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Cleveland officials take a victory lap

 
“We planned for this for a year and a half,” said Cleveland police Chief Calvin Williams, who was in the street directing protesters on Wednesday outside Quicken Loans Arena.
“We planned for this for a year and a half,” said Cleveland police Chief Calvin Williams, who was in the street directing protesters on Wednesday outside Quicken Loans Arena.
Published July 23, 2016

Every time Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams was asked this week about the calmer-than-expected protests outside of the Republican National Convention, he responded with a muted, steady-as-she-goes response.

On Friday, the city's top cop finally exhaled.

"Good morning. Cleveland rocks!" he said to reporters.

After weeks of concern that protests outside the convention would turn dangerous in the midst of a vitriolic campaign season, culminating in the nomination Thursday of Donald Trump, and increased tensions over violence abroad and at home, Cleveland leaders took a victory lap after their public safety success story, completing the week with few arrests or reports of violence.

"We planned for this for a year and a half," Williams said. "We worked it up and down for a year and a half."

During five days of mostly tame demonstrations, police made just 23 arrests, surprisingly few compared with conventions in recent years in New York, Minnesota and Tampa, all where arrests numbered in the hundreds. Aside from a fracas Wednesday over a group's attempt to burn a U.S. flag, the drama in Cleveland this week was confined to the convention hall itself.

RNC ratings fall short

Television is Donald Trump's comfort zone, the medium where he ruled as master of The Apprentice, lured record audiences to Republican primary debates, and deftly outmaneuvered opponents with his camera-ready skills.

For politicos and producers alike, the Republican National Convention here this week was widely anticipated as a ratings bonanza.

It did not live up to the hype.

About 30 million Americans watched Trump's climactic acceptance speech Thursday evening on the major cable news and broadcast channels, according to preliminary average figures released by the networks Friday.

That was about 200,000 fewer viewers than the last Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, received when he addressed his party's convention in 2012.

In one sense, a slight drop on the traditional broadcast networks could have been expected: In the past four years, many Americans have turned to less traditional means to watch televised events, including YouTube, Facebook and livestreams widely available around the web.

But the 2016 race, with its unlikely cast of candidates and dramatic twists, had been attracting record audiences to cable news networks throughout the past year. The 19.8 million viewers who watched the Republican convention Tuesday, across all the major news networks, was notably less than the 24 million who tuned in to the first Republican primary debate on Fox News in August.

DNC emails get leaked

Wikileaks posted a massive trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails online Friday, in what the organization dubbed the first of a new "Hillary Leaks" series.

The cache includes nearly 20,000 emails and more than 8,000 file attachments from the inboxes of seven key staffers at the political party, including communications director Luis Miranda and national finance director Jordan Kaplan, according to the Wikileaks website. The emails span from January 2015 through late May and are presented in a searchable database.

The cache appears to contain sensitive personal information about some donors, including Social Security numbers, passport numbers and credit card information.

The DNC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Duke bids for Senate

David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, embarked on a campaign Friday to seek a U.S. Senate seat as a Republican in Louisiana, where he will try to capitalize on his history of inflammatory speech and on the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

The decision by Duke, a former state representative whose unsuccessful campaigns include bids for Congress, governor and president, thrust him into a sprawling field for the Senate seat and intensified what was already poised to be a raucous race.

But before Duke could even file his qualifying paperwork in Baton Rouge, the capital, Republicans there and in Washington were distancing themselves from a campaign they plainly expected to be marked by racism and anti-Semitism.

Judge pondering suit

A federal judge said Friday that he is inclined to deny a request by Donald Trump's lawyers to dismiss a lawsuit that accuses the Republican presidential nominee of defrauding customers at the now-defunct Trump University.

U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel did not elaborate on his thinking during a lengthy hearing in San Diego.

Trump's attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, urged the judge to reconsider, calling the lawsuit a "gross overreach" of federal civil racketeering statutes. He told the judge the plaintiffs have failed to show that Trump himself orchestrated allegedly misleading marketing claims.

"He did not run Trump University. He was not the chief operating officer. He did not direct the day-to-day affairs," Petrocelli said. "The idea that he is somehow at the center of it is not supported by the evidence in the case."

Curiel will issue a final decision in writing at a later time.

Information from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press was used in this report.