The police report states that Pierce and his girlfriend met a woman named Maggie Baca and two of her friends in the hotel when "both groups of parties began a conversation about politics which got Mr. Pierce upset."

"Mrs. Baca stated that Mr. Pierce began to push her and at this point her and her friends began to walk to their room," the report said. "Mrs. Baca stated that Mr. Pierce followed them to their room and stuck his arm in the door and tried to enter the room."

The report went on to say that Baca accused Pierce of hitting her in the head and grabbing her hoodie as she and her friends allegedly attempted to push him from getting into the room.

Both Pierce and Baca reportedly declined medical assistance.

“I regret that what started as a civil political discussion escalated to the level that it did,” said Pierce, 52. “Although what has been reported thus far differs in important respects from what actually occurred, I have confidence that the judicial process will work as it should.”

Maggie Elena Baca told police that she encountered Pierce and his girlfriend on the 23rd floor of the Lowes Atlanta Hotel. After she got into a political debate with the actor, Baca said Pierce followed her and her friends as they walked away, tried to force his way into their room and “began to hit her in the head and grab her hoodie, ripping her hoodie off,” according to the police report. Pierce, who was charged with simple battery, disputed that account and said the women tried to pull him into their room.

One of Wendell Pierce’s co-stars from HBO’s “The Wire” defended Pierce against allegations he hit a female Bernie Sanders supporter after a political debate turned ugly on May 14.

“He said it was complete and absolute bogus BS,” Chad Coleman — who’s now starring on the History Channel’s remake of “Roots” and played Dennis “Cutty” Wise on “The Wire” — told us.

“We can all be politically fervent, but to go to that extent and accuse him to that extent is just wrong. He’s an amazing guy,” added the actor at a Lincoln Center premiere for “Roots,” where attendees included Rev. Al Sharpton and A+E Networks boss Nancy Dubuc.

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Sanders' experience in Southern California offers glimpses into everything that went right — and wrong — for his campaign. In more ways than one, at Lynwood and in Santa Monica and all throughout the primary season, Sanders was a party crasher. Sometimes that worked out for him. And sometimes it did not.

This week marked the final presidential nominating contest for the Democratic Party, in Washington, D.C. Bernie Sanders lost. And he isn't throwing in the towel just yet, he says. But Sanders also says he can do "arithmetic." And that math shows he did not get enough votes or delegates to be the Democratic nominee. (He trails Clinton by millions in the Democratic popular vote, and hundreds in party's delegate count, with or without superdelegates.) Hillary Clinton was declared the "presumptive nominee" last week, and she is now campaigning as one would expect a presumptive party nominee to campaign, complete with the endorsement of a sitting President. It'd be fair to say that the only thing keeping Bernie Sanders' campaign alive is that he hasn't yet said it is dead.
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In many ways, the Sanders campaign was a love revolution, with a message of unity, diversity and prosperity for all. But under the surface, the Sanders' movement was just as much an exercise in anger.
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It was a moment that, in several ways, could symbolize Sanders' entire campaign — a victory and a defeat, all at the same time. And, in spite of it all, a dogged determination to keep pressing ahead — and to seemingly never, ever admit you've lost.

Sanders congratulated Clinton on her primary victory and Clinton congratulated Sanders on his campaign, according to statements from both camps prepared by aides. They discussed issues on the Democratic Party platform ranging from raising the minimum wage, campaign finance reform, universal healthcare and college affordability.

“Secretary Clinton and Senator Sanders met at the Capital Hilton in Washington this evening and had a positive discussion about their primary campaign, about unifying the party and about the dangerous threat that Donald Trump poses to our nation,” said a Clinton campaign official.

Clinton has now won nearly 400 more pledged delegates than Sanders and some 15 million votes, about 3.5 million more than her opponent. Sanders has said he will continue to campaign in the convention, but there is a widespread acceptance among his aides and allies that he has clearly lost the primary.
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Also attending the meeting were Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, Clinton campaign manger Robby Mook, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver and Bernie’s wife, Jane Sanders. Mook and Weaver have been the most frequent points of contact between the two campaigns. Sanders and Clinton met for around an hour-and-a-half.

Bernie Sanders’ brother, Larry, has admitted to Heat Street what his younger sibling will not: Hillary Clinton is likely to be the next president of the United States.

After an extraordinary campaign during which Bernie has raised more than $200 million from individual donors and inspired legions of young voters to take an interest in politics, this member of the Sanders family is prepared to acknowledge publicly that the game is up as far as the Democratic Party nomination is concerned.

“I think he’s made it quite plain: he will campaign against Trump and therefore for Mrs Clinton,” says Larry, speaking from his home in Oxford, England. “And he will continue his campaign for an equal society.”

Why won’t Bernard say this in public? Why is he fighting on?

Most Democrats want to see Sanders treated with respect and dignity, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. But Sabato also said the nomination battle is over and Sanders "has to cooperate.” Tuesday's meeting with his Senate colleagues offers Sanders a good chance to transition to the role of “party unifier,” Sabato said.

“If he drags his feet, he will be seen as a spoilsport at a time when Democrats are horrified at the prospect of a President Trump,” Sabato wrote in an email. “Sanders will risk losing all that he has gained.”

On Sunday evening, after meeting in Burlington, Vt., with his close advisers and supporters, Sanders called for a 50-state strategy to get young people and working people to run for political office and to demand that government answers the needs of “ordinary people,” not just wealthy campaign contributors.

Asked whether he'll still consider himself a candidate after Tuesday, Sanders responded: "We are taking this campaign and our ideas for a strong platform to transform the Democratic Party away from a party which spends far too much time raising money from wealthy people into a party which represents the grassroots of this country."

You know, even as we figure out more about what happened, we need to get to work. And I have a number of proposals how to tackle this issue of self radicalization. I would set up a team exclusively dedicated to detecting and preventing lone wolf attacks. And that means providing more resources, creating more integrated intelligence use among all levels of law enforcement, strengthening the communication that we have coming from abroad, as well as internally, and working with Silicon Valley to prevent online radicalization. This killer was interviewed by the FBI three times and I'm not going to second guess what career law enforcement professionals do everyday to defend our nation. But we need to look carefully at this. Should we have a broader database? You know, someone comes to the attention of FBI not once but three times, does that suggest that local law enforcement needs to know. That people need to be more aware? Do we need to, you know, push the Congress harder to pass a law forbidding anybody on the no fly list from buying a weapon in our country? Something they have refused to do. And should people who express the kind of admiration and allegiance to terrorism be on that list? So I think we're going to have to take a hard look about what more we can do to prevent this kind of lone wolf attack.

I had an unexpected reaction last week to President Obama’s “coronation” of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic contender for president. It was unexpected, because this whole election has been so distasteful and ugly. Frankly, I have watched in such horror as a racist and xenophobe inches closer and closer to the White House that I haven’t even really weighed in on a Democrat.

I have felt, in the past and in this election, that our latent sexism and misogyny is on full display in both men and women as Hillary Clinton repeatedly has been held to different standards than her male counterparts. I have cringed at my own sexism as I’ve wished she looked more attractive and dressed younger. As I wished she were more charming.

And then last week happened, and Obama said there is no one more uniquely qualified for this job, and I felt such excitement.
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I feel as though she is me, and you, and every other smart-as-hell woman who had to scrape for what men take for granted. She should be the next president of the United States not because she is the most uniquely qualified woman, but because she is the most uniquely qualified person, period.

In forthright comments a day after the massacre at the Pulse Club, the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic party issued a call for a return to “commonsense gun safety reform” and lambasted the Republican-controlled Congress for what she called a “totally incomprehensible” refusal to address the country’s lax gun laws.

“We can’t fall into the trap set up by the gun lobby that says if you cannot stop every shooting you shouldn’t try to stop any,” she said.

Clinton’s tough stance on gun control sets up a torrid fight with her Republican rival for the White House Donald Trump, who has positioned himself as a champion of the second amendment and dismissed any calls for greater gun controls as weakness. She insisted that while she did believe that law-abiding American citizens have the right to own guns, it was also possible to see that “reasonable, commonsense measures” could be taken that would make people more safe from guns.

Rattling off all the ways that Florida allows the proliferation of guns – the state doesn’t regulate assault weapons or large capacity magazines, doesn’t require a permit to buy a gun or oblige owners of weapons to be licensed – she said: “That’s a lot of ‘nots’. I believe strongly that commonsense gun safety reform across our country would make a difference. We know the gunman used a weapon of war to shoot down at least 50 innocent Americans.”

The two things that are said perhaps most often about Janet Hill—that she is a lawyer and that she was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley College, in the late sixties—are not true. “That legend was started by the sportscaster Dick Vitale, in 1991,” she said recently, of the Clinton story. Hill’s son Grant was then a star at Duke; he would become a star in the N.B.A. as well, and is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. “He focussed all the time on Calvin,” Hill continued, referring to her husband, a retired N.F.L. star. “Then, one day, his cameraman widened the shot—and there I was. Dick said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Grant’s mother! She went to Wellesley with her roommate Hillary Clinton! She’s a lawyer in Washington, in the Bush Administration!’ The only correct part is: I’m Grant’s mom and I went to Wellesley. Hillary and I were just good friends there.”

Janet Hill has known Hillary Rodham Clinton since 1965, when they were freshmen at Wellesley. “She played a big role in encouraging me not to leave that first week of college,” Hill, who serves on the boards of Dean Foods, the Carlyle Group, and Duke University, said. “It was culture shock: being in an all-female, predominantly white environment. I grew up in segregated New Orleans, and suddenly I’m at Wellesley, with only five blacks in my class. But my mother told me I couldn’t come home, and Hillary told me I couldn’t leave school.”

Hill and the other four African-American women who graduated from Wellesley’s four-hundred-and-twenty-person class of 1969 remember Clinton, with whom many of them still communicate, fondly. (A sixth African-American student in the class transferred after her sophomore year, and has since passed away. There were also two black students from outside the United States.) “What I liked about her was that we did not seem to be novelties to her,” Nancy Gist, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., said recently. “There were a lot of white women at Wellesley who hadn’t really had much contact with black people, especially people like us. They didn’t quite know what to make of us. Hillary did not communicate any of that. I don’t know that she had spent time around black people, but for whatever reason she did not seem to be so mystified.”

“I remember us correcting each other’s art-history essays in her room,” Alvia Wardlaw, a leading expert on African-American art, who lives in Houston, recalled. “It was me, Hillary, and Lillian Miller. I remember I had used a phrase that Lillian tried to correct, and Hillary said, ‘No, that sounds good.’ She was a very approachable and positive classmate. That’s what I appreciated about her. She was very open. And you could hear that big laugh of hers all through the dining hall.” Freshmen were required to carry heavy trays of milk, water, and food to tables where students ate together, family-style. “It was some heavy lifting,” Wardlaw added. “But Hillary would joke about it being good exercise.”

RICHMOND, Va. -- Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, issued a new warning to President Obama on Friday as he went after old enemies like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren at his first campaign rally since the end of the Republican and Democratic primary contests in Richmond, Virginia.

Back to his teleprompter-free self after enduring over a week of criticism from his own party over his attacks against a Hispanic judge, Trump assailed the president's plans to campaign alongside Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, on Wednesday in Wisconsin.

"We have a president that doesn't know what the hell he's doing, folks," Trump said. "I hear he's going to take a lot of time, during our time, when he's supposed to be looking at trade and the military and all of these things, and he's going to campaign for Crooked Hillary."

"You know what? That's OK. That's OK," Trump said before then issuing a veiled threat to the president. "Because if he does that, we're allowed to say things about him that normally we wouldn't bring up. Remember when Bill started campaigning?"