The Morning Briefing: Terrorist Attack Update, See the RUSSIAN 'Election' Ads and Much, Much More

Good Thursday morning!

Here is what’s on the President’s agenda today:

In the morning, President Donald J. Trump will meet with Republican senators.
In the afternoon, the President will make a jobs announcement.
The President will then meet with House Republican leaders and Republican members of the House Ways and Means Committee.
Later in the afternoon, the President will announce the nominee for Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

The latest on the NYC terrorist attack

The Uzbek radical Islamic terrorist feels no remorse for killing 8 people and wounding eleven.

An Uzbek immigrant accused of plowing a truck down a New York City bike path, killing eight people, told investigators he had been inspired by watching Islamic State videos and began planning the attack a year ago, according to a criminal complaint filed against him on Wednesday.

In the course of that interview, the complaint said, Saipov told investigators he chose Halloween for the attack because he believed more people would be on the streets and said he had originally planned to strike the Brooklyn Bridge as well as the bike path on the western edge of lower Manhattan.

The complaint said Saipov had requested permission to display the flag of the Islamic State militant group in his hospital room.

It said he was particularly motivated by seeing a video in which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who led the campaign by Islamic State – also known as ISIS – to seize territory for a self-proclaimed caliphate within Iraq and Syria, exhorted Muslims in the United States and elsewhere to support the group’s cause.

Investigators found thousands of ISIS-related propaganda images and videos on a cellphone belonging to Saipov, including video clips showing ISIS prisoners being beheaded, run over by a tank and shot in the face, the complaint said.

Authorities have also nabbed another Uzbek “person of interest,” Mukhammadzoir Kadirov.

The Feds interviewed the NYC terrorist back in 2015 for “possible ties to suspected terrorists but a case was never opened against him, law enforcement officials tell ABC News.”

Saipov was listed as a “point of contact” for two men whose were listed in a Department of Homeland Security counterterrorism database and later overstayed their tourist visas, a federal official told ABC News. One was flagged after arriving from a so-called “threat country,” while the other vanished and was being actively sought by federal agents as a “suspected terrorist.” An official told ABC News that the FBI has since located him and he is not believed to have been involved in Tuesday’s attack.

Speaking on Wednesday, President Donald Trump noted that Saipov had served as the “point of contact” for 23 people. A source confirmed that number to ABC News but said it is unclear if those people are “immediate family members, distant family members, or friends.” Only those two men, however, were listed in the database.

In response to the attack by Saipov, President Trump called for an end to the lottery program that allowed Saipov to come to the United States. A group of senators said they would also support this legislative move. The White House said it considers Saipov an “enemy combatant.”

“I believe we would consider this person to be an enemy combatant,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

The father of one of the victims is speaking out: “These people, they come to the country and they hurt us,” Drake told Fox. “I just think that vetting should be a lot more difficult to allow these people who come into the country, especially a single man. You get these radicals, and my son is the victim.”

Here are the RUSSIA ads that stole the election for Donald Trump

Go see them all for yourself. Did you see any of these in your Facebook feed? I didn’t. What do you think, persuasive or not?

Clinton: My real collaboration with the RUSSIANS is not the same as the unsubstantiated claims about Trump’s collaboration with the RUSSIANS

Hillary Clinton says the salacious dossier she helped pay for and populated with information obtained from RUSSIAN officials is not the same kind of thing as the unspecified, vague accusations that the Trump campaign “colluded” with the RUSSIAN government to infect our electoral system. Just let that sink in: the dossier was populated with information provided by RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE and then pitched to every political outlet in DC to smear her political opponent and she expects us to believe SHE did not work with the RUSSIANS to interfere with our elections? OH PLEASE.

Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in a new interview argued the controversial and unverified dossier on President Trump that her campaign helped fund is not equivalent to the Trump campaign possibly colluding with Russia to meddle in the presidential election.

“Of course there is,” Clinton told Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” when asked by host Trevor Noah if there is a difference between the two.

Oh, and the cost of the Steele dossier? $1 million.

Twitter buried tweets about Podesta/DNC email leaks

Just as suspected.

Twitter buried significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the last two months of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

“Approximately one quarter (25%) of [#PodestaEmails tweets] received internal tags from our automation detection systems that hid them from searches,” Edgett said.

He added that “our systems detected and hid just under half (48%) of the Tweets relating to variants of another notable hashtag, #DNCLeak, which concerned the disclosure of leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee.”

Edgett explained that Twitter hid the tweets as “part of our general efforts at the time to fight automation and spam on our platform across all areas.”

How many of those tweets came from Russian-based accounts? Just 2%.

Political bias or “just doing their job”?

WATCH: Justice Clarence Thomas interview on FNC

Historical picture of the day:

U.S. Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican Presidential candidate, waves to the crowd from an open car as he rides up Broadway to a rally at Herald Square in New York on Nov. 2, 1959. U.S. President Eisenhower is seated behind Nixon’s left arm. (AP Photo)

Other morsels:

THE HOUSTON ASTROS ARE WORLD SERIES CHAMPS!

Baseball: Astros’ Correa proposes to girlfriend after World Series win

3 dead after random shooting at Colorado Walmart, suspect still at-large

A million people cut the cord in the last 3 months, and cable companies are worried

Chelsea Handler Promotes Petition To ‘Impeach Trump’

GOP senator wants Senate sexual harassment training to be mandatory

Papa John’s says NFL’s ‘poor leadership’ is impacting pizza sales

Dustin Hoffman, accused of sexually harassing teen intern 32 years ago, feels terrible, apologizes

‘Jane Doe’ prepares $4M Harvey Weinstein lawsuit over sexual assault claims

Kevin Spacey getting treatment after sexual assault allegations

Director Brett Ratner Accused of Sexual Misconduct by Six Actresses