nobody knows if anything that binance has said is true, considering they were decrying FUDsters for making assumptions about their “maintenance” right up until they admitted someone “hacked” them and ran off with the butts. https://t.co/W400NIRw2X

— Buttcoin (@ButtCoin) May 8, 2019

Trading will not be impacted.

— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) May 7, 2019

Image: raymond wong / mashable

Image: RAYMOND WONG / MASHABLE

HENDERSON, Nev. — Joe Biden abandoned his last run for president, in 2008, before the primary reached Nevada. And his most recent association with the state was unflattering.

It was less than six weeks ago that Biden was accused by Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman, of touching her inappropriately at a campaign event in the early nominating state in 2014.

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But as Biden arrived in Nevada on Tuesday for the first time since announcing his campaign for president, even Flores acknowledged that her accusations have failed to fully resonate here.

One reason is the broad network of local political connections that Biden has cultivated for decades. Those relationships — both here and elsewhere — have greased Biden’s relatively seamless entry into the race, glossing over the flaws of his candidacy as he powers to a lead in national and state polls that has only grown since he joined the crowded field.

The elements of Biden’s front-runner status are on clear display in Nevada, where former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who remains a political force in the state, praised Biden publicly on the day that he entered the race. Biden secured the endorsement of a key state lawmaker, state Sen. Yvanna Cancela, a former political director of the influential Culinary Workers Union. And he has built significant ties to other statewide elected officials, appearing here last year on behalf of now-Sen. Jacky Rosen, now-Gov. Steve Sisolak and now-state Attorney General Aaron Ford.

“He certainly has a lot of support and infrastructure, both from his previous runs and in his capacity as vice president,” said Andres Ramirez, a Nevada-based Democratic strategist and former vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s Hispanic Caucus. “So that’s definitely going to be helpful to him … He definitely has a lot of friends.”

Like many Democrats, Ramirez’s view of the Flores controversy was that it had little political effect.

“The people who didn’t like Joe Biden are going to continually not like Joe Biden,” he said. “But I don’t think Lucy Flores persuaded anybody who was undecided or a Biden supporter to drop their support for him.”

Flores concedes as much, in part because she says her motives for criticizing the former vice president were unfairly questioned, and in part because she has since moved out of state.

“I think that very much happened to me in Nevada,” she said.

While Biden spoke at a rally outside Las Vegas on Tuesday, a woman in the audience yelled to him, “You can hug and kiss me anytime, Joe!”

Biden paused, chuckled and said, “That’s very nice. Thank you.”

Speaking Tuesday in the early-voting state with the largest Latino population — 29 percent — Biden lit into President Donald Trump for rhetoric on immigration that he said Trump uses to “demonize people.”

“We’re better than that,” Biden said at the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Local 159, in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.

When a military veteran who immigrated from Mexico asked Biden if he would stop veterans from being deported from the United States, Biden said, “Yes.”

“Anybody who fought for the United States of America should not be in a position [of being] deported,” Biden said, causing the veteran to salute him.

Later, when another man called out, “Trump is Hitler,” Biden responded, “I’m not going to stoop down to his level.”

The Democratic presidential field this year includes several Western Democrats laying claims to Nevada, which holds the first nominating contest in the West. Sen. Kamala Harris, from neighboring California, has been a presence in the state for years. But there is also former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee. Montana Gov. Steve Bullock is verging on running. And Beto O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso, Texas, is about as close to Las Vegas as it is to Dallas.

Another Texas-based candidate, former HUD Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, is also a familiar presence, hoping to connect in a state where 19 percent of the 2016 caucus vote was cast by Latinos, according to entrance polls.

But Biden is far ahead of any of those Democrats in national polls, and his office of the vice presidency elevated every appearance he made in the state during President Barack Obama’s tenure. Biden was widely viewed as an asset to Hillary Clinton when he campaigned for her in her successful run against Donald Trump in the state in 2016.

“He knows Nevada, and he will do very well in Nevada,” Reid told reporters on the day that Biden announced his candidacy.

While pledging to remain “as neutral as I can be” in the primary, Reid said that Biden in Congress and as vice president “was always very good to me.”

Former Clark County Democratic Party Chairman Chris Miller, who has endorsed Harris, nevertheless said of Biden, “He obviously was a great asset to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. He’s been here several times, he’s well liked.”

Biden’s popularity appeared to be tested in March, when Flores, Nevada’s Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014, wrote in “The Cut” that she was at a campaign rally in the state when Biden approached her from behind and smelled her hair.

“He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head,” Flores wrote. “My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused.”

Biden said after Flores’ accusation that he “offered countless handshakes, hugs, expressions of affection, support and comfort. And not once — never — did I believe I acted inappropriately. If it is suggested I did so, I will listen respectfully. But it was never my intention.” Still, the Democrat with a reputation for his close personal campaigning pledged “to be more mindful and respectful of people’s personal space.”

Flores, who has since moved to California, told POLITICO that when she wrote about her encounter with Biden, “what I wanted was for this to be taken seriously, to be discussed.” She said she believes that has happened, though she suggested her accusations were unfairly clouded by questions about her political motivations.

“I still believe that we made headway,” she said.

For his part, Biden is making strides in Nevada after his relatively late entry into the race. His campaign on Monday announced significant staff hires in the state, including state director Hilary Barrett, who was Hillary Clinton’s deputy political director in Nevada in 2016.

Cancela described the organization Biden is assembling as a “stellar crew.” And she said that when he decided to run, “it was a no-brainer for me” to endorse him.

“I think people know and trust Joe Biden,” she said. “And people know and trust in his leadership and his conviction to lead the country.”

FBI director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday said that if any 2020 presidential campaign is contacted by a foreign agent, it’s “something the FBI would want to know about.”

But would President Donald Trump’s campaign alert the feds if approached by a potential election meddler? It won’t say.

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The Trump campaign did not respond to numerous inquiries about whether it has implemented a policy about foreign interference — including the use of information stolen or hacked by a foreign power and whether aides must formally report outreach from foreigners. Several Democratic campaigns, by contrast, have announced policies on the subject.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report documented “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign,” and argued that Trump’s campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” But Mueller found no criminal conspiracy between the campaign and the Kremlin, and Trump allies insist there was nothing unlawful about soliciting or making use of information provided by a hostile nation.

Meanwhile, Wray and other top U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that Russia plans to interfere again in the 2020 election. “We assess that foreign actors will view the 2020 U.S. elections as an opportunity to advance their interests,” Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee in January.

Some Trump defenders say that his 2016 campaign was a ragtag, amateurish enterprise plagued by a combination of naivete and ignorance that Russia successfully exploited. But even though his 2020 re-election operation has come to resemble a traditional presidential campaign, it has proved reluctant to address the persistent threat of foreign interference.

“A normal campaign clearly would back down and say, ‘Going forward, we won’t take any foreign information.’ But there is nothing normal about Donald Trump,” said Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary and veteran Democratic campaign strategist.

In House testimony on Tuesday, Wray told lawmakers his agency wants to know if a foreign government offers assistance to a presidential campaign in any form, be it opposition research, stolen material, or signal boosting on social media.

“I think my view is that if any public official or member of any campaign is contacted by any nation state or anybody acting on behalf of a nation state about influencing or interfering with our election, then that’s something that the FBI would want to know about,” Wray said.

Several of Trump’s Democratic opponents have already made public pledges not to knowingly use stolen or hacked information. The first to do so was Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was followed by Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar. Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard have also adopted such pledges.

Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez issued an open letter in late April to his Republican counterpart, Ronna Romney McDaniel, asking her to join him in “condemning the weaponization of stolen private data in our electoral process.”

“Under my leadership, the Democratic National Committee will not encourage the theft of private data, nor will we seek out or weaponize stolen private data for political gain,” Perez wrote.

McDaniel responded that “any breach of our political organizations — regardless of party — is an affront to all of us, and we should come together as Americans to prevent it from ever happening again.”

The Mueller report outlined several overtures from Russian agents to Trump campaign aides, including the now infamous Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and then Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have dirt on Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Manafort also took a meeting with his longtime business associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties to Russian intelligence, and who used the meeting to deliver a peace plan that would have ceded part of Eastern Ukraine to Russia, the Mueller report says.

The Trump campaign has given early signs of a casual approach to foreign contacts. Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale last month delivered a paid speech to a Romanian audience that included politicians and policymakers, according to a Washington Post report, and the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has insisted there is nothing wrong with accepting information from a hostile foreign nation.

“Who says it’s even illegal?” the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, told CNN’s Jake Tapper just over a week after the release after the Mueller report. “There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians, it depends on where it came from.”

For Democrats, meanwhile, shunning that type of information is becoming a rallying cry. Lockhart on Tuesday pushed campaign operatives to send tweets indicating they have “never solicited nor received information from Russia or any adversary of the U.S.” along with the hashtag “#everybodydoesntdoit.”

“I have heard from almost every [previous] Republican presidential campaign with people saying, one, they wouldn’t solicit it, and two, they wouldn’t receive it” Lockhart said. “Except for Trump.”