Just minutes before Sunday night's presidential debate, an extraordinary confrontation unfolded between Republican Donald Trump's campaign and the staff of the Presidential Commission on Debates after Trump tried to give seats in his VIP box to a group of women who have accused Bill Clinton of making unwanted sexual advances.
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The situation de-escalated 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 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's line of sight from the stage.
With little other option to avoid a physical scuffle, however, the Trump campaign relented.
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.
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Among the women 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 tightly under wraps, going so far as to tell the 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 confrontation.
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, said in an interview with CBS News on Monday that she still did not understand why Fahrenkopf would not allow the women to be seated where Trump wanted them.
"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."
Before the first debate at Hofstra University on Long Island last month, the Clinton and Trump campaigns bickered over the guests they would invite. Clinton's aides invited Mark Cuban, the reality TV entrepreneur and frequent Trump antagonist, and said he would be sitting in the front row.
Trump threatened to invite another woman from Bill Clinton's past, Gennifer Flowers, and seat her in the front row. Flowers, who has said she carried on a long-running affair with the former president, did not attend.
A Section on 10/11/2016