How Biden and Trump agreed on where and when to disagree
CNN
For two men who agree on so little, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump could agree on this: They needed to debate.
For two men who agree on so little, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump could agree on this: They needed to debate. After months of speculation over the traditional pre-election face-offs – when they would happen, what they would look like and whether the candidates would actually show up – the 2024 showdowns were quickly announced Wednesday morning after Biden’s campaign laid out its criteria for participating. It was hardly a foregone conclusion. Trump skipped his party’s primary debates, deeming them useless. Biden and his aides had long harbored deep skepticism about the traditional debate format and schedule. To Biden’s team, the move to lay out its debate proposals seized back control of a narrative that he was unwilling or unable to square off against Trump. Some of the president’s advisers hoped that by listing out their terms first, they could box Trump into a format he wouldn’t have chosen for himself. On Wednesday, some Trump allies and advisers expressed frustration after Biden’s public announcement that the quick acceptance of network debates left them playing catch up — something they described as particularly annoying after Trump’s campaign had repeatedly, and publicly, called on Biden to debate. Still, apart from Trump’s desire to hold more than two debates and his urgings for a live audience, many of the conditions laid out in the Biden campaign’s proposal were criteria the Trump campaign also wanted – namely, to move up the schedule by three months and to avoid sharing a stage with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The sudden resolution of one of the contest’s biggest unanswered questions had actually been in the works for weeks, people familiar with the matter said, as the campaigns separately came to the conclusion that debates over the summer would benefit both their candidates and American voters. The calendar appears set for the earliest debate between Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in decades. And a campaign that had been trudging along slowly, through a GOP primary that seemed foretold and a fog of legal problems for Trump, has suddenly jolted into high gear.
Attorneys for Donald Trump conducted an internal investigation into allegations that one of his top aides, Boris Epshteyn, has sought to gain financially from his influence with Trump and others in the president-elect’s orbit, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
The special counsel stressed his decision was not about the strength of his case against Trump
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