‘It’s hard for the vice president to break through…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) Clinton crony Terry McAuliffe argued that presidential candidate Joe Biden should keep campaigning from his basement, where he has been quarantining due to the coronavirus pandemic.
In a “monthly breakfast” meeting of the Norfolk City Democratic Committee, McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor, said Democrats shouldn’t want to put Biden in front of the cameras right now, because doing so would make him even more of a liability.
“It’s hard for the vice president to break through,” McAuliffe claimed, according to an audio recording obtained by Fox News.
“You’ve got the COVID crisis. He’s not a governor, doesn’t have the National Guard. He’s not the president, doesn’t have the briefing room. He needs to come out strategically. And when he says something like he did on race relations two days ago, it needs to have a big impact—thoughtful, and that’s what we’re preferring that he actually do at the time.”
McAuliffe was presumably referencing remarks Biden made in a virtual town hall, during which he accused Trump of dividing the country in response to a question about race relations (ignoring the even greater divisiveness of Obama-era race riots) and asked, “Is this really as good as we think we can be as a nation?”
In the same breath, however, Biden promptly stuck his foot in his mouth with a “deplorables moment,” in which he estimated, “There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there that are just not very good people.”
Although McAuliffe, a former Democratic National Committee chair, pointedly sidestepped the presumptive nominee’s long history of blunders and troublesome track record with racial issues, the fears of a major gaffe seem to be the prime reason his campaign handlers have kept him on script and in controlled settings as much as possible.
Only days before the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered the latest round of racial uprisings, Biden had, himself, been panned by many in the African–American community for declaring that those who support Trump “ain’t black.”
Trump’s campaign has capitalized on his campaign rival’s weakness, frequently raising questions about his deteriorating cognitive state.
“I’d love to see him get out of the basement so he can speak,” Trump joked last month.
Covering for Clinton
McAuliffe—who launched his political career as a campaign fundraiser for former President Bill Clinton, with a special knack for securing Chinese investors—also laid cover for his friend and longtime boss Hillary Clinton.
During the breakfast, he repeated a false talking point from Clinton’s campaign that blamed her failure on the last-minute interference of disgraced FBI Director James Comey.
Clinton was plagued throughout the campaign over the mishandling of classified emails using an illicit server from her home in New York to avoid public information requests and subpoenas.
Comey drew heat from Democrats for reopening an investigation, which he had prematurely dropped earlier that year, after new evidence was discovered on the laptop of convicted felon Anthony Weiner.
McAuliffe assured the audience that there would be no repeat.
“We’re not gonna have crazy Jim Comey coming out 12 days before the election with that ridiculous thing he did,” he said.
However, it later was revealed that biased, partisan investigators, led by agent Peter Strzok, had actively tried to suppress the evidence and lie about the new break in the case in order to avoid damaging Clinton.
Comey was forced to disclose the truth only after a field agent in the New York office threatened to go “rogue” with the bombshell information, which the FBI director appropriately feared would tarnish the bureau’s image and undermine confidence in the election.
An ongoing criminal investigation by the Justice Department is looking into the role that Comey, Strzok and other corrupt members of the Obama intelligence community played in efforts to spy on the Trump campaign and later smear the new president with false claims of Russian collusion.
Among the many questions raised is why then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was overseeing the investigations into both Clinton and Trump, failed to recuse himself in the politically charged cases despite the fact that his wife, Jill, had received nearly half a million dollars from a McAuliffe-run PAC for a Virginia state senate campaign.
Liberty Headlines’ Ben Sellers contributed to this report.