Trump tried to seat Bill Clinton’s accusers in VIP box

TOPSHOT - Republican nominee Donald Trump poses with members of the audience after the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / SAUL LOEBSAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images less TOPSHOT - Republican nominee Donald Trump poses with members of the audience after the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri on October 9, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / SAUL ... more Photo: SAUL LOEB, AFP/Getty Images Photo: SAUL LOEB, AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Trump tried to seat Bill Clinton’s accusers in VIP box 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

An extraordinary backstage confrontation between Donald Trump’s campaign and the staff of the Presidential Commission on Debates unfolded just minutes before the debate on Sunday night after Trump tried to give seats in his VIP box to a group of women who have accused former President Bill Clinton of making unwanted sexual advances.

The situation calmed only after the commission threatened to call security to remove the women if they tried to sit in the box, where they would have been right next to Clinton and in Hillary Clinton’s line of sight from the stage — a spectacle that Trump and his top advisers tried to engineer for maximum shock effect just as tens of millions of people would be tuning in from around the world.

With little other option to avoid a physical scuffle, however, the Trump campaign relented.

The episode was the latest in a string of threats, taunts and gamesmanship over the debates from both campaigns.

The incident in St. Louis on Sunday night, reported earlier by the Washington Post, rose to the highest levels of the Trump campaign and the debate commission.

Moments before the kerfuffle over seating, Trump and his campaign chief executive, Stephen Bannon, had surprised reporters by staging an impromptu news conference with the Republican nominee and three women, who have claimed that the Clintons minimized and belittled their claims of sexual misconduct. Among them were Paula Jones, whose sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton helped precipitate his impeachment, and Juanita Broaddrick, who has accused the former president of raping her in 1978.

The Trump campaign, which paid for the women to travel to St. Louis, kept the news conference under wraps, even telling reporters they took into the room, where Jones, Broaddrick and the others were waiting, that they were about to witness Trump’s debate preparations.

There was little the debate commission could do to stop Trump and Bannon’s news conference. But when the co-chairman of the commission, Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., a former Republican National Committee chairman, got word that the campaign was going to try to put the women in the Trump VIP box just as the last of the audience members were taking their seats, he objected.

“He said, ‘I will get security and yank them out of there,’” said one Republican with firsthand knowledge of the incident.

From the Trump campaign’s perspective, it was utilizing its four seats in the VIP box as it should. But Fahrenkopf insisted that the agreement with the commission and the two campaigns allowed only family members in those seats. The commission denied the Clintons’ request that Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri be seated in their box.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, told CBS News on Monday that she did not understand why Fahrenkopf would not allow the women to be seated in the box.

“I was surprised that they thwarted that, only because it did not say family box, it said VIP box,” Conway said. “These women want to be heard.”