Mainstream media's history of attacking GOP figures Video

Clinton camp: Mills potential conflict of interest 'absurd'

The Untouchables.

Hillary Clinton's campaign is questioning a report about a top aide to Clinton when she was secretary of state also conducting interviews for the Clinton Foundation, saying implications about a potential conflict of interest are “absurd.”
Then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills took an Amtrak train from Washington to New York City in June 2012 to interview two executives to potentially become the foundation’s next leader, sources told CNN, which first reported the story.
Clinton purportedly accepted the secretary of state post in 2009 in part on the condition that any foundation activity would neither “create conflicts nor the appearance of conflicts” of interest for her.
The CNN report doesn’t state Mills broke any rules but suggested her interviewing trip has added to the “blurred lines” between Clinton’s government work and non-government activities, which have long created problems for her and husband President Bill Clinton.
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as secretary of state to send and receive official emails has also added to that perception.
The Clinton campaign said Friday that Mills “volunteered her personal time” and paid for her own travel to New York City.

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“And it was crystal clear to all involved that this had nothing to do with her official duties,” the campaign said. “The idea that this poses a conflict of interest is absurd."
Mills' attorney also purportedly said such work was voluntary.
The foundation did not immediately respond to a FoxNews.com request Saturday for comment.
The CNN report comes the same week as a new batch of Clinton emails seemed to show foundation donors got preferential treatment during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department.
Conservative watchdog Judicial Watch released the 44 new email exchanges, which the group says were not in the original 30,000 handed over to the State Department. Clinton has repeatedly claimed she turned over all work-related emails during the now-closed probe into her private server use.
The documents challenge Clinton's insistence that there was "no connection" between the foundation and her work at the State Department.
In one email exchange, Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, tried to put billionaire donor Gilbert Chagoury -- a convicted money launderer -- in touch with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.
And a report this week by The Daily Caller says that several investigations are  being launched, including one led by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara of the Civil Frauds Unit that will focus on the foundation's dealings in New York. The agency has declined to comment.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has also tried to get answers about Mills' New York trip. Grassley sent Secretary of State John Kerry a letter in January about the issue.

Pelosi says already getting 'obscene and sick' messages after cell phone number, email address released

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Saturday that she has received “obscene and sick” calls, voicemails and text messages after a hacker posted the private cell phone numbers and email addresses of roughly 200 current and former congressional Democrats.
“Please be careful not to allow your children or family members to answer your phone or read incoming text messages,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to colleagues. “This morning, I am changing my phone number and I advise you to do so as well.”
The contact information was part of a large computer-content dump Friday and the most recent in a series of cyberattacks on Democratic Party organizations, including the Democratic National Committee, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Pelosi said she was flying from Florida to California on Friday when she heard that the information had been posted by the hacker or hackers known as "Guccifer 2.0."
She also confirmed that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has hired a cybersecurity firm to conduct an investigation of the breach, purportedly part of a Russian cyber-attack that Pelosi has termed “an electronic Watergate break-in.”
Pelosi added that the chief information security officer of the House, in coordination with Capitol Police, has sent communications to those people whose email addresses have been made public about how to address the problem. The chief administrative officer of the House has also sent an email stating that the House computer system has not been compromised, but urged members and staff to be vigilant about opening emails and websites.

The DCCC is also issuing similar guidance.
Rep. Ben Ray Lujan, D-N.M., was also holding a conference call with lawmakers on Saturday evening along with cybersecurity experts who have been investigating and responding to the breach.

"This is a sad course of events, not only for us, but more importantly for our country," Pelosi said in urging lawmakers to join the conference call with Lujan.

Coverage of Trump controversies raises questions about media

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Republican Defect Cartoon

Short Circuit Cartoon

The 5 Kinds of Republicans Who Are Defecting From the Party of Trump

The political news this week is being dominated by reports of elephants breaking away from the herd: Republicans who are not supporting Donald Trump for president. They are most often being differentiated by exactly what they are saying or not saying: Some are simply refraining from opportunities to endorse their nominee; some are publicly refusing to endorse their nominee; a few are going to vote for the Libertarian or a last-minute conservative independent or write-in candidate; and a steadily increasing number are going over the brink to support Hillary Clinton, as one might expect with Election Day fast approaching. There’s no telling when the exodus will end; the latest Trump outrage, about “Second Amendment people” having some plans for HRC, is creating a fresh bout of heartburn for exasperated Republicans, and could send a new batch toward the exit ramp.

But in understanding this phenomenon and weighing its importance (or the lack thereof), it’s helpful to look at the non-endorsees and their backgrounds and motives. To that end, here’s a classification system of the five different kinds of Republicans who have broken ranks over Trump:

1. Nominal Republicans who are out of synch with their party: While they are not as plentiful as they were in the days when liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats walked the Earth, there are always some nominal partisans available, often long in the tooth, who object to the general direction of “their” party and can be rounded up to show their displeasure with a statement of dissent or a cross-endorsement. This used to be a particular cross to bear for Democrats, from the days of John Connally’s Democrats for Nixon in 1972 to Joe Lieberman’s active support for John McCain in 2008 — but Republicans are catching up.

Former South Dakota senator Larry Pressler is a good example of this breed of errant pachyderm. He endorsed Barack Obama twice, attempted a Senate comeback as an independent in 2014, and has now endorsed Hillary.

But my favorite defector of the cycle has got to be former Michigan governor William Milliken, who endorsed Clinton as a protest against Trump’s candidacy. Like Pressler, he’s a serial defector; he endorsed John Kerry in 2004, and de-endorsed John McCain late in the 2008 cycle. But to grasp how out of touch the 94-year-old Milliken is with the contemporary GOP, consider that he became governor of Michigan when George Romney resigned to join Richard Nixon’s cabinet. Enough said.

2. Lame ducks. As James Hohmann notes in the Washington Post, the willingness of current Republican elected officials to stray from party discipline is more or less in inverse relationship to their vulnerability to punishment by Republican leaders and/or angry “base” voters. So, unsurprisingly, the two most prominent defectors in the House Republican Conference — Richard Hanna, a New Yorker who has endorsed Clinton, and Scott Rigell, a Virginian who will vote Libertarian — had already announced their retirements. A Democratic precedent was Senator Zell Miller in 2004, who endorsed and spoke for George W. Bush a few months before he left Washington for good. Two years later Miller headed up something called Democrats for Santorum on behalf of the soon-to-be-defeated Pennsylvania senator; it seemed to be composed of Miller himself and his image in the mirror. But I digress …

3. Political realists. There are also Republican defectors who seem to be motivated by cold political calculation. Most obviously, Illinois senator Mark Kirk’s slim odds of reelection almost certainly depend on winning a lot of votes from people who loathe Trump. But even his Senate colleague Susan Collins, who is being treated today as a brave woman of principle for refusing to get on the Trump Train, could be thinking about her political future in Maine, where according to Hohmann she could be contemplating a gubernatorial run as an independent.

More famously, Ted Cruz is clearly calculating his “vote your conscience” statement at the Republican convention will look infinitely better if and when Trump goes down to a catastrophic defeat, leaving his own self as the front-runner for 2020. John Kasich and Ben Sasse could be making similar calculations about their political futures.

4. Redundants. In many respects the most sympathetic group of Republican defectors are former environmental, immigration, and trade-policy officials who obviously have no place in a party led by Donald Trump. I mean, really: Let’s say you are Robert Zoellick, once George W. Bush’s United States Trade Representative. Trump is accusing you and people just like you of deliberately selling American workers down the river and destroying the country in close concert with the godless Clinton administration globalists in the other party (on top of that, Zoellick ran the World Bank and worked for Goldman Sachs!). Are you going to blandly endorse him or fight to win “your” party back? It’s a pretty easy call. The same is true of Republicans closely identified with comprehensive immigration reform and strong environmental regulation (e.g., former EPA director Christine Todd Whitman, who has indicated she will vote for Clinton).

5. Assorted elites. For most of the rest of the elite defectors, the emphasis should be on the word “elite.” They are mostly former appointed officials in Republican administrations who have since moved on to life in that floating stratosphere of policy mavens, think tankers, lobbyists, and Cabinets-in-waiting. They are heavily found on that list of 50 Republican foreign-policy experts calling for Trump’s defeat.

Some are actually “redundants” associated with past Republican policies Trump has denounced (you can add the Iraq War to the list above). Others know there is no way they will have a place in, or even access to, a Trump administration. Still others simply have a reciprocal assessment of Trump as a loser. They are mostly sincerely angry about what is happening to their party, and plan to have a future role in the GOP when the “fever” has broken. What they all have in common is that they will never, ever have to deal with Republican primary voters, other than at a safe distance.

The key question to ask with all five groups of Republican defectors is whether they represent a significant group of rank-and-file Republican voters, who have for the most part been more likely to stick with Trump than elected officials and other elites have been. That’s not the only measurement of the value of defectors; sometimes independent voters can be swayed by these kind of negative testimonials for a major-party candidate, and there are financial considerations as well, since wealthy donors prefer some cover before abandoning a party nominee. But it will be interesting to find out whether the party has truly left the defectors behind, or if instead they are simply a party-in-exile that will hold the reins long after Donald Trump has left politics like a bad circus leaving town.

Donald Trump’s Other Campaign Foe: The ‘Lowest Form of Life’ News Media

Donald J. Trump was on the defensive all week, battered from all sides for his heated statements hailing the Second Amendment and linking political opponents to the Islamic State.

But on Friday morning, Mr. Trump rose early to strike back at his favorite adversary.

“Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) ‘the founder’ of ISIS,” Mr. Trump fumed on Twitter shortly after dawn. “THEY DON’T GET SARCASM?”

He soon fired off another gibe. “I love watching these poor, pathetic people (pundits) on television working so hard and so seriously to try and figure me out,” Mr. Trump taunted. “They can’t!”

Hacker posts contact information for almost 200 congressional Democrats

A hacker or group of hackers using the name "Guccifer 2.0" posted the private email addresses and cell phone numbers of almost 200 current and former Democratic members of Congress Friday.
The disclosure is the latest dump of information stolen in recent cyberattacks on a number of Democratic Party organizations, including the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
Guccifer 2.0 posted a spreadsheet containing the contact information of 193 current and former Democratic House members as part of a larger document dump on his personal blog. In an accompanying blog post, Guccifer said accessing the DCCC server "was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach."
Included in the spreadsheet were the cell phone numbers of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md.
The Wall Street Journal reported that it was able to reach Hoyer at the cell phone number listed on the spreadsheet. Hoyer said he was not aware that the information had been stolen or posted online.

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"I imagine a lot of people are going to change their cellphone numbers pretty soon," Hoyer said.
The spreadsheet also included contact information for members of various House national security committees, including the House Intelligence Committee, the House Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Relations Committee.
"This is sensitive information and it could be used in a very detrimental way by a foreign government," Hoyer told the Journal.
The DCCC said in a statement that it was aware that the documents had been released and were "investigating their authenticity."
There was no immediate comment from Pelosi's office or the White House.
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said late Friday that he had "every confidence that law enforcement will get to the bottom of this, and identify the responsible parties. And when they do, I hope the Administration will disclose who is attempting to interfere with the American political process, and levy strong consequences against those responsible."

Intelligence officials believe that the cyberattacks on the DNC and DCCC were likely carried out by hackers affiliated with the Russian government. The Journal reported that at least one cybersecurity company has said there appear to be links between the Kremlin and the entity identifying itself as Guccifer 2.0, though the hacker or hackers have denied this claim.