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Morning Must Reads for Tuesday, November 1, 2016

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Good Tuesday morning from Salt Lake City. Today is the 306th day of the year. There are 60 days left in 2016.

A robocall targeting Utah voters questions Evan McMullin’s sexuality. Legislative Republicans are not financially supporting a GOP candidate in southern Utah. Donald Trump used a legally murky method to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes.

The clock:

  • Today is the last day to register to vote online in Utah (11/1/2016)
  • Seven days until the 2016 presidential election – (11/8/2016)
  • 48 days until the Electoral College meets to cast their votes for president and vice president (12/19/2016)
  • 80 days until Inauguration Day (1/20/2017)
  • 83 days until the first day of the 2017 Utah Legislature – (1/23/2017)
  • 128 days until the final day of the 2017 Utah Legislature – (3/9/2017)

Ten talking points for Tuesday:

  1. Absolutely disgusting. A white nationalist who supports Donald Trump launches a robocall to Utah voters urging them not to vote for Evan McMullin because he may be a “closeted homosexual” [Utah Policy, Deseret News, Tribune]. The Trump campaign “strongly condemned” the call [The Daily Beast].
  2. Legislative Republicans have not donated a single penny to support the campaign of former Rep. Christine Watkins, who is seeking to return to Utah’s Capitol Hill as a Republican after previously holding a seat as a member of Democratic leadership [Utah Policy].
  3. Hillary Clinton pushes back against the FBI’s new email inquiry saying “There’s no case here” [CBS News]. The FBI has begun loading emails belonging to Huma Abedin into a special computer program to determine whether they contain classified information [New York Times]. Abedin says she didn’t know her emails were on a laptop belonging to her former husband Anthony Weiner [NBC News]. John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, says people should stop comparing “emailgate” to the Watergate scandal. Dean was sentenced to prison for his role in Watergate [Huffington Post].
  4. Donald Trump used a legally dodgy method to avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes in the early 1990s. Documents show Trump simply did not report millions of dollars in income to the IRS in the form of debt that was forgiven by his creditors [New York Times]. 
  5. This is really, really weird. Cyber security experts launched an investigation to see if Russian hackers had attempted to breach Donald Trump’s computer systems. Instead, they discovered a computer server registered to one of Trump’s companies was communicating with a pair of servers in Russia owned by Alfa Bank. The Trump server was set up to be almost invisible to outsiders and the communication with the Russian server looks to experts like a secret, direct line of communication between the two servers [Slate].
  6. Some allies of Sen. Orrin Hatch are raising money to establish a “Hatch Center,” which would be located at one of Utah’s universities [Politico].
  7. Donald Trump has refused to pay more than $750,000 his campaign’s pollster [Washington Post].
  8. Rep. Mia Love is maintaining her double-digit lead over Democrat Doug Owens according to a new survey [Tribune].
  9. Rep. Jason Chaffetz says he has received death threats following his tweet last week announcing that the FBI is reviewing more emails that may be related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation [Deseret News]. 
  10. Utah voters are not returning their mail-in ballots at the rate election officials expected [Tribune].

On this day in history:

  • 1512 – The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, one of Italian artist Michelangelo’s most famous works, was exhibited to the public for the first time.
  • 1765 – The Stamp Act went into effect, prompting stiff resistance from American colonists.
  • 1800 – President John Adams and his family moved into the newly built White House after Washington became the U.S. capital.
  • 1952 – The United States exploded the first hydrogen bomb in a test at Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands.
  • 2011 – A U.N. report said the world’s population had topped the 7 billion mark. The U.N. Population Fund predicted 8 billion people by 2025.