A spokesman for the NFL says the football league didn’t send a letter to Trump as the billionaire businessman claims. The schedule was announced in September 2015.
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It’s been predicted by political pundits that the debates between Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton could pull record ratings, which would logically cut into the NFL’s ratings on the two conflicting nights. That’s a long way from an official effort to get the debates moved that was reduced to writing, printed on NFL letterhead, and signed by Roger Goodell or some other high-level league executive.
Trump: Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t like. “Unacceptable!” he wrote. In an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Trump said he got a letter from the National Football League calling the conflict “ridiculous”.
The NFL and the Commission on Presidential Debates on Saturday rejected both of Trump’s assertions. I will do three debates.
The NFL likely won’t suffer too bad from the scheduling conflict, we’re guessing.
“Listen, I don’t know about whether the commission is rigged, I just think there’s a lot of flaws with this commission”, Priebus said.
In fact, the debates were actually scheduled a year ago by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, a group that features both Republicans and Democrats. “Schedule the debates against Jacksonville Jaguars” games.
The first presidential debate will conflict with a Falcons-Saints game that was probably not going to be all that watched anyway. The commission said it was “impossible” to avoid all sporting events.
But in a statement provided to CNNMoney, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) defended itself and the choices it made, and suggested that it is not interested in rescheduling. A debate has never been rescheduled as a result.
Trump and his campaign have denied any link to such Russian actors.
Trump took to Twitter on Friday, calling the debate schedule “unacceptable”.
Supporters of Sanders claimed that the Democratic National Committee deliberately scheduled its primary debates out of primetime, to shield Clinton, a perception deepened by the release of internal DNC emails after a hack which the Clinton campaign and federal investigators believe was carried out by Russian intelligence services. “That’s what she conspired for to keep Bernie Sanders from getting a large audience”.
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In the ABC interview, Trump said three debates were “fine” and that he’d rather have three than one.
