Hill, The

The Senate Majority PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Democratic leaders, reported that it raised $19.3 million through the first 20 days of October, setting a record. It’s the most the political action committee, run by former advisers to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and his deputy, Sen Charles Schumer (D-NY), has ever reported raising.

“Record-setting support has us well-positioned for this final stretch of the cycle. In less than two weeks Democrats are going to take back the Senate,” said Shripal Shah, a spokesman for the group. Senate Democrats expect to pick up five to seven seats on Election Day and are focusing their spending in battlegrounds such as New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Nevada, Indiana and Missouri. They need a net pickup of four seats to win Senate control if Hillary Clinton is elected president. Without her in the Oval Office, they need five. The fundraising report shows Democrats are catching up with outside Republican-allied groups. The Senate Leadership Fund, a group linked to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), announced that it plans to spend $25 million on half a dozen Senate races in the final days of the campaign.

[Commentary] For the third time in less than a decade, AT&T is merging again. In the wake of the announcement, there is rampant speculation on whether it’s unconscionable or inevitable. However, whether or not the $85 billion merger rises to the level of an outright rejection or just strong conditions, there is still a far more profound problem, which is not the merger, but the market itself. Four massive firms (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter) now totally dominate the digital communications landscape. Preventing any further consolidation of distribution is a no brainer, but that will still not address the underlying problem. Public policy cannot force firms to compete and the prospects of a new distribution network entering the market are slim to none. Breaking up the dominant firms requires decades of litigation and may not succeed.

Our only option is to ensure these mammoth network operators cannot use their power over the pipes to stymie competition for the content and applications that ride over them. However, the Federal Communications Commission has four active and nearly complete proceedings that will further that goal and the proposed AT&T Time Warner transaction makes completing them all the more critical: Set Top Boxes, Zero rating, Privacy, and Business Data Services.

[Dr. Mark Cooper is the Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America.]

Presidential politics are casting a shadow over the biggest media acquisition of 2016. The outcome of the White House race could help determine the fate of the proposed $85 billion sale of Time Warner to telecommunications behemoth AT&T, an unusual situation for a massive sale. “It’s such an interesting thing about this deal, is the fact that it was announced when it was announced,” said Craig Aaron, president of Free Press, which argues the deal would be bad for consumers. “I think this would be a highly controversial deal whenever it happened, but the fact that it’s happening two weeks out from the election and will be decided by … appointees who nobody knows who they are yet, makes this a much more political fight than maybe it would have been if it had happened at another time.” Neither of the presidential hopefuls has spoken kindly of the proposal.

The State Department is months behind on a request that it explain how a former IT aide’s e-mails appeared to have disappeared, and Republicans are crying foul. Documents obtained by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and given to ABC News reportedly show that the State Department has not responded to a July request from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) despite a demand that it do so within 30 days. The missing e-mails are from Bryan Pagliano, an IT worker responsible for many aspects of the private e-mail setup Hillary Clinton used during her time as secretary of State.

In May, the State Department said that it did not have Pagliano’s e-mail archive, prompting outrage from the Obama Administration’s critics. It’s unclear whether Pagliano deleted his e-mails or they went missing through some other means. Despite the missing archive, the department has located some e-mails that Pagliano sent or received through the e-mail accounts of other government staffers. The National Archives, which has broad responsibilities for federal record storage, asked the State Department to describe the steps it has taken to recover Pagliano’s e-mails this summer. So far, officials have not responded. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the department is “still in the process” of responding to the letter.

[Commentary] The media is rigging this election in favor of Donald Trump by swallowing hook, line and sinker Russia's efforts to boost his campaign. The media continuously reports on hacked e-mails that intelligence officials with a high degree of certainly have traced to Russian hackers. Conveniently, Trump has failed to recognize this reality despite his penchant for truly absurd conspiracy theories such as Muslims in New Jersey cheering the 9/11 terrorist attacks or Sen Ted Cruz's (R-TX) father being part of the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. This hacking represents a blatant and unprecedented effort by a hostile foreign power to influence the outcome of an American presidential election. The hacking is also a serious violation of American law. Under the federal Stored Communication Act, it is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison to hack into a private e-mail server.

So far, leakers linked to the Russians have released tens of thousands of Democratic documents and zero Republican documents. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out whom the Russians are attempting to elect in 2016. The media's complicity in Russian hacking tilts the playing field in favor of Trump because we have no Republican documents to compare with the material contained in the hacked Democratic e-mails, which may or may not have been doctored. It also threatens the long-term health of our democracy. By selectively leaking illegally obtained documents that the media dutifully covers, the Russians have proven that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from such meddling in our elections.

[Lichtman is distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington.]

President Barack Obama gave an “entirely factual” response when asked in 2015 about how he discovered Hillary Clinton used a private e-mail server as Secretary of State, his top spokesman said. President Obama’s claim that he first learned about Clinton’s server “through news reports” was called into question again after an e-mail chain released Oct 25 by WikiLeaks showed a top Clinton aide expressing concern in March 2015 that the president might be accused of lying. "What the president said was an entirely factual response,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. "I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state,” Earnest continued. “But they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny, so I guess they are back to recycling thoroughly debunked conspiracies."

The White House has repeatedly insisted that President Obama did not have knowledge of Clinton’s unusual e-mail server, even though the two did communicate by e-mail during her time at the State Department. But Clinton’s allies privately expressed concern about President Obama’s claim during a March 2015 CBS News interview that he first learned through media reports that the secretary of State used an e-mail system “outside the U.S. government for official business,” as reporter Bill Plante described it while questioning the President. “[L]ooks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news,” Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin told other allies in a March 7, 2015, email published by WikiLeaks. “[W]e need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov,” responded former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills. At a White House press briefing two days after the email exchange, Earnest said that Obama knew about Clinton’s email address because he sent messages to it. But he said the president was unaware of the exact nature of the server or the extent to which she used it.

A top aide to Hillary Clinton appeared to worry in March 2015 that President Barack Obama might be accused of lying about his knowledge of Clinton’s private email server. In a brief email chain released by WikiLeaks, Clinton allies seemed to scurry to respond to Obama’s claim that he was unaware of Clinton’s use of a personal email account while she was Secretary of State until after it became public.

“[L]ooks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news,” Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin told other campaign aides in a March 7, 2015 email, using acronyms for the President and Clinton. “[W]e need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov,” responded Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at the State Department. The White House has insisted that President Obama was unaware of Clinton’s unusual email setup during her tenure at the State Department, even though the two occasionally communicated by email.

AT&T’s chief executive said that he couldn't "prejudge" whether the issue of so-called zero-rating, or providing customers with free data when they view certain content, would hold up the company’s acquisition of Time Warner. Randall Stephenson said that he “can’t prejudge any of this” when asked whether the use of zero-rating could be a problem in getting the deal approved by regulators. “I really don’t know — just going to have to get into the process, put the data out with regulators, and begin that effort, and the sausage will come out the way the sausage comes out,” he said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Zero-rating programs have become controversial in recent years. They allow a carrier to provide free data usage to customers when they’re using a certain application or viewing specific content. The most prominent of these programs is T-Mobile’s Binge On, which allows customers to stream video from major services without it counting against their monthly allotment of data. But other companies, including AT&T, have tested offerings where companies can “sponsor” data usage. Some have speculated that zero-rating could become an issue as regulators consider whether to approve AT&T’s purchase of content giant Time Warner.

[Commentary] Earlier this week, both the Clinton and Trump campaigns contacted supporters advising that this is the “last opportunity to see your name on a major FEC report before Election Day.” It is obviously a shill: the campaigns want money. But behind the sales pitch lies an idea. Maybe forcing people to disclose their political giving isn’t so bad. Maybe disclosure does exactly the opposite of what its detractors say.

For decades federal law has required disclosure of some forms of political spending. When an inspired debate watcher donates more than $200 to a campaign, her name and contribution get posted on the Federal Election Commission’s website. To stay private, one must give below the threshold. The email from Hillary’s campaign told supporters exactly what they had to give to pass the threshold and go public. There is another way to stay private: “dark money.” Instead of giving to a candidate, one can give to “social welfare” organizations, which support candidates but are prohibited from coordinating with them. These organizations spend millions on politics, and law permits their donors to remain secret. Disclosure might “thaw” more speech than it chills.

[Wood is Assistant Professor of Law, Political Science and Public Policy at University of Southern California. Gilbert is Sullivan & Cromwell Professor of Law at University of Virginia. ]

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission’s comment consideration schedule for Network Neutrality rules consequently was seriously delayed. Six hundred staff lawyers at the Commission subsequently spent nearly nine months to gather, divvy up, read, and categorize what eventually totaled 4 million public responses to the proposed rules, costing taxpayers an estimated $4 million. What became immediately clear to me was that -- although not impossible to overcome -- the lack of consistency and shared best practices across all federal agencies in accepting and reviewing public comments was a serious impediment. The promise of Natural Language Processing and cognitive computing to make the public comment process light years faster and more transparent becomes that much more difficult without a consensus among federal agencies on what type of data is collected – and how.

I would suggest expanding the discussion around Artificial Intelligence and regulatory processes to include how the technology should be leveraged to ensure fairness and responsiveness in the very basic processes of rulemaking – in particular public notices and comments. These technologies could also enable us to consider not just public comments formally submitted to an agency, but the entire universe of statements made through social media posts, blogs, chat boards -- and conceivably every other electronic channel of public communication.

[Davis is the founder and CEO of Notice and Comment Inc., a former federal prosecutor, he founded the company while serving as the debate coach for the nationally renowned Howard University debate team.]