Thursday, September 29, 2016
Dem lawmaker wears Hillary pin during House hearing on Clinton email probe
Another Crook in the government or just a dumb ass? |
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, raised eyebrows Wednesday when she showed up wearing a gold Hillary Clinton campaign pin to a House Judiciary Committee hearing dealing with the FBI probe regarding Clinton’s private email server.
The committee heard testimony from FBI Director James Comey on the agency’s decision not to pursue charges and a newly revealed set of controversial immunity deals given to Clinton’s staff.
Jackson Lee asked Comey questions while wearing the "H" campaign pin -- though the exchange left no doubt as to her leanings on the matter.
"[Republicans] want you to prosecute, or ask the DOJ to prosecute, Secretary Clinton regardless of the facts. So they’ve engaged in an almost daily ritual of holding hearings, desperately trying to tear down the investigation," she told Comey.
The House has guidelines restricting certain forms of campaign-related activity, but there is no apparent ban on wearing pins. However, while it is not unusual in the slightest for representatives to express their political beliefs on Capitol Hill, wearing campaign paraphernalia during an oversight hearing is more of a rarity.
Jackson Lee also was spotted wearing the pin on the House floor during the vote to override President Obama’s veto of a bill allowing 9/11 victims’ families to sue Saudi Arabia.
Jackson Lee’s expression of support for Clinton was noted on a pro-Donald Trump subreddit, /r/The_Donald, in a thread entitled “Don’t mind me, just doing my impartial oversight with my shiny gold H pin on.”
Jackson Lee’s office did not immediately return a request for comment from FoxNews.com.
Jackson Lee isn’t the only lawmaker to sport an "H" pin on the Hill. On Tuesday, Clinton’s running mate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., arrived on the Senate floor wearing the lapel pin.
When alerted to it, he said he had forgotten to take it off.
Gary Johnson has 'Aleppo moment' when asked about his favorite foreign leader
FILE - In this Sept. 3, 2016 file photo, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson speaks during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP) |
Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson said he was having another “Aleppo moment” after drawing a blank when he was asked to name is favorite foreign leader in an interview Wednesday.
Asked on MSNBC’s “Hardball” to come up with a name, Johnson blanked in a fashion similar to a moment he had on the network earlier this month.
"I guess I'm having an Aleppo moment," Johnson said as he tried to make light of the awkward moment.
Johnson said he was thinking of the name of the former president of Mexico, but was “having a brain freeze.” His running mate Bill Weld chimed in that he was thinking about Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president from 2000 to 2006 who has recently had spats with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over his determination to build a wall at the Mexican border and to have the country pay for it.
Another political gaffe could hurt the presidential aspirations for the former New Mexico governor even more. Johnson failed to reach the 15 percent needed to get on stage for the first presidential debate. As of Wednesday, Johnson was polling at 6 percent in the Real Clear Politics polling average.
Johnson and Weld were speaking at town hall at the University of New Hampshire in appeal to the millennial voter, according to the Los Angeles Times. The pair have garnered enough millennial support to make some nervous. President Barack Obama has come out to say that a third-party vote was essentially “a vote for Trump.”
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
Frustrated Trump advisers pan him for lousy debate prep (anonymously)
Kurtz: When campaign aides vent to the press |
Donald Trump believes he won the first presidential debate. He’s proclaimed that publicly and told me so himself.
Some of his advisers disagree, and they believe his debate prep was something of a disaster.
One well-placed source told me that there were too many people in the room during these sessions, as many as a dozen at a time, and some, including two generals, had no experience with debates or even campaigns. The result was that the candidate got lots of conflicting advice on what to say and do from a team that hadn’t even agreed internally on the best strategies.
I’m also told that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, hardly unabashed Trump fans, provided debate advice by phone.
The result, in this source’s view, is that Trump was overprepared, which left him without a clear plan to deliver his message or respond to Hillary Clinton’s jibes.
A harsher indictment was delivered to the New York Times, one in which Trump advisers attempted to blame the boss.
It’s striking that they would criticize their
candidate from behind a curtain of anonymity. In effect, they’re saying,
hey, don’t blame us, we tried to tell him but he wouldn’t listen.
Or viewed another way, they are using the press to send him a message that he needs to change his approach for the second debate in St. Louis.
Now much of this is inside baseball. Hillary Clinton is widely credited, even by many conservative commentators, as having delivered a strong performance at Hofstra and kept her opponent on the defensive. She will probably get a polling bump of a couple of points. But Trump’s supporters remain in in his corner after watching him go toe-to-toe with a former secretary of State without committing a major gaffe.
When campaigns are in a tailspin, loyalty sometimes melts as its consultants and strategists scramble to salvage their own reputations at the boss’ expense. But Trump, against all the odds set by the pundits, is in an extremely competitive race against Clinton and could win the thing.
Here’s what the Times reported yesterday:
“Campaign advisers to Donald J. Trump, concerned that his focus and objectives had dissolved during the first presidential debate on Monday, plan to more rigorously prepare him for his next face-off”—but that “whether he is open to practicing meticulously is a major concern.”
Yes, that is the sound of some folks throwing the nominee under the bus.
These unnamed sources “were privately awash in second-guessing about why he stopped attacking Mrs. Clinton on trade and character issues and instead grew erratic, impatient and subdued as the night went on. In interviews, seven campaign aides and advisers, most of whom sought anonymity to speak candidly, expressed frustration and discouragement over their candidate’s performance.”
The Gang of Seven is clearly ticked off.
The last time this kind of internal carping hit the press, during the “let Trump be Trump” debate, Paul Manafort was gone and Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were tapped to run the show.
Trump’s fans are angry at the media coverage portraying him as having lost the debate, at least according to my Twitter feed. And who knows? It’s not like the press hasn’t been repeatedly wrong about Trump.
But a story in which some of Trump’s own advisers are anonymously quoted as saying he was “erratic” in a debate watched by 84 million people doesn’t help the cause. Even if the Times reporters sought out these sources, you don’t usually see Hillary advisers anonymously griping about their candidate.
Even successful campaigns go through near-death experiences. Clinton was sliding in the polls through her pneumonia period and Democrats were starting to panic. In the end, the burden is on Trump himself, and not his inner circle, to find a way to win.
Odds and Ends
--Howard Dean standing by his ludicrous suggestion that Donald Trump might have a coke problem makes me want to ... scream. It’s outrageous for a doctor, ex-governor and former presidential candidate and party chairman to act like a smear merchant. Kudos to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for calling on his colleague to apologize.
--A former Chris Christie ally, David Wildstein, has testified that the governor laughed when he told him the George Washington Bridge lanes were being closed as an act of political retaliation. I don’t know if that’s true, and the former presidential candidate has denied it, but imagine if Trump had chosen Christie as his running mate.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.
Some of his advisers disagree, and they believe his debate prep was something of a disaster.
One well-placed source told me that there were too many people in the room during these sessions, as many as a dozen at a time, and some, including two generals, had no experience with debates or even campaigns. The result was that the candidate got lots of conflicting advice on what to say and do from a team that hadn’t even agreed internally on the best strategies.
I’m also told that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, hardly unabashed Trump fans, provided debate advice by phone.
The result, in this source’s view, is that Trump was overprepared, which left him without a clear plan to deliver his message or respond to Hillary Clinton’s jibes.
A harsher indictment was delivered to the New York Times, one in which Trump advisers attempted to blame the boss.
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
Or viewed another way, they are using the press to send him a message that he needs to change his approach for the second debate in St. Louis.
Now much of this is inside baseball. Hillary Clinton is widely credited, even by many conservative commentators, as having delivered a strong performance at Hofstra and kept her opponent on the defensive. She will probably get a polling bump of a couple of points. But Trump’s supporters remain in in his corner after watching him go toe-to-toe with a former secretary of State without committing a major gaffe.
When campaigns are in a tailspin, loyalty sometimes melts as its consultants and strategists scramble to salvage their own reputations at the boss’ expense. But Trump, against all the odds set by the pundits, is in an extremely competitive race against Clinton and could win the thing.
Here’s what the Times reported yesterday:
“Campaign advisers to Donald J. Trump, concerned that his focus and objectives had dissolved during the first presidential debate on Monday, plan to more rigorously prepare him for his next face-off”—but that “whether he is open to practicing meticulously is a major concern.”
Yes, that is the sound of some folks throwing the nominee under the bus.
These unnamed sources “were privately awash in second-guessing about why he stopped attacking Mrs. Clinton on trade and character issues and instead grew erratic, impatient and subdued as the night went on. In interviews, seven campaign aides and advisers, most of whom sought anonymity to speak candidly, expressed frustration and discouragement over their candidate’s performance.”
The Gang of Seven is clearly ticked off.
The last time this kind of internal carping hit the press, during the “let Trump be Trump” debate, Paul Manafort was gone and Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were tapped to run the show.
Trump’s fans are angry at the media coverage portraying him as having lost the debate, at least according to my Twitter feed. And who knows? It’s not like the press hasn’t been repeatedly wrong about Trump.
But a story in which some of Trump’s own advisers are anonymously quoted as saying he was “erratic” in a debate watched by 84 million people doesn’t help the cause. Even if the Times reporters sought out these sources, you don’t usually see Hillary advisers anonymously griping about their candidate.
Even successful campaigns go through near-death experiences. Clinton was sliding in the polls through her pneumonia period and Democrats were starting to panic. In the end, the burden is on Trump himself, and not his inner circle, to find a way to win.
Odds and Ends
--Howard Dean standing by his ludicrous suggestion that Donald Trump might have a coke problem makes me want to ... scream. It’s outrageous for a doctor, ex-governor and former presidential candidate and party chairman to act like a smear merchant. Kudos to MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for calling on his colleague to apologize.
--A former Chris Christie ally, David Wildstein, has testified that the governor laughed when he told him the George Washington Bridge lanes were being closed as an act of political retaliation. I don’t know if that’s true, and the former presidential candidate has denied it, but imagine if Trump had chosen Christie as his running mate.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.
Jets owner, Hollywood producer, Wall Street titans helped drive Trump’s $18M day
Trump vows to be much tougher on Clinton in next debate |
The campaign announced the total on Tuesday, the morning after the Republican nominee’s first presidential debate with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. In doing so, the campaign listed some of the influential figures involved in the billionaire businessman's accelerating fundraising.
About one-third of the money reportedly came in the form of relatively small, online donations. The remainder was solicited during a phone-calling blitz during which more than 100 top fundraisers went to Trump Tower in New York City to make calls.
“We had a massive fundraising day,” said Mnuchin, the Trump campaign’s finance chairman. “With this kind of energy and generous support behind us, we are going to have President Donald J. Trump in the White House.”
The campaign listed 26 of the fundraisers including Mnuchin, Trump and several top officials from the Republican National Committee.
Mnuchin led one of six teams in the effort, part of a larger joint-fundraising effort with the Republican National Committee known as the Trump Victory Committee.
See the Fox News 2016 battleground prediction map and make your own election projections. See Predictions Map →
Trump, who essentially self-funded his primary campaign, has largely trailed Clinton in general election fundraising. Clinton last month, for example, raised $143 million, compared to $90 million for Trump.
Still, Trump and Clinton are essentially tied in most national polls.
Mnuchin, who followed his father as a partner at Goldman Sachs, joined the campaign as finance chairman this spring, facing the task of getting a bare-boned operation to at least compete with the Clinton fundraising juggernaut.
His finance and production company, RatPac-Dune Entertainment, is connected to such blockbusters as “The Devil Wears Prada” as well as the “X-Men” and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series.
His fundraising team, MAGA (Make American Great Again) also included venture capitalist and GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy and Ray Washburne, a Trump Victory vice chairman and one of several Dallas-based investors.
The Yuuuge Team, a reference to one of Trump’s favorite campaign expressions, was led by Lew Eisenberg, Trump Victory’s finance chairman.
Eisenberg is a financier and investor with long, deep ties to Wall Street and Republican fundraising circles. He started on Wall Street with Goldman Sachs and in 2002 was the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman.
His political support and connections have come with several prestigious appointments including chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, during and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
Johnson, the Jets owner, was among the first high-profile figures to back Trump. The businessman and philanthropist is the great-grandson of a Johnson & Johnson co-founder.
Others included Trump attorney Michael Cohen and financier and Fox News contributor Anthony Scaramucci.
Team Deplorable, a reference to what Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters, included financier Roy Bailey; Gentry Beach, a long-time Trump friend and another Dallas investor; and former Texas Rangers baseball team owner Tommy Hicks.
Trump joined running-mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, sons Eric and Donald Jr., and daughter Ivanka Trump on one of the other teams.
“We’re still going! Thank you America, #MAGA,” Trump tweeted after the announcement Tuesday.
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