Bill Clinton blames Republicans, media for extending wife Hillary's email controversy

Former President Bill Clinton is blaming Republicans and the media for the controversy related to wife and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s email controversy, saying the GOP has led a “full-scale frontal assault” on her campaign.
Clinton entered the race as the clear party front-runner. But her poll and favorability numbers have dropped since news broke in March that she used a private server and email accounts for official business while serving as secretary of state.
“I have never seen so much expended on so little,” the former president said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN. “The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible.”
Clinton maintains that she didn’t break any rules or laws by using the private system, including those on sending and receiving confidential emails. But she has admitted to making a mistake in judgment and has said she is sorry, in an effort to bury the controversy.
She has turned over thousands of official emails that the government is releasing in batches. And federal officials reportedly will be able to recover those she deemed private and deleted, which is prolonging the controversy.
Bill Clinton likened the email controversy to questions over the Whitewater land deal that he faced during his 1992 presidential campaign. Saying the furor was more politics than substance, Clinton argued that his wife has been open in answering questions and will bounce back from a decline in the polls.
“She said she was sorry that her personal email caused all this confusion,” he said. “And she’d like to give the election back to the American people. And I trust the people. I think it will be all right.”
Clinton added that the news media also played an inappropriate role in his wife’s troubles.
“You know, at the beginning of the year, she was the most admired person in public life,” he said. “What happened? The presidential campaign happened. And the nature of the coverage shifted from issue-based to political.”
In addition, the Obama administration on Friday reportedly discovered a chain of emails that his wife failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of her work-related correspondence as the country’s top diplomat
Their existence challenges her claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
"I think that there are lots of people who wanted there to be a race for different reasons,” Bill Clinton said. “And they thought the only way they could make it a race was a full-scale frontal assault on her. And so this email thing became the biggest story in the world.

Boehner says he would have survived recall vote, vows no government shutdown

House Speaker John Boehner on Sunday struck a defiant tone after announcing his resignation two days earlier, saying he would have had enough votes to survive a potential recall effort and that House conservatives won’t get a government shutdown.
“Winning that vote was never an issue,” Boehner told CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “I was going to get the overwhelming numbers of [votes]. I would have gotten 400 votes probably.”
Had Boehner submitted to such a vote, he would have needed at least 218 of them from the House’s 435 members.
However, the Ohio lawmaker said he didn’t want fellow House Republicans to “walk a plank” to keep him in charge of the GOP-controlled chamber.
“They're going to get criticized at home by some who think that we ought to be more aggressive,” Boehner said.
The vote to replace Boehner could come as early as this week. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, No. 2 in Boehner's leadership team, reportedly has enough votes to become speaker. However, it's unclear whether the chamber's conservative caucus will field a candidate or even have enough votes to challenge a more moderate candidate or force multiple rounds of balloting.
Boehner also said Sunday “no” to the possibility that the federal government will partially shut down Wednesday because Congress will indeed pass a stop-gap spending bill without funding for Planned Parenthood -- a measure President Obama has vowed to veto.
The effort to defund Planned Parenthood was essentially led by the same small-but-powerful group on conservative House members who were trying to ouster Boehner.
Boehner said Sunday that the GOP-led Senate is expected next week to pass a continuing resolution, or temporary spending measure, and that the House will take up the Senate bill.
Boehner will now almost certainly have enough votes, with support from Democrats, to pass the legislation without fear of retaliation from conservatives.
“I expect my Democrat colleagues want to keep the government open as much as I do,” he said.
Still, Boehner, who became speaker in the 2010 Tea Party wave election, said House leaders will form a special select committee to address recently released videos featuring Planned Parenthood executives that have resulted in the defund effort.
The secretly recorded videos show group executives at times callously discussing the legal sale of fetal tissue.
Boehner said he will vacate his leadership post and House seat by October 30 and that he plans until then to try to pass “conservative legislation.”
However, he was not specific about such key, looming issues as passing a comprehensive transportation bill and a measure to keep open the government’s Import-Export bank.
“I expect that might have a little more cooperation from some around town to try to get as much finished as possible,” Boehner said. “I don't want to leave my successor a dirty barn. I want to clean the barn up a little bit before the next person gets there.”

Bush not concerned about weekly polls, but says he needs to be better candidate

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush on Sunday downplayed polls showing he has yet to recapture his early, front-runner status but acknowledged that he needs to be a better candidate.
“Candidates have to get better, and that’s what I intend to do,” the former Florida governor told “Fox News Sunday.” "These polls really don't matter. ... I know it's an obsession because it kind of frames the debate for people for that week. But I'm in it for the long haul."
Bush is in sixth place among likely Republican voters, according to a Fox News poll released Sunday. He received 7 percent of the vote, and billionaire businessman Donald Trump finished first with 26 percent.
"It is a marathon, and we just started advertising," he also said. "We've got a great ground game in these early states. I'm confident I can win New Hampshire."
Bush also defended his remarks last week about Democratic and Republican candidates competing for the black vote, comments that have been compared to those made in 2012 by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney after his loss.
"Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” Bush, a favorite among the Republican establishment, said Thursday in early-voting state South Carolina. “It isn't one of division and 'Get in line and we'll take care of you with free stuff.’ ”
On Sunday, he said his remarks are, in fact, the opposite of what Romney said.
“To the contrary,” Bush said. “I think we need to make our case to African-American voters and all voters that an aspirational message, fixing a few big complex things, will allow people to rise up. That's what people want. They don't want free stuff. That was my whole point.”
He argued that the average American family’s disposable income has declined by thousands of dollars and that 6 million more Americans are in poverty since President Obama was elected in 2007, while the federal government continues to spend trillions of dollars annually on poverty programs.
“We should try something different, which is to give people the capacity to achieve earned success, fix our schools, fix our economy, lessen the crime rates in the big urban areas and I think people in poverty could be lifted up,” Bush told Fox.
He also said he disagrees with some congressional Republicans’ idea of shutting down the government this week by not agreeing to a spending bill that includes funding for Planned Parenthood.
“That's not the way democracy works,” he said. “It’s better to elect a conservative president who pledges to do it and work with Congress.”
He also backed the efforts of House Speaker John Boehner, who resigned last week, saying he “admired” him and that he will be missed “in the long run.” 

Trump 2016 Cartoon

Donald Trump swears off Fox News after ‘unfair’ treatment

Donald Trump’s disgust for Fox News has reached the point that he has decided not to give the conservative-leaning channel any more interviews for the time being.

The Republican presidential frontrunner has been known to make noise when he feels Fox News has given him the shaft — this week is no exception.

“@FoxNews has been treating me very unfairly & I have therefore decided that I won’t be doing any more Fox shows for the foreseeable future,” he tweeted Wednesday afternoon.

Mere hours later, the Trump campaign released a statement saying that he stands by his comments.

“As a candidate for president of the United States and the definitive frontrunner in every poll, both nationally and statewide, including the just released poll in the state of Florida, Mr. Trump expects to be treated fairly,” the statement reads. “All you have to do is look at the tremendous ratings last night from ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,’ where Mr. Trump was the guest, or the ratings from both debates, to fully understand the facts.”

Shortly after, a Fox News spokesperson said that Trump’s “boycott” was a direct response to the channel canceling his scheduled appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” Thursday.

“When coverage doesn’t go his way, he engages in personal attacks on our anchors and hosts, which has grown stale and tiresome,” the spokesperson said. “He doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists what to ask is not how the media works in this country.”

The on-again, off-again feud started when Trump took issue with Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s line of questioning at the first GOP primetime debate in early August.

Trump’s disgust with the network sprang back to life Monday night as he live-tweeted throughout Bill O'Reilly’s and Kelly’s programs at 8 and 9 respectively.

Trump, who said he was “having a really hard time” watching Fox News, accused “The O'Reilly Factor” of being “very negative” to him and refusing to publish polls that show him dominating the GOP primary.

In a tweet to the show, Trump wrote, “why don’t you have some knowledgeable talking heads on your show for a change, instead of the same old Trump-haters. The real estate magnate also suggested that Kelly should take another 11-day “unscheduled” vacation.

“Do you ever notice that lightweight @megynkelly constantly goes after me but when I hit back it is totally sexist. She is highly overrated!” Trump said.

Trump retweeted dozens of his supporters who called O'Reilly’s guests “spoon- fed morons” and pro-Bush RINOs (Republican in Name Only), and attacked Kelly for criticizing the Republican frontrunner.  

But the businessman’s anger is not reserved exclusively for Fox News. He also took issue with CNN’s handling of the second primetime GOP debate, held earlier this month.

“I wasn’t treated fairly by CNN,” Trump said to New York Magazine. “And it shouldn’t have been three hours long. It was too long. I can’t imagine anyone enjoying watching three hours of a debate.”

But plenty of people tuned in, largely because of Trump’s Midas touch when it comes to ratings.

For all of our Trump fans, a sweet little morsel left over from yesterday’s Gabriel Sherman post about the latest eruption of the Trump/Fox war.
Are there any Fox News hosts so obsequious towards Trump that they might dial him up and beg him to come back, like Johnny Fontane pleading with the Godfather to help him get that part he always wanted? Seems hard to imagine for most of them. Emphasis on “most.”

One reason there likely won’t be peace in our time is that Trump still has not gotten over Kelly’s questioning of him during the opening Republican primary debate. “She caused me a lot of damage, didn’t she?” Trump recently vented to a friend. “He’s really angry,” a source explained…
Both sides are posturing to save face. Yesterday a Fox statement called Trump’s boycott “stale and tiresome.” But a source close to the Trump campaign told me that Trump thinks he has the leverage. Trump has been hearing from Fox hosts who are worried that his boycott will hurt ratings. The calculus seems to be that by shunning Fox, Trump is hoping to drive a wedge between Fox hosts, Kelly, and Ailes. That may be wishful thinking. As an Ailes friend told me today: “Roger can’t turn back. The entire credibility of Fox as powerbroker rests on Trump being destroyed.”

That theory about Trump’s strategy would be more plausible if he hadn’t attacked Kelly with that nasty bit about bleeding out of her whatever, which was bound to create sympathy for her among her colleagues. I think the real strategy here is straightforward: Boycott Fox and cast them in the role of Republican establishment villain, a bad place to be for a network that presumes to cater to the Republican man on the street. Even if Fox’s ratings don’t begin to dive right now, the seeds will have been planted among pro-Trump viewers that Fox can’t be trusted. Eroding their populist credibility among their viewer base is a process and he’s trying to move that process along.
This bit from Breitbart seems plausible too:

An individual with knowledge of these matters told Breitbart News that Ailes is “furious” at Lowry for saying on Megyn Kelly’s program The Kelly File on Wednesday that former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina “cut [Trump’s] balls off with the precision of a surgeon, and he knows it, he knows it.”
Ailes is mad at Lowry because this move means, in the ongoing war between Fox News and Trump, Fox News has now “given up the moral high ground.” Essentially, Ailes understands, that means his network looks like the unfair aggressor that Trump has accused it of being—rather than a neutral arbiter of the news—all while Trump continues soaring in the 2016 GOP primary polls.

On the one hand, that lends a bit of credence to Sherman’s theory about the wedge that Trump is supposedly trying to drive between Kelly and the rest of the Fox universe. Colleagues who sympathized with her over the “bleeding” remark might not be as sympathetic now that her show was used by Lowry to throw a scatological insult back at Trump. It’s one thing for Fox to cover him unsparingly, it’s another thing to deliberately antagonize him. On the other hand, that supports my theory too that Trump’s true aim mainly is to hurt Fox’s credibility with its populist viewers. The litmus test for whether a media outlet is “establishment” is whether it’s treating him “unfairly,” whatever that means. Lowry’s comment about Fiorina cutting his balls off is something that a viewer who’s not sure about his critique of Fox could point to as proof that Trump’s right and that they really are out to get him. It’s unimaginable that the same sort of “balls” taunt would be aimed by a guest at, say, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz. So now Ailes needs to make a big show about entertaining Trump’s grievances in order to show his fans among the Fox viewership that he’s taking their concerns seriously.

Bill Clinton blasts media for overblowing Hillary email scandal: 'Never seen so much expended on so little'

President Clinton isn't buying into the scandal swirling around his wife's use of personal emails during her time as Secretary of State.
In an interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, the 42nd President of the United States said the controversy is merely "catnip" that the Republican Party is tossing at his wife in order to distract voters from the real issues like student loan debt, income inequality, mental health care and more.
"I actually am amazed she's borne up under it as well as she has; I've never seen so much expended on so little," Clinton said.He also pointed blame at the media, which the former president suggested has a knack for picking a candidate to target.
"The press has to have somebody every election — we're going to give them you. You better not run," he said, recounting a phone call he received from the George H. W. Bush administration in 1992, warning him not to run for president.
Clinton credited some in the media: "There have been a shocking number of really reputable press people who have explained how you can't receive or transmit classified information, how the government has no central authority for classification and that Defense, State and the intelligence agencies have their own."
He concluded: "I mean, there have been a lot of really fine things. It's just that they don't seem to show up on television very much. And it is what it is."

France launches first airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria

PARIS –  France has fired its first airstrikes in Syria as it expands military operations against Islamic State extremists, President Francois Hollande's office announced Sunday.
The office said that "France has hit Syria" based on information from French reconnaissance flights sent earlier this month. It didn't provide any further details.
France has been firing airstrikes on IS extremists in Iraq as part of the U.S.-led coalition since last year, but had resisted airstrikes in Syria because it didn't want to strengthen President Bashar Assad. Hollande announced a change in strategy earlier this month because of growing concern about the Syrian refugee crisis.
The president's office argued Sunday that it was a question of national defense, as France has been attacked and threatened by extremists claiming ties to IS.
Hollande, heading to the U.N. General Assembly, also stressed the importance of seeking a political solution for Syria.
"More than ever the urgency is putting in place a political transition," including elements of the opposition and Assad's regime, Hollande said.
France has remained opposed however to recent diplomatic suggestions of allowing Assad to stay in power for a limited time.
While no specifics were provided about the location or timing of the airstrikes, French military officials have said they would target IS training and logistical sites, according to French media reports.
The French government has insisted that while it is part of the U.S.-led coalition, France is deciding who and what to hit independently.
Hollande announced Sept. 7 that France would start airstrikes, days after the photo of a dead 3-year-old Syrian boy galvanized public concern about Syrian refugees.
In his statement Sunday, Hollande said: "Civilian populations must be protected from all forms of violence, that of IS and other terrorist groups but also the murderous bombardments of Bashar Assad."

In GOP White House races, candidates cast Boehner's departure as like-minded, anti-establishment victory

Candidates in the Republican presidential primary, which is largely a competition to prove one’s conservative credentials, are mostly applauding the resignation of House Speaker John Boehner, which was influenced by the chamber’s far-right members.
On Saturday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie suggested voters are unhappy with how Congress is being run and called for a “reset,” though like the other candidates didn’t mention Boehner by name.
“The American people are disappointed,” Christie told Fox News. “They gave our party the majority in both houses and we have not delivered some of the things we need to deliver.”
At the Values Voter Conference, Real estate mogul and GOP frontrunner Donald Trump said Friday that Republican congressional leaders like Boehner are "babies."
He also suggested that Boehner was personally likable but said, "We want people who are going to get it done."
The annual event, this weekend in Washington, has become something of a victory lap for conservative activists, as the 2016 candidates celebrate Boehner's departure by lashing out at congressional Republicans for not fighting hard enough for conservative priorities.
In the 2016 White House race, anti-establishment candidates such as Trump and Democratic candidate Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have done well tapping into voters' frustration with the Washington establishment.
Fellow top-tier candidate Florida Sen. Marco Rubio on Friday said, "I'm not here to bash anyone, but the time has come to turn the page."
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another GOP candidate, suggested that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also should resign.
Jindal said it's time for "a clean slate" of Republican leaders in Congress.
The Louisiana governor has struggled to stand out in the crowded Republican presidential field. He's been increasingly critical of the GOP establishment in recent weeks.
Jindal called congressional Republicans "the surrender caucus." He said Boehner and McConnell "need to surrender their gavels" to make room for "someone who is willing to fight to protect our conservative ideals."