Archive for the ‘Hillary Clinton’ Category

Michael Flynn Resigns, Hillary Clinton Delivers Wry Response … – NBCNews.com

Michael Flynn was among the harshest critics of Hillary Clinton's private email server during the presidential campaign. So it is hardly surprising that the former Democratic contender exacted a smidgen of wry revenge Tuesday after Flynn resigned as President Donald Trump's national security adviser.

Clinton posted a message referring to tweets by Flynn and his son last year in which they linked to baseless news stories about her campaign.

The retired Army lieutenant-general quit hours after it emerged the Justice Department warned the White House it believed he could be subject to blackmail.

Related: Who Knew What About Flynn and Russia and When?

In his resignation letter, Flynn said the "fast pace of events" meant he provided "incomplete information" to Vice President Mike Pence and others about phone calls last year in which he discussed American sanctions with Russia's ambassador in Washington.

Flynn was a vocal critic of Clinton's private email server during the race, even joining the crowd's chant of "lock her up" at the Republican National Convention.

He also tweeted "U decide," alongside a link to fake-news story linking Clinton with money laundering and sex crimes with children.

His son, Michael G. Flynn, circulated another fake-news story tying the Clinton campaign to the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theory, alleging in December that she had used the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. to run a child sex-trafficking operation.

Clinton's message included a joke by Philippe Reines, who worked for Clinton in both the Senate and State Department. Reines played the part of Trump during the Clinton team's mock debates in the campaign.

U.S. officials have told NBC News that the FBI and CIA agree that Russia tried to meddle in the election to help Trump win. Flynn's critics, meanwhile, have worried that he was too close to Moscow.

Flynn does have supporters, however, with some Russian lawmakers coming to his defense Tuesday.

The scandal was "not even paranoia, it's something immeasurably worse," said a Facebook post by Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the upper chamber of the Russian parliament.

"Either Trump hasn't found the necessary independence and he's been driven into a corner... or russophobia has permeated the new administration from top to bottom," he added.

Alexey Pushkov, a senator with the United Russia party, which supports President Vladimir Putin, said Flynn was "forced to go" because of "paranoia." Pushkov also labeled the incident a "witch hunt."

While the Kremlin's supporters piled in, the government itself remained neutral. Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, told state-run news agencies that the matter was "none of our business."

Back in the States, Democrats were scathing.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California said Flynn's resignation was "all but ordained the day he misled the country about his secret talks with the Russian ambassador." Schiff is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating the Trump campaign's alleged contacts with Russia.

And Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland said in a joint statement that Flynn was "unfit" to be national security adviser.

Criticism also came from the other side of the aisle, with Texas Republican Rep. Bill Flores tweeting that he was "glad Michael Flynn is gone from White House. We need more sanctions on Russia, not fewer!"

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Michael Flynn Resigns, Hillary Clinton Delivers Wry Response ... - NBCNews.com

Michael Flynn last July: If I did a tenth of what [Hillary Clinton] did, I would be in jail – Vox

Michael Flynn, President Donald Trumps national security adviser, has resigned just weeks after the new president took office. The resignation came after questions grew over whether Flynn had deliberately lied to Vice President Mike Pence and the FBI over phone calls with a Russian envoy on December 29, which may have violated federal law.

On social media, a few Trump critics were quick to point out the hypocrisy that led Flynn to this moment. During the July 2016 Republican National Convention, in which Trump accepted his nomination to run for president, Flynn joined crowds in chanting, Lock her up! in reference to Hillary Clinton, who had been accused of mishandling classified information by using a private email server. As the crowd chanted, Flynn said, If I did a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today. (The FBI concluded that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a case against Clinton over the email issue.)

Flynn, meanwhile, was forced to resign a few weeks after he and Trump took office. According to US officials who spoke to the Washington Post and New York Times, Flynn had reportedly spoken to the Russian envoy about sanctions imposed on Russia and hinted that Trump would be willing to lift them. That may have put Flynn in violation of the Logan Act, an obscure law that prohibits people outside the executive branch from making foreign policy on behalf of the US administration. But no one has ever been prosecuted under the law, making a prosecutions future uncertain.

The problems arose when it later came out that Flynn had lied to not only Pence about the phone call but also the FBI. That could put him in the path of more serious criminal charges for lying to law enforcement investigators.

In his resignation letter, Flynn said that during the fast pace of events of the Trump transition period, he inadvertently briefed the Vice President Elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian Ambassador. Its hard to imagine him accepting a similar excuse if Clinton had done something similar.

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Michael Flynn last July: If I did a tenth of what [Hillary Clinton] did, I would be in jail - Vox

Katy Perry Just Designed a Shoe and Named It After Hillary Clinton – Cosmopolitan.com

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It's no secret that Katy Perry is a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter she campaigned heavily for Hillary before the election and at Sunday's Grammys she wore a white pantsuit and "PERSIST" arm band in solidarity with her (and all women, TBH). Now she's proving her admiration for Hillary again, this time in shoe form.

Katy Perry Collections, Katy's new line of footwear that launches on Feb. 16, features shoes named after kick-ass ladies in her life.

"I chose some of my favorite girlfriends and my female family members and named all the shoes after them," Katy told People of her collection, which will retail between $59 and $299. Two styles are named after Girls stars Lena Dunham and Allison Williams, for example. But the name that truly sticks out is the "Hillary," a super-cute blush-pink pump with a lucite heel that's filled with tiny gold accents.

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"Its got stars in the heel, so it's a pep in her step," Katy explained of the design, but she was quick to note that the shoe isn't necessarily something that reads H.R.C. (i.e., a sensible nude pump with a low, chunky heel) . "I didn't necessarily shape the shoe[s] after [each woman], but ... I tried to pair the shoes that best represented their personality."

Can't wait to see Hillary wearing these!

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Katy Perry Just Designed a Shoe and Named It After Hillary Clinton - Cosmopolitan.com

DNC leaders say Hillary Clinton lost because she talked too much about Trump – Chicago Tribune

Every leading contender to take over the Democratic National Committee believes Hillary Clinton focused too much on attacking Donald Trump at the expense of articulating an affirmative case for holding the White House. During their final showdown before the chairman's election in Atlanta on Feb. 25, there was consensus that the party's problems derive mainly from subpar organization and communication - not anything fundamental.

"We forgot to talk to people," said Tom Perez, who was secretary of labor until last month and a finalist to be Clinton's running-mate last summer. "I'm a big believer in data analytics, but data analytics cannot supplant good old fashioned door knocking. . . . We didn't communicate our values to people. When Donald Trump says, 'I'm going to bring the coal jobs back,' we know that's a lie. But people understand that he feels their pain. And our response was: 'Vote for us because he's crazy.' I'll stipulate to that, but that's not a message."

Many Democratic leaders remain in a state of denial about the lessons of the election. They have only been in the wilderness for a few weeks now, and Clinton won the popular vote. The mass protests of the past four weekends and Trump's sagging popularity have added to their overconfidence that they'll easily win again in 2020.

It was striking during a two-hour forum in Baltimore that not one of the 10 candidates for chair suggested the party should moderate in response to last year's losses. Indeed, there was no substantive discussion about policy at all during the Saturday evening event. It was taken as a given that all the aspirants are committed liberals. This is a stark contrast to the ideological debates that enveloped the party following similar setbacks in 2004, 1988 or 1972. It reflects the degree to which the Bernie Sanders wing is ascendant, and Blue Dogs have left the party.

Perez is the clear frontrunner, but he still does not have the votes locked up. With backing from key figures in Barack Obama's orbit (Joe Biden) and the Clinton machine (Terry McAuliffe), he is the establishment favorite. But his progressive bona fides are beyond question, from his tenure as a Montgomery County councilman to helming the Justice Department's civil rights division. That makes it hard for Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who won an early endorsement from Sanders and Chuck Schumer, to get too far to Perez's left. That is part of the explanation for why the chair's race lacks much ideological tension.

Pete Buttigieg, the 34-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has tried to position himself as a consensus candidate who is not part of the Clinton or Sanders wing. Because the winner must get support from a majority of the 447 eligible voters, the election may go into two, three or even four rounds.

Buttigieg's goal is to be the second choice for as many Perez and Ellison supporters as possible. But his diagnosis of what went wrong in 2016 sounds a lot like Perez's. "We spent so much time talking about the politicians, like that's what really matters," he said. "I was guilty of it. I had a button when we were campaigning for Hillary . . . that said 'I'm with her.' It was all about her. Then when we realized who the opponent was going to be, it was all about him. We said, 'I'm against him because he is terrible.' He is terrible. But the people at home were saying, 'Who is talking to me? Who is talking about me?' Everything we talk about has to be explained in terms of how it directly touches people's actual lives."

Ray Buckley, the longtime chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party,likened the DNC to a car that's broken down on the side of the road but really only needs a tune-up. He said he'd reallocate money from television advertising toward field organizing. "We need someone who can lift up the hood and fix the damn car," he said.

"While many of you know that I'm openly gay, many of you don't know . . . that I come from the lowest of the white working class," he added later. "We ran hundreds of millions of dollars of commercials telling the voters that, 'Oh, our opponent if offensive.' When you're worried about your damn paycheck, about your job, about where you're going to live and if your kids are going to go to school, you don't really give a crap if the president is insulting. The reality is we didn't have a positive message for anyone I'm related to. We didn't offer a message to my neighbors. We didn't offer a message to the people in Indiana or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Kentucky."

"The Clinton campaign treated this organization with disrespect," said Jehmu Greene, another long-shot candidate for chair and a regular liberal commentator on Fox News.

Ironically, every person who complained about how the party was too focused on attacking Trump in 2016 also tried to out-do the other candidates in promising to go after the new president. Ellison called Trump "the most misogynistic person to ever become president." Perez called him "the most dangerous and destructive person to ever hold the presidency." Buttigieg described the new commander-in-chief as "a chicken-hawk."

Because rural, red states have relatively outsized influence in the DNC voting process, all the candidates for chair are talking a great deal about re-embracing what Howard Dean called the 50 state strategy. "We got into this mess because we didn't win about a thousand elections," said Ellison. "I gave five grand to the Louisiana state party. I've been out to Nebraska. . . . You are where the votes are."

Perez called for more intensive candidate training and the creation of a Center for Best Practices: "So that we can go and say, 'Hey, Alaska, you flipped your House Democrat. How did you do it? Hey Kansas, you won 14 seats in the state House. How did you do it?' The answer is: Without any help from the DNC! We've got to change that."

None of the candidates for chair, however, wanted to argue that national Democrats have lurched too far to the left to consistently compete in these rural places. The closest anyone came was when Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, complained that the Democratic National Committee has increasingly become the Democratic Presidential Committee. "All we've focused on was the presidency and nothing else. We cannot leave any Democrat or Democratic Party behind," he said. "I got into a Twitter fight yesterday. Somebody said, 'Do you support (Joe) Manchin Democrats? I said, I support anybody who is a Democrat! . . . I support anyone who will give the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi."

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DNC leaders say Hillary Clinton lost because she talked too much about Trump - Chicago Tribune

Goodwin: Hillary Clinton Reminds Us Why We’re Lucky She Lost the Election – Fox News

Published February 13, 2017

By Michael Goodwin, The New York Post

Thank you, Hillary Clinton. Thank you for reminding America about the importance of Donald Trumps victory and of the awful consequences if you had won.

Clinton sent out a taunting tweet of 3-0 after the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously slapped a halt on Trumps executive order on immigrants and refugees.

Her support for the ruling isnt surprising Clinton said she was for open borders at one point but the gutter sniping was telling. The activist judges who based their ruling on their liberal politics instead of the Constitution are the same kind she would appoint to the Supreme Court and all other federal courts if she were in the Oval Office.

Thankfully, she wont get the chance, a fact reinforced by Trump aide Kellyanne Conway. She fired back at Clinton with her version of 3-0, tweeting PA, WI, MI, a reference to three formerly blue states, worth 46 electoral votes, that Trump flipped to his column. Touch!

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Goodwin: Hillary Clinton Reminds Us Why We're Lucky She Lost the Election - Fox News