Donald Trump: I should charge for CNN debate

US posts 7th batch of Clinton emails containing 7,800 pages of messages

Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump says he should charge CNN for appearing in the network’s upcoming Republican primary debate.

Mr Trump bragged to about 5,000 backers at a rally on Monday in Georgia that he’s a ratings draw that networks have used to make money in previous debates.

He suggests he would demand that CNN pay him $5 million for him to appear in the next debate, scheduled for December 15 in Las Vegas. Mr Trump says he’d give the money to programmes that helped veterans.

Mr Trump flew to Georgia after meeting with dozens of black pastors in his Manhattan offices. Some of the pastors say they wanted to challenge Mr Trump about his racially charged rhetoric.

While some pastors left the gathering with hopes their message had resonated, Mr Trump said afterward he had no plans to change his approach, which he said had taken him to “first position in every single poll”.

Meanwhile, the state department on Monday released a new tranche of about 5,000 emails sent or received by Hillary Clinton when she served as top US diplomat and controversially used a private email server.

The equivalent of 7,800 pages of messages, mostly from 2012 and 2013, were checked for classified information and then made public on a department website.

Among the emails was apparent acknowledgement from Ms Clinton, perhaps the world’s most important diplomat at the time, that her email and Blackberry device were down for two weeks following Hurricane Sandy, which slammed the northeast coast in October 2012.

“Between losing my internet/berry service for two weeks during Sandy and jet lagging around the world, I’m not sure what I never received but am trying to crawl out from under the ones that are piled up in my in box,” Ms Clinton wrote longtime friend Betsy Ebeling on November 14, 2012 during a trip to Australia.

The exact location of Ms Clinton’s server has been a mystery, but her main residence is in Chappaqua, New York.