Donald Trump pushes U.S.-made products in New Hampshire

Vice President Joe Biden is certain that Bernie Sanders will endorse Hillary Clinton.

“Oh I’ve talked to Bernie. Bernie’s going to endorse her. This is going to work out,” Biden told NPR’s Rachel Martin in an interview that will air Sunday on “Weekend Edition.”

Asked about Biden’s statement Thursday evening, Sanders said he last spoke with the vice president three weeks ago and repeatedly demurred when asked about a potential endorsement.

“Look, on that issue, we are trying to work with Secretary Clinton’s campaign,” he said during an interview on MSNBC, pointing to his goal to make the Democrat’s party platform more liberal on issues such as tuition-free public college and universal healthcare.

He emphasized that his goal was to do everything in his power to defeat presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, who he called a “pathological liar” who thinks climate change is a “hoax,” and has denigrated Latinos, women, African-Americans and Muslims.

Pressed by host Chris Hayes about whether that included an endorsement and appearances with Clinton at rallies, Sanders again declined to answer directly.

“It is no great secret we are trying to do everything we can right now to make the Democratic platform the most progressive platform in the history of the Democratic party,” he said, adding that he wanted to be able to go back to the millions of supporters who voted for him and detail the concessions he obtained. “I hope we can reach that goal. We are not there at this moment.”

Last week on MSNBC, Sanders answered “yes” to whether he will vote for Clinton in November. He’s since said that Clinton will have to adopt more of his positions to win over his voters.

In an email Thursday afternoon, his campaign called on supporters to help bring Sanders’ delegates to July’s Democratic convention in Philadelphia to vote “for a progressive platform.”

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Donald Trump again defied Republican orthodoxy during an event in a former factory New Hampshire on Thursday, declaring that “we’re better off paying a little bit more” for consumer products if it means protecting American jobs.

“The goods will also be of a higher quality,” Trump added. “We’re known for that.”

The comments came as Trump builds on the issue that has surpassed immigration as his central campaign theme: that decades of trade pacts have depressed U.S. manufacturing and lowered wages.

Thursday’s speech, which included questions from an invited audience, supplemented a more formal address Trump delivered earlier this week in which he threatened to end trade pacts and impose tariffs. The speech drew criticism from the Chamber of Commerce and other longtime stalwarts of the GOP’s business wing, along with a lengthy rebuke from President Obama.

Trump pushed back against their criticism Thursday, insisting that he is in favor of free trade but that the U.S. has done a poor job of making deals, he said.

“Yes, I’m a free trader,” Trump said.

“Here’s my stance on trading: I want to make great deals for the United States,” he said.

Yet he also threatened to impose taxes of 35% on companies that ship jobs overseas, a step that would likely require congressional approval and one that would not fit the usual definition of free trade.

Trump, in response to a question from the audience, also urged Americans to buy more products that are manufactured domestically. Trump conceded he does a lot of business overseas, though he did not discuss that some Trump-branded products are manufactured abroad.

The presumptive GOP nominee also made a joke about Mexico, a country that has been targeted in many of his immigration and trade policies.

When a plane overhead interrupted his speech, he mused that it came from Mexico: “They’re getting ready to attack.”

Hillary Clinton will also hold her first joint campaign appearance with President Obama in North Carolina on Tuesday.

Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch has spent the past two days fending off questions about her private meeting on a government jet with former President Bill Clinton, whose wife’s use of a personal email server while serving as secretary of State is being investigated by the Justice Department.

The 30-minute conversation Monday night, Lynch said, was mostly about personal matters and did not delve into the investigation into Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.

“Our conversation was a great deal about his grandchildren,” Lynch told reporters in Phoenix on Tuesday afternoon. “It was primarily social and about our travels. He mentioned the golf he played in Phoenix, and he mentioned travels he’d had in West Virginia. We talked about former Attorney General Janet Reno, for example, whom we both know, but there was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body.”

The encounter occurred just after Lynch had landed on a government jet Monday evening at the international airport in Phoenix, where she was scheduled to meet the next day with law enforcement officials as part of a nationwide community-policing fact-finding tour.

The former president, who was departing the airport on a private jet, noticed Lynch’s plane had arrived and decided to go over and say hello, said a person familiar with the meeting. He then boarded and spoke with Lynch and her husband, Stephen Hargrove, who had joined the attorney general on the trip.

Lynch on Wednesday told reporters that she did not believe the meeting gave the appearance of impropriety, even though the Justice Department and FBI are in the midst of an investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server while secretary of state.

FBI agents and prosecutors are trying to understand whether Clinton or her aides knowingly or negligently discussed classified government secrets over a non-secure email system when she served as secretary of State.

“My agency is involved in a matter looking at State Department policies and issues,” Lynch said. “It’s being handled by career investigators and career agents, who always follow facts and the law, and do the same thorough and independent examination in this matter that they’ve done in all. So that’s how that’ll be handled.”

Despite her assurances, Lynch was blasted over the meeting by Republicans, who said it raised questions about her fairness in overseeing the probe. Democrats expressed frustration that the former president would put the attorney general in such a position.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said on The Mike Gallagher Show that the meeting was “so terrible” and “one of the big stories of this week, of this month, of this year.”

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tweeted: “Lynch & Clinton: Conflict of interest? An attorney, cannot represent two parties in a dispute and must avoid even the appearance of conflict.”

French President Francois Hollande backed Hillary Clinton for president in an interview published Thursday.

According to a portion of the interview translated by Politico, Hollande said the best thing for U.S. Democrats would be to ensure Clinton gets elected, adding that a Donald Trump presidency would strain U.S.-European relations.

The interview was published by the French newspaper Les Echos.

Hollande isn’t the first foreign leader to voice concern about Trump. British Prime Minister David Cameron called Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong.”

And London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has criticized Trump for his “ignorant” views of Islam and called on Americans to vote for Clinton.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox has consistently bashed Trump for his anti-immigrant views, but less enthusiastically lent his support to Clinton.

“What choice do I have?” he told The Times in May.

Soon after an American Indian tribe announced plans to open a casino at a Catskills horse track, ads started appearing in local newspapers and on radio, sounding an alarm about unbridled crime and corruption.

They came from the New York Institute for Law and Society, a new self-described grass-roots anti-gambling group targeting the St. Regis Mohawks. Its campaign in 2000, supposedly supported by 12,000 “pro-family” donors, warned of the evils an Indian casino would bring: “increased crime, broken families, bankruptcies and, in the case of the Mohawks, violence.”

But there were no 12,000 donors. Virtually all the money for the campaign, more than $1 million, came from Donald Trump.

The institute was the brainchild of Trump’s longtime lobbyist and consultant, Roger Stone, and Trump himself was hands-on — not just paying the bills, but signing off on ad copy or radio scripts depicting the tribe as violent criminals and drug dealers. When Stone hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the Mohawks, Trump secretly paid the bills.

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Republicans who go back on their word and refuse to endorse the party’s nominee for president shouldn’t be allowed in public office, Donald Trump argued.

“They broke their word,” Trump said Wednesday at a campaign rally in Bangor, Maine. “In my opinion, they should never be allowed to run for public office again because what they did is disgraceful.”

Trump’s Republican primary rivals, including Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and John Kasich, opted not to endorse the presumptive GOP nominee despite early assurances that they would support the party’s nominee, no matter who it was.

Trump has struggled to get some conservatives to support his candidacy, including leaders of the party. He has even said he would fund his fight for the White House on his own if necessary.

“I have a lot of cash; I may do it in the general election,” Trump said in a June 21 interview on NBC. “But it would be nice to have some help from the party.”

Republican Sen. Mike Lee angrily denounced Donald Trump, making a personal case for why he won’t endorse his party’s presumptive nominee for president.

During an interview, Lee talked about Trump’s effort during the GOP primaries to falsely tie rival Ted Cruz’s father to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Lee, who calls Texas Sen. Cruz a friend, said he can’t support a nominee who espouses such a conspiracy theory.

“I hope I can get over these concerns,” Lee, of Utah, said on Newsmax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show.” “I hope Mr. Trump can help me identify them. But don’t sit here and tell me, Steve, that I have no reason to be concerned about Donald Trump.”

Lee, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, also said Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from coming to the U.S. reflects religious intolerance. He invoked his state’s large Mormon community, saying his constituents are concerned that they could also be targeted as a minority Christian sect.

Lee said he could change his mind about endorsing Trump if the businessman were to soften his stances.

“Donald Trump can still get a vote from a lot of conservatives like me,” Lee said. “... I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender of the U.S. Constitution, that he is not going to be an autocrat, that he is not going to be an authoritarian.”

President Obama challenged the contention Wednesday that Donald Trump is a populist and got an assist from Mexico’s president, who warned darkly that Hitler and Mussolini used rhetoric similar to Trump’s with tragic results.

In a screed that he himself described as a “rant,” the president said that a populist must fight for the working class and “ordinary people,” which he charged Trump has never done, and not simply criticize the downside of the global economy or denigrate immigrants.

“That’s not the measure of populism,” Obama said. “That’s nativism. Or xenophobia. Or worse.”

Without naming Trump, Obama said people “don’t suddenly become a populist because they say something controversial in order to win votes.”

Obama insisted that he himself has earned the label, though, citing his work as a community organizer early in his career up through the decision he made to bail out the failing auto industry during the heart of the financial crisis at the beginning of his presidency.

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