Electoral saboteurs are already leveraging the tools of the day to throw the New Hampshire primary.
A robocall utilizing a digitally manipulated recording of President Joe Biden rang the phones of New Hampshire Democrats over the weekend, imploring them to “save” their votes during the presidential primary on Tuesday, calling the write-in campaign “malarkey.”
“Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again. Your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” the call said, before dishing the phone number of Kathy Sullivan, the former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) January 22, 2024
Sullivan, still a prominent New Hampshire Democrat, is the brains behind Granite for America, a super PAC dedicated to urging Granite State voters to write in Biden as a candidate on Tuesday after the state rejected a new Biden-backed DNC calendar that moved New Hampshire’s historically front-and-center primaries down the totem pole.
“I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible because this is an attack on democracy,” Kathy Sullivan, a former state party chair, told NBC News about whoever’s behind the robocalls, adding that she plans to involve federal law enforcement.
“I’m not going to let it go. I want to know who’s paying for it? Who knew about it? Who benefits?” she added.
The New Hampshire attorney general’s office said it is investigating the matter as an “unlawful attempt” at voter suppression.
“Although the voice in the robocall sounds like the voice of President Biden, this message appears to be artificially generated based on initial indications,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement, noting that it had received several complaints about the unsolicited contact. “These messages appear to be an unlawful attempt to disrupt the New Hampshire Presidential Primary Election and to suppress New Hampshire voters. New Hampshire voters should disregard the content of this message entirely.”
Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told NBC News that “the campaign is actively discussing additional actions to take immediately.”
Even a Trump campaign rally in New Hampshire wasn’t far enough away to allow Florida Representative Matt Gaetz to escape his past.
On Sunday, the MAGA Republican got trolled by an audience member during a campaign meet and greet, asking if Gaetz would be interested in a “bag full of underage girls,” and emerging with a sack containing a blow-up sex doll.
“Dude,” Gaetz chortled while nervously rubbing his hands together.
The attendee was quickly escorted out.
Ummmm pic.twitter.com/ccA5nBQyWI
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 21, 2024
The allegation-infused present seems to be a part of a burgeoning trend for Gaetz, who just last month received a facetious award under similar circumstances at an Ohio GOP event.
On a livestream of the Strongsville Republican Party’s Christmas gathering, Gaetz was handed a trophy lauding him for his alleged dedication to using Venmo to pay for sex with underage girls.
“Congratulations for your dedication to using Venmo to allegedly pay underage girls to have sex with you,” the presenter said.
“Oh come on man, you’re so full of it,” Gaetz responded, continuing to hold the award in his hands.
LMAO, a patriot infiltrated the Strongsville GOP event with @mattgaetz and presented him with an award for trying to sleep with underage girls. pic.twitter.com/rNDbsfY9Us
— The Rooster (@rooster_ohio) December 8, 2023
The heavy-handed accusations against Gaetz arise from a Department of Justice sex-trafficking probe into one of Gaetz’s friends, Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, paying a teenage girl to have sex with him and other men. That probe named Gaetz, who Greenberg claimed had paid him via Venmo to have sex with an underage girl in his network in 2017.
Eight months after Greenberg warned Gaetz to “steer clear” of the girl, the lawmaker Venmo’d Greenberg $900 in back-to-back payments, per The Daily Beast, telling the taxman to “hit up” the girl on his behalf. At that point, she was five months past her eighteenth birthday, while Gaetz had just turned 36.
Greenberg was later convicted of sex trafficking an underaged girl. No formal charges were issued against Gaetz as a result of the DOJ probe.
However, since then, the House Ethics Committee has launched its own investigation into Gaetz, examining not just alleged sexual misconduct but also allegations of illicit drug use and other wrongdoing by the Floridian.
Donald Trump is freaking out about E. Jean Carroll—again—in his longest posting spree against her yet.
Carroll’s defamation trial against Trump was adjourned Monday after one of the jurors became sick. Presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan dismissed the courtroom around 10 a.m., according to reporters on scene. About 10 minutes later, Trump was off to the races.
Trump made 42 posts about Carroll (and one pushing falsehoods about the House January 6 investigative committee) on Truth Social in the span of 13 minutes. Many of his posts included photos or clips of interviews that he has previously shared about Carroll. Trump’s posting rate is so fast that the former president must have some prescheduled, some drafts saved for constant reuse, someone else posting for him, or some combination of all three.
His Truth Social account shared media interview clips and social media posts that appear to come from Carroll, all stripped of context so as to paint her as some sort of sexual deviant. He also falsely claimed that the co-founder of LinkedIn is paying Carroll’s legal fees and that presiding Judge Kaplan and Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan (no relation) are Democratic operatives.
Trump has made these claims about Carroll multiple times before. This is the third time during this trial that he has gone on such a posting spree. The first time was just before the trial began, and the second was—inexplicably—as he sat in the courtroom for the first day of the trial.
It’s likely that Trump is airing his grievances online because he is barred from doing so in the courtroom. Kaplan ruled two weeks ago that Trump and his lawyers cannot say certain things about Carroll during the trial—including many of the things Trump has been posting. But the posts could come back to haunt him, as Carroll’s lawyer has already said she’ll use his words as evidence against him.
This social media screed came just three days after a bizarre campaign event, during which Trump insisted Nikki Haley was responsible for security on January 6, 2021. Trump appears determined now to use the brain cells he has left to attack the woman he raped and defamed.
This trial is just to set damages. In May, a jury unanimously found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and then defaming her when denying her accusations. Kaplan ruled in September that since it was already proven Trump assaulted Carroll, the comments for which he is on trial this time are by default defamatory. Carroll is seeking at least $10 million in damages. Trump already owes her $5 million.
Donald Trump’s campaign nixed access for a pool reporter to a New Hampshire rally on Sunday—even though he was there to represent five major news networks.
NBC News correspondent Vaughn Hillyard, who has long covered Trump, told his employers on Sunday that the GOP front-runner’s campaign had suddenly objected to his presence.
“Your pooler was told that if he was the designated pooler by NBC News that the pool would be cut off for the day,” Hillyard wrote in an email obtained by The New York Times. “After affirming to the campaign that your pooler would attend the events, NBC News was informed at about 2:20 p.m. that the pool would not be allowed to travel with Trump today.”
That eyebrow-raising decision may be in part due to a testy exchange between Hillyard and Trump ally Representative Elise Stefanik, who has played a major role in recent Trump rallies as she vies to become Trump’s V.P. pick.
At another campaign event Friday night, Stefanik—who has been in serious consideration for the number two spot among Trump’s inner circle—went full MAGA while fielding a question from Hillyard on E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case.
“How do you grapple with standing by [Trump’s] side while a jury is debating how much to award E. Jean Carroll for being sexually abused by Donald Trump?” asked Hillyard.
“The media is so biased. This is just another example of the media being out of touch,” Stefanik retorted before tirading about Trump’s odds against President Joe Biden, dubbing the case a “witch hunt.”
“Why not believe E. Jean. Carroll? It’s not me. It’s not the media. It’s a jury that found that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll,” Hillyard interjected.
“Do you believe E. Jean Carroll?” @VaughnHillyard asks Elise Stefanik.
Stefanik: “No, of course not… The media is so biased. This is just another example of the media being out of touch.”
Vaughn: “It’s not the media, it’s a jury that found he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll.” pic.twitter.com/8UIZCSmkUj
— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) January 20, 2024
A spokesman for the Trump campaign, Steven Cheung, confirmed to the Times that the network pool did not attend the event but added that the campaign does not “bar reporters based on their reporting.” Later on Sunday, Hillyard was allowed to attend a different New Hampshire rally held in Rochester.
Still, the spontaneous ban recalls Trump’s 2016 campaign, in which the real estate mogul barred Washington Post and BuzzFeed News reporters from his events. Trump then continued the practice while in office, at one point revoking the press credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta and banning another CNN pool reporter, Kaitlan Collins, from attending public events.
You have to hand it to Ron DeSantis: the man successfully brought a divided country together. Just not in the way he wanted.
The Florida governor on Sunday ended his presidential campaign, a run that was arguably more embarrassing to watch than for him to actually do it. But what should have been a serious and bittersweet moment was instead ruined by a now-classic DeSantis goof.
“We don’t have a clear path to victory,” DeSantis said in a video message, which he accompanied with the caption, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
DeSantis attributed the quotation to Winston Churchill, but in a perfect encapsulation of what a disaster his campaign was, social media users were quick to correct him. “The quoted words in this tweet do not appear in this phrasing in any of Winston Churchill’s books, articles, speeches and papers,” a community note on X (formerly Twitter) read. “They do appear in a Budweiser print ad from 1938.”
The note was later removed for unknown reasons, but other X users had the receipts: The International Churchill Society stated the British prime minister never said that quotation. It didn’t take long before someone else found the exact Budweiser ad that did use that line.
It’s also ironic that DeSantis accidentally used a line from a Budweiser ad, as the beer brand came under fire last year from the exact people DeSantis was hoping to