right and duty to make their own decision on election day.

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Wave That Flag: Meet the Deadheads Who Stump for Trump - Variety

Americans are counting down the hours to vote in an embittered election race, pitting incumbent Republican Donald Trump against his Democrat challenger Joe Biden.

Tonight, we should start to get some idea of whether President Trump will keep his place in the White House, orif Mr Biden will deny him a second term.

Many news channels will be providing live election coverage tonight heres how you can stream the event online.

The US election takes place on 3 November 2020.

With the time difference, however, the majority of election shows in the UK will start late tonight, and mainly air in the early hours of 4 November.

The BBCs US Election 2020 programme, can be watched online from BBC iPlayer, either through theBBC One live streamorthe BBC News Channel live stream.

You will also be able to watch a live stream on the BBC News website on theUS Election Live Page, where you will find text updates, key tweets and an interactive map with results and polling data too.

The live programme will be fronted by Katty Kay from Washington and Andrew Neil from London, starting at 11.30pm (GMT) on Tuesday 3 November and will also be shown live on TV on BBC One and the BBC News Channel.

Christian Fraser will show every result from a special screen, while Jon Sopel and Clive Myrie will be with the Trump and Biden campaigns with further reporters including Emily Maitlis in key states.

Tina Daheley will present bulletins throughout the night and experts will be on hand to offer analysis.

The coverage will continue into the next morning, with other presenters taking over in the early hours.

To watch a selection of additional programmes, short videos and documentaries about the US election from the BBC, such as What Does The Election Cost? as well as all the debates, you can head to BBC iPlayer.

You can watch ITVs election night special called Trump Vs. Biden: The Results, live through ITV Hub, here.

The ITVs live coverage, which you can also watch on its TV channel, runs from 11pm (GMT) to 6am and will be led by Tom Bradby, who will be presenting the show from Washington.

He will be supported from the studio by Washington correspondent, Robert Moore and US political analyst Dr. Keneshia Grant.

Additionally, Julie Etchingham will report live from the swing state of Florida, while a cast of politicians, campaigners and voters from across the US political spectrum will also offer insight and analysis.

Those set to make an appearance include Anthony Scaramucci, Ann Coulter and Martin Luther King III.

Sky News can be streamed live online, here and through its YouTube channel here.

Skys election show, calledAmerica Decides, will begin at 10pm (GMT) tonight and will also be available to watch on the Sky News TV channel.

The show will be anchored byDermot Murnaghan, and accompanied by US Correspondent Cordelia Lynch, former aide to Donald Trump, Omarosa Manigault Newman and the former British Ambassador to the US, Sir Kim Darr

Broadcasting from a studio overlooking the White House, the show will present live results, expert analysis, special guests and a bespoke augmented reality studio allowing viewers to visualise the Race to the White House.

There will also be other channels providing live election coverage that can streamed online.

These include CNN which can be watched live, for free, from the UK via its website here. The channel is streaming 24/7 but the official election show kicks off at 9pm GMT (4pm ET).

Most US news channels will be showing election coverage tonight, some of which can be streamed live through YouTube.

These include ABC News which can be watched here, from midnight tonight (GMT).

Others providing coverage that can be streamed on YouTube include CBS News, which starts at 10pm (GMT) and NBC News, which will start early and provide coverage all day today, from 11am (GMT).

While we will know results from many states in the early hours of 4 November, it may be a while longer until we know the who will be the next US President.

Due to thecomplexity of voting during the coronavirus pandemic, states have taken different approaches to processing and counting votes, with some taking longer than others.

There are three basic ways to vote in the US: in person on election day, in person and early, and via a mail-in ballot all of which will be counted separately and on different timescales.

For more information on why it may take longer than usual to find out the results of the vote,see our article here.

The i on TV newsletter is a daily email full of suggestions of what to watch as well as the latest TV news, opinions and interviews. Sign up here to stay up to date with the best new TV.

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US election 2020 live stream: how to watch results online from UK tonight, and what time it starts - iNews

ANew Yorkercartoon shows Donald Trump in an orange jumpsuit. Until last night, his enemies could enjoyably salivate over that prospect. Today, it might look to them as though President Trump is not going to jail, after all. We cannot say yet whether thats because he has won outright, or because he has lost so narrowly he can dispute the result and dictate the terms of his exit. Either way, the Joe Biden blow-out that most of the polls predicted and his supporters nervously expected has not materialized. This is, as a New York Timesheadline said, a nail-biter. It is not yet a repeat of 2016; Biden could well win, but the opinion polls, which set the tone of much of the reporting of this race, and which made much of the political weather, were once again dramatically, embarrassingly wrong.

As I write, Biden has a slight lead in the Electoral College. It looks as if he will win Arizona, which was Trumps in 2016. Immigration seems to have turned the state from red to blue. The next results to watch are those from Georgia and North Carolina if Trump wins both, the race will then be decided by the three Rust Belt states he flipped in 2016: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. If Biden wins Georgia and North Carolina, he would probably need only one of those three states.

At the moment, Trump is ahead in Georgia, but only slightly. One Democratic party operative told me that African American votes from Fulton County outside Atlanta were still being counted and would give the state to Biden. Elsewhere, he said, Bidens vast advantage in mail in ballots would carry the remaining states. Bidens got this. Its true that mail-in ballots favor Biden by a huge margin. Thats part of the reason why Nate Silver a pollster whos been less wrong than others in the past says the final result could be Biden 280, Trump 258.

Or it could be Trump. Almost alone among polling organizations, the Democracy Institute said that Trump would beat Biden.Some early results have matched their predictions. They thought Trump would take Florida with a four-point lead; in the end it was 3.4 percent. Florida could be a special case. President Trump did unexpectedly (and ironically) well among Hispanics there. That was largely because Cuban-American men of a certain age and outlook seem to approve of Trumps macho, unapologetic swagger. We are still waiting to see if all of the Democracy Institutes other state-by-state predictions are borne out and Donald Trump is triumphant.

To understand how we got here, watch or watch again Andrew Neils Spectator TV interview with the director of the Democracy Institute, Patrick Basham.

They discussed the shy Trump voter, people too embarrassed to say publicly that they would cast their ballot for Trump. The percentage of these voters may be only in the low single digits, but that could be more than enough to make the difference in a tight race. The Democracy Institute also took its projections only from people identifying as likely voters instead of from those simply registered to vote the mistake that Basham says other polling organizations made. This is a crucial difference given the devotion of many Trump supporters. Large and enthusiastic crowds came to see Trump in the last days of the campaign. Bidens events could have been held in a campervan, as the conservative commentator Ann Coulter said. If Trump has won, he earned his victory by fighting to the very last rally.

Of course, the votes are still being counted. And in many of the remaining states, the two candidates are separated by a gap of a few tens of thousands of votes, just tenths of a percentage point. There could be a recount in more than one state and then, as widely expected, challenges from both sides in the courts. President Trump has long been telegraphing that this will be his strategy as so often with Trump, he says exactly what he is thinking and we should take him at his word.In the early hours of this morning, he declared that he was ready to go the Supreme Court to right the wrong of what he has repeatedly called (without evidence) a rigged election. Avery sad group of people was trying to disenfranchise millions of Americans. This is fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly we did win this election.

Donald Trump must fear losing the protection of the Oval Office. He was Individual 1, identified as an unindicted co-conspirator in the successful prosecution of his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. Cohen was convicted of paying $130,000 in hush money to the porn actress Stormy Daniels six days before the 2016 election an illegal campaign contribution. Cohen told me recently that this was done at the direction of Trump and hes prepared to give evidence against him. Cohen and many others speculate that Trump will try to pardon himself, or resign the presidency and get Mike Pence to pardon him.

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This might not help Trump. A pardon would apply only to federal crimes. Making an illegal campaign contribution is a federal crime but in this case, if Cohen is telling the truth, it may have involved other, state crimes. The payment was allegedly buried in the Trump Organizations accounts as legal expenses and false accounting is a state crime in New York. More than that, Cohen told me he believed that Trump would almost certainly face state charges of tax evasion and of bank fraud. The Trump Organization is being investigated by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr, who has already convened a Grand Jury. Cohen had spoken several times to state prosecutors about Trumps business practices. He told me: His dangers are vast and significant.

Cohen wouldnt say me exactly what evidence he has given to Vance but there are some clues in his book,Disloyal. Trump is accused of keeping two sets of books one for the banks, another for the IRS. Cohen writes that Trump would order him and other executives to inflate the value of buildings and golf courses for the banks to get bigger loans. For instance, Seven Springs mansion in Westchester cost $7 million but was supposedly given a value of $291 million for Deutsche Bank. For the IRS on the other hand the same properties would be deemed essentially worthless, or better yet the subject of giant capital losseshe could then deduct. Trump reportedly took a $21 million tax deduction on Seven Springs. In one scene from Disloyal,Trump gets a tax refund check for $10 million and holding it up, delighted, says: Can you believe how fucking stupid the IRS is?

The President, like any other American, is innocent until proven guilty. He says that Cohen is a proven liar. But what if Trump believes that the office of the presidency is the only thing keeping him out of jail? He would cling to the gold lame drapes in the Oval Office with his last ounce of strength. And there is always a deal to be done. According to Trump, the art of the deal is to behave so unreasonably at the start of a negotiation that an opponent is desperate for an agreement on almost any terms. If Trump makes enough trouble now in the courts or on the streets could he extract a promise that he will remain a free man after he leaves the presidency? That would be Trumps greatest deal ever.

This article was originally published on The Spectators UK website.

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Donald Trump is preparing to strike his greatest deal yet - The Spectator US