USA DAWN: NEWS AND UPDATES

As the dust begins to settle around the p---y grab heard ’round the world, a few questions remain unanswered. First of all: Why did it take until last Friday for a tape of  Donald Trump  bragging about coming onto a married woman and groping whomever he wanted—“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything”—to leak? And who, exactly, is behind the tape’s sudden leap into the public sphere? The answer may surprise you. According to Page Six, the person responsible for Trump’s catastrophic October surprise might very well be . . .  Billy Bush  himself, the hapless  Today  show host who was escorting Trump to a shoot for Bush’s old show,  Access Hollywood , when the Republican candidate made his now-notorious comments into a microphone he didn’t realize was recording his every word. The  New York Post ’s gossip section alleges that Bush “boasted at a party in August that he had a ‘tape of Trump being a real dog,’ ...

There's been a lot of election brouhaha over the past several weeks, and this past week,  Today  host Billy Bush was suspended from his duties on the daytime talk show series after footage was released revealing he had made some disparaging comments against women more than a decade ago. This morning,  The Today Show  returned to the schedule. Interestingly, the series chose to barely make note of the Billy Bush scandal, with the hosts only briefly addressing the scandal. Al Roker, who took over for Billy Bush during  Today 's third hour, addressed what happened with the tape from a decade ago that surfaced, noting: As you can see Billy Bush is not joining us today, as you're probably aware, (he was) part of that 2005  Access Hollywood  taping with Donald Trump that's been in the news all weekend. Roker's onscreen partner, Tamron Hall, picked up the slack where Roker left off, also noting that NBC has indefinitely su...