Lester Holt: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's teams clash over role of presidential debate moderator

Tensions flared between the Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns ahead of the first 2016 presidential debate amidst a dispute over the proper role of its moderator, Lester Holt.

With just hours before the high-stakes encounter on the campus of Hofstra University in New York, the Clinton team once more insisted that Mr Holt, the NBC nightly news anchor, should not hesitate to call out Mr Trump should he make statements he considers factually incorrect.

But representatives of Mr Trump said that any such interventions from the debate’s moderator would amount to tilting the night in Ms Clinton’s favour.

The back-and-forth between the campaigns means there will be almost as much pressure on Mr Holt on Monday night as on the candidates. Appointed permanently to the anchor’s chair by NBC barely a year ago, this will be Mr Holt’s first time stewarding a presidential debate.

It is inevitable that whatever Mr Holt decides to do - to be a proactive presence on the stage or essentially restrict himself to introducing the issues and letting the candidates have at it with each other - he will get criticism from somewhere.

“No matter what he does, he'll get hammered,“ Joe Scarborough, the host of Morning Joe on MSNBC said earlier on Monday. ”Nobody will be happy no matter what he does.”

High in Mr Holt’s mind will the opprobrium that was poured onto his NBC colleague, Matt Lauer, after he moderated a national security town hall in New York, when the two candidates appeared on stage back-to-back for half an hour each.

Mr Lauer, who hosts a morning breakfast programme, was scorned for allowing Mr Trump to repeat a well-known falsehood - that he always opposed the Iraq War - unchallenged and for grilling Ms Clinton with a far tougher fusillade of questions than he did the Republican nominee.

There is concern in the Clinton camp that expectations have been set so low for Mr Trump in advance of the debate that he will need to do very little to be declared the victor. It also worries them that like Mr Lauer at the last event, Mr Holt may treat the two candidates differently.

“You should be held to the same standard on knowledge, what kind of plans you have, your ability to explain your plans,“ Jennifer Palmieri, the Clinton communications director, commented. ”Our concern is just what kind of standard is he held to."

Her campaign manager, Robbie Mook, told NBC on Monday that he remained anxious that Mr Holt should work to keep Mr Trump on the straight and narrow as regards truthfulness so that Ms Clinton does not have spent her precious minutes correcting him.

“We don't want Donald Trump's lies, distortions to be a distraction,“ he said. “We want this to be about the issues. We want both candidates to explain their plans to the American people.”

Kellyanne Conway, the Trump campaign manager, was on the defensive about an assertion by her candidate last week about Mr Holt’s political affiliation.

“Lester is a Democrat. It's a phony system. They are all Democrats,” he said on the Bill O’Reilly Show on Fox News. Mr Holt is actually a registered Republican.

Ms Conway denied on Monday that Mr Trump had deliberately lied about Mr Holt’s political leanings but that he rather made a mistake through ignorance. “He didn't lie,” she insisted. “A lie would mean he knew the man's party affiliation.”

Appearing on Morning Joe, Ms Conway said that the demands from the other side that Mr Holt should fact-check the candidates was really an effort to “game the ref” and swing the debate against her side.

She was pressed meanwhile on whether Mr Trump would offer more details on plans to beat Isis which he says he has up his sleeve but which he has so far refused to talk about because they must remain secret.

“He'll be happy to offer specifics without telling the enemy what we're going to do,” Ms Conway said, adding that “people are just amazed” that Ms Clinton outlined her strategy against Isis on her website.

Mr Trump is certain meanwhile to come under pressure from Ms Clinton to pledge finally to reveal his tax returns like every other presidential candidate in the modern era - pressure he is almost certain to continue to resist.