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With a family like this: Nevada GOP candidate's relatives tell voters to pick rival

That’s going to make for an awkward Thanksgiving.
Adam Laxalt is running for attorney general in Nevada as a Republican, but is being opposed by an unusual group: his own flesh and blood. In fact, some of Laxalt's extended family members have written a public letter urging voters to pick Laxalt’s Democratic opponent, Ross Miller, instead of their relative.
Laxalt's campaign consultant Robert Uithoven dismissed the letter as a desperate move from Miller's campaign, and said Laxalt "doesn't have anything bad to say" about his relatives.
“The only reason our opponent would exploit this issue and circulate this kind of thing is he sees himself losing his political career," Uithoven told FoxNews.com.  
In the letter, which was published Thursday by the Las Vegas Sun, the seven family members said they felt they had to speak up in support of Miller “to maintain the integrity of our home state of Nevada.”
“Know that our message does not originate from a Republican, Democratic or even family affiliation,” the letter says. “It has to do with the most basic question all voters must ask themselves when they step into the voting booth, ‘Who really is the best qualified candidate for attorney general for the state of Nevada?’”
The message was signed by Adam Laxalt's aunts, Kevin and Neena Laxalt, as well as his cousins Kevan, Kristin, Michelle, Peter and Meggan.
A FoxNews.com request for comment from the Miller campaign was not immediately returned.
Uithoven said there are many family members that support Laxalt's campaign, and have been with the "candidate every step of the way." He said he believes the letter will have little impact because Nevada's voters are focused on real issues, not a family feud.
"Most voters, they are voting for a candidate they are not voting for a family," he said. 
Laxalt’s mother, who is also named Michelle Laxalt, also spoke out in support of her son.
"Nevada is full of large families, all of whom may not adore one another at all times. I doubt Nevadans are truly interested with family beefs that are not their own," she said in a statement to the Associated Press. "Many of us are so proud and supportive of Adam, his military service to our nation and his desire to serve in public office."
This isn’t the first time Laxalt’s family drama has made headlines.
The 34-year-old was revealed last year to be the secret child of longtime New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici and Michelle Laxalt, whose father former Nevada Sen. Paul Laxalt, served alongside Domenici for years.
Domenici and Michelle Laxalt, who was 24 when she had her son, said at the time that they decided to go public with their decades-old secret because they believed someone was about to release the information in an attempt to smear Domenici, who had a reputation as a deeply devoted family man.
"I deeply regret this and am very sorry for my behavior," Domenici, 80, said in his statement. "I hope New Mexicans will view that my accomplishments for my beloved state outweigh my personal transgression."
Domenici was the longest-serving senator in New Mexico history when he retired in 2010 after six terms. Michelle Laxalt became a prominent lobbyist, Republican activist and television commentator after the affair.

Dozens of expelled Nazis reportedly paid millions in Social Security

Former Auschwitz guard Jakob Denzinger lived the American dream.
His plastics company in the Rust Belt town of Akron, Ohio, thrived. By the late 1980s, he had acquired the trappings of success: a Cadillac DeVille and a Lincoln Town Car, a lakefront home, investments in oil and real estate.
Then the Nazi hunters showed up.
In 1989, as the U.S. government prepared to strip him of his citizenship, Denzinger packed a pair of suitcases and fled to Germany. Denzinger later settled in this pleasant town on the Drava River, where he lives comfortably, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. He collects a Social Security payment of about $1,500 each month, nearly twice the take-home pay of an average Croatian worker.
Denzinger, 90, is among dozens of suspected Nazi war criminals and SS guards who collected millions of dollars in Social Security payments after being forced out of the United States, an Associated Press investigation found.
The payments flowed through a legal loophole that has given the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave. If they agreed to go, or simply fled before deportation, they could keep their Social Security, according to interviews and internal government records.
Like Denzinger, many lied about their Nazi pasts to get into the U.S. following World War II, and eventually became American citizens.
Among those who benefited:
--armed SS troops who guarded the Nazi network of camps where millions of Jews perished.
--an SS guard who took part in the brutal liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland that killed as many as 13,000 Jews.
--a Nazi collaborator who engineered the arrest and execution of thousands of Jews in Poland.
--a German rocket scientist accused of using slave labor to build the V-2 rocket that pummeled London. He later won NASA's highest honor for helping to put a man on the moon.
The AP's findings are the result of more than two years of interviews, research and analysis of records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and other sources.
The Justice Department denied using Social Security payments as a tool for removing Nazi suspects. But records show the U.S. State Department and the Social Security Administration voiced grave concerns over the methods used by the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations.
State officials derogatorily called the practice "Nazi dumping" and claimed the OSI was bargaining with suspects so they would leave voluntarily.
Since 1979, the AP analysis found, at least 38 of 66 suspects removed from the United States kept their Social Security benefits.
Legislation that would have closed the Social Security loophole failed 15 years ago, partly due to opposition from the OSI. Since then, according to the AP's analysis, at least 10 Nazi suspects kept their benefits after leaving. The Social Security Administration confirmed payments to seven who are deceased. One living suspect was confirmed through an AP interview. Two others met the conditions to keep their benefits.
Of the 66 suspects, at least four are alive, living in Europe on U.S. Social Security.
In newly uncovered Social Security Administration records, the AP found that by March 1999, 28 suspected Nazi criminals had collected $1.5 million in Social Security payments after their removal from the U.S.
Since then, the AP estimates the amount paid out has reached into the millions. That estimate is based on the number of suspects who qualified and the three decades that have passed since the first former Nazis, Arthur Rudolph and John Avdzej, signed agreements that required them to leave the country but ensured their benefits would continue.
Long-living beneficiaries can collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments.
A single male who earned an average wage of $44,800 a year and turned 65 in 1990, the year after Denzinger did, would receive nearly $15,000 annually in Social Security benefits, according to the Urban Institute, a nonprofit public policy group in Washington. That's $375,000 over 25 years. The amounts are adjusted for inflation.
The Social Security Administration refused the AP's request for the total number of Nazi suspects who received benefits and the dollar amounts of those payments.
Spokesman William "BJ" Jarrett said the agency does not track data specific to Nazi cases. A further barrier, Jarrett said, is that there is no exception in U.S. privacy law that "allows us to disclose information because the individual is a Nazi war criminal or an accused Nazi war criminal."
The agency also declined to make the acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, or another senior agency official available for an interview.
The Justice Department declined the AP's request for an official to speak on the record. Spokesman Peter Carr said in an emailed statement that Social Security payments never were used as an incentive or as a threat to persuade Nazi suspects to depart voluntarily.
"The matter of Social Security benefits eligibility was raised by defense counsel, not by the department, and the department neither used retirement benefits as an inducement to leave the country and renounce citizenship nor threatened that failure to depart and renounce would jeopardize continued receipt of benefits," Carr said.
The department opposed the legislation in 1999, Carr acknowledged, because it would have undermined the OSI's mandate to remove Nazi criminals as expeditiously as possible to countries that would prosecute them.
Speed was a key factor.
Survivors of the Holocaust who made the United States their home after the war had been forced to share it with their former Nazi tormenters. That had to change, and fast, the OSI's proponents said. If suspects were to stand trial, they needed to be found and ousted while they were alive. The OSI and its backers didn't want death to cheat justice.
Yet only 10 suspects were ever prosecuted after being expelled, according to the department's own figures.
At his home in Osijek, Denzinger would not discuss his situation. "I don't want to say anything," he told the AP in German as he rested on his walker in the hallway of his apartment.
But Denzinger's son, who lives in the U.S., confirmed his father receives Social Security payments and said he deserved them. "This isn't coming out of other people's pockets," Thomas Denzinger said. "He paid into the system." Plus his father is paying 30 percent in taxes. "They should be taking out nothing," he said.
Another former Nazi camp guard, longtime Montana resident Martin Hartmann, lives in Berlin and also is collecting Social Security, according to a person with knowledge of Hartmann's finances who requested anonymity because the person did not want to be associated with Hartmann's Nazi history. Hartmann, 95, left the U.S. in 2007, just before a federal judge issued an order to revoke his citizenship.
The loophole also means new suspects, including former SS unit commander Michael Karkoc, whom the AP located last year in Minnesota, could retain benefits even if removed to another country.
German prosecutors opened an investigation after the AP uncovered documentation showing Karkoc, 95, ordered his unit to raze a Polish village during the war. Dozens of women and children were killed in the attack.

US drops arms, ammunition to Kurds fighting ISIS in Kobani

The U.S. military said late Sunday that it had dropped weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to Kurdish forces battling to hold the Syrian border town of Kobani against Islamic State militants.
The airdrops were the first of their kind and followed weeks of U.S. and coalition airstrikes in and near Kobani. Earlier Sunday, U.S. Central Command (CentCom) said that it had launched 11 airstrikes overnight in the area.
CentCom said U.S. C-130 cargo planes made multiple drops of arms and supplies provided by Kurdish authorities in Iraq. It said they were intended to enable continued resistance to Islamic State efforts to take full control of Kobani.
In a conference call with reporters after CentCom announced the airdrops, senior administration officials said three C-130 planes dropped 27 bundles of small arms, ammunition and medical supplies. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House.
One official said that while the results of the mission are still being assessed, it appeared that "the vast majority" of the supplies reached the intended Kurdish fighters.
The official also said the C-130s encountered no resistance from the ground in Syria during their flights in and out of Syrian airspace.
The airdrops are almost certain to anger the Turkish government, which has said it would oppose any U.S. arms transfers to the Kurdish rebels in Syria. Turkey views the main Kurdish group in Syria as an extension of the Turkish Kurd group known as the PKK, which has waged a 30-year insurgency in Turkey and is designated a terror group by the U.S. and by NATO.
President Barack Obama called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday to discuss the situation in Syria and notify him of the plan to make airdrops Sunday, one administration official told reporters. He would not describe Erdogan's reaction but said U.S. officials are clear about Turkey's opposition to any moves that help Kurdish forces that Turkey views as an enemy.
One of the administration officials said the airdrops should be seen as a humanitarian move. He said U.S. officials believe that if Kobani were to fall, the Islamic State militants would massacre Kurds in the town.
Another administration official said "you might see more" U.S. resupply missions to benefit the Kurdish fighters in Kobani in the days ahead. Yet another administration official said a land route to resupply the Kurds had been under discussion but would require Turkish cooperation. He said talks on resupply needs and means would continue.
In a written statement, CentCom said its forces have conducted more than 135 airstrikes against Islamic State forces in Kobani.
Using an acronym for the Islamic State group, Central Command said, "Combined with continued resistance to ISIL on the ground, indications are that these strikes have slowed ISIL advances into the city, killed hundreds of their fighters and destroyed or damaged scores of pieces of ISIL combat equipment and fighting positions."
The airdrops came amid reports of some of the fiercest fighting yet in the month-long battle for Kobani, with Reuters reporting that Islamic state fighters had attacked Kurdish fighters with mortars and car bombs. The Britain-based Syria Observatory for Human Rights claimed that 70 Islamic State fighters had been killed over two days, though those reports could not be immediately confirmed.