‘Fantastic’ Beto O’Rourke gets endorsement from former Mexican President Vicente Fox

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox endorsed Beto O'Rourke in the Texas Senate race in a Twitter video on Thursday. (Twitter)

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico who famously said his country will not (expletive) pay for President Trump’s proposed border wall on Thursday announced his support for the "great American” and “fantastic” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.
“Wow! What a candidate! What a man! Beto, you are fantastic,” Fox said in a video posted to Twitter. “You’re great! You’re an all-American.”
With just a few weeks left before the midterm elections, O’Rourke is in a tight race with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
Fox, who served as Mexico’s president from 2000 to 2006, has openly voiced his discontent for Trump and his immigration policies – including the hotly debated wall along the southern border.
“I’ve been an opponent and resistant (of Trump) because I feel as part of this nation — I am part of this nation — and I don’t like what I’m seeing,” Fox said during a speech at Northwestern University on Tuesday night, according to the Chicago Tribune.
The former Mexican president praised O’Rourke as compassionate and intelligent who understands Americans, “but you also understand we are human beings.”
“You are the enlightenment for Texas and I hope every single Mexican, Latin, every Hispanic in that great state of Texas is going to vote for you,” Fox said. “You deserve it because you are going to respond to the hope and expectations of Texas, understanding what they need and understanding what America needs.”
O’Rourke has some catching-up to do if he hopes to be the first Democratic Senator in Texas since 1993.
A CNN poll released this week shows Cruz with a 7 percent edge over his Democratic challenger among likely voters, with only 9 percent of Texas voters saying they could change their mind about who to support.
One of O’Rourke’s challenges is that he is running against Cruz, a Cuban-American who has held the seat since 2013, in a state with a large Hispanic population.
The El Paso congressman is a fluent Spanish-language speaker, who occasionally sprinkles the language in his speeches and talks about inclusion and representing everyone.
“That means going to every county in Texas, but it also means listening and speaking in English y tambien en Espanol,” O’Rourke, a Democrat, said during a rally at Rice University last week.
A recent Quinnipiac poll shows Cruz leading the Senate race by 9 points, but O’Rourke holds a 24-point lead among Hispanic voters.
Texas has routinely ranked near the bottom for voter turnout, and census data shows only 40 percent of Hispanics voted during the 2016 presidential election.
Trump renewed his support for Cruz on Wednesday, saying the GOP senator “has done so much for Texas” and bashing opponent Beto O’Rourke as a “flake” after the candidates sparred in a feisty Senate debate.
Fox News' Madeleine Rivera contributed to this report.

Ocasio-Cortez refuses to endorse Bernie Sanders 2020 run

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic socialist congressional candidate who has spent weeks campaigning with fellow socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, on Thursday refused to endorse his prospective candidacy in the 2020 presidential race.
Ocasio-Cortez, 29, worked as an organizer for Sanders' failed presidential campaign in 2016 before winning in a surprise upset over longtime establishment Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in the state's 14th Congressional District primary in May.
"She’ll see what the field looks like," Corbin Trent, Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director, said in an interview with Politico. "She’s focused on 2018, [Bernie’s] focused on 2018. We’re all focused on 2018."
For his part, the 77-year-old Sanders did not endorse Ocasio-Cortez's run against Crowley. And in August, former President Barack Obama, in turn, initially declined to endorse Ocasio-Cortez even after her stunning primary win, underscoring the challenges facing progressives campaigning to the left of the Democratic Party establishment in hopes of taking their views mainstream. (Obama endorsed her earlier this month.)
Despite the back-and-forth snubs, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have nonetheless teamed up in the past several months to tout socialist and far-left candidates throughout the country during the midterm season, to varying degrees of success.

"She’ll see what the field looks like."
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s comms director Corbin Trent

For example, socialist-backed candidates have prevailed in Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Washington. But Abdul El-Sayed, an avowed populist who was vying to be Michigan's first Muslim governor, finished nearly 20 percentage points behind establishment Democrat Gretchen Whitmer in the state's August primary, despite the backing of both high-profile socialists.
Also in August, Fayrouz Saad, who was angling to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress, finished in a distant fourth place in Michigan's 11th Congressional District primary, despite support on the stump from Ocasio-Cortez.
Similarly, in Missouri, Rep. Lacy Clay soundly defeated far-left progressive Cori Bush. And in Hawaii in August, a fiscally conservative Democrat, Ed Case, took down 29-year-old Kaniela Ing, a democratic socialist who had Ocasio-Cortez's endorsement.
For Sanders, who has kept the door open on running again for the White House in 2020, the defeats were a continuation of his recent losing streak. Over the past two years, several candidates he has backed in several important races -- including in gubernatorial primaries in Virginia and Ohio, and in several House races in Iowa and New Jersey -- have come up short.
Some former Sanders staffers, meanwhile, have said in interviews they hope to find another torchbearer in 2020 for the Vermont senator's beliefs.
“All the former staff I’ve talked to agree Bernie should focus on making sure the nominee is someone who continues what he started,” Keegan Goudiss, Sanders’ former digital advertising director, told Politico. “It’s a sure thing that he will be able to influence 2020 from the outside. But if he decides to run, I doubt many former staffers will return unless directly asked to. Either way, he misses capturing energy if he doesn't decide soon.”
The magazine quoted several other former Sanders staffers with a similar perspective on Sanders' future, although some did say they would support him running again for the presidency.
One of those people, Sanders spokesman Jeff Weavers, who also ran his 2016 campaign, wrote a book published earlier this year titled “How Bernie Won."
“Bernie Sanders is an extremely energetic and vigorous person, and has more energy, I would say, than people half his age,” Weavers said in an interview, dismissing criticisms that Sanders would be too old to compete in 2020.
His book concludes: “Run, Bernie, Run!”

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Colorado seen as model for election security

Election officials in Colorado implemented changes after concerns about foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election, including paper ballots and 'risk-limiting audits'; Alicia Acuna reports from Denver.

With less than three weeks until the midterm elections, many Americans are still concerned about the integrity of the country’s voting systems.
According the Department of Homeland Security, the only system successfully breached by Russian government actors in 2016 was Illinois’ voter registration system.
“Although no votes were changed,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said, “we saw without question that Russian government cyber actors were actively seeking vulnerabilities and access to our election infrastructure. We assume ... that Russia’s campaign probably targeted all 50 states.”
While they weren’t successful in altering the outcome, Russian interference has had a lasting effect, according to election expert David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research: “There’s no reason to think they’re going to stop. To be perfectly honest, if their goal is to get Americans to lose faith in their systems, it appears that they are somewhat successful.”
A recent poll by The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research bears that out. It found 79 percent of American adults are somewhat to extremely concerned that the country’s voting system might be vulnerable to hackers.
Nielsen and others are looking to the state of Colorado as a model for how to conduct secure elections.
“Colorado has been called the safest state in America to vote,” Secretary of State Wayne Williams said.
After 2016, his office decided it wouldn’t wait for federal help, and began making upgrades to its election systems.
“It’s absolutely critical that people have confidence in the election system,” he explained. “It gives legitimacy to government once that election takes place, but the other part is we want people to participate in the election.”
Colorado has invested in new tabulating machines, and uses a two-factor authentication system for the operators. The state does routine post-election audits and uses paper ballots, generating them even when votes are cast electronically.
TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDER TO IMPOSE SANCTIONS AGAINST ANY ELECTION INTERFERENCE
Last November, Colorado became the first state in the nation to conduct risk-limiting audits during an election. That’s where random samples of paper ballots are compared to the electronic record, making sure there is a 100 percent correlation. If there are any discrepancies at all, that means something is wrong.
Nielsen agreed with election security experts that risk-limiting audits are the best way to ensure election results are accurate: “It really leaves those leaving the polls with the confidence that ... the democracy worked, and they had a voice and their voice was heard.”
“People see what we’re doing in Colorado,” Williams said. “They want to be able to implement a lot of the things we’re doing here, things like paper-based ballots and risk-limiting audits.”
When the state held an election-security training session in September, election officials from around the nation came to observe. Nielsen was on hand to give the keynote speech, saying, “If you don’t mind, we’d like to continue to use you as a best example of what other states can adopt.”
TRUMP OFFICIALS SOUND ALARM ON RUSSIAN MEDDLING, VOW TO FIGHT BACK
Earlier this year, the federal government provided $380 million to help states beef up their election security, but many say they have not had enough time to get everything in place for the midterm elections. And Congress failed to pass a bipartisan bill in its last session that would have required risk-limiting audits in all states. So far, only Rhode Island and New Mexico have joined Colorado in implementing the measure.
On the plus side, all but five states are now using paper ballots, more than ever before, according to Becker: “We’re going to need to give resources to election officials to make sure they can stay on par, or ahead of the game, against the bad guys.”
He and other experts hope the practices Colorado already is using will be in place nationwide by the time the 2020 presidential election arrives.

Trump hits the AP as media fact-check his nonstop interviews

As President Trump continues his midterm media blitz, he is sharpening his language against the press even as some of its practitioners ramp up their criticism of his claims.
This was inevitable, given the sheer volume of words that the president is putting out there and the journalistic desire to fact-check the hell out of him.
In one dispute, I have to say, Trump is basically right.
While he is making this FBN week, with back-to-back sessions with Stuart Varney and Trish Regan of Fox Business Network, Trump also did a lengthy interview with the AP. It was a solid and substantive sitdown. But then the Associated Press slapped this headline on the story:
"Trump Tells AP He Won't Accept Blame If GOP Loses House."
That's pretty eye-catching, a preemptive alibi less than three weeks before the midterms. It got picked up by Drudge and a whole lot of other places. But it doesn't match what Trump said.
Asked if he would accept any responsibility if the Democrats capture the House, the president responded:
"No, I think I'm helping people. They would say that in the old days that if you got the support of a president or if you've got the support of somebody it would be nice to have, but it meant nothing, zero. Like literally zero. Some of the people I've endorsed have gone up 40 and 50 points just on the endorsement."
Come on: "No, I think I'm helping people" is not even close to "I won't accept responsibility if my party gets shellacked." Trump didn't even address the possibility of the GOP losing the House. That's the wire-service equivalent of clickbait. (Though I'd like to see any candidate who went up 50 points [!] based on a Trumpian endorsement.)
The president called the headline "FAKE NEWS" on Twitter, and told Varney Tuesday: "I get such phony news. Everything's a fake. Even yesterday I gave an interview to AP and the headline was totally different from everything I said. The headline was this terrible headline, everything else was perfect."
Trump is on shakier ground with his response about the budget deficit. It's ballooned to $779 billion, a 17 percent jump and the highest in six years. The administration's own projections say the deficit will top a trillion dollars in 2020. And while the deficit has faded as a political issue — used mainly by the out party to bash the in party — that tide of red ink is basically unsustainable.
Trump told the AP he had "no choice" because "I had to take care of our military." He said the administration also had to deal with "a tremendous number of hurricanes and fires" and that "now we're going to start bringing numbers down."
First, boosting spending on defense is a choice — a defensible choice, to be sure — but a political decision that adds to the deficit. And that's especially true if you simultaneously slash corporate and individual taxes by $1.5 trillion. The notion that the tax cuts would pay for themselves has not been proven true, at least so far.
Trump asked his Cabinet members yesterday to come back with 5 percent budget cuts, but made clear that the Pentagon would barely be touched, if at all. So having cut taxes and raised defense, he will now go after domestic spending — precisely the argument the two parties have been having for decades.
And then the AP got to the Stormy Daniels insult:
"Sir, as the president of the United States, is it appropriate to call a woman, and even one who is making serious allegations and who you are in litigation against, to call her a horseface?"
Trump's response: "You know what? You can take it any way you want."
"How should we take it?"
"Did you see the letter?" Trump asked. "She put out a letter. I had nothing to do with her. So she can lie and she can do whatever she wants to do. She can hire a phony lawyer. You take a look at this guy, a stone-cold loser. Take a look at his past. They can say anything about me. I'm just saying, I just speak for myself. You take a look, and you make your own determination."
I'm taking a look, and I think Trump does this deliberately. He knows full well the press and the left will go nuts over his denigrating another woman's looks, but he also knows that will spark days of media debate, put the focus on his winning the porn star's suit, and perhaps detract from the confrontation with Saudi Arabia.
So the criticism is justified, but where's the media and liberal outrage over the rapper T.I.?
This guy posted a video of himself in the Oval Office with a Melania look-alike who walks in, starts stripping (it's R-rated) and then begins attending to T.I. It is beyond demeaning.
Melania spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham called it "disrespectful and disgusting to portray her this way simply because of politics. These kinds of vulgar attacks only further the divisiveness and bias in our country -- it needs to stop."
This is the first lady we're talking about. So anyone who's disgusted by the slam against Stormy should find this mocking of Melania equally gross.

Soros-backed group fires operative after arrest over alleged battery against GOP campaign manager

The liberal group American Bridge 21st Century announced Wednesday night that it had fired one of its operatives a day after he was arrested and accused of battery against the female campaign manager for Nevada GOP gubernatorial candidate Adam Laxalt.
In a statement, American Bridge said that Mike Stark had been relieved of his duties "effective immediately."
American Bridge was founded in November 2010 by David Brock, who also founded liberal watchdog group Media Matters. The group’s largest donor is liberal billionaire George Soros, who contributed more than $2 million between 2015 and 2016. Soros is still involved with the group, most recently donating $300,000 in February, and $80,000 last year.
Stark, 50, was arrested by Las Vegas city marshals Tuesday evening after 31-year-old Kristin Davison said he grabbed and twisted her arm, refusing to let go.
DEM OPERATIVE FOR SOROS-FUNDED GROUP ARRESTED FOR 'BATTERY' AGAINST NEVADA GOP CANDIDATE'S CAMPAIGN MANAGER
"Politics is a little bit aggressive these days, but this is just insane," Davison told Fox News earlier Wednesday. "I’ve never seen anything like it."
Davison told Fox News that Stark “burst into the room where [Laxalt] and I were talking with a camera” and got "very physical" with her.
"This man was physically almost body-checking me," she said. "I was getting nervous for my safety, so we left, and went into an open room.” However, she said Stark tried to follow her, Laxalt and other staffers into the second room.
"He grabbed my right arm, my leg was lodged between the door and the wall. He twisted my arm, and contorted it behind my back,” she explained. “I was scared. Every time I tried pulling away, he would grab tighter, and pull me closer into him.”

Davison was bruised after allegedly being held by Stark on Tuesday. (Kristin Davison)

Davison said Stark pulled her head into his chest, bruising her neck, and held her there for several minutes. She said it “felt like an hour.”
“I was scared and screaming ‘stop—you’re hurting me,’” she explained.
Davison said Stark warned Laxalt, saying, “Adam, there’s only one way you can make this stop.”
“That really scared me,” she said.
Stark also has a record of arrests while working for American Bridge. He was arrested in October of last year for disorderly conduct at an event in Virginia while covering then-GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct in February of this year.
Earlier this year, Stark was arrested for allegedly assaulting the press secretary for Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The incident with press secretary Heather Swift unfolded in March at the Longworth House Office Building after a budget hearing before a House committee. Stark allegedly approached Zinke and reportedly “used his full body to push” Swift as she tried to leave the room. Swift, who called the incident “terrifying,” told police that she decided to press charges to help obtain a “stay-away order” against him.

Stark, right, allegedly held Davison in the doorway, threatening Attorney General Laxalt. (Kristin Davison)

“Assaulting the female campaign manager of the opposing campaign is disgusting and it has no place in our system,” Laxalt campaign spokesperson Parker Briden said. “This mob behavior from the left is out of control. Encouraging violence, as many prominent Democrats like former Attorney General Eric Holder have recently done, is having real, dangerous consequences.”
Democratic candidate Steve Sisolak and Nevada State Democratic Party officials have denied any connection to Stark.

State Department provided 'clearly false' statements to derail requests for Clinton docs, 'shocked' federal judge says

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.
"I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case," Lamberth said during Friday's hearing.
The Department of Justice's Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, noted in a bombshell report in June that it was "inconsistent with typical investigative strategy" for the FBI to allow Mills to sit in during the agency's interview of Clinton during the email probe, given that classified information traveled through Mills' personal email account. "[T]here are serious potential ramifications when one witness attends another witness' interview," the IG wrote.
SEVEN HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE DOJ WATCHDOG'S REPORT INTO FBI, DOJ CONDUCT DURING CLINTON PROBE
On Friday, Lamberth, who was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, said he did not know Mills had been granted immunity until he "read the IG report and learned that and that she had accompanied [Clinton] to her interview."

"I was actually dumbfounded when I found out ... that Cheryl Mills had been given immunity."
— U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth

The transparency group Judicial Watch initially sued the State Department in 2014, seeking information about the response to the Benghazi attack after the government didn't respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Other parallel lawsuits by Judicial Watch are probing issues like Clinton's server, whose existence was revealed during the course of the litigation.
The State Department had immediately moved to dismiss Judicial Watch's first lawsuit on a motion for summary judgment, saying in an affidavit that it had conducted a search of all potentially relevant emails in its possession and provided them. The affidavit noted that some more documents and emails could be forthcoming.
But Lamberth denied the request to dismiss the lawsuit at the time -- and on Friday, he said he was happy he did, charging that State Department officials had intentionally misled him because other key documents, including those on Clinton's email server, had not in fact been produced.
"It was clear to me that at the time that I ruled initially, that false statements were made to me by career State Department officials, and it became more clear through discovery that the information that I was provided was clearly false regarding the adequacy of the search and this – what we now know turned out to be the Secretary’s email system," Lamberth said Friday.
He continued: "I don’t know the details of what kind of IG inquiry there was into why these career officials at the State Department would have filed false affidavits with me. I don’t know the details of why the Justice Department lawyers did not know false affidavits were being filed with me, but I was very relieved that I did not accept them and that I allowed limited discovery into what had happened."
During a tense exchange with Justice Department lawyer Robert Prince, Lamberth pressed the issue, accusing Prince of using "doublespeak" and "playing the same word games [Clinton] played."
That "was not true," the judge said, referring to the State Department's assurances in a sworn declaration that it had searched all relevant documents. "It was a lie."
But Prince pushed back sharply, saying he took the judge's accusations "extremely seriously."
"It might be that our search could be found to be inadequate, but that declaration was absolutely true," he said.
"Now, it's been made clear in rulings by various courts that, basically, the courts are going to expect us to search items that come in afterward in this instance, and that's understandable, but at the time, that was not at all clear, you know?" Prince continued. "I understand if Your Honor thinks that the searches that were done up to the motion for summary judgment were inadequate, but being wrong about the search being adequate does not make it a false affidavit."
Lamberth ultimately conceded that he had "misremembered" some details on the issue.
In a statement, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who was present at the hearing, pushed the White House for answers.
“President Trump should ask why his State Department is still refusing to answer basic questions about the Clinton email scandal,” Fitton said. “Hillary Clinton’s and the State Department’s email cover up abused the FOIA, the courts, and the American people’s right to know.”
The hearing was held because Judicial Watch is seeking to compel Clinton and other officials to testify and provide more information as part of its lawsuit.
Clinton has since blamed Republicans and groups like Judicial Watch for derailing her presidential bid in 2016.
“Take the Benghazi tragedy—you know, I have one of the top Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, admitting we’re going to take that tragedy—because, you know, we’ve lost people, unfortunately, going back to the Reagan administration, if you talk about recent times, in diplomatic attacks,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Today" in an interview last year. “But boy, it was turned into a political football. And it was aimed at undermining my credibility, my record, my accomplishments.”
BENGHAZI MASTERMIND SENTENCED TO 22 YEARS IN PRISON ON FEDERAL TERRORISM CHARGES
Four Americans were killed in the attack on the Benghazi embassy, and the Clinton State Department was faulted for ignoring security concerns in the run-up to the attack, contributing to the poor defense posture at the post.
The independent government Accountability Review Board that examined the tragedy concluded there were “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels” at the department that “resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”
Then-national security adviser Susan Rice claimed on several talk shows that the attack was caused by a YouTube video, even as e-mails uncovered after the fact revealed that administration officials knew the incident was the result of terrorism. Officials the State Department were stunned by Rice's appearances, according to the emails, with one State Department employee suggesting Rice had gone "off the reservation."
Rice has since openly suggested she is considering running against Maine moderate Republican Sen. Susan Collins because of her vote to support Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation. Rice called Collins' speech announcing her vote a "paean to disingenuousness and incoherence."
But Collins has downplayed any potential challenge from Rice.
"As far as Susan Rice is concerned, her family has a home in Maine, but she doesn’t live in the state of Maine," Collins said earlier this month. "Everybody knows that."

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