She is fake democrat! A Right wing backed operative!! Boycott #tulsigabbard!
She is fake democrat! A Right wing backed operative!! Boycott #tulsigabbard!
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She is fake democrat! A Right wing backed operative!! Boycott #tulsigabbard!
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard gets 2020 endorsement from David Duke
Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has apparently gotten an endorsement she said she can do without — from former KKK leader David Duke.
The 68-year-old white supremacist and former GOP Louisiana state senator plastered a banner on his Twitter page prominently featuring a photograph of the Hawaiian lawmaker.
“Tulsi Gabbard for President,” it blares, along with the tagline: “Finally a candidate who will actually put America First rather than Israel First!”
“Tulsi Gabbard is currently the only Presidential candidate who doesn’t want to send White children off to die for Israel,” the former Grand Wizard tweeted his more than 50,000 followers along with a photograph of Gabbard meeting a US service member and his child.
But Gabbard wasted no time in lashing back at Duke and rejected his backing.
“I have strongly denounced David Duke’s hateful views and his so-called ‘support’ multiple times in the past, and reject his support,” she told The Post in a statement Tuesday.
“Publicizing Duke’s so-called ‘endorsement’ is meant to distract from my message: that I will end regime-change wars, work to end the new cold war and take us away from the precipice of a nuclear war, which is a greater danger now than ever before.”
Gabbard — who is of Samoan heritage — served with the US Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was first elected to office in Hawaii in 2013.
The 37-year-old, who announced her White House bid last week, received Duke’s unwelcome endorsement despite several moves signaling her potential support for the Jewish state.
In November 2016, Duke tweeted that Gabbard was a representative of a “political realignment” he hoped to see in the US — and called for Donald Trump to appoint her secretary of state.
She responded: “U didn’t know I’m Polynesian/Cauc? Dad couldn’t use ‘whites only’ water fountain. No thanks. Ur white nationalism is pure evil.”
The following month, she tweeted: “Our movement is one of love/aloha, inclusivity. Duke represents hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, fear. We don’t want his ‘support.’ Period.”
In the early 2000s, Gabbard touted working for her father’s anti-gay organization, which sought to pass a measure against same-sex marriage in her state and promoted controversial conversion therapy.
In a statement to CNN, she said: “First, let me say I regret the positions I took in the past, and the things I said. I’m grateful for those in the LGBTQ+ community who have shared their aloha with me throughout my personal journey.”
Duke also endorsed Trump for president in 2016.
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper in February that year whether he’d disavow the former Grand Wizard, the then-Republican candidate said: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?”
Duke again praised Trump’s presidency after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 in which Trump claimed there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Duke did not immediately respond to a message for comment Tuesday.
Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has apparently gotten an endorsement she said she can do without — from former KKK leader David Duke.
The 68-year-old white supremacist and former GOP Louisiana state senator plastered a banner on his Twitter page prominently featuring a photograph of the Hawaiian lawmaker.
“Tulsi Gabbard for President,” it blares, along with the tagline: “Finally a candidate who will actually put America First rather than Israel First!”
“Tulsi Gabbard is currently the only Presidential candidate who doesn’t want to send White children off to die for Israel,” the former Grand Wizard tweeted his more than 50,000 followers along with a photograph of Gabbard meeting a US service member and his child.
But Gabbard wasted no time in lashing back at Duke and rejected his backing.
“I have strongly denounced David Duke’s hateful views and his so-called ‘support’ multiple times in the past, and reject his support,” she told The Post in a statement Tuesday.
“Publicizing Duke’s so-called ‘endorsement’ is meant to distract from my message: that I will end regime-change wars, work to end the new cold war and take us away from the precipice of a nuclear war, which is a greater danger now than ever before.”
Gabbard — who is of Samoan heritage — served with the US Army National Guard in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and was first elected to office in Hawaii in 2013.
The 37-year-old, who announced her White House bid last week, received Duke’s unwelcome endorsement despite several moves signaling her potential support for the Jewish state.
In November 2016, Duke tweeted that Gabbard was a representative of a “political realignment” he hoped to see in the US — and called for Donald Trump to appoint her secretary of state.
She responded: “U didn’t know I’m Polynesian/Cauc? Dad couldn’t use ‘whites only’ water fountain. No thanks. Ur white nationalism is pure evil.”
The following month, she tweeted: “Our movement is one of love/aloha, inclusivity. Duke represents hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, fear. We don’t want his ‘support.’ Period.”
In the early 2000s, Gabbard touted working for her father’s anti-gay organization, which sought to pass a measure against same-sex marriage in her state and promoted controversial conversion therapy.
In a statement to CNN, she said: “First, let me say I regret the positions I took in the past, and the things I said. I’m grateful for those in the LGBTQ+ community who have shared their aloha with me throughout my personal journey.”
Duke also endorsed Trump for president in 2016.
When asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper in February that year whether he’d disavow the former Grand Wizard, the then-Republican candidate said: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?”
Duke again praised Trump’s presidency after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 in which Trump claimed there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Duke did not immediately respond to a message for comment Tuesday.
2020 elections
The ‘Russian asset’ and the ‘warmonger’:
The roots of the Clinton-Gabbard dispute
The hard feelings between the two Democrats
date back to the 2016 presidential primary.
Politico
By MARC CAPUTO
and DANIEL STRAUSS
10/23/2019 05:02 AM EDT
The blowback against Tulsi Gabbard began the day after she endorsed Hillary Clinton’s primary rival in 2016.
Kives, a Hollywood agent, forwarded the email chain to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest aide, to gloat about the verbal beatdown.
“Hammer dropped!” he wrote.
The Hawaii congresswoman’s rough experience in the 2016 primary offers a window into her relationship with the Clinton team, providing additional context for the acrimonious, headline-making exchange between the two Democrats.
This time, Clinton struck Gabbard first, lacerating the Hawaii congresswoman as a “favorite of Russians” and suggesting that Republicans “are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Though Clinton didn’t expressly name Gabbard, it was obvious of whom she spoke.
Gabbard responded by trashing Clinton as the “queen of warmongers” and the “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party,” before going on to say the former Democratic presidential nominee was behind an effort to destroy her reputation.
“I was told she will never forget,” Gabbard said Monday in an email fundraising pitch, referring to her endorsement of Sanders. “Her rich and powerful friends in the media and Democratic Party would try to destroy me.”
The feud illuminates two of the most emotional issues tugging at Democrats heading into the 2016 election:
Considering her experience in 2016, Clinton is engaged in truth-telling, not payback, her supporters say.
“I think that Gabbard supporters citing these concocted spilled-milk motivations is nonsense,” said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. “This is about a former secretary of state having grave concerns about the policy positions and the dangerous rhetoric (or at times, silence) that indicates a world view voters should take time to understand and be concerned by.”
Since Trump’s election, Gabbard has grown increasingly estranged from her party, a process that began while serving as DNC vice chair in 2016, when she added her voice to the growing chorus of critics concerned that the DNC was holding too few debates — a policy which worked to Clinton’s advantage.
Then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who quietly favored Clinton along with other top party staffers — responded to the public criticism by disinviting Gabbard from one of the debates she planned to attend.
Gabbard, who declined to comment for this story, later resigned her party post and endorsed Sanders in dramatic fashion, announcing her decision on “Meet the Press.”
Several months later, Gabbard struck again. Just before Clinton was officially nominated to be the party’s standard-bearer, Gabbard went out of her way to play up internal divisions by tweeting a New York Daily News story that highlighted how some of Wasserman Schultz’s DNC staffers privately speculated about attacking Sanders’ lack of devotion to his Jewish faith.
But the Clinton campaign’s hard feelings toward Gabbard haven’t affected the congresswoman’s trajectory nearly as much as Gabbard’s own unusual path. After the 2016 election, the former Iraq War combat veteran became a political oddity in the party — she emerged as a darling of conservative commentators on FOX News. In the aftermath of this new conflict, Gabbard appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and tweeted a link to her interview, accusing Clinton of “the new McCarthyism.”
After Trump’s election, Gabbard met with Trump and his transition team in Trump Tower amid talk of a possible administration job as part of a visit arranged by Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon. Gabbard described the conversation as “frank and positive.”
But it was Gabbard’s decision to visit Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and her reticence in condemning him — after criticizing U.S. policy and occasionally seeming to favor Putin’s involvement there — became a final breaking point for many Democrats, including Clinton.
Gabbard has since been favorably covered by Russian propaganda outlets, is widely seen as the right’s favorite Democratic candidate and hired an adviser with Kremlin links.
Even so, Sanders bristled at Clinton’s characterization.
“Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset,” he wrote in a Monday tweet.
A top Clinton adviser, Phillippe Reines, said Gabbard’s fall from grace among Democrats is a matter of both party politics and policy.
“Politically, in 2015 she was the first woman in Congress to endorse Sanders. So she didn’t make many friends there. I’d say that’s 25% of the answer,” Reines said via email.
“Substantively, the red line she crossed was visiting Syria. It was against [U.S. government] policy,” Reines said. “Worse, she coddled Assad. The criticisms levied at her about Assad are 1000% valid. I mean, who the hell holds back on Assad? And the obstinacy since then is Trump-like. That’s 75%.”
Jennifer Holdsworth, who served as New Jersey state director for Hillary for America, said Gabbard made the dispute personal because she is self-serving.
“Tulsi Gabbard has always been about whatever brings the most press to Tulsi Gabbard,” Holdsworth said.
Supporters of Gabbard and Sanders — as well as Trump, who defended the congresswoman Monday — say Clinton is trying to deflect blame for running a bad campaign in 2016 and losing to Trump. Clinton backers and mainstream Democrats hailed Clinton for giving voice to their suspicions and drawing attention to ongoing Russian interference that played a major role in the 2016 campaign.
Both emails cited in this story, for example, were released by the group WikiLeaks after they were hacked by Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence officials and bipartisan congressional investigations.
The interference by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and other actors was chronicled in both an indictment of Russian operatives and Senate Intelligence Committee reports that showed how the foreign government used social media platforms to spread disinformation and negative information about Clinton, sometimes by boosting Trump or her other opponents.
Bill Browder, a financier and activist who has run afoul of Putin, said he thought it was no coincidence that Gabbard recently hired an operative who had worked with a Kremlin-backed lawyer who smeared him because he helped secure the passage of the Magnitsky Act. That law sanctioned Russia in reaction to the death of a friend of Browder — after whom the law is named.
“Out of all the thousands of people she could have chosen, she happened to choose the one who had first-hand experience working with a Russian agent of Vladimir Putin’s,” Browder said of Gabbard. “I don’t believe in coincidences. It’s less likely to be a coincidence when you look at her policies, which are the same policy as Putin’s: pro-Assad, anti-gay and pro-Trump.”
Gabbard has renounced her past homophobic views and has criticized Trump at the Democratic debates.
Clinton, however, has stopped short of directly calling Gabbard a Russian asset in her comments. On the Campaign HQ with David Plouffe podcast, Clinton just said Gabbard was the preferred candidate of Russian agents who “have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton did say she suspected Gabbard would run as a third-party candidate — a claim Gabbard has denied — and did call 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein “a Russian asset.”
“They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate,” Clinton said. “So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
When asked if Clinton were singling out Gabbard, whom she didn’t mention by name, her spokesman, Merrill, referenced Russian Matryoshka dolls and said, “If the nesting doll fits.”
www.politico.com
.
The ‘Russian asset’ and the ‘warmonger’:
The roots of the Clinton-Gabbard dispute
The hard feelings between the two Democrats
date back to the 2016 presidential primary.
Politico
By MARC CAPUTO
and DANIEL STRAUSS
10/23/2019 05:02 AM EDT
The blowback against Tulsi Gabbard began the day after she endorsed Hillary Clinton’s primary rival in 2016.
“We were very disappointed to hear that you would resign your position with the DNC so you could endorse Bernie Sanders, a man who has never been a Democrat before,” former Clinton Foundation director Darnell Strom, writing on his behalf and that of a friend, wrote in an email to the outgoing Democratic National Committee vice chair.
“You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgment so will not be raising money for your campaign,” Strom wrote.
Kives, a Hollywood agent, forwarded the email chain to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Huma Abedin, Clinton’s closest aide, to gloat about the verbal beatdown.
“Hammer dropped!” he wrote.
The Hawaii congresswoman’s rough experience in the 2016 primary offers a window into her relationship with the Clinton team, providing additional context for the acrimonious, headline-making exchange between the two Democrats.
This time, Clinton struck Gabbard first, lacerating the Hawaii congresswoman as a “favorite of Russians” and suggesting that Republicans “are grooming her to be the third-party candidate.” Though Clinton didn’t expressly name Gabbard, it was obvious of whom she spoke.
Gabbard responded by trashing Clinton as the “queen of warmongers” and the “personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party,” before going on to say the former Democratic presidential nominee was behind an effort to destroy her reputation.
“I was told she will never forget,” Gabbard said Monday in an email fundraising pitch, referring to her endorsement of Sanders. “Her rich and powerful friends in the media and Democratic Party would try to destroy me.”
The feud illuminates two of the most emotional issues tugging at Democrats heading into the 2016 election:
- worries about Russian interference; and
- the prospect of a third-party candidate who could sap away just enough voters to allow an unpopular Donald Trump to win a second term.
Considering her experience in 2016, Clinton is engaged in truth-telling, not payback, her supporters say.
“I think that Gabbard supporters citing these concocted spilled-milk motivations is nonsense,” said Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill. “This is about a former secretary of state having grave concerns about the policy positions and the dangerous rhetoric (or at times, silence) that indicates a world view voters should take time to understand and be concerned by.”
Since Trump’s election, Gabbard has grown increasingly estranged from her party, a process that began while serving as DNC vice chair in 2016, when she added her voice to the growing chorus of critics concerned that the DNC was holding too few debates — a policy which worked to Clinton’s advantage.
Then-DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — who quietly favored Clinton along with other top party staffers — responded to the public criticism by disinviting Gabbard from one of the debates she planned to attend.
Gabbard, who declined to comment for this story, later resigned her party post and endorsed Sanders in dramatic fashion, announcing her decision on “Meet the Press.”
Several months later, Gabbard struck again. Just before Clinton was officially nominated to be the party’s standard-bearer, Gabbard went out of her way to play up internal divisions by tweeting a New York Daily News story that highlighted how some of Wasserman Schultz’s DNC staffers privately speculated about attacking Sanders’ lack of devotion to his Jewish faith.
But the Clinton campaign’s hard feelings toward Gabbard haven’t affected the congresswoman’s trajectory nearly as much as Gabbard’s own unusual path. After the 2016 election, the former Iraq War combat veteran became a political oddity in the party — she emerged as a darling of conservative commentators on FOX News. In the aftermath of this new conflict, Gabbard appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and tweeted a link to her interview, accusing Clinton of “the new McCarthyism.”
After Trump’s election, Gabbard met with Trump and his transition team in Trump Tower amid talk of a possible administration job as part of a visit arranged by Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon. Gabbard described the conversation as “frank and positive.”
But it was Gabbard’s decision to visit Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2017 and her reticence in condemning him — after criticizing U.S. policy and occasionally seeming to favor Putin’s involvement there — became a final breaking point for many Democrats, including Clinton.
Gabbard has since been favorably covered by Russian propaganda outlets, is widely seen as the right’s favorite Democratic candidate and hired an adviser with Kremlin links.
Even so, Sanders bristled at Clinton’s characterization.
“Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset,” he wrote in a Monday tweet.
A top Clinton adviser, Phillippe Reines, said Gabbard’s fall from grace among Democrats is a matter of both party politics and policy.
“Politically, in 2015 she was the first woman in Congress to endorse Sanders. So she didn’t make many friends there. I’d say that’s 25% of the answer,” Reines said via email.
“Substantively, the red line she crossed was visiting Syria. It was against [U.S. government] policy,” Reines said. “Worse, she coddled Assad. The criticisms levied at her about Assad are 1000% valid. I mean, who the hell holds back on Assad? And the obstinacy since then is Trump-like. That’s 75%.”
Jennifer Holdsworth, who served as New Jersey state director for Hillary for America, said Gabbard made the dispute personal because she is self-serving.
“Tulsi Gabbard has always been about whatever brings the most press to Tulsi Gabbard,” Holdsworth said.
Supporters of Gabbard and Sanders — as well as Trump, who defended the congresswoman Monday — say Clinton is trying to deflect blame for running a bad campaign in 2016 and losing to Trump. Clinton backers and mainstream Democrats hailed Clinton for giving voice to their suspicions and drawing attention to ongoing Russian interference that played a major role in the 2016 campaign.
Both emails cited in this story, for example, were released by the group WikiLeaks after they were hacked by Russian agents, according to U.S. intelligence officials and bipartisan congressional investigations.
The interference by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and other actors was chronicled in both an indictment of Russian operatives and Senate Intelligence Committee reports that showed how the foreign government used social media platforms to spread disinformation and negative information about Clinton, sometimes by boosting Trump or her other opponents.
Bill Browder, a financier and activist who has run afoul of Putin, said he thought it was no coincidence that Gabbard recently hired an operative who had worked with a Kremlin-backed lawyer who smeared him because he helped secure the passage of the Magnitsky Act. That law sanctioned Russia in reaction to the death of a friend of Browder — after whom the law is named.
“Out of all the thousands of people she could have chosen, she happened to choose the one who had first-hand experience working with a Russian agent of Vladimir Putin’s,” Browder said of Gabbard. “I don’t believe in coincidences. It’s less likely to be a coincidence when you look at her policies, which are the same policy as Putin’s: pro-Assad, anti-gay and pro-Trump.”
Gabbard has renounced her past homophobic views and has criticized Trump at the Democratic debates.
Clinton, however, has stopped short of directly calling Gabbard a Russian asset in her comments. On the Campaign HQ with David Plouffe podcast, Clinton just said Gabbard was the preferred candidate of Russian agents who “have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”
Clinton did say she suspected Gabbard would run as a third-party candidate — a claim Gabbard has denied — and did call 2016 Green Party candidate Jill Stein “a Russian asset.”
“They know they can’t win without a third-party candidate,” Clinton said. “So I don’t know who it’s going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states that they most needed.”
When asked if Clinton were singling out Gabbard, whom she didn’t mention by name, her spokesman, Merrill, referenced Russian Matryoshka dolls and said, “If the nesting doll fits.”
The ‘Russian asset’ and the ‘warmonger’: The roots of the Clinton-Gabbard dispute
The hard feelings between the two Democrats date back to the 2016 presidential primary.
www.politico.com
.
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