"The Poor People’s Campaign” next week is holding what the social justice group says is the largest 2020 presidential forum so far where candidates take questions, and front-runner Joe Biden has agreed to appear.

Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Michael Bennet, as well as Rep. Eric Swalwell, Julián Castro, Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson and Wayne Messam, have also said they’ll be at the June 17 event in Washington, according to the the organization.

The event has the potential be an adversarial setting for the 2020 candidates. Rev. William Barber, who co-leads the organization with Rev. Liz Theoharis, said the presidential candidates will take questions directly from them and low-income activists.

“We cannot have another election cycle like we had in 2016, where we had 26 presidential debates in the primary and general election — and not one focused on systemic voter suppression and gerrymandering, and not one focused on poverty,” Barber said. “We have to demand that we focus on these issues.”

The organization said it expects about 1,000 people to attend the three-day gathering that the presidential forum is a part of, including members from 40 states, along with religious leaders, union representatives and economists. The Poor People’s Campaign also invited President Donald Trump to the town hall, but he is not expected to attend, organizers said.

Over the next year and a half, the Poor People’s Campaign is planning to hold a series of town halls, trainings and voter-registration drives in an effort to mobilize Americans who do not typically vote in presidential elections. The group said the effort will culminate in a “major” march on Washington in the spring of 2020.
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President Donald Trump took another dig at former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday, claiming the Democratic primary front-runner’s looks and mind are less sharp due to age.

At 72 and 76, respectively, Trump and Biden are among the oldest candidates seeking the White House in 2020. But the president’s comment came in the form of a tweet responding to “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough’s remark earlier Wednesday that Trump “looks like he’s about 20 years younger than a lot of Democratic candidates.”

“He can engage the audience,” Scarborough said of Trump on the MSNBC morning show. “He can engage viewers, despite the hateful rhetoric, despite everything else. You can see that guy is gearing up for 2020. And yes, Democrats, he’s going to be hard to beat.”

Trump commented on a tweet linking to a Washington Examiner article summing up Scarborough’s comments and wrote: “Thank you Joe and remember, the BRAIN is much sharper also!”

The president has already gleefully touted his age in the early stages of the 2020 primary, comparing himself to the two Democrats he reportedly views as his most likely challengers in the general election — Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is 77. Trump last month called himself “a young, vibrant man” while talking to reporters, claiming Biden and Sanders make him look youthful and energetic.

Trump has reportedly told his aides, however, that he views Biden as his biggest threat in 2020 — perhaps fueling extra insults lobbed at the former vice president. In a speech in Louisiana on Tuesday, the president alleged that Sanders “has a lot more energy than Biden.”

“But it’s energy to get rid of your jobs,” Trump continued during a tangent bashing a slew of the 20-plus Democratic primary candidates. “He’s got the opposite energy that you produce. Not good energy, you don’t like his energy.”

All three white male septuagenarians, though, will likely fight for overlapping segments of voters, competing to win the blue-collar and Rust Belt blocs that helped secure Trump’s victory in 2016. And Biden and Sanders face a young and diverse pool of primary contenders.

Scarborough on Wednesday played a clip of Trump’s diatribe from the prior day.

“Let’s be blunt about Donald Trump,” he said. “That guy can do on a campaign stage what nobody else can do.”

The “Morning Joe” host has a complicated relationship with the president. Scarborough and his co-host and wife, Mika Brzezinski, were once friends of Trump but have been deeply critical of him since he entered the White House.

Scarborough is a former congressman and Republican, who announced he was leaving the GOP to become an independent in 2017, stating his personal values clashed with what the party stood for under Trump’s leadership.

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The president has often launched attacks at “Morning Joe” from his Twitter account over the course of his campaign and presidency, repeatedly criticizing the show’s ratings and characterizing it as “fake news.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham sharply rebuked Donald Trump Thursday for saying he would likely take dirt on his 2020 opponents from a foreign government, though he also gave the president an out, calling it potentially a “mistake of law.”

“That’s not the right answer,” Graham told reporters Thursday. “A foreign government comes to you as a public official and offers to help your campaign giving you anything of value, whether it be money or information on your opponent, the right answer is no.”

In an interview Wednesday with ABC News, Trump told anchor George Stephanopoulos that he wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to alert the FBI if he was presented with damaging information on a political opponent by an agent of a foreign government except for if there was perceived wrongdoing.

“It’s not an interference, they have information — I think I’d take it,” Trump said. “If I thought there was something wrong, I’d go maybe to the FBI — if I thought there was something wrong.”

The president also brushed off the fact, when pointed out to him, that his opinion lies in direct conflict with that of FBI Director Christopher Wray, who Trump then said was “wrong.”

Graham said he’d been consistent in his views on the issue, noting that he agreed with Wray. But he, along with other Republicans and the White House in defending Trump, conflated the Trump campaign’s willingness to meet with Russians claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton in 2016 with the Steele dossier. The unverified opposition research on Trump was compiled by a former British spy and was initially funded by Republicans, then the Clinton campaign, and ultimately wound up in the hands of the FBI.

Graham made clear on Thursday that “I don’t want to send a signal to encourage this,” but said he hoped he could find common ground with Democrats.

“I think it’s a mistake. I think it’s a mistake of law,” he said, adding that “I hope my Democrat colleagues will be equally offended by the fact that this actually did happen in 2016 where a foreign agent was paid for by a political party to gather opposition research. All those things are wrong.”

Current campaign finance law prohibits foreign nationals from directly or indirectly making, among other things, “a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value,” which Graham said Thursday he thought explicitly outlawed the kind of help Trump said he would be willing to accept.

“But I’m willing to make it clear if we need to,” he added.

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President Trump on Thursday ordered that the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. in the coming year be cut to 18,000, down from the administration’s previous refugee ceiling of 30,000.

Updated 8:38 p.m. ET

President Trump has ordered that the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S. in the coming year be cut nearly in half to 18,000, down from the administration’s previous refugee ceiling of 30,000.

The limit represents the lowest number of refugees seeking protection from violence or political persecution allowed into the country since the modern refugee program was established in 1980.

The new cap, which marks the third time the Trump administration has dwindled the refugee limit, would also be a more than 80% decline compared with the last year of the Obama administration, when the U.S. allowed up to 110,000 refugees who were fleeing war, persecution and poverty to resettle in America.

Trump officials also announced that this year cities and states will have to provide written consent before accepting foreigners fleeing persecution, allowing localities to opt out of accepting refugees.

The administration argues it needs to devote its energy to dealing with a humanitarian and security crisis along the southern border, where tens of thousands of asylum-seekers are arriving every month.

According to senior administration officials who briefed reporters on Thursday, the U.S. will accept up to 5,000 people fleeing religious persecution, a maximum of 4,000 Iraqis who have assisted the U.S. military and no more than 1,500 people from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. An additional 7,500 migrants seeking family reunification and who have already been cleared for resettlement could be accepted.

The International Refugee Assistance Project’s Betsy Fisher called the new limits a “shockingly low refugee admissions goal,” warning that the policy “will all but ensure that people in need of safety will be left in dangerous conditions.”

But senior administration officials defended the action by arguing that the focus needs to be on protecting those already in the U.S.

“At the core of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy is a commitment to make decisions based on reality, not wishes,” the State Department said in a statement announcing the new policy.

Administration officials also cited the nearly 1 million backlogged cases in immigration courts in the U.S., many of which are pending asylum cases.

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“The current burdens on the U.S. immigration system must be alleviated before it is again possible to resettle large number of refugees,” the administration said in a statement. “Prioritizing the humanitarian protection cases of those already in our country is simply a matter of fairness and common sense.”

Immigration rights advocates swiftly criticized the new asylum limit.

Daryl Grisgraber of Oxfam America called the announcement “immoral and un-American.”

“In their senseless quest to keep foreigners out, this administration proves they are willing to abandon our nation’s founding principles and outright reject human rights,” Grisgraber said.

Separately, Trump issued an executive order to allow states and localities to refuse the resettlement of refugees in their communities, which is expected to face challenges in court.

Ryan Mace with Amnesty International USA slammed both moves.

“To cut the number of refugees the U.S. will accept to this low of a number reflects nothing more than this administration’s attempts to further hate, division, and prejudice in a country that once valued dignity, equality, and fairness.”

In justifying the order giving local governments the ability to turn away people seeking asylum, one senior administration official said state and local officials are best positioned to know the resources and capacities that have to devote to resettlement.

“So the administration wants to provide for closer coordination with them and a more clearly defined role for them in the process of selecting sites for initial resettlement,” the official said.

LAS VEGAS — Kamala Harris hired a dream team of operatives. Joe Biden has solid establishment support. Bernie Sanders heads a volunteer army. And Julián Castro is seen as a “sleeper.”

But of the two dozen Democrats running for president, none matches Elizabeth Warren when it comes to the size of her campaign operation, the crowds at her rallies and the buzz among activists and operatives in Nevada.

“Elizabeth Warren just has a gigantic campaign,” said Laura Martin, executive director of the social justice organization Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “There are counties all over rural areas where some campaigns are just doing tours, but she has staff there. And that was a strategy President Obama had in 2008 when he won Nevada.”

Another Democratic operative put it more bluntly: “Warren has built a monster.”

Among 17 Democratic strategists, activists and experts interviewed by POLITICO for this story, Warren’s campaign was mentioned most often as the most impressive of the field, followed by Harris’.

The standing of the two women speaks to their early organizing in the state, the on-the-ground experience of their staffs and one of Nevada’s unique political distinctions: the power of women. It’s the only state in the nation whose U.S. senators are both women and where women constitute the majority of the state Legislature and congressional delegation — a triumph of progressivism and political organization powered by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s vaunted political machine.

Reid is neutral in the race. But he, like the others, singled out Warren’s organization in the state without prompting. In Nevada, Reid said, boots on the ground are more critical than, say, a TV advertising campaign that can make the difference in other states such as New Hampshire.

“Nevada is a hands-on game. For example, Elizabeth Warren is going to open 10 new offices this week in Nevada. If you want to win a caucus state, that’s what you have to do, things like that,” Reid said, though the Warren camp says it is opening 5 offices this week and will have a total of 6 in the state. “All the candidates are setting up offices; she just has got more than any that I’ve heard of, so far.”

Paradoxically, the front-runner in the early polls of Democrats in Nevada and the nation — Biden — isn’t singled out for having a top campaign, in part because he started so late relative to the others. But the former vice president has less ground to make up because of his high name recognition, positive brand with Democrats and deep connections to politicians in the state.

Biden and Harris are slugging it out for endorsements, and his campaign scored a political coup by earning the support of rising star Yvanna Cancela, the state’s first Latina state senator and a former Reid staffer and past political director of the powerful Culinary Workers Union. Biden’s campaign is counting on strong union support and was hosted on previous trips by the unions for painters and electrical workers.

A critic of Biden’s, former assemblywoman and 2014 lieutenant governor candidate Lucy Flores, said Biden is favored to win because of his name recognition, money and political connections. Plus, she said, Biden owns the moderate lane in the state while Warren and Sanders carve up the progressive vote. If Biden wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, as polls indicate he would right now, he would be likelier to win third-in-the-nation Nevada.

“Sanders lost some support but still has big name ID,” said Flores, who had accused Biden of unwanted touching. She added that Sanders, who narrowly losing the Nevada caucus in 2016, still has a legion of devoted volunteers and experienced campaign hands who know the vagaries of Nevada politics.

“You shouldn’t discount experience dealing with the Nevada caucus because it’s such a shit show,” Flores said.

There’s scant polling in Nevada in part because it has a caucus, which is far more difficult to poll, especially this far out. Also, Nevada this year has a virtual caucus and an early vote component for the first time, which make turnout projections so difficult that state Democratic Party officials won’t hazard a guess as to what the composition of the electorate will look like.

In the absence of polls, insiders are paying more attention to tangible signs on the ground: the size of campaign teams, endorsements, crowd sizes and candidate visits.

Of the top-tier candidates, Biden has visited the least during the campaign so far — four times — and Harris has campaigned there the most, eight times, according to the Nevada Independent’s candidate tracker. Warren and Sanders are tied with six visits each. Warren was one of the first candidates to participate in rural county “virtual meet-and-greets” to ensure candidates don’t just stick to Las Vegas and Reno.

In all, 19 candidates visited Nevada last weekend for an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees conference, around which many built two full days of outreach events that extended into rural areas.

The enthusiasm gap between Warren and Biden was apparent in Henderson over the weekend. Biden drew a crowd of 200 on Saturday at the Sun City MacDonald Ranch senior community center. The night before, across town at the Green Valley High School gym, Warren packed in 750 at a town hall.

In early July, Warren’s campaign hosted an event at an architecture firm in Reno. About 150 people were expected, but 800 showed up. The last time a crowd that big came for a political event at the venue was during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign, when she was winning. Clinton won the popular vote in the state by nearly 6 percentage points that year, but she lost the caucus count to Barack Obama by one delegate.

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For Castro, Nevada is a make-or-break state. He’s visited nine times, the most of any candidate, and has made deep inroads with the grassroots.

“Julián Castro could be a sleeper,” Martin, the social justice advocate, said. However, many believe he’s just too overmatched by the top-tier candidates to break through.

With eight visits, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is right behind Castro in the number of campaign stops, tied with Harris. But like Castro, Booker is failing to gain traction in the eyes of insiders or polls. Booker has personal roots in Nevada, reminding reporters at the AFSCME conference that his mother lives in Las Vegas.

Booker, Castro and Harris are the only major nonwhite Democratic candidates, and Nevada is the first early state with a majority nonwhite population; 28 percent of the Democratic electorate is Latino, 14 percent is African American and 11 percent is Asian American and Pacific Islanders, the fastest-growing segment of the Nevada electorate and one that has been heavily courted by the candidates.

“The culture is shifting. It used to be we were afterthoughts. Now people understand AAPI is a determining group in Nevada,” said Grace Vergara-Mactal, executive director of Service Employees International Union.

Harris has also intensified her African American outreach, holding events last weekend at a Baptist Church and at a community center in North Las Vegas, a city with a large black population.

“She has a strong, strong grip on the black community, but she’s making sure to make her rounds around Nevada,” said Shaundell Newsome, a Las Vegas businessman and black business community insider who noted Harris is “pushing hard" with members of her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

“We haven’t really seen much of Biden. I haven’t had a Biden sighting,” Newsome added.

One of Harris’ biggest assets is geography. Not only is California next door, Democrats and union members from the state are frequently imported into Nevada to help political campaigns there. Harris’ campaign, an adviser acknowledged, wants to run a “two-state strategy” that takes advantage of the kinship between the two states and the fact that absentee voting in California’s March 3 primary will be going on during Nevada’s caucus, which ends Feb. 22.

Harris’ top-level state staff is also seen as a major advantage: Reid machine alumna Megan Jones, Obama-Clinton veteran Emmy Ruiz and Lauren Brooks, who worked on Jacky Rosen’s successful Senate bid last year. Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, is also a Reid veteran, as is Warren’s communications director, Kristen Orthman.

Warren’s operation earns broader praise because of its attention to detail and its apparent omnipresence.

During the legislative session, Warren’s team stood out in the state Capitol by testifying on behalf of an abortion-rights bill. It was signed into law by newly elected Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, a bright spot for Democrats as they watched Republican legislatures in other states crack down on abortion rights.

The campaign also focuses on the finer points. Operatives noted that others, Warren’s Nevada team members all have the same Twitter avatar backgrounds and launched a “#NVertheless” social media campaign that weds the Nevada’s postal abbreviation with Senate Majority Mitch McConnell’s admonishment of Warren that she adopted as a badge of honor.

Kenia Morales, an organizer with America Votes Nevada, said the campaign discipline of Warren, Harris and Sanders stands out even more when compared with Biden’s campaign. She noted that at an event earlier this year, his team had campaign stickers available for volunteers, but no T-shirts.

“It shows to me how important Nevada is or isn’t, from an optics perspective,” Morales said. “If there are 20 Bernie Sanders folks all in Bernie Sanders hats and shirts with a clipboard and giving out stickers, and you see five Biden folks in their regular clothes with the Biden stickers on their clipboard, it’s like: ‘Is Biden taking Nevada seriously?’ I don’t know.”

David Siders contributed to this report

The inmate population at the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, once stood at nearly 700 but has since dwindled to 40.

The U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, is nearly empty these days, but President Trump is explicitly ruling out the possibility of sending thousands of captured Islamic State fighters there.

“The United States is not going to have thousands and thousands of people that we’ve captured stationed at Guantánamo Bay, held captive at Guantánamo Bay for the next 50 years and us spending billions and billions of dollars,” Trump told reporters Friday during an appearance at the White House with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

“I want the countries to take back the captured ISIS fighters,” Trump added, noting that many of these captives come from European nations, including Germany and France. “And if they don’t take them back, we’re going to probably put them at the border, and then they’ll have to capture them again.”

Few of the foreign ISIS fighters captured on the battlefield in Syria and Iraq have been repatriated. Without embassies in those war-torn nations or extradition treaties, European allies of the U.S. have been reluctant to accept nationals being held as prisoners of war.

“It is certainly not as easy as they think in America,” German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas told reporters earlier this year. “German citizens have the right to return, but we have little ability in Syria at present to check whether German citizens are actually affected.”

Approximately 2,000 fighters are being held by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Defense Forces in northeastern Syria with assistance from U.S. military forces. Trump demanded at a separate White House event Friday that their home countries “take those people back, put them on trial, and do what they have to do to them.”

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There is growing concern among U.S. and SDF officials that the makeshift prisons where the fighters are being held are vulnerable to attacks by the captured insurgents’ comrades-in-arms.

While campaigning in 2016, Trump promised he would send more prisoners to Guantánamo Bay. “We’re gonna load it up with some bad dudes, believe me,” he told a rally in Sparks, Nev. “We’re gonna load it up.”

But no new prisoners have been sent to the Guantánamo lockup since the final year of the George W. Bush administration. An inmate population there of nearly 700 at its peak dwindled to 41 by the time Trump took office. With the transfer last year of one of those captives, the number now stands at 40.

Renovation and expansion of prison facilities in Guantánamo along with the construction of permanent housing for guards had fueled speculation that preparations were underway for an influx of ISIS fighters. Trump signed an executive order last year reaffirming the need to keep the Guantánamo stockade in operation.

Trump said last month that European leaders, who have long criticized the Guantánamo prison, had asked him to use that facility to house the ISIS fighters captured in Syria and Iraq. “They say to us, ‘Why don’t you hold them in Guantánamo Bay for 50 years and you just hold them and spend billions and billions of dollars holding them?’ ” Trump said at a Kentucky veterans convention. “And I’m saying, ‘No, you got to take them.’ “

Trump’s emphasis on the cost of holding inmates in Guantánamo coincides with recent reports detailing how $6 billion has been spent keeping terrorism suspects locked up and how the annual cost per prisoner has risen to $13 million.

Trump did not explain how the U.S. might go about carrying out his threat that unless European allies accept nationals who are Islamic State prisoners of war, “we’re releasing them at the border.”

He did make clear, though, that he is not contemplating Guantánamo as an alternative destination for those captives.

DES MOINES, Iowa — Joe Biden on Thursday adamantly defended his assertions that President Donald Trump embraced white supremacists after a deadly demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., engaging in an animated exchange after his public remarks here.

After the former vice president’s turn on the soap box at the Iowa State Fair on Thursday, a Breitbart reporter confronted Biden, accusing him of mischaracterizing Trump’s remarks after the 2017 demonstrations.

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At the suggestion that Trump had condemned the actions of marching white supremacists, Biden grew adamant, wagging his finger as he described the demonstrators as hate-filled with “veins bulging.”

“No he did not, he walked out and he said — let’s get this straight — he said there were very fine people in both groups,” Biden said as he slogged through a scrum of media and supporters at the fair. “They were chanting anti-Semitic slogans, carrying flags.”

Biden has repeatedly pointed to Trump’s response to Charlottesville as the central reason for his entering the 2020 presidential race, framing his candidacy as a quest to regain the soul of America. On Thursday before a state fair crowd — as he does in nearly every stump speech — Biden again pointed to Charlottesville.

“He said there were ‘very fine people in both groups,’” Biden told fairgoers. “No sitting president has ever said something like that.”

For his part, Trump has defended his remarks after Charlottesville.

“If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” Trump said in April. “I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general.”

At the time, Trump faced intense criticism for not denouncing the marchers and seeming to offer a moral equivalence between the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who incited the rally and those who protested against them.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler and President Trump attend an event about the environment at the White House in July.

The Trump administration is following up on President Trump’s threat to go after California for pollution that he blames on the state’s large homeless population. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom Thursday expressing concern that he is failing to enforce the Clean Water Act.

Trump said after a visit to California last week that San Francisco is violating pollution laws by allowing needles and other waste from homeless encampments to drain into the ocean.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed responded to the letter, rejecting Trump’s claims.

“I’m sick of this president taking swipes at our city for no reason other than politics,” Breed said. “As I’ve said before, there are no needles washing out to the Bay or ocean from our sewer system, and there is no relationship between homelessness and water quality in San Francisco.”

The EPA letter expands Trump’s complaints, saying that the state is not acting with enough urgency to address environmental problems related to homelessness.

“California is responsible for implementing appropriate municipal storm water management and waste treatment requirements as part of its assumed federal program,” Wheeler wrote. “The state is failing to properly implement these programs.”

The letter said the alleged violations put nearly 800,000 residents at risk.

Wheeler asked Newsom to respond in 30 days about what the state plans to do about it.

A spokesman for the governor also responded to the letter.

“The president is abusing the powers of the presidency and weaponizing government to attack his political opponents. This is not about clean air, clean water or helping our state with homelessness,” said Nathan Click, spokesman for Newsom. “This is political retribution against California, plain and simple.”

The Trump administration and California are in an escalating fight over a range of issues, including homelessness, the environment and immigration.

During a fundraising trip to California last week, the president portrayed the homeless as harmful to the state: “If these Democrat liberal politicians don’t straighten it out, the federal government will have to come in. We’re not going to lose cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and others that are great cities. We’re not going to allow that to happen to our cities.”

Trump also said homeless people scare away foreigners who want to live in those cities.

Trump’s statements have provoked the ire of homeless advocates in California. David Lewis, the executive director of environmental group Save The Bay, said Trump’s sudden interest in the homeless crisis is purely political.

“The way to reduce the impacts from homeless encampments is to reduce homelessness,” said Lewis.

Earlier this week, Wheeler sent a letter to the California Air Resources Board, accusing the state of having the worst air quality in the United States. He threatened to withdraw billions of dollars in federal highway money if the situation does not improve.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s News Desk.

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Microsoft said it has seen “significant cyber activity” by a hacker group with suspected ties to Iran.

Microsoft says a hacker group with ties to Iran has targeted a U.S. presidential campaign, in the latest sign that foreign governments may try to influence the 2020 election.

In a blog post published Friday, Tom Burt, a Microsoft security executive, said the company has seen “significant cyber activity” by a group it is calling Phosphorus. Burt said Microsoft believes the group “originates from Iran and is linked to the Iranian government,” although he did not say how the company reached that conclusion.

A Microsoft spokesman declined to name the campaign, citing privacy concerns. Burt said the hackers also tried to break into the accounts of current and former U.S. government officials, journalists covering politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran.

The attacks took place in August and September, according to Microsoft. Burt said hackers made more than 2,700 attempts to identify email accounts connected to specific customers and carried out attacks on 241 of those accounts.

They compromised four accounts, but none were associated with the political campaign or government officials, Microsoft said.

The hackers collected personal information, including phone numbers, in their efforts to gain access to the email accounts using password reset or account recovery functions, the company said.

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Microsoft Says It Discovered — And Stopped — Attempted Cyberattack Tied To Russia

“While the attacks we’re disclosing today were not technically sophisticated, they attempted to use a significant amount of personal information both to identify the accounts belonging to their intended targets and in a few cases to attempt attacks,” Burt wrote in the blog post. “This effort suggests Phosphorus is highly motivated and willing to invest significant time and resources engaging in research and other means of information gathering.”

Intelligence agencies have warned that foreign governments including Iran may try to influence American politics leading up to next year’s election.

In July, Burt said Microsoft had flagged nearly 800 cyberattacks suspected of being carried out by nation-states on political organizations.

Facebook and Twitter have each suspended hundreds of accounts originating from Iran that were linked to a coordinated disinformation campaign.

A lobbyist for the U.S. Soccer Federation reached out to at least five Democratic presidential campaigns ahead of their primary debate last month to argue that the women’s national team isn’t paid less than the men’s team.

The soccer organization has been fighting a highly publicized lawsuit brought by the World Cup-winning women’s team, and the federation apparently believed the players’ claims of being underpaid might become an issue in the Democratic debate, emails obtained by POLITICO show.

“Given the high profile nature of this issue, and the fact that it could come up during the debate, the U.S. Soccer Federation wants to be sure all of the candidates have access to all available information,” Ray Bucheger, a lobbyist hired by U.S. Soccer, wrote in an email to one of the campaigns late last month.

Bucheger also sent to several campaigns a presentation U.S. Soccer has circulated on Capitol Hill in recent weeks as part of a lobbying campaign to push back against the women’s pay claims. Bucheger and another lobbyist, along with U.S. Soccer’s general counsel, Lydia Wahlke, have met with staffers for lawmakers who have introduced legislation designed to force U.S. Soccer to pay the women’s and men’s teams equally.

Staffers for five presidential campaigns contacted by U.S. Soccer shared details of Bucheger’s outreach on the condition that POLITICO not identify which candidates they worked for. U.S. Soccer declined to answer questions about Bucheger’s efforts to reach the campaigns. Bucheger didn’t respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear how many campaigns were approached. POLITICO reached out to the campaigns of all 20 Democrats who participated in the debate last month. Several said they weren’t aware of any outreach from Bucheger, and others did not respond to requests for comment.

Patricia Ewing, a spokeswoman for Marianne Williamson’s campaign, said no one from U.S. Soccer had reached out ahead of the debate.

“If they had, Marianne Williamson would have told U.S. Soccer to pay the women more than the men, since it is the women that are world champions,” she wrote in an email to POLITICO.

In the lawsuit the women’s team filed against U.S. Soccer in March, they argued, among other things, that under a previous contract, a player on the women’s team could have earned in a year as little as 38 percent of what a men’s team player made.

U.S. Soccer has hired two Washington lobbying firms, FBB Federal Relations and Van Ness Feldman, to push back against those claims. The lobbyists they’ve hired have met with staffers for lawmakers who introduced equal-pay legislation, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-Calif.), both of whom have cited the 38 percent statistic in pushing for pay equity.

The presentation given to congressional staffers and sent to presidential campaigns emphasizes the benefits the female players receive — including a guaranteed salary, maternity leave, a nanny subsidy, injury protection, health benefits, and retirement perks — that the male players do not. It also states that the women were paid nearly five times as much as the men last year, earning $275,478 in average cash compensation per player, compared with $57,283 for the men’s team. Both teams have criticized those numbers as misleading.

Comparing how the women’s and men’s teams are paid is tricky because they play different numbers of games each year and their compensation is structured differently. Molly Levinson, a spokeswoman for the women’s team players in their lawsuit, said the presentation Bucheger sent to the campaigns contained “inflated and cherry-picked numbers.”

“Imagine the proudest time of your life was putting on a USA jersey, working harder than ever, winning the World Cup,” Levinson said in a statement Friday. “Then imagine coming home to find that [U.S. Soccer], your employer, the organization whose stated purpose is to promote and support you, has had hidden meetings with lawmakers to diminish and undervalue you.”

Neil Buethe, a U.S. Soccer spokesman, said the organization was trying to provide accurate information about how the women’s team is compensated.

“There was a dearth of information publicly available about U.S. Soccer and its role in supporting women’s soccer; an information gap we were asked by several Members of Congress and others to fill,” Buethe wrote in an email to POLITICO. “We are 100 percent supportive of the Women’s National Team and have done more than any organization in the country, and perhaps the world, to invest in and build the girls and women’s teams.”

U.S. Soccer might not have needed to worry about the debate. Only one candidate — Sen. Kamala Harris of California — talked about the pay gap between men and women during the two-night event in Detroit, but she didn’t mention the women’s team.

“Since 1963, when we passed the Equal Pay Act, we have been talking about the fact women are not paid equally for equal work,” Harris said. “Fast forward to the year of our Lord 2019 and women are paid 80 cents on the dollar, black women 61 cents, Native American women 58 cents, Latinas 53 cents.”

Harris proposed requiring corporations to make public whether they’re paying women equally and fining them 1 percent of their profits for every percentage point of difference between what they pay men and women.

“That will get everybody’s attention,” she said.

A senior adviser to one of the campaigns contacted by Bucheger who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk with reporters said the lobbying efforts had no effect on the campaign’s debate preparations.

“Whoever does their lobbying and PR should be fired, and the money should go to the players,” the adviser said.