AMY GOODMAN: With the presidential election just over four weeks away, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off Sunday night at Washington University in St. Louis in what Politico described as the “ugliest debate” in U.S. history. The debate came two days after The Washington Post published a shocking video from 2005 of Donald Trump talking on an open microphone, bragging about sexually assaulting women. Trump is now facing a growing number of calls to step down as the Republican Party’s nominee.

We will spend the rest of the show airing excepts of Sunday’s debate and giving Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein a chance to respond to the same questions posed to the major-party candidates. Stein and Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson were excluded from the debate under stringent rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. We invited both Stein and Johnson to join us on the program; only Stein took us up on the offer. We turn now to the debate moderators Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz in St. Louis at Washington University, Raddatz of ABC, Anderson Cooper of CNN. This is Cooper.

ANDERSON COOPER: We have a question here from Ken Karpowitz. He has a question about healthcare. Ken?

DONALD TRUMP: I’d like to know, Anderson: Why aren’t you bringing up the emails? I’d like to know. Why aren’t you getting to the bottom—

ANDERSON COOPER: You brought up the emails.

DONALD TRUMP: No, it hasn’t. It hasn’t. And it hasn’t been finished at all.

ANDERSON COOPER: Ken Karpowitz has a question.

DONALD TRUMP: It’s nice to—one on three.

KEN KARPOWITZ: Thank you. Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, it is not affordable. Premiums have gone up. Deductibles have gone up. Copays have gone up. Prescriptions have gone up. And the coverage has gone down. What will you do to bring the costs down and make coverage better?

ANDERSON COOPER: That first one goes to Secretary Clinton—

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you.

ANDERSON COOPER: —because you started out the last one to the audience.

HILLARY CLINTON: He wants to start. He can start.

DONALD TRUMP: No, go ahead, Hillary.

HILLARY CLINTON: No, go ahead, Donald.

DONALD TRUMP: No, I’m a gentleman, Hillary. Go ahead.

ANDERSON COOPER: Secretary Clinton?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, I think Donald was about to say he’s going to solve it by repealing it and getting rid of the Affordable Care Act. And I’m going to fix it, because I agree with you. Premiums have gotten too high, copays, deductibles, prescription drug costs. And I’ve laid out a series of actions that we can take to try to get those costs down.

But here’s what I don’t want people to forget when we’re talking about reining in the costs, which has to be the highest priority of the next president. When the Affordable Care Act passed, it wasn’t just that 20 million people got insurance who didn’t have it before. But that, in and of itself, was a good thing. I meet these people all the time, and they tell me what a difference having that insurance meant to them and their families. But everybody else, the 170 million of us who get health insurance through our employers, got big benefits. Number one, insurance companies can’t deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Number two, no lifetime limits, which is a big deal if you have serious health problems. Number three, women can’t be charged more than men for our health insurance, which is the way it used to be before the Affordable Care Act. Number four, if you’re under 26 and your parents have a policy, you can be on that policy until the age of 26—something that didn’t happen before. So, I want very much to save what works and is good about the Affordable Care Act. But we’ve got to get costs down. We’ve got to provide some additional help to small businesses, so that they can afford to provide health insurance.

But if we repeal it, as Donald has proposed, and start over again, all of those benefits I just mentioned are lost to everybody, not just people who get their health insurance on the exchange. And then we would have to start all over again. Right now we are at 90 percent health insurance coverage. That’s the highest we’ve ever been in our country.

ANDERSON COOPER: Secretary Clinton, your time’s up.

HILLARY CLINTON: So I want to get to 100 percent but get cost down and keep quality up.

ANDERSON COOPER: Mr. Trump, you have two minutes.

DONALD TRUMP: It is such a great question, and it’s maybe the question I get almost more than anything else, outside of defense. Obamacare is a disaster. You know it. We all know it. It’s going up at numbers that nobody’s ever seen worldwide. It’s—nobody has ever seen numbers like this for healthcare. It’s only getting worse. In '17, it implodes by itself. Their method of fixing it is to go back and ask Congress for more money, more and more money. And we have right now almost $20 trillion in debt. Obamacare will never work. It's very bad, very bad health insurance, far too expensive, and not only expensive for the person that has it, unbelievably expensive for our country. It’s going to be one of the biggest line items very shortly.

We have to repeal it and replace it with something absolutely much less expensive and something that works, where your plan can actually be tailored. We have to get rid of the lines around the state, artificial lines, where we stop insurance companies from coming in and competing, because they wanted, President Obama and whoever was working on it—they want to leave those lines, because that gives the insurance companies essentially monopolies. We want competition. You will have the finest healthcare plan there is. She wants to go to a single-payer plan, which would be a disaster, somewhat similar to Canada. And if you ever noticed, the Canadians, when they need a big operation, when something happens, they come into the United States in many cases, because their—their system is so slow, it’s catastrophic in certain ways. But she wants to go to single payer, which means the government basically rules everything. Hillary Clinton has been after this for years. Obamacare was the first step. Obamacare is a total disaster. And not only are your rates going up by numbers that nobody’s ever believed, but your deductibles are going up, so that unless you get hit by a truck, you’re never going to be able to use it.

ANDERSON COOPER: Mr. Trump, your time—

DONALD TRUMP: It is a disastrous plan, and it has to be repealed and replaced.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, your response?

DR. JILL STEIN: It’s not rocket science how to fix this disaster that the Affordable Care Act is. In fact, healthcare costs are skyrocketing. It’s now—you know, we pay essentially $3 trillion a year, is what the price tag is for healthcare, when you include government, business and out-of-pocket expenses. One out of every three Americans now cannot afford healthcare. Yes, the numbers of coverage have gone up, but there is massive underinsurance, and it is prohibitive. The premiums and the deductibles and the copays are just too high, so many people with insurance cannot afford to get it. There is almost half a trillion dollars of needless expense in the Affordable Care Act. This was the boondoggle built in for insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, that they are making out like bandits here in a healthcare system based on profit, not based on people.

And the solution is pretty straightforward. We need a Medicare-for-all system, an improved Medicare-for-all system. Right now 25 percent of healthcare costs are spent on wasteful paper pushing, on CEO salaries, on advertising, etc., on exorbitant pharmaceutical costs like paying $400 for an EpiPen, which contains $1 worth of medication. This is the kind of abuse that is built into this program, because we do not have the capacity to negotiate and do bulk purchasing, which needs to be built in. Under an improved Medicare-for-all system, that 25 percent overhead is reduced to about 1 percent, 1 to 2 percent overhead. So it enables us to put our healthcare dollars truly into healthcare, so that you are covered, head to toe, cradle to grave, your mental health, your pharmaceuticals, your hearing aid, your insulin pump, whatever, and your reproductive healthcare and your mental healthcare. And the healthcare decisions are between you and your doctor. It gets corporations off your back, and it gets CEOs out of the business of deciding and micromanaging your healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. After a short break, we’ll return to the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate and give Dr. Stein a chance to respond to those same questions posed to the major-party candidates at Washington University in St. Louis. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Headache” by Frank Black, here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman. We’re spending the show airing experts of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, giving Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein a chance to respond to the same questions posed to the major-party candidates. Stein and Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson were excluded from the debate under stringent rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. We invited both Stein and Johnson to join us; only Stein took us up on the offer. We thought we’d, well, bring you what democracy sounds like, what it looks like, as we go back now to debate moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN.

ANDERSON COOPER: Thank you, Mr. Trump. The question from Patrice was about: Are you both modeling positive and appropriate behaviors for today’s youth? We received a lot of questions online, Mr. Trump, about the tape that was released on Friday, as you can imagine. You called what you said “locker room banter.” You described kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?

DONALD TRUMP: No, I didn’t say that at all. I don’t think you understood what was said. This was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologize to my family. I apologize to the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk.

You know, when we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have—and, frankly, drowning people in steel cages, where you have wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, where you have so many bad things happening, this is like medieval times. We haven’t seen anything likes this, the carnage all over the world. And they look, and they see. Can you imagine the people that are, frankly, doing so well against us, with ISIS, and they look at our country, and they see what’s going on?

Yes, I’m very embarrassed by it. I hate it. But it’s locker room talk and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS. We’re going to defeat ISIS. ISIS happened a number of years ago in a vacuum that was left—

ANDERSON COOPER: So—

DONALD TRUMP: —because of bad judgment. And I will tell you: I will take care of ISIS.

ANDERSON COOPER: So, Mr. Trump—

DONALD TRUMP: And we should get on to much more important things and much bigger things.

ANDERSON COOPER: Just for the record, though, are you saying that what you said on that bus 11 years ago, that you did not actually kiss women without consent or grope women without consent?

DONALD TRUMP: I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.

ANDERSON COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that?

DONALD TRUMP: I say I said things that, frankly, you hear these things. They’re said. And I was embarrassed by it. But I have tremendous respect for women.

ANDERSON COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

DONALD TRUMP: And women have respect for me. And I will tell you—no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders on our country, which we don’t have now. People are pouring into our country, and they’re coming in from the Middle East and other places. We’re going to make America safe again. We’re going to make America great again. But we’re going to make America safe again. And we’re going to make America wealthy again, because if you don’t do that, it just—it sounds harsh to say, but we have to build up the wealth of our nation.

ANDERSON COOPER: Thank you, Mr. Trump.

DONALD TRUMP: Right now, other nations are taking our jobs, and they’re taking our wealth.

ANDERSON COOPER: Thank you, Mr. Trump.

DONALD TRUMP: And that’s what I want to talk about.

ANDERSON COOPER: Secretary Clinton, do you want to respond?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, like everyone else, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking over the last 48 hours about what we heard and saw. You know, with prior Republican nominees for president, I disagreed with them on politics, policies, principles, but I never questioned their fitness to serve. Donald Trump is different. I said, starting back in June, that he was not fit to be president and commander-in-chief. And many Republicans and independents have said the same thing.

What we all saw and heard on Friday was Donald talking about women, what he thinks about women, what he does to women. And he has said that the video doesn’t represent who he is. But I think it’s clear to anyone who heard it that it represents exactly who he is, because we’ve seen this throughout the campaign. We have seen him insult women. We have seen him rate women on their appearance, ranking them from one to 10. We’ve seen him embarrass women on TV and on Twitter. We saw him, after the first debate, spend nearly a week denigrating a former Miss Universe in the harshest, most personal terms. So, yes, this is who Donald Trump is.

But it’s not only women, and it’s not only this video that raises questions about his fitness to be our president, because he has also targeted immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, people with disabilities, POWs, Muslims and so many others. So this is who Donald Trump is.

And the question for us, the question our country must answer, is that this is not who we are. That’s why, to go back to your question, I want to send a message—we all should—to every boy and girl—and, indeed, to the entire world—that America already is great, but we are great because we are good. And we will respect one another, and we will work with one another, and we will celebrate our diversity. These are very important values to me, because this is the America that I know and love. And I can pledge to you tonight that this is the America that I will serve if I’m so fortunate enough to become your president.

MARTHA RADDATZ: And we want to get to some questions from online—

DONALD TRUMP: Well, am I allowed to respond to that? I assume I am.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Yes, you can respond to that.

DONALD TRUMP: It’s just words, folks. It’s just words. Those words, I’ve been hearing them for many years. I heard them when they were running for the Senate in New York, where Hillary was going to bring back jobs to upstate New York, and she failed. I’ve heard them where Hillary is constantly talking about the inner cities of our country, which are a disaster education-wise, job-wise, safety-wise, in every way possible. I’m going to help the African Americans. I’m going to help the Latinos, Hispanics. I am going to help the inner cities. She has done a terrible job for the African Americans. She wants their vote, and she does nothing. And then she comes back four years later. We saw that firsthand when she was a United States senator. She campaigned where the primary part of her campaign—

MARTHA RADDATZ: Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump, I want to get to audience questions and online questions.

DONALD TRUMP: So, she’s allowed to do that, but I’m not allowed to—

MARTHA RADDATZ: You’re going to have—

DONALD TRUMP: Sounds fair.

MARTHA RADDATZ: You’re going to get to respond right now.

DONALD TRUMP: Sounds fair.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, you have two minutes to respond.

DR. JILL STEIN: So, the question, you know, is we candidates are modeling behavior that is appropriate for our children to emulate. And I—you know, I agree in the strongest terms that Donald Trump’s abusive behavior and abusive language towards women and everybody else is shameful and despicable and a terrible thing for our children and the rest of society to witness. Sexual violence towards women is not a trivial matter. One out of six women is a victim of sexual violence. Three women a day are killed by domestic violence. So, this issue cannot be overemphasized as a really critical concern for all of us.

At the same time, it’s very important that we not lose sight, not allow this despicable incident here to overshadow the other issues that are very much at stake. Let’s just look, for example, at the condition of our youth and our younger generation, not only the sky-high rates of unemployment they’re facing, the incredible skyrocketing of the costs of college education, the fact that 43 million young people are locked into predatory student loan debt with no way out in the economy as it exists, with low-wage, part-time, temporary jobs having, you know, become available since the Wall Street crash. That recovery is pretty much limited to the upper 5 to 10 percent, a few little, you know, changes around the margins, but this hasn’t been a recovery for everyday people.

My campaign is the only one that is speaking to the climate crisis falling on the shoulders of young people, the only campaign that is speaking to the endless wars that are making us less secure and that are bankrupting our budget, and the only candidate that will bail out young people the way Barack Obama and Democrats and Republicans in Congress bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $16 trillion. It’s about time for us to bail out the victims of Wall Street: the younger generation, who is trapped in predatory student loans debt.

And I just want to encourage people to go to my website, Jill2016.com, to be a part of this movement. The numbers are there: 43 million young people are locked into debt. That is a winning plurality of the vote. If that word were to get out, this election could be turned on its head. There is a voter revolt which is actually in full swing right now. And you can see that the corporate media is working overtime to try to do a blackout on our campaign, which is the real threat to this politics as usual that is throwing us under the bus. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let—let’s go back to debate moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC.

MARTHA RADDATZ: This next question comes from the public through the bipartisan Open Debate Coalition’s online forum, where Americans submitted questions that generated millions of votes. This question involves WikiLeaks’ release of purported excerpts of Secretary Clinton’s paid speeches, which she has refused to release, and one line in particular, in which you, Secretary Clinton, purportedly say, “You need both a public and private position on certain issues.” So, Tiu from Virginia asks: “Is it OK for politicians to be two-faced? Is it acceptable for a politician to have have a private stance on issues?” Secretary Clinton, your two minutes.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, right. As I recall, that was something I said about Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie called Lincoln. It was a master class watching President Lincoln get the Congress to approve the 13th Amendment. It was principled, and it was strategic. And I was making the point that it is hard sometimes to get the Congress to do what you want to do, and you have to keep working at it, and, yes, President Lincoln was trying to convince some people, he used some arguments; convincing other people, he used other arguments. That was a great, I thought, a great display of presidential leadership.

But, you know, let’s talk about what’s really going on here, Martha, because our intelligence community just came out and said in the last few days that the Kremlin, meaning Putin and the Russian government, are directing the attacks, the hacking on American accounts to influence our election. And WikiLeaks is part of that, as are other sites where the Russians hack information—we don’t even know if it’s accurate information—and then they put it out. We have never in the history of our country been in a situation where an adversary, a foreign power, is working so hard to influence the outcome of the election. And believe me, they’re not doing it to get me elected. They’re doing it to try to influence the election for Donald Trump. Now, maybe because he has praised Putin, maybe because he says he agrees with a lot of what Putin wants to do, maybe because he wants to do business in Moscow—I don’t know the reasons, but we deserve answers. And we should demand that Donald release all of his tax returns, so that people can see what are the entanglements and the financial relationships—

MARTHA RADDATZ: And we’re going to get to that later.

HILLARY CLINTON: —that he has with Russians and other foreign powers.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Secretary Clinton, you’re out of time. Mr. Trump?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think I should respond, because—so ridiculous. Look, now she’s blaming—she got caught in a total lie. Her papers went out to all her friends at the banks, Goldman Sachs and everybody else. And she said things—WikiLeaks—that just came out. And she lied. Now she’s blaming the lie on the late great Abraham Lincoln. That’s one that I haven’t—OK, honest Abe. Honest Abe never lied. That’s the good thing. That’s the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you. That’s a big, big difference. We’re talking about some difference.

But as far as other elements of what you were saying, I don’t know Putin. I think it would be great if we get along with Russia, because we could fight ISIS together, as an example. But I don’t know Putin. But I notice any time anything wrong happens, they like to say the Russians, the—she doesn’t know if it’s the Russians doing the hacking. Maybe there is no hacking. But they always blame Russia. And the reason they blame Russia, because they think they’re trying to tarnish me with Russia. I know nothing about Russia. I know about Russia, but I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia. I don’t deal there. I have no businesses there. I have no loans from Russia.

I have a very, very great balance sheet, so great that when I did the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, the United States government, because of my balance sheet, which they actually know very well, chose me to do the Old Post Office between the White House and Congress, chose me to do the Old Post Office. One of the primary things—in fact, perhaps the primary thing was balance sheet. But I have no loans with Russia. You could go to the United States government, and they would probably tell you that, because they know my sheet very well. In order to get that development, I had to have.

Now, the taxes are a very simple thing. As soon as I have—first of all, I pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. Many of her friends took bigger deductions. Warren Buffett took a massive deduction. Soros, who’s a friend of hers, took a massive deduction. Many of the people that are giving her all this money, that she can do many more commercials than me, gave her—took massive deductions. I pay hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, but—but as soon as my routine audit is finished, I’ll release my returns. I’ll be very proud to.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, your response?

DR. JILL STEIN: So, you know, on this issue of Hillary’s statement about the public views versus the private views, that’s certainly borne out by her history, where, you know, her public statement is that she is the friend to women and children, but, in fact, privately and her actual track record is to dismantle Aid to Families with Dependent Children, to have supported NAFTA and the offshoring of our jobs, to support the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And now she says she’s against it, but her director of transition, Ken Salazar, is a big booster, as is her VP candidate. So, you know, which is it?

In Haiti, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton led the charge to push down the abysmal poverty wages of the Haitian people from 60 cents an hour down to a shocking 40 cents an hour, so as to boost the profits of the American corporation. So, you know, and on Black Lives Matter, you know, there was lip service to the cause of racial justice. But the Democratic Party official position, revealed again in some leaked emails, was that, you know, pat them on the head, you know, meet with them, but don’t make any concessions to them, do not give them any ground, do not, in other words, acknowledge what a crisis situation this is, where African Americans are at risk, driving in their cars down the street, from police violence. So, this is a real problem, and it goes hand in hand with another statement that was just released, where Hillary said that she doesn’t have much contact with the people because of the economic fortunes that she and her husband have enjoyed.

In blaming this on Abraham Lincoln, or blaming her statement on Abraham Lincoln, it’s noteworthy that Abraham Lincoln was a third-party candidate, and that in times of great social upheaval, third parties occasionally prevail. And for so many people, the issue here is the politics of fear and the greater fear of Donald Trump that overrides everything else, including Hillary Clinton’s record creating the economic misery leading to the rise of Donald Trump. So I just want to underscore for people to remember what happened under Richard Nixon, one of the most terrible, regressive, oppressive presidents we’ve ever had, where we had the courage of our convictions. And under this terrible president, we achieved bringing the troops home from Vietnam, women’s right to choose, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, protections for workers in the workplace, because we, the people, were standing up and leading the charge towards the kinds of policies that we actually deserve. It’s important for us to lead with the politics of courage. The politics of fear, unfortunately, has delivered everything we were afraid of.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein. After a short break, we’ll return to the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate in St. Louis and give Dr. Stein a chance to continue to respond to the same questions posed to the major-party candidates. This is Democracy Now!’s “Expanding the Debate” special. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: Downtown Boys performing “Wave of History” here in our Democracy Now! studio. To see our full interview with them, go to democracynow.org. Yes, this is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency,” as we continue our “Expanding the Debate” special. We’re spending the show airing excerpts of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton presidential debate in St. Louis at Washington University and giving Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein a chance to respond to the same questions posed to the major-party candidates. We also invited Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson, but he did not take us up on our offer. Let’s go back to the debate. It’s co-moderated by Anderson Cooper of CNN, and this is Martha Raddatz of ABC.

MARTHA RADDATZ: We have another audience question. Beth Miller has a question for both candidates.

BETH MILLER: Good evening. Perhaps the most important aspect of this election is the Supreme Court justice. What would you prioritize as the most important aspect of selecting a Supreme Court justice?

MARTHA RADDATZ: We begin with your two minutes, Secretary Clinton.

HILLARY CLINTON: Thank you. Well, you’re right. This is one of the most important issues in this election. I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real-life experience, who have not just been in a big law firm and maybe clerked for a judge and then gotten on the bench, but, you know, maybe they tried some more cases, they actually understand what people are up against, because I think the current court has gone in the wrong direction. And so I would want to see the Supreme Court reverse Citizens United and get dark unaccountable money out of our politics. Donald doesn’t agree with that. I would like the Supreme Court to understand that voting rights are still a big problem in many parts of our country, that we don’t always do everything we can to make it possible for people of color and older people and young people to be able to exercise their franchise. I want a Supreme Court that will stick with Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose, and I want a Supreme Court that will stick with marriage equality.

Now, Donald has put forth the names of some people that he would consider. And among the ones that he has suggested are people who would reverse Roe v. Wade and reverse marriage equality. I think that would would be a terrible mistake and would take us backwards. I want a Supreme Court that doesn’t always side with corporate interests. I want a Supreme Court that understands because you’re wealthy and you can give more money to something doesn’t mean you have any more rights or should have any more rights than anybody else. So I have very clear views about what I want to see to tend to change the balance on the Supreme Court. And I regret deeply that the Senate has not done its job, and they have not permitted a vote on the person that President Obama, a highly qualified person—they have not given him a vote to be able to have the full complement of nine Supreme Court justices. I think that was a dereliction of duty. I hope that they will see their way to doing it, but if I am so fortunate enough as to be president, I will immediately move to make sure that we fill that, we have nine justices—

MARTHA RADDATZ: Thank you, Secretary Clinton.

HILLARY CLINTON: —and they get to work on behalf of our people.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Thank you. You’re out of time. Mr. Trump?

DONALD TRUMP: Justice Scalia, great judge, died recently, and we have a vacancy. I am looking to appoint judges very much in the mold of Justice Scalia. I’m looking for judges, and I’ve actually picked 20 of them, so that people would say highly respected, highly thought of and actually very beautifully reviewed by just about everybody, but people that will respect the Constitution of the United States. And I think that this is so important. Also, the Second Amendment which is totally under siege by people like Hillary Clinton—they’ll respect the Second Amendment and what it stands for, what it represents. So important to me.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Jill Stein, presidential nominee of the Green Party, your response? You have two minutes.

DR. JILL STEIN: OK, and I’ll try to be quick on this. We very much need Supreme Court justices who are ready to stand up for everyday people. And that means to end the stranglehold that big money has on our political system. So that means not only overturning Citizens United, but supporting the fact that money is not speech and that corporations are not people. In addition, we need strong support for our rights as voters, which are being encroached on by voter ID laws terribly. And we need to support the constitutional right to vote, and ensure that there is positive and continuous support for that right to vote, which is very much under threat. And in addition, the Supreme Court needs to be strongly in support of women’s rights, the rights of immigrants, workers’ rights and LGBTQ rights. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to debate moderator, Martha Raddatz of ABC

MARTHA RADDATZ: And, Secretary Clinton, I do want to follow up on the emails. You’ve said your handling of your emails was a mistake. You disagreed with Director—FBI Director James Comey calling your handling of classified information, quote, “extremely careless.” The FBI said that there were 110 classified emails that were exchanged, eight of which were top-secret, and that it was possible hostile actors did gain access to those emails. You don’t call that extremely careless?

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, Martha, first let me say, and I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it because I want everyone to hear it. That was a mistake, and I take responsibility for using a personal email account. Obviously, if I were to do it over again, I would not. I’m not making any excuses. It was a mistake. And I am very sorry about that.

But I think it’s also important to point out where there are some misleading accusations from critics and others. After a year-long investigation, there is no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using, and there is no evidence that anyone can point to at all—anyone who says otherwise has no basis—that any classified material ended up in the wrong hands. I take classified materials very seriously and always have. When I was on the Senate Armed Services Committee, I was privy to a lot of classified material. Obviously, as secretary of state, I had some of the most important secrets that we possess, such as going after bin Laden. So I am very committed to taking classified information seriously. And as I said, there is no evidence that any classified information ended up in the wrong hands.

MARTHA RADDATZ: OK, we’re going to move on.

DONALD TRUMP: And yet, she didn’t know the word—the letter C on a document. Right? She didn’t even know what that word—what that letter meant. You know, it’s amazing. I’m watching Hillary go over facts, and she’s going after fact after fact. And she’s lying again, because she said she—you know, what she did with the emails was fine. You think it was fine to delete 33,000 emails? I don’t think so. She said the 33,000 emails had to do with her daughter’s wedding, number one, and a yoga class. Well, maybe we’ll give three or three or four or five or something. Thirty-three thousand emails deleted, and now she’s saying there wasn’t anything wrong.

And more importantly, that was after getting a subpoena. That wasn’t before. That was after. She got it from the United States Congress. And I’ll be honest, I am so disappointed in congressmen, including Republicans, for allowing this to happen, our Justice Department where her husband goes onto the back of an airplane for 39 minutes, talks to the attorney general, days before a ruling is going to be made on her case. But for you to say that there was nothing wrong with you deleting 39,000 emails, again, you should be ashamed of yourself. What you did—and this is after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress—

ANDERSON COOPER: We have to move on. Secretary Clinton, you can respond, and then we’ve got to move on.

DONALD TRUMP: If you did that—wait a minute. One second.

MARTHA RADDATZ: We want to give the audience a chance here.

DONALD TRUMP: If you did that in the private sector, you’d be put in jail, let alone after getting a subpoena from the United States Congress.

ANDERSON COOPER: Secretary Clinton, you can respond, then we have to move on to a audience question.

HILLARY CLINTON: Look, it’s just not true. And so, please, go to—

DONALD TRUMP: Oh, you didn’t delete them? You didn’t delete them?

ANDERSON COOPER: Allow her to respond, please.

HILLARY CLINTON: Those were personal emails, not official.

DONALD TRUMP: Over 33,000? Yeah, right.

HILLARY CLINTON: Not—well, we turned over 35,000, so it was—

DONALD TRUMP: Oh, yeah. What about the other 15,000?

ANDERSON COOPER: Please allow her to respond. She didn’t talk while you talked.

HILLARY CLINTON: Yes, that’s true, I didn’t.

DONALD TRUMP: Because you have nothing to say.

HILLARY CLINTON: And I didn’t in the first debate, and I’m going to try not to in this debate, because I’d like to get to the questions that the people have brought here tonight to talk to us about.

DONALD TRUMP: And get off this question.

HILLARY CLINTON: OK, Donald. I know you’re into big diversion tonight, anything to avoid talking about your campaign and the way it’s exploding and the way Republicans are leaving you. But let’s at least focus—

DONALD TRUMP: Let’s—let’s see what happens in the [inaudible]. Let’s see what happens.

ANDERSON COOPER: Allow her to respond.

HILLARY CLINTON: —on some of the issues that people care about tonight. Let’s get to their questions.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein, your response? You have two minutes.

DR. JILL STEIN: You know, Hillary Clinton’s behavior, I think, you know, extremely careless with regard to the emails. That amounts to gross negligence, which technically is the threshold for prosecution for having violated laws about how national security information should be handled. The fact that a leaker was not—or that a hacker was not discovered doesn’t mean anything, because hackers often leave no trace, and you only find out long, long after.

Hillary Clinton also stated—and this was in the inspector general’s report—that this was intentional, that she did not want her private business subject to FOIA, to Freedom of Information Act. And, in fact, what she deleted amounted to half the volume of her emails, which is pretty staggering that someone on a job as busy as the secretary of state’s job has half of their time on the job, or at least half the volume of their emails, is spent on their own personal business.

And it’s a little bit disturbing that as she is conducting the secretary’s business, she has concurrently this Clinton Foundation business, where she is granting special favors, special partnerships, special government contracts, weapons deals, etc., to Clinton Foundation donors.

So, there’s just a lot here that represents how the economic and political elite are very much represented, I think, by both of these candidates, and underscores why it’s really important for us to exercise our power in a democracy. We have a right to know who we can vote for, as well as a right to vote. And I urge people to go to my website, Jill2016.com, and join our campaign for open debates, so that we can truly learn what is at stake in this election and what our options are. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go back to debate co-moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC.

MARTHA RADDATZ: We’re going to move on to Syria. Both of you have mentioned that.

DONALD TRUMP: But she said a lot of things that were false. I mean, I think we should—

MARTHA RADDATZ: You’ve—you—

DONALD TRUMP: —be allowed to maybe dispute—

MARTHA RADDATZ: We can—no, Mr. Trump, we’re going to go on. This is about the audience—

DONALD TRUMP: —because she has been a disaster as a senator.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Mr. Trump, we’re going to move on. The heartbreaking video of a five-year-old Syrian boy named Omran sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble after an airstrike in Aleppo focused the world’s attention on the horrors of the war in Syria, with 136 million views on Facebook alone. But there are much worse images coming out of Aleppo every day now, where in the past few weeks alone 400 have been killed, at least 100 of them children. Just days ago, the State Department called for a war crimes investigation of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad and its ally, Russia, for their bombardment of Aleppo. So this next question comes from social media, through Facebook. Diane from Pennsylvania asks: “If you were president, what would you do about Syria and the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo? Isn’t it a lot like the Holocaust, when the U.S. waited too long before we helped?” Secretary Clinton, we will begin with your two minutes.

HILLARY CLINTON: Well, the situation in Syria is catastrophic, and every day that goes by, we see the results of the regime, by Assad, in partnership with the Iranians on the ground, the Russians in the air, bombarding places, in particular, Aleppo, where there are hundreds of thousands of people, probably about 250,000 still left. And there is a determined effort by the Russian Air Force to destroy Aleppo in order to eliminate the last of the Syrian rebels who are really holding out against the Assad regime. Russia hasn’t paid any attention to ISIS. They’re interested in keeping Assad in power. So I, when I was secretary of state, advocated, and I advocate today, a no-fly zone and safe zones. We need some leverage with the Russians, because they are not going to come to the negotiating table for a diplomatic resolution unless there is some leverage over them. And we have to work more closely with our partners and allies on the ground.

But I want to emphasize that what is at stake here is the ambitions and the aggressiveness of Russia. Russia has decided that it’s all in in Syria, and they’ve also decided who they want to see become president of the United States, too, and it’s not me. I’ve stood up to Russia. I’ve taken on Putin and others. And I would do that as president. I think wherever we can cooperate with Russia, that’s fine, and I did, as secretary of state. That’s how we got a treaty reducing nuclear weapons. It’s how we got the sanctions on Iran that put a lid on the Iranian nuclear program without firing a single shot. So I would go to the negotiating table with more leverage than we have now. But I do support the effort to investigate for crimes, war crimes, committed by the Syrians and the Russians, and try to hold them accountable.

MARTHA RADDATZ: Thank you, Secretary Clinton. Mr. Trump?

DONALD TRUMP: First of all, she was there, as secretary of state, with the so-called line in the sand, which—

HILLARY CLINTON: No, I wasn’t. I was gone. I hate to interrupt you, but at some point—

DONALD TRUMP: OK. But you were in contact—excuse me. You were—

HILLARY CLINTON: At some point we need to do some fact checking here.

DONALD TRUMP: You were in total contact with the White House, and perhaps, sadly, Obama probably still listened to you. I don’t think he’d be listening to you very much anymore. Obama draws the line in the sand. It was laughed at all over the world, what happened.

Now, with that being said, she talks tough against Russia. But our nuclear program has fallen way behind, and they’ve gone wild with their nuclear program. Not good. Our government shouldn’t have allowed that to happen. Russia is new in terms of nuclear. We are old. We’re tired. We’re exhausted in terms of nuclear. A very bad thing. Now, she talks tough. She talks really tough against—against Putin and against Assad. She talks in favor of the rebels. She doesn’t even know who the rebels are. You know, every time we take rebels, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else, we’re arming people. And you know what happens? They end up being worse than the people. Look at what she did in Libya with Gaddafi. Gaddafi’s out. It’s a mess. And, by the way, ISIS has a good chunk of their oil. I’m sure you probably have heard that. It was a disaster, because the fact is, almost everything she’s done in foreign policy has been a mistake, and it’s been a disaster.

AMY GOODMAN: Jill Stein, your final comment, presidential nominee of the Green Party, on this issue of Syria?

DR. JILL STEIN: So, Syria is a disaster, and it’s a very complicated disaster. It is a civil war. It is a proxy war among many nations. It is a pipeline war also between Russia and the Gulf states, who are competing to run their pipelines with fracked gas into Europe across Syria. So, this is a very complicated situation, and there is a hornets’ nest, a real circular firing squad of alliances here that’s, you know, extremely, extremely complicated.

To present a no-fly zone here as a solution is extremely dangerous. A no-fly zone means we are going to war with Russia, because it means we will be shooting down planes in the sky in order to create this no-fly zone, which is where Russia has a commitment to defending the Assad government. So, remember, there was a ceasefire, which was very hard-won, and that ceasefire was destroyed by the action of the Americans bombing, apparently by mistake, although some people say not by mistake, but it was our bombing of the Syrian troops that destroyed that ceasefire.

We need to redouble our efforts here. And we need to acknowledge that war with Russia is not an option. There are 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. And who was it that dropped out of the nuclear arms control? That was George Bush. That was our part, the U.S., in allowing the nuclear arms race to re-engage. Mikhail Gorbachev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, said last week—

AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.

DR. JILL STEIN: —that we are now at a more dangerous period regarding nuclear war than we have ever been. So, it’s really important for the warmongers in the Democratic and Republican parties to be cooling their jets now and for us to be moving forward towards a weapons embargo and a freeze on the funding of those countries that are continuing to fund terrorist enterprises.

AMY GOODMAN: Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein, thanks so much for being with us as part of our “Expanding the Debate” two-hour special. If you didn’t get the whole thing, go to democracynow.org, and also our three-and-a-half-hour special on the night of the St. Louis debate, Sunday night, with all of our guests in pre- and post-debate conversation.