‘He wouldn’t hit anybody. Especially a woman. He’s got two daughters…’
(Ben Sellers) Let us take a moment to remember the “Believe all women” movement.
Lawyer Michael Avenatti, while representing Brett Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick in her salacious—and now largely debunked, potentially perjurious—claims against the Supreme Court nominee, would certainly have wanted us to, no matter the credibility.
But as Avenatti, who was arrested Wednesday following an apparent incident of domestic violence against a female companion, now faces his own scandal, the circumstances are, uh, different.
I want to be clear: I DID NOT commit domestic violence nor have I ever committed domestic violence. I did not strike any woman nor have I ever. I did not strike my ex-wife in the face nor did I hit anyone else in the face. I am a decent man & I look forward to being exonerated.
As the story broke Wednesday, with celebrity gossip site TMZ leading the charge, it was widely reported in the media—including by Liberty Headlines, which culled its information from the Tribune News Service’s subscription-based wire content—that the victim was Avenatti’s estranged ex-wife.
However, CNN national political correspondent MJ Lee later tweeted that she had spoken with ex-wife Lisa Storie-Avenatti by phone and that the latter strongly denied involvement. Interestingly, she explained that Avenatti, as a family man, could never have done such a thing.
I spoke with Avenatti’s wife on the phone. “I haven’t see Michael in months. It’s a complete fabrication,” she said. “Bruises on my face? It is insanity. He wouldn’t hit anybody. Especially a woman. He’s got two daughters.”
It’s easy to imagine what the reaction on CNN would have been to such a statement had it come during the Kavanaugh hearing.
Rather, when Kavanaugh became emotional before the Senate Judiciary Committee while discussing his two daughters and the difficulty he and his wife had faced explaining the situation to them, he was mocked and scorned.
While Avenatti’s ordeal has helped the Left to suddenly recover its empathy, it also has helped liberals to regain another virtue, recognizing the importance of concepts like “due process” and “innocent until proven guilty.”
TMZ reported that Avenatti’s most famous client, Trump accuser Stormy Daniels, issued a statement urging people not to jump to conclusions. “We should all reserve judgement until the investigation—an investigation Michael has said he welcomes—is complete, and that’s what I’m going to do,” Daniels said.
However, it seems unlikely that Avenatti, who had declared himself a 2020 presidential challenger to Trump but was already seen by some on the Left as harmful to the cause, will be able to regain his standing.
While conservative Fox News pundit Sean Hannity said on his show Wednesday that he intended to reserve judgment now that the tables have turned on Avenatti, actress and #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano was less forgiving.
Milano, the former child star of sitcom “Who’s the Boss” and films like “Poison Ivy II,” has become one of the Hollywood-driven feminist movement’s leading voices. At the invitation of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, she was seated prominently in the gallery during the Kavanaugh hearings.
On Wednesday, she tweeted her condemnation of Avenatti following the “totally disgusting” allegations.
Totally disgusting. And before anyone asks me, yes, I’m disavowing Avenatti. I do not care what side he’s on. #Bastahttps://t.co/sHK1PggVsj
The “#Basta” hashtag—Italian for “enough”—had been used by Avenatti in his own tweets advocating women’s causes. Others Twitter users also have begun repurposing it, now with an added layer of irony.
Correction: Initial wire reports indicated that Avenatti’s estranged ex-wife was the domestic-abuse victim. The New York Daily News now reports that his ex-wife denies any involvement and defended him. The story and headline have been updated to reflect the change.
Michael Avenatti (screen shot: MSNBC/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Michael Avenatti, the Trump-trolling attorney most famous for representing porn star Stormy Daniels in her lawsuits against the president, was arrested Wednesday for allegedly assaulting a female acquaintance, according to a report originally broken by celebrity gossip site TMZ.
Law enforcement sources told TMZ that Avenatti was charged with felony domestic assault after allegedly beating up the woman at a ritzy apartment building in Los Angeles on Tuesday, according to New York Daily News.
TMZ said the incident happened as Avenatti attempted to evict the woman from the apartment. While filing the domestic violence report, the article noted, her face appeared “swollen and bruised” with “red marks.”
A second confrontation occurred on Wednesday, TMZ reports, after the woman attempted to gather her things with help from the building security. Avenatti showed up shortly thereafter screaming profanities and claiming, “She hit me first.”
Avenatti was reportedly still in custody Wednesday afternoon and could not immediately be reached for comment, said New York Daily News.
Once the darling of nearly every CNN and MSNBC talk show, who declared himself a potential 2020 presidential challenger for Trump, Avenatti already had fallen into a degree of disrepute after a failed gambit to grab headlines during the contentious and highly watched confirmation saga of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Following the accusations of Christine Blasey Ford and another accuser, Avenatti used his media clout to dramatically trot out a third accuser, Julie Swetnick. However, Swetnick’s outlandish claims of having witnessed the conservative jurist participating in orgies were quickly dispatched.
Many of the Left resented Avenatti’s forsaking the more credible witnesses in the interest of his own profit and showmanship.
A comprehensive review of all of the claims, released last month by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, thoroughly debunked the uncorroborated accounts and recommended both Swetnick and Avenatti be investigated by the Department of Justice for potential perjury due to the use of a sworn affidavit.
Around the same time, Avenatti faced a setback in the Stormy Daniels case as a judge threw out a defamation lawsuit she had pressed and ruled that Daniels was obligated to pay Trump’s considerable legal expenses for the frivolous claim.
In May, Avenatti was sued by his former legal partner, Jason Frank, for breach of contract after missing the deadline in a settlement agreement to pay Frank $4.85 million.
‘Failing to take immediate action … would only encourage additional mass unlawful migration and further overwhelming of the system.’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Derided by Democrats like Joe Biden during campaign season as being thousands of miles away and reduced to a fearmongering tactic, the caravan of predominantly Central American migrants, as promised, is now at the doorstep of the United States.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that a group of 356 arrived by bus in Tijuana, near the California border, on Tuesday and that dozens of others were starting to arrive at other checkpoints.
San Diego’s Fox 5 showed a live-stream video on its Facebook account of some approaching the rusted coastline border fence at the city’s Friendship Park.
Other images from the local media showed border officials scrambling to fortify sections of the fence with barbed wire to deter crossing.
The Union Tribune reported that U.S. Customs and Border Protection planned to close three lanes at the San Ysidro Port of Entry and one at the Otay Mesa Port while it installed “port hardening infrastructure equipment” in preparation for the arrivals.
By many estimates, the caravan had swollen to a total of around 14,000 presumed refugee-seekers by late October. No recent estimates were available to determine whether it had shrunken along the way or continued to grow in the past two weeks.
Although Mexican officials had attempted to forestall the trek, offering temporary residency, many reportedly scoffed at the proposal.
As President Donald Trump continued his efforts to make good on a promise to deploy troops to the border, he faced unprecedented resistance from court orders and from the Pentagon, which initially balked at the idea before agreeing to send 5,200 to support border patrols prior to last week’s midterm election.
Counting the national guardsmen already dispatched, more than 7,000 active-duty troops are now set to guard the border through Dec. 15, with the possibility that as many as 15,000 may be sent.
Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!
Even as the caravan members arrived, Trump adversaries like retiring Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., continued to criticize the deployment as a political stunt, saying it was unfortunate that the troops—some of whom he said were deployed in Tucson, at least 60 miles from the nearest point of entry, would have to miss their Thanksgiving holiday in order to protect the border.
While efforts to prevent the rock-throwing rabble-rousers from setting foot on U.S. soil were underway, questions also lingered on how to accommodate those who crossed—thus entitling them at minimum to an interrogation and asylum hearing—in the already overstretched tent cities established by Customs and Border Protection.
Migrants would need to wait several weeks before even being admitted for processing, The Union-Tribune reported. Already, the waiting list for asylum-seekers is about 2,500 long.
“If they really cared about addressing this, they wouldn’t be deploying military, they’d be deploying asylum officers to the border,” Erika Pinheiro, an attorney with the group Al Otro Lado, told The Union-Tribune.
Trump has bemoaned what he said is billions of dollars spent annually on the broken asylum process and has dangled the possibility several executive orders to act as deterrents—including the reinstatement of a controversial “zero-tolerance” policy that would permit family separations during processing and a challenge to the 14th Amendment’s “birthright citizenship” entitlements.
Last week, he issued a formal proclamation addressing the mass migration, saying he would suspend asylum eligibility for those who attempt to enter the U.S. unlawfully or without proper documentation.
“Failing to take immediate action to stem the mass migration the United States is currently experiencing and anticipating would only encourage additional mass unlawful migration and further overwhelming of the system,” Trump said.
“Presidential Proclamation Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States” https://t.co/9blzn1XGyS
Marc Elias/IMAGE: Maxwell School of Syracuse University
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In 2013, Democrat attorney Marc Elias, a partner at the Perkins Coie firm who had served as general counsel for the John Kerry presidential campaign, joined a panel at Syracuse University to discuss campaign finance reform.
In his introductory remarks, Elias offered a revealing anecdote about his own motivations: “My daughter reminded me that when she was 6 and asked me to play a board game with her, the first thing I did, being a lawyer, was I said, ‘Fine, I’ll play Chutes and Ladders, but I want to read the instructions, because I want to figure out how I can win.”
Whether the goal is beating his 6-year-old daughter at a children’s board game, or defrauding American voters and taxpayers by exploiting the vulnerabilities in their most trusted institutions, Elias has been very good at winning for the past two decades.
He has represented a veritable who’s who of left-wing figures, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren.
But lest some liberals see in his efforts a sort of nobility, or at least fair play—using the rules of the game to re-rig, in the Left’s favor, systems that Elias sincerely believed had been rigged against them—his other pursuits, such as loosening campaign-finance laws and shielding his clients from ethics violations, leave no doubt that Elias’s idea of ‘winning’ is not for the betterment of society.
In his current role representing incumbent U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D.-Fla., in the most expensive Congressional race to date, whatever the outcome, Elias could see big returns thanks to a 2014 spending-bill rider he helped Congressional leaders to write that raised by more than sevenfold the amount wealthy donors could contribute to national campaign committees for things like attorney’s fees.
‘Doing It to Win’
Brenda Snipes/IMAGE: YouTube
In a statement Elias made about the current Florida recount—in which his client, Nelson, has trailed behind current Gov. Rick Scott by a narrow margin—Elias said, “We’re doing this not just because it’s automatic, but we’re doing it to win.”
A last-minute coup for Nelson—whose deficit already has narrowed from more than 50,000 votes on Election Day evening to around 12,500 a week later, as boxes of unaccounted-for ballots continued turning up in Broward County under elections supervisor Brenda Snipes—would not be a surprise to anyone.
“My predictions come true with a remarkable degree of accuracy on these things,” Elias said in a conference call interview last Thursday, reported by leftist blog Talking Points Memo.
Even while liberal publications like Mother Jones highlight Elias’s “longshot” plan to recalibrate voting machines in order to discover a supposed 24,000 Democratic “undervotes” on the Senate ticket, a judge in Broward County denied Scott’s request to impound the machines in order to prevent tampering, saying there was nothing substantiating Scott’s accusations of dirty tricks, the Sun Sentinel reported.
“If someone in this county has evidence of voter fraud, they should report it to their local law enforcement officer,” said Broward Circuit Judge Jack Tuter, before chiding Scott for even insinuating the possibility of Orwellian impropriety: “We need to be careful what we say. Words mean things.”
However, he has no difficulty in blurring the lines between the two.
In addition to providing legal representation, Elias and his firm have also played a major role in the flow of money to and from Democratic national committees. Perkins Coie notoriously served as the intermediary and money handlers for its clients in the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee with Fusion GPS, through which Elias commissioned opposition research on then-candidate Donald Trump.
The Free Beacon noted that in the past Elias has effectively helped to shield Democratic politicians such as Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes amid separate accusations that each inappropriately used Senate or campaign funds for luxurious travel expenses.
Some cases have involved political conflicts of interest, such as Grimes’ case, in which she chartered vehicles from her father’s catering company. Elias also was deployed for damage control when North Carolina Sen. Kay Hagan’s husband was found to be receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus grants, and in another case where Nevada’s Harry Reid attempted to funnel $31,000 in campaign funding to his granddaughter as a “holiday gift.”
However, while rendering legal services and representing politicians on the campaign trail, Elias and his firm may have their own conflicts of interest to deal with. Campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.org ranked Perkins Coie in the top 5 percent of more than 18,000 PACs and organizations it tracks for political contributions.
Nearly all of its contributions all go to Democrats, including two major clients, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, which it gave just under $74,000 and $32,000 respectively for the 2018 campaign.
Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, who recently managed to overcome an Election Day deficit to best Republican Martha McSally, was another of the firm’s top recipients, receiving nearly $21,000.
A Broken System
Harry Reid/Photo by Center for American Progress Action Fund (CC)
Despite his firm’s mutually serving generosity with Democrats, though, Elias has tried to fashion himself as a champion of campaign finance reform.
Former Federal Election Commission chairman Robert Lenhard told Politico, “There is no Democratic-side campaign finance lawyer who is more important than Marc Elias—that is without a doubt.”
But the issue Elias has is not so much reining in the massive spending and closing loopholes that allow an influx of dark money into races like the one in Florida.
Rather than use his legal clout to challenge the Supreme Court’s landmark Citizens United decision, which afforded First Amendment protections to small businesses like a conservative film production company seeking to make non-monetary political contributions, Elias went the other direction, paving the way for mega-corporations like his law firm and billionaire plutocrat clients to have nearly unfettered ability to donate.
Elias, in his 2013 consortium at Syracuse University, said, “The resolution is not whether the campaign finance system ought to be more regulated or ought to be less regulated … my proposition is simply this: It is broken as it sits today.”
A year later, he had achieved his goal of “fixing” the system. Working with his longtime client Reid, the departing Senate majority leader—in cooperation with then-House Speaker John Boehner—Elias helped slip into a year-end $1.1 billion spending bill a rider that raised the amount a wealthy individual donor could give to national party committees from $97,200 to $777,600, according to Politico.
Not surprisingly, the 2018 midterms broke records as being the most expensive on the books, and topping all others is the Florida senate race, which yielded more than $180 million in spending, with roughly half being outside (non-candidate) spending.
In the top eight Senate races alone for the 2018 election cycle, all of which were in tightly fought battleground states, the total cost was $840 million. This is more money than the projected 2018 Gross Domestic Product of 11 of the world’s 193 countries, according to the International Monetary Fund—and certain only to increase in 2020.
Of course, one of the restrictions lifted in the 2014 spending rider was on money that could be applied toward legal fees, Politico noted, “including some for legal fees that are likely going to be collected by [Elias’] own firm.”
As Elias told Politico, his area of law “is always interesting and usually rewarding.”
‘Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year…’
Note: This is the third in a multi-part series examining Democrat attorney Marc Elias. This article covers Elias’ role as the middle man between the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Fusion GPS firm in commissioning the infamous ‘Steele dossier’ in 2016. Other articles in the series explore Elias’ role in election recounts, ‘sue till blue’ redistricting and shielding politicians under investigation for financial improprieties.
Marc Elias/IMAGE: Michael McIntee and The Uptake via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) For the past two decades, Marc Elias, the chief political law attorney at Perkins Coie, representing many top-level Democrats, has been directly implicated in nefarious election-related practices through redistricting and recounts.
However, in his capacity as official counsel for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, Elias’ guiding hand in seemingly corrupting and politicizing the nation’s most trusted government institutions went beyond the courtroom and into the highest reaches of America’s law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering apparati.
Despite its failure to derail the candidacy and subsequent presidency of Donald Trump, the Steele dossier—in which Elias likely played a pivotal role—has proved a source of constant distraction and polarization during the first two years of Trump’s administration, while further eroding an already shaken public trust in the ethics, motives and allegiances of “deep state” bureaucratic officials.
Stealing Elections?
As previously reported, Marc Elias has a long history of turning narrow losses for Democrats into victories—where questionable ballots appear after the race already has been all but certified.
Most recently, he has led the effort in Florida, where recounts are currently underway in both the Senate race between Democrat incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson and Republican Gov. Rick Scott, and in the gubernatorial race between Democrat Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis.
Trying to STEAL two big elections in Florida! We are watching closely!
With Republicans still holding an edge early Monday, Broward County, which is notorious for election mismanagement and possible fraud, was continuing to find new votes, as Trump tweeted Monday:
The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!
In addition to having a hand in many such recount efforts—some giving Democrats in Congress a majority or supermajority—Elias also had a lead role, circumventing many state legislatures, in a redistricting push that targeted several tossup states.
Barring any court reversals, the results in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, North Carolina and, of course, Florida will likely turn some of Trump’s key 2016 battleground victories into a solid blue in 2020.
Trump downplayed the possible implications in his own re-election efforts, expressing confidence that his margins of support would be strong enough to overcome the handicaps of a stacked deck.
In the 2016 Election I was winning by so much in Florida that Broward County, which was very late with vote tabulation and probably getting ready to do a “number,” couldn’t do it because not enough people live in Broward for them to falsify a victory!
But there is plenty of reason for Trump to be worried as Elias played a part in launching the “witch hunt” that has become the single greatest headache of Trump’s presidency thus far: helping to commission a dubiously sourced, largely debunked piece of opposition research known as the Steele dossier.
Steele-ing the Presidency
Christopher Steele/IMAGE: YouTube
British newspaper The Independent said that it was Elias, working on behalf of Clinton and the DNC, who in April 2016 retained Fusion GPS—the research firm that compiled information about the Trump campaign from ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
The reports and research Steele generated then were given directly to Elias during the course of the election.
The unverified claims, many of which eventually went public after leaking to the media, included not only the suggestion that Trump campaign officials had colluded with Russia to hack DNC servers, but also sordid and salacious rumors suggesting the Russians had compromising information to blackmail Trump.
All indications are that Elias’ law firm, Perkins Coie, helped funnel money from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to Fusion GPS. As Breitbart noted recently, that included a combined total of $9.2 million from Clinton and the DNC for “legal and compliance consulting” in the span from around November 2015 to December 2016.
In the course of doing his research, Steele, in turn, likely paid off several Kremlin-linked Russians to provide the suspect information, meaning the DNC may have been supporting the very same people who had hacked its servers in order to try to implicate Trump in the hacking.
When The Washington Postfirst broke the story in October 2017 that linked Elias and Perkins Coie to Fusion GPS, Elias “vigorously” denied any involvement to New York Times reporter Ken Vogel.
It was no surprise he turned to Vogel, a sympathetic ear who, while operating as chief investigative reporter at Politico, showed a penchant for hounding conservative philanthropists Charles and David Koch. Prior to the 2016 election, Vogel was outed by Wikileaks and criticized by other media institutions for vetting his articles with the DNC before publication.
According to The Daily Caller, “Elias’ denial appears to have been intentionally misleading in light of new reporting … [that] Elias reportedly hired Fusion to dig up dirt on Trump as part of a project that became the Trump dossier.”
But even liberals’ vaunted Gray Lady knew it couldn’t maintain the ruse. Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted:
Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
Reporting at the time claimed that the opposition research into Trump had originally begun during the Republican primary race, when an anonymous GOP donor had secured Fusion GPS.
Although those on the Left pointed to this as justification, suggesting it was about Trump’s character and not partisan politics, most of Trump’s main GOP contenders cast doubt on the claim, with The Washington Examiner‘s Byron York saying “GOP donor” was likely a case of semantic games.
“The reason it is not at all believable that a Republican was behind it is, nobody used [any information] from it,” Terry Sullivan, campaign manager for Sen. Marco Rubio, told York. “Everybody was pretty damn desperate at the end. If someone had a kitchen sink, they would have thrown it.”
Only the Beginning…
Sydney Blumenthal/IMAGE: CNBC via YouTube
Efforts to unravel the web of intrigue surrounding the source of the Steele dossier led Republicans in the House Oversight, Intelligence and Judiciary committees down a seemingly endless trail of rabbit holes, pointing toward a rogue’s gallery of leftist conspirators such as billionaires George Soros and Tom Steyer, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and unsavory Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal.
But the smear attack that Elias helped orchestrate was merely the prelude to the real story, as Obama’s Justice Department and FBI soon took up the cause.
At the same time that the DNC and Clinton campaign discontinued their funding of the Fusion GPS research in October 2016, the FBI began making payments to Steele and Fusion GPS related to their investigations into the Russian conspiracy charges.
In May 2017, former FBI Director Robert Mueller was appointed to lead an investigation into the claims. While it appears likely to conclude soon—either due to Mueller’s completion or due to pressure from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker—the investigation continues to lend fuel to Democrats’ attacks on Trump.
Although no corroborating evidence has yet been presented publicly linking Trump with any collusion or campaign violations, as a result of the investigation that the Steele accusations spawned, several Trump associates have been prosecuted on unrelated white-collar charges. Some having struck plea deals with Mueller in return for lighter sentencing.
Meanwhile, Trump has succeeded in using the allegations to expose the corruption of several top-ranking “deep state” officials. Among the revelations are that:
The FBI continued to use the information from the dossier, despite a lack of corroborative evidence, to apply for multiple warrants through the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on the Trump campaign under false pretenses.
Peter Strzok/IMAGE: Fox Business via Youtube
The former FBI counterintelligence chief, Peter Strzok, was a vicious and remorseless partisan who not only pushed the Russia conspiracy in an effort to set up Trump, but simultaneously worked to actively suppress information implicating Hillary Clinton in an e-mail scandal that he also oversaw.
Strzok exchanged many text messages expressing his intentions with his paramour, FBI attorney Lisa Page, who was one of the initial investigators working for Mueller to investigate Trump’s involvement with Russia. The lovebirds’ actions were strongly repudiated in a report by the DOJ inspector general, despite claims that there was no political bias in the investigations.
Strzok’s boss, former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was married to Jill McCabe—a 2015 candidate for a Virginia state election who received $700,000 in campaign cash from a close Clinton ally and former fundraiser, then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, while her husband was overseeing the investigation into Clinton. McCabe also was accused of using FBI resources to benefit his wife’s campaign.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who took direct oversight of the Mueller investigation when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself, was revealed to have had conversations with McCabe about wearing a wire in meetings with Trump in order to ensnare the president.
Several high-ranking former FBI officials, including McCabe and former Director James Comey, likely used selective leaking of information to the media in order to extend their investigations and gain leverage with the FISA courts. One or the other—or both—then likely lied about doing so in testimony before Congress.
Whether Elias, as Clinton’s top campaign lawyer, was simply a cog in the machine or a ringleader in these efforts remains unknown.
While Trump attempted to declassify several crucial documents related to the Steele dossier, FISA applications and FBI investigation, the DOJ quickly tamped down his efforts to do so in September, despite Congressional calls for transparency.
With the House soon to hand over the reins to Democrats in the next Congress, the crucial questions are unlikely to soon be answered, though many more continue to be raised.
‘When a party loses a statewide election, it’s not because their opponents have cleverly divided their voters into a district or two … it’s the product of a larger political failure…’
Note: This is the second in a multi-part series examining Democrat attorney Marc Elias. This article covers Elias’ role in state redistricting challenges. Other articles will explore Elias’ role in election recounts, the Steele dossier and campaign fundraising violations.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Attorney Marc Elias, touted as Democrats’ go-to guy for issues related to recounts and redistricting, has had his work cut out for him following the recent midterm election.
Elias, the chairman of political law practice at high-power firm Perkins Coie, boasts a long track record of reversing Republican victories through the recount process—typically under dubious circumstances.
Most recently, he has been secured by incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson to fight his narrow election-night loss to Republican challenger Rick Scott. With other contentious legal disputes emerging in the Florida and Georgia gubernatorial elections and the Arizona Senate race, Elias will likely have some kind of a role.
As soon as Democrats sent their best Election stealing lawyer, Marc Elias, to Broward County they miraculously started finding Democrat votes. Don’t worry, Florida – I am sending much better lawyers to expose the FRAUD!
But while Elias, who was general counsel for both the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry presidential campaigns, now has his moment in the national spotlight to shift the political power structure toward the Democrats, he also has been working behind the scenes for much longer to steer the election—by challenging the redistricting functions of state legislatures within the court system.
The direct result of his efforts included several Democratic congressional pickups in swing states like Virginia and a bluer map for the 2020 presidential election in states that once were highly competitive.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee’s war-chest—already far outpaced by the well-heeled left—was forced to dedicate additional resources to contests in places that once had been all but assured, and taxpayers continue to line Elias’s pockets challenging the rulings of activist left-wing tribunals that have been tied up in the court system.
The Gerrymandering Obsession
During a recent episode of “The View,” liberal co-host Joy Behar lamented the mixed election results in which Republicans were able to maintain and even build on their small majority in the U.S. Senate.
This Senate majority not only assures an easier road to judicial and Cabinet appointments for at least the next two years, but also helps to protect President Donald Trump from removal should Democrats in the House of Representatives seek to impeach him for partisan reasons.
As ABC political analyst Matthew Dowd discussed Democrats’ winning the popular vote turnout contest while still losing politically in the Senate races, Behar interjected, “Because of gerrymandering.”
Behar’s knee-jerk response was not only revealing of her limited scope of political knowledge, but also of the party’s obsession with the notion that the system is inherently rigged against them, which in turn justifies their efforts to re-rig in their favor by any means necessary.
In the face of President Barack Obama’s staggering losses during his two terms—netting a total of more than 1,030 seats flipped to the GOP in state and national races—the Left desperately needed a scapegoat.
Obama’s first midterm, in 2010, during which Democrats lost an unprecedented six Senate seats, six governorships and 63 House seats, flipped the House and sent a clear message about the Affordable Care Act that had been passed a few months earlier, as well as the condition of the economy and other crucial issues regarding the direction of the country.
Their main nemesis du jour was gerrymandering, the redistricting process that got its name from Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812, when it was first implemented to give the party in power an electoral advantage. The word was a portmanteau of Gerry’s name and the salamander-like district that he had signed off on creating.
However, few have disputed in the past that if consistently applied it benefits both parties, resulting in a sort of imperfect stasis, another factor in the political calculus that functions as a sort of check and balance from one election to the next, with no cleaner way of ensuring fairness and accountability having been provided for under the law.
In a piece Politico published last year as prelude to a potentially landmark Supreme Court case, author Jeff Greenfield noted that the Left’s “defeats did not happen because of gerrymandering … In order for the GOP to use its power to entrench its majorities, it had to win those majorities in the first place.”
The article continued, “That happened because Republicans and their conservative allies poured resources into a workmanlike effort to win control over state politics, while Democrats were mesmerized by the more glamorous fight to win and hold the White House.”
As Greenfield noted, Republican gains in the Senate and governor’s races actually served as an argument against the Left’s gerrymandering excuse, since it is impossible to redistrict them without redrawing the state lines.
“What has happened, rather, is that the Democratic Party has lost touch not just with the white working class, of which we’ve heard so much this past year, but with a much broader segment of American voters,” Greenfield said.
“When a party loses a statewide election, it’s not because their opponents have cleverly divided their voters into a district or two, or because their voters are ‘clustered’ in a city or two; it’s the product of a larger political failure.”
Redistricting from the Bench
Whether or not it was a symptom of a larger political failure and being out of touch with a critical mass of voters, that didn’t stop Democrats from wanting to right the wrong by rigging the system in their favor.
Twitter challenge: Wisconsin has a partisanship score (PVI) of EVEN. Below, I’ve drawn a GOP gerrymander where 6/8 districts have a score of R+7 or higher.
I will personally award $7,000 to the first follower who draws a Dem gerrymander where 6/8 districts are D+7 or higher. pic.twitter.com/h0dJ922FAE
If Republicans were going to use state legislatures and elected offices to entrench their power, the Democrats would need to use activist courts and the un-elected bureaucracy to unravel the laws.
Their first big break came as the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases emerging from the 2011 redistricting: Gill vs. Whitford in Wisconsin, which plaintiffs argued favored Republicans, and Benisek vs. Lamone in Maryland, in which Democrats in power had redrawn a district to eliminate a Republican seat.
However, the high court (with now retired Justice Anthony Kennedy casting the swing vote) decided that the cases lacked standing, and that each individual district would need to handle its own suit rather than a statewide one.
Although this would seem a break for Republicans, the failure to resolve the issue—instead punting it back to the state level—ultimately empowered attorneys like Elias to take advantage of more favorable situations, such as the liberal-friendly Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
North Carolina’s Congressional districts/IMAGE: USA Today via Youtube
Elias took up cases in Virginia and North Carolina (which had a long history of challenging districts in the courts), joining other suits to argue that the existing districts were racist.
Working with state-level officials, some of whom he previously had helped install through election recounts, he was able to circumvent the GOP-led legislatures using “sue till blue” litigation that was extremely costly to taxpayers and highly lucrative for the Perkins Coie law firm.
Although the legislatures continued to challenge the cases, with the litigation tied up before the midterm election, state-level Democrats were empowered to implement their own redrawn maps.
Of four closely watched races in Virginia where the GOP had incumbents, Democrats flipped three seats. In North Carolina, Republicans managed to fend off several traditionally red seats by minuscule margins but were forced to devote unprecedented resources to doing so as outside money flooded in from the Left.
The greatest impact, though, may have been in Pennsylvania, where Democrats managed to flip four districts in the area surrounding Philadelphia after the state Supreme Court forced a map redraw. (Republicans were able to flip one previously Democratic district as well.)
Even if Elias had no hands-on involvement, he was certainly watching with interest from the sidelines.
BREAKING: Pennsylvania Supreme Court strikes down congressional map. Orders new map in time for 2018 election. Since the case was decided under the State constitution, there is no route to SCOTUS. There will be a new, fair map for 2018.
Barring any new developments in court rulings, the impact of the Pennsylvania decision—as well as those in Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin and other potential battleground states targeted in the redistricting initiative—will most certainly be to upset the balance and turn once competitive states into a blue wall, effectively disfranchising voters in vast swaths of rural areas while disproportionately weighting the urban population.
Rather than rest on their laurels, though, the Left will not stop until it is in complete control. As liberal activist David Daley told left-skewing political website Vox, “The Democrats made some gains, but I’m not sure that they made enough gains to ensure that they have a reasonable voice in the process.”
Note: This is the first in a multi-part series examining some of the activities of Democrat attorney Marc Elias. This article covers Elias’ questionable practices while contesting close political races and securing disputed election results. Future articles will explore Elias’ role in state redistricting efforts, the Steele dossier and campaign fundraising violations.
Democrat attorney Marc Elias/IMAGE: Maxwell School of Syracuse University via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson, D.-Fla., watched his seat slip away by a narrow margin on Tuesday, adding another pickup into the GOP win column, the idea of conceding defeat may have been the last thing on his mind.
Instead, Nelson called on liberal super-attorney Marc Elias, the chair of the Political Law Group at the powerful D.C. firm Perkins Coie, who for more than two decades has been helping the Left secure dubious election victories under questionable circumstances.
Among the accolades on Elias’ Perkins Coie biography is a Washington Post description of him as a “go-to lawyer for Democrats in recount fights and redistricting battles.”
If asked to name the Left’s most dangerous figures, many may come to mind—from shadowy plutocrats like George Soros to violent Antifa radicals to deceitful deep-state partisans like Peter Strzok.
But when it comes to having a direct impact on undermining the fabric of democracy and tilting the scales leftward, Elias—despite often operating in plain site and under the most mundane of circumstances—stands above the rest.
Although not typically a household name, he has had his hand in nearly every recent court challenge brought by the national Democratic Party, was the general counsel of the Hillary Clinton and John Kerry campaigns, and served as personal attorney to figures like Harry Reid and Barack Obama.
A Checkered Past
Ever since the Supreme Court was tapped to settle 2000’s disputed Bush vs. Gore recount in Florida, the importance of a powerful legal presence in elections is not taken for granted. As voting is an imperfect art, riddled with broken machines and dimpled chads—not to mention modern-era hacking concerns—it sometimes comes down to who can force, extend or stop a recount at the right moment.
Democrats have been remarkably blunt about the use of no-holds-barred tactics deployed in narrow races, whether it is through soft intimidation, voter fraud or placing corrupt officials in key positions to certify the vote. Even if their skulduggery is later discovered, once an oath is taken or a precedent established, it is difficult to reverse.
During my career handling recounts, we have averaged one statewide recount-able election (excluding for president). Not all of these have resulted in recounts, but almost all have involved some post election legal activity. pic.twitter.com/F0XnX2RP7m
From his first high-profile case, representing Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, a trail of voter-fraud accusations has followed Elias’ clients, along with a pattern of repeated recounts that result in Republican victories getting overturned by the narrowest of margins.
Several of the Senate candidates Elias secured unlikely victories for early in their careers, such as Washington’s Maria Cantwell and Montana’s Jon Tester, remain vital to the current Democratic caucus.
Minnesota (2008)
One of Elias’ major successes was in Minnesota, securing “Saturday Night Live” comedian Al Franken a spot in the Senate, which gave Democrats a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in 2008.
When Election Day ended, Republican Norm Coleman had the advantage by 215 votes, which triggered an automatic recount. As votes were contested and re-examined by state officials, shockingly, several bags of ballots were reported to have gone missing from Democrat-friendly areas, only to be ‘rediscovered’ after Elias sent a letter to the precincts.
The votes—which Coleman contended were likely duplicates or otherwise illicitly recorded—gave Franken the edge by 312. Despite Coleman’s wish to continue fighting the court battle, Franken and Elias forcefully insisted that Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty certify the race for him so that newly elected President Barack Obama could commence his legislative agenda. Democrat Secretary of State Mark Richie joined Franken and Elias in petitioning the courts to force the issue, and ultimately certified in Franken’s favor.
In addition to the suspicious circumstances surrounding the mystery ballots, U.S. News & World Report later noted that approximately 400 felons in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area had been allowed to vote in the election; others estimated it even higher.
Virginia (2013) and North Carolina (2016)
When Elias cropped up again in the 2013 challenge of Virginia’s attorney general race, few were surprised that ballots again began to miraculously appear. The race had narrowly propelled former Democratic National Committee chair and close Clinton ally Terry McAuliffe to the governor’s mansion, but Republican AG candidate Mark Obenshain stood in the way of a complete Democratic routing that would help turn the formerly red state a solid blue prior to Hillary Clinton’s presidential run.
Obenshain capped off election night with a 1,200 vote lead, but soon thereafter, new votes started getting discovered in Virginia’s liberal enclaves of Richmond and Fairfax that left Democrat Mark Herring victorious with a certified margin of 165 votes. Obenshain subsequently requested a recount, which boosted Herring’s lead to around 900.
By November 2016, Elias was gaining a reputation for being enmeshed in suspicious campaign operations like Fusion GPS’s Steele dossier. However, that didn’t stop North Carolina’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Roy Cooper, from securing him in a fight against Republican incumbent Pat McCrory.
Like its northern neighbor Virginia, the Tar Heel State seemed vulnerable to a blue conversion, but McCrory, who had famously opposed legislative efforts to mandate transgender bathrooms, stood in the way.
Former N.C. Gov. Pat McCrory
Unlike earlier contests, Elias found himself playing defensive as Cooper finished slightly ahead of McCrory.
With the race too close to call, by a margin of less than 5,000 votes, Cooper declared an election-night victory.
McCrory, however, raised multiple accusations of voter fraud that included Democratic campaign organizations paying people to fill out absentee ballots and counting the votes of dead people.
McCrory also questioned the late arrival of 90,000 votes from left-leaning Durham County on the night of the election that had put Cooper ahead.
Several precincts, including Durham, scoffed at and actively fought McCrory’s call’s for a recount. Not surprisingly, as the ballots in contested areas were re-examined, Cooper’s lead continued to grow, more than doubling to a total of 10,277 by time McCrory ultimately conceded.
Ironically, as he fought to prevent McCrory from due process, the duplicitous Elias was continuing to represent Hillary Clinton and penned a blog post bemoaning the possibility of outside interference in the presidential election. Even though he had never “uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside[emphasis added– ed.] attempts to alter the voting technology,” Elias nonetheless threatened to pursue recounts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“It should go without saying that we take these concerns extremely seriously” Elias said. “We certainly understand the heartbreak felt by so many who worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton, and it is a fundamental principle of our democracy to ensure that every vote is properly counted.”
2018 Recounts
Elias has currently been tapped to represent Sen. Bill Nelson in Florida should the vote tally fall within the 0.5 percent margin to automatically trigger one. As of Thursday, that seemed likely.
Two other possible Democratic challenges could have major political implications. In the Georgia governor’s race, where Democrat Stacey Abrams (48.7 percent) so far has refused to concede, an automatic runoff election would be triggered there if Republican Brian Kemp’s tally (currently at 50.3 percent) fell below the 50 percent mark.
And in the Arizona Senate race to replace Sen. Jeff Flake, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s 1 percentage point deficit to Republican Martha McSally means that election officials are now turning to things like the “late early ballots” dropped off at polling places on Election Day.
Election watchers should not be surprised if a bag of votes miraculously turns up in Elias’ trunk to put one or more of his Democratic clients over the top. Stranger things have happened.
“We’re doing this not just because it’s automatic, but we’re doing it to win,” Elias said in a statement about the potential Nelson challenge, the Associated Press reported.
The statement echoed another Elias client, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s shockingly candid response during a 2015 interview discussing his upcoming Senate retirement. When asked why, during the 2012 election, he made a deliberately deceptive statement about GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax records, Reid’s reply: “Romney didn’t win, did he?”
‘Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions …’
Donald Trump & Paul Ryan (screen shot: ABC News/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As analysts work to make sense of the mixed outcome from Tuesday’s midterm election, some may wonder whether Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s ineffectiveness in mobilizing the House GOP was responsible for losing the lower chamber to Democrats.
In reality, a complex tapestry of intangible factors—and a few historical constants—played a part.
But the Wisconsin congressman, whose divergence from Trumpism made him a political casualty, certainly had a role in it.
Despite public statements Trump made at rallies that the midterms were a referendum on him, media outlets including the Los Angeles Times and Politico reported that the president privately held the Congress responsible for what he considered to be their elections, and pinned much responsibility on the retiring Ryan for his failure to lead.
Trump publicly said as much last week after Ryan second-guessed the legality of the president’s proposal to repeal birthright citizenship by executive order:
Paul Ryan should be focusing on holding the Majority rather than giving his opinions on Birthright Citizenship, something he knows nothing about! Our new Republican Majority will work on this, Closing the Immigration Loopholes and Securing our Border!
While the two Republican leaders have largely avoided the public disputes that others—even members of Trump’s own cabinet—have engaged in, the exchange offered a window into the out-of-sync dynamic that disappointingly resulted in Congressional gridlock during what should have been the GOP’s shining moment.
Not only did the House struggle to find traction on countless legislative issues, such as balancing the budget and pushing through entitlement reform—two of Ryan’s and Trump’s shared objectives—but the election effort itself seemed fraught with disarray and lackluster candidates going up against a well-funded and well-coordinated Democratic machine.
Those that worked with me in this incredible Midterm Election, embracing certain policies and principles, did very well. Those that did not, say goodbye! Yesterday was such a very Big Win, and all under the pressure of a Nasty and Hostile Media!
Whether one can cast blame the departing Ryan, one of more than 40 GOP congressmen who decided not to pursue re-election when faced with the daunting road ahead, may be something of a “chicken vs. egg” question that depends on the perspective.
In the six years after being selected as Mitt Romney’s 2012 vice presidential running mate, Ryan, now 48, was branded everything from P90X beefcake to political wunderkind to Ayn-Rand-reading face of neoconservatism to policy wonk determined to fix the tax system to a last-gasp GOP savior following a party mutiny over his predecessor, former Speaker John Boehner.
Nancy Pelosi and Paul Ryan/IMAGE: CNN via Youtube
Ryan spent 10 terms in Congress, chairing two powerful committees before getting drafted into the speakership. But unbeknownst to him, by time he assumed the gavel in October 2015, the fate of his own political trajectory and legislative ambitions had already been sealed by Trump’s June 2015 ride down a golden escalator to announce his candidacy.
Ryan’s reluctance to step into the role of Congress’s main cat-herder was punctuated by his difference in vision and style from Trump. The former’s career inside the D.C. Beltway had acclimated him to a different kind of deal-brokering—one geared toward sausage-factory compromises, albeit a little too eager to acquiesce to the opposition—than the pragmatic business mogul who embraced conflict and controversy with an eye toward winning big-time.
Like Boehner, Ryan struggled as speaker to bridge the gap among factions and to placate the various stakeholders. As seasoned liberal adversaries like Nancy Pelosi maneuvered to regain power by undermining any legislative action, on Ryan’s right the increasingly vocal House Freedom Caucus quickly lost confidence in him over his lukewarm support of Trump.
Meanwhile, in the world outside D.C., Ryan was less than assured of safeguarding his own working-class district from an embarrassing political defeat at the hands of either a primary challenger or a well-funded progressive like Randy “The Iron Stache” Bryce, who promised to ‘repeal and replace‘ the incumbent.
Publicly, Ryan (who at 16 lost his father to a heart attack) expressed his desire to spend time with his family as his three children approached their teenage years. The shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise last year by a deranged, left-wing radical not only waylaid the legislative agenda for several crucial months, but also, no doubt, added to the psychological toll pressing on Ryan—third in ascension order for the presidency—to step away.
In announcing his retirement in April, Ryan said, “[I]t’s easy to [let politics] take over everything in your life, and you can’t just let that happen because there are other things in life that can be fleeting as well—namely your time as a husband and a dad, which is the other great honor of my life.”
But as Ryan’s mind drifted back to the Badger State, the result was a power vacuum among House GOP leadership that left Trump pulling double duty.
Where other chief executives in his position historically have maintained a low midterm profile in order to avoid making it about their policies and personalities, Trump took ownership, barnstorming across the country in recent weeks.
From a historical perspective, it was a success—his projected loss of 36 seats (with some races on Wednesday still being counted or contested) fell in line with expectations—unlike Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who each ceded control of Congress in their first midterms with losses of 52 and 63 seats, respectively.
In his statement following the loss, Ryan brought out his customarily analytical approach by noting that on average, going back to 1862, the president’s party has lost 32 House seats and two Senate seats in midterm elections (Trump’s Senate is expected to gain three).
“Tonight history has repeated itself,” Ryan said. “A party in power always faces tough odds in its first midterm election.”
But he also acknowledged the new political realities with an appeal to his successors “find common ground” despite the rancor.
“We don’t need an election to know that we are a divided nation, and now we have a divided Washington,” Ryan said. “As a country and a government we must find a way to come together.”
‘CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person…’
Jim Acosta/Photo by Gage Skidmore (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Between interviewing prospective attorneys general and pondering how to find a new way forward until the 2020 election with a now divided government—and an opposition party that made impeaching him its central platform—President Donald Trump probably had enough to worry about on Wednesday.
But that didn’t stop CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta from doggedly trying to steal Trump’s time by questioning the president over the semantics of a caravan approaching the border and whether he was concerned about further indictments in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russian collusion investigation.
Following a tense exchange between Trump and Acosta in which the reporter allegedly accosted a female White House staffer, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Twitter late Wednesday night that Acosta’s press pass had been suspended.
As a result of today’s incident, the White House is suspending the hard pass of the reporter involved until further notice.
Trump already had little patience as soon as Acosta prefaced his question about a statement he made during the close of the election campaign.
“Here we go,” Trump said.
After a gamely exchange that lasted about a minute and a half, in which the two talked over one another and Trump managed to slip in a jab at CNN’s ratings, the president finally told Acosta, “That’s enough.”
However, Acosta refused to yield the mic as a female White House staffer approached to take it.
As Trump stepped away from the podium, Acosta finally handed over the mic.
Trump then lit into him, saying, “I tell you, CNN should be ashamed of itself having you working for them. You are a rude, terrible person.”
As Acosta attempted to interject, Trump added, “The way you treat [Press Secretary] Sarah Huckabee [Sanders] is horrible.”
In June, CBS published a story that was widely spread suggesting that Sanders, who has been publicly mocked at the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner and forced from a restaurant by intolerant social justice warriors, was considering a departure.
However, Sanders put the rumors to rest, saying on Twitter that she loved her job.
Does @CBSNews know something I don’t about my plans and my future? I was at my daughter’s year-end Kindergarten event and they ran a story about my “plans to leave the WH” without even talking to me. I love my job and am honored to work for @POTUS
Acosta has often assumed the role of chief antagonist during press briefings, so much so that during Trump campaign rallies, people in the audience would actively look for him in order to heckle with jeers of “CNN sucks.”
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Former President Barack Obama took great strides during his time in office to see that the government, not science, had the upper hand in determining people’s gender.
But at a rally in the D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia, he confoundingly took it a step farther, encouraging voters to replace a Republican woman, Rep. Barbara Comstock, with Democratic Jennifer Wexton because, “Lord knows we need more women in charge,” he said.
Obama pressed forward with a talking point that his party first trotted out during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that the #MeToo movement would dominate the midterms. Promoting it as a reboot of 1992, liberals have declared—ironically, despite the election of serial abuser Bill Clinton to the nation’s highest office that year—2018 marked the return of the “Year of the Woman.”
But as it did the first time around, the changing context has made the Left’s bid for the female vote a bit awkward on occasion.
On one hand, Democratic politicians like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Vice President Joe Biden have shown a lack of self-awareness by refusing to reconcile their rhetoric with their own misogynist histories.
On the other hand, as Obama proved Tuesday, the Left has no issue with disparaging the wrong “type” of female—i.e. the conservative kind.
Sen. Susan Collins and Justice Brett Kavanaugh/IMAGE: NBC News via Youtube
While supporting the politically charged and unsubstantiated claims of Kavanaugh accusers—some of whom have since been discredited and admitted to lying—leftist activists didn’t bat an eye in sending death and rape threats to the offices of Maine Sen. Susan Collins after she cast the deciding vote for Kavanaugh.
Likewise, pop-star Taylor Swift made the unusual move of endorsing Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Phil Bredesen by claiming he would do a better job representing women’s issues than his opponent Marsha Blackburn—an actual woman. Blackburn countered that she represented the issues that mattered to the women of Tennessee.
Although the “Believe all women” slogan was popular for a brief moment during the Kavanaugh hearings, it quickly ran into its limits as Keith Ellison, deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee, worked overtime to brush his own abuse scandal under the rug.
Meanwhile, in California’s hotly contested 39th district, several tables were turned as Democrats found themselves rallying around a male millionaire lottery winner, Gil Cisneros, to replace retiring Republican congressman Ed Royce rather than Young Kim, a first-generation Korean-American woman.
Adding insult to injury, Cisneros found himself tamping down claims from another left-wing politician, Melissa Fazli, that after the state Democratic convention, Cisneros had demanded sex in exchange for a campaign contribution. It took a good talking to for Fazli to come around.
“This past week, seeing the pain of Dr. Ford and so many women and the dismissiveness of both Judge Kavanaugh and Washington Republicans, I felt it was important to reach out to meet with Melissa,” Cisneros said, according to Politifact. “… We sat down and heard each other, found a clear case of misunderstanding, and are both ready to move forward.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, who stands poised to head the House Judiciary Committee should Democrats retake the lower chamber, nonetheless joined Cisneros on the campaign trail Tuesday, with a promise to re-open the House investigation into collusion between Trump and Russia during the 2016 campaign, even as special prosecutor Robert Mueller is working to bring his investigation to a close.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford deserves our respect.
I am inspired by her courage.
She is one woman, but her words carry the weight of millions who have faced sexual assault.
