Donald Trump Suggests He’d Expand His Plans to Limit Immigration

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign.html

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Donald J. Trump suggested in an interview on Sunday that he would expand his proposed immigration restrictions to include anyone entering the United States from countries or territories “compromised” by terrorism, including allies such as Germany and France.

Mr. Trump’s comments, in an appearance on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” appeared intended to clarify portions of his speech at the Republican convention indicating that he might be rolling back his earlier proposed ban on Muslim immigration. Mr. Trump indicated that the United States needed to protect itself from the failures of countries like France, which he said had allowed itself to be infiltrated by terrorists.

“I actually don’t think it’s a rollback. In fact, you could say it’s an expansion,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with the NBC host Chuck Todd. “I’m looking now at territory.” In the coming weeks, Mr. Trump told Mr. Todd, he would be unveiling a detailed list of countries and territories from which immigrants would be subject to “extreme vetting.”

It has been a tumultuous weekend for both Mr. Trump and the Democratic Party, which was reeling from a data breach that spilled thousands of emails from within the Democratic National Committee, revealing conversations about fund-raising and staffers’ private criticisms of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

The emails included staff members for the committee, which was required to remain neutral in the Democratic primary, strategizing over how to rebut Mr. Sanders’s criticisms of their handling of the primary process and of its chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. In one email, a party official urged colleagues to get reporters to raise questions about Mr. Sanders’s religious faith to undermine him with Democratic voters in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Mr. Trump and his allies seized on the emails on Saturday and Sunday, saying that they proved the Democratic primary had been rigged against Mr. Sanders and that the senator’s supporters should defect from Hillary Clinton to support Mr. Trump.

But in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Mr. Sanders seemed to reject that idea, although he harshly criticized Ms. Wasserman Schultz and repeated his call for her to resign as party chairwoman.

He could not speak for all 13 million voters in the primary, Mr. Sanders said, but believed few would support Mr. Trump. Mr. Sanders argued that the “vast majority” of his supporters believed Mr. Trump was “somebody who lies all the time, somebody who wins his campaign just by vicious attacks against his opponents, somebody who has not brought forth any kind of serious agenda.” Mr. Trump, Mr. Sanders said, opposed raising the minimum wage and wanted to throw millions of people off federal health insurance programs set up under President Obama.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign seized on the hackers’ reported links to Russian intelligence agencies. Appearing earlier on the ABC program, Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, suggested that “Russian state actors” had broken into the D.N.C.’s email accounts and released the emails on Friday in order to help Mr. Trump.

“Experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the D.N.C., stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually of helping Donald Trump,” Mr. Mook said in an appearance on CNN.

Mr. Mook provided no evidence that the Russian government had directed the release of the emails, which were posted Friday by WikiLeaks. An internal D.N.C. audit conducted by the firm CrowdStrike indicated that the hack was perpetrated by two groups of hackers with ties to Russian intelligence.

Mr. Trump has praised President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and suggested he would reconsider the United States’ commitments to NATO, a move that would likely empower Mr. Putin. At the Republican convention last week, Trump allies modified a plank in the party platform calling on the United States government to provide arms to Ukrainian forces fighting Russian and Russian-backed rebels. And Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has worked in the past for Ukraine’s former Russian-backed president, Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Asked on “This Week” whether Mr. Trump or his campaign had ties to Mr. Putin, Mr. Manafort called the claim “absurd.”

He added, “There’s no basis to it.”