Rand Paul super PAC aides take ‘leave of absence’ (3324 hits)
U.S. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky and presidential candidate, right, listens to Congressman Rod Blum, an Iowa Republican, during a campaign in Atkins, Iowa, U.S., on April 25, 2015.
Longtime aides to Sen. Rand Paul’s political team will take an undefined “leave of absence” from the only Super PAC endorsed by the Republican presidential candidate on the day of the first Republican debate.
This move comes just one day after the Justice Department indicted them for concealing payments to an Iowa lawmaker in exchange for his support, stemming from their work on the 2012 presidential campaign run of Paul’s father, Ron Paul.
America’s Liberty PAC issued a statement a day after the federal charges were made public.
“As a result of the indictments and for the sake of justice, John Tate, founder and President of ALPAC, and Jesse Benton, General Consultant to ALPAC, will take leaves of absence to vigorously fight to prove that they are innocent of these charges.”
Sen. Rand Paul on Thursday morning called the timing “suspicious” in an interview with CBS.
“I think that’s at least suspicious timed,” he told Charlie Rose. “The stuff’s complicated, you know, campaign finance rules are very complicated, they’ll be lawyers and accountants involved in this, and uh, they’ll, you know, they’ll get it sorted out over time, I’m sure.”
Tate, Benton and another associate, Dimitri Kesari, are charged with conspiracy, causing false records to obstruct a contemplated investigation, causing the submission of false campaign expenditure reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and engaging in a scheme to make false statements to the FEC. Benton is additionally charged with making false statements to the FBI.
Taking a similar approach to Ron and Rand Paul, the group found the timing of the indictment suspicious.
“We are disappointed the Government has chosen to do this,” John McCardell, Vice President for Finance for the group, wrote Thursday morning.
“The timing of the indictments speaks volumes as they came on the eve of the first Republican debate, and we find it very suspicious. ALPAC will continue to fight for Rand Paul in his race for the White House. We stand behind Rand, what he believes in, and his promise to defeat the Washington Machine.”
About Campaign for Liberty Statement of Principles Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity—a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.
But many Americans today are frustrated. The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all. For all their talk of "change," neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way. Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt. Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy. Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands. Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world. Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.
This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years. Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.
That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.
The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document. Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a "living document" that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers. Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.
With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.
We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.
We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns. And the central bank's ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred. For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.
We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress. We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.
We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives. Such compromises of our country's independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control. Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example? The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.
We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.
Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.
Our country is ailing. That is the bad news. The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us. Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.
John F. Tate
President John is the President of Campaign for Liberty, a grassroots lobbying organization dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, constitutional government, sound money, free markets, and a noninterventionist foreign policy.
Since its founding in June of 2008, Campaign for Liberty has grown to over 750,000 active members nationwide and has led the effort for passage of Congressman Ron Paul’s bill to require a full audit of the Federal Reserve.
John has spent the last 28 years working in the political, lobbying, and non-profit world in the areas of high dollar fundraising, direct mail, political strategy, grassroots activism , state and federal legislation, and non-profit management.
He is the founder and President of JFT Consulting, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in political strategy, fundraising, and grassroots lobbying. John also served as the Campaign Manager for the Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee and as National Political Director for the 2008 Ron Paul Presidential Campaign.
Prior to joining Campaign for Liberty, John served as the Vice President, Membership for the Leadership Institute. In this role, he headed up a department of LI staff that contacted and visited supporters nationwide to show them and raise funds for special targeted LI programs. In his 4 years at LI, this program raised nearly $4 million. He also taught at many of LIs schools.
Before joining LI, John spent 14 years with the National Right to Work Committee, serving as Vice President from 1998 to 2004. As Vice President, he oversaw all state and federal lobbying efforts, public relations, the affiliated state and federal PACs for Right to Work, and a direct mail and telemarketing fundraising operation that raised more than $23 million to combat Big Labor’s coercive power over workers.
In 1996, John was the GOP nominee for Congress in Virginia’s 2nd district.
Prior to his work at National Right to Work, John was Executive Director of Right to Work organizations in California and Delaware and served as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill.
John is a long-time political activist in Virginia and National politics. He was Chairman of the Rules committee at the 1994 Virginia Republican State Convention and has worked on numerous local, state, and national campaigns around the country.
John is a graduate of the University of Virginia with a B.A. in History
Saturday, August 8th 2015 at 1:16PM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve,
In our encounters and discussions that features Rand Paul, this is the second time that you have tried to redirect the topic off of Rand and on to another subject. Now this is great information to read if the subject was on Campaign for Liberty Statement of Principles however this blog is about Rand Paul and his super PAC aides take ‘leave of absence.
What is the matter, is this too sensitive for you to handle? Come on Brother Steve, can't you see that your boy's candidacy is in trouble and in order for Rand to get out of this mess, he will have to tow the line of the leaders,the Koch Brothers would Hi-Jacked and sponsored the libertarian Party.
Now you know full well that you don't cut them out of it.
John Tate is one of those indicted. Campaign for Liberty was started after the Republican Party fraudulently blocked Ron Paul's nomination. Now we have the same thing happening to Rand Paul and I'm pointing out the reason. How am I not on topic?
And Brother Deacon, if you want to talk about the Koch brothers fine. Is this blog about them or is it about Rand Paul?
Saturday, August 8th 2015 at 7:29PM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve,
If we was to look at the first 13 paragraphs you have brought to this blog you have deferred your writings from the troubles of Rand to the history of the Campaign for Liberty and this Statement of Principles Americans inherit from our ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression.
Are you kidding me, have you forgot, their was no glorious tradition of freedom or resistance to oppression for my ancestors in this country. Only since 1964 and the passing of the civil rights act is the time we as a people started feeling the freedoms of this country. I could go on and on about that but that is a subject for another blog.
Brother Steve you have mentioned only two small paragraphs about Ron Paul and nothing about Rand. Now, you have said more in this paragraph, then any previous information you have shared to date.
Is it that he won't be a one term Senator establishment darling like Barack Obama? I could have told you that in 2010.
Saturday, August 8th 2015 at 11:26PM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve,
It is right in front of you, right in the beginning of this blog.
Brother Deacon, it's a moot point because Rand Paul won't be the nominee. But my advice, if you want to keep the American dream alive, don't waste your vote on Hillary Clinton.
Sunday, August 9th 2015 at 8:37AM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve,
I am glad you went there. Who do you think would best represent the Nation?
Whoever will get us out of this $18 trillion debt. I think Rand Paul is best qualified to do that, but failing him maybe Donald Trump. But I haven't heard him speak to the issue so far.
Are you hearing yourself: YOUR WORDS: "maybe Donald Trump. But I haven't heard him speak to the issue so far." then why are you trying to tell me about someone you know nothing about. Come on Brother Steve.
If I'm wrong and Rand Paul is nominated I need look no farther. When it comes down to it I don't need to even think about it for another 14 months. It would probably be in my best interests not to.
Sunday, August 9th 2015 at 5:12PM
Steve Williams
Another factor in the rise the of National debt is the lack of revenue that Rand Paul and the republican party wants to implement by giving more tax breaks to corporations and the top third percent of the richest of Americans as they continue to use tax loopholes and keep the monies made here in the U.S. and keep it in off shore accounts.
Do you seriously want to go back to those days of the Great Recession under George Bush and The Republican Party? do you Brother Steve?
That's quite a spin Brother Deacon. The debt stands at $18 trillion and that's a fact. What's the Democrat plan?
Sunday, August 9th 2015 at 8:04PM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve, you know well that that republicans have been blocking the attempts of the Obama administration to block those tax loopholes for the multi corporations for years now and they will not bring forth a plan to help that effort. Your boy Rand damn sure want do it because he wants more freedom for big business and the rich.
Here is some more insight on the Paul's Rand Paul super PAC aides take ‘leave of absence, that you may not know about because I did not. Click here: http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/key-backer-rand... Everyone sells out and LIE, Ron Paul people stabbed Michele Bachmann in the back... WOW!
Sorenson, a Republican elected to the Iowa Senate in 2010, resigned last October following the release of a damning report by an independent investigator working on behalf of the Senate Ethics Committee. That report found "probable cause" that Sorenson broke Senate ethics rules by accepting payments from a political action committee associated with Bachmann. The report also said his denials of taking such payment may represent a felony under Iowa law. Funds were sent through two firms The 566-page report focused primarily on Sorenson's dealings with the Bachmann campaign, but is the most authoritative accounting so far of his presidential campaign activities. In it, Mark E. Weinhardt, the specially appointed independent counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee, reported that Sorenson was paid by the Bachmann campaign and by a Bachmann-controlled political action committee, but filtered the funds through two separate consulting firms.
So Hillary is touting reduced college tuition and Sanders is saying free college tuition. This is why I voted for Jill Stein in 2012. When the Green Party said it who cares? But let the Democrats and it's all over the airways. Why do you think that is Brother Deacon?
Monday, August 10th 2015 at 1:45PM
Steve Williams
And you also saw Is stadium full Of about 19,000 People to hear Bernie Sanders, Another nine Thousand people couldn't get in To the stadium but they heard Bernie Sanders speak out side the The stadium Which drew the largest crowds That any Republican Party Or Libertarian Party Presidential candidate Has gather to this date.
Here is the 2012 Presidential Debate for third-party candidates hosted by Free and Equal. It includes Jill Stein (Green Party) and Gary Johnson (Libertarian) among others.
Did you see the video Brother Deacon?
Tuesday, August 11th 2015 at 3:49PM
Steve Williams
Yes I did take the time to hear The 2012 Free & Equal Presidential Debates with Christina Tobin and Larry King.
Would you take a look what rand is talking about with that Flat Tax that we was talking about earlier. This is another reason why I called his campaign f failed. This man is not for people like you in the middle or lower classes.
It looks like Rand Paul isn't the only one in trouble. Clinton is found to have top-secret documents on her private server.
Tuesday, August 11th 2015 at 11:58PM
Steve Williams
That is according to one Republican and not the justices department.
The inspector general said the information, while not specifically marked classified, was secret and should not have been handled on an email system without security.
“In response to the above references congressional notification, my office received multiple congressional requests for copies of former Secretary Clinton’s emails containing classified intelligence community (IC) information. These emails, attached hereto, have been properly marked by IC classification officials, and include information classified up to “TOP SECRET//SI/TK//NOFORN,” Mr. McCullough said in his memo to Congress.
Top secret information is deemed to be so sensitive that its release could cause major damage to national security. NOFORN is a designation saying the information is not to be shared with foreign nationals. The other designations denote the type of information contained.
The classified information in Mrs. Clinton’s emails has become a nightmare for the Obama administration, which is under a court order to release her messages, but is struggling to review them and strip out the secret information first — while also keeping to the judge’s schedule.
The State Department missed its July deadline by more than 1,700 pages, and blamed the secret information for the problem.
Trying to get a handle on the situation, the State Department now says it is sharing questionable emails with five different intelligence agencies, giving them a chance to weigh in on what kinds of things should be withheld.
John F. Hackett, the State Department’s top open-records official, told the federal court late last week that they have added the extra step at the behest of Mr. McCullough.
The revelations pose a political problem for Mrs. Clinton, who had said her email arrangement was secure.
“These emails were not retroactively classified by the State Department,” Mr. Linick said in a public statement cosigned by intelligence community IG I. Charles McCullough III. “Rather, these emails contained classified information when they were generated and, according to IC classification officials, that information remains classified today. This classified information should never have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system.”
It was a clear rebuke of Mrs. Clinton’s practices, essentially accusing the nation’s former top diplomat of being careless in handling of government secrets.
The July 24 public statement followed weeks of internal bickering in memos Mr. Linick chose to post online, as if to underscore his independence.
There was a power struggle between one of Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at State, Patrick Kennedy, the undersecretary for management, and Mr. McCullough, who, like Mr. Linick, is a career government investigator. Mr. McCullough wanted a bigger hand in processing the Clinton emails. Mr. Kennedy said he did not need much help.
It was Mr. Linick who invited Mr. McCullough directly into the process of reviewing Mrs. Clinton’s 33,000 emails at the State Department’s Freedom of Information Office. The invitation ultimately created a headache for State bureaucrats and Mrs. Clinton’s campaign team.
That review allowed Mr. McCulloughto look at a small sample of emails, which prompted him to send a referral to the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. It is now investigating Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information and the lengths to which the secrets were passed among her Internet recipients.
Every Secretary of State or White House staffers from Ragan to Bush had a private server and all of them destroyed there hard drive when they lift office and none of them went to jail, not one.
Why is everyone picking on Hillary Clinton -- they didn’t mind when President George W. Bush’s White House also used private email, pundit Juan Williams asked on Fox News Sunday.
The show’s March 15, 2015, pundit panel debated the importance of the ongoing controversy regarding Clinton’s decision to exclusively use a private email account, rather than a .gov account, during her time as secretary of state. In doing so, experts say she was able to circumvent transparency and records preservation standards.
Williams turned to his fellow commentator, Republican strategist and former Bush adviser Karl Rove, arguing that the email scandal during the Bush administration didn’t garner the same level of media criticism. Thus, the attention on Clinton is unwarranted. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/state...
By omitting important information and context from the Hillary Clinton email story, are reporters and pundits guilty of trying to make the episode more interesting and more nefarious than it actually is?
As the press demands answers regarding which private emails Clinton handed over to the State Department and which ones she withheld because she deemed them to be personal in nature, many journalists fail to include relevant information about prominent Republicans who have engaged in similar use of private email accounts while in office, specifically former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
By omitting references to Powell and Bush and how they handled private emails while in office, the press robs news consumers of key information.
See Brother Steve, I don't blame you for trying to take the heat off Rand Paul and redirect the subject of members of Rand's family being indicted by the justice department, after you made the statement that Ron Paul and Rand is the most honest people running for office. I think that Rand is running scared and dropping like a rock in the polls.
Yu can stop waiting now because having a private server was common practice. The republican party will play this out for as long as they can just like they did Benghazi with seven investigations, tens of millions of American tax dollar and found nothing, nada, zip!!!
Now back to Rand Paul and his weak attempt at running for the 2016 presidency. Here's is some up to date numbers in Rand's own state of Kentucky. Paul sat atop the GOP field in a CNN/ORC poll conducted in March 2014, and had support in the double-digits as recently as April of this year, but in the most recent CNN/ORC poll in July, just 6% of Republican registered voters said they would support the Kentucky senator.
They really do some strange things in Kentucky for Rand Paul.
Nobody has addressed the security of Clinton's server, beyond equating private = not secure. That's not the case, in fact a private server can be made just as secure as a government server. Possibly more secure because the government is a beauracracy and things slip through the cracks. If Hillary was smart she could have defended that her server was secure just by disclosing the steps she took to make it secure, i.e. who she hired to make it secure. I might have missed it but I haven't heard her say anything like that.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton entrusted her email server to an IT firm that was not cleared to handle classified materials, according to the chief spokesman for the Defense Security Service.
The DSS is an arm of the Defense Department and is the only federal agency authorized to approve private sector company access to sensitive or confidential material.
The agency reviews and approves private contractors to assure they have secure facilities and approves security clearances for employees to clear them for access to sensitive or classified materials.
Since 2013, Clinton used Platte River Networks, a small Denver-based company, to upgrade and maintain her private email server at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
About 13,000 companies have received FCL or facility-wide clearance. But Platte River is not one of them.
“Platte River is not cleared” to have access to classified material, stated Cindy McGovern, chief public affairs officer for DSS in a telephone interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, told the DCNF that the Platte River involvement “raises serious questions” about the security surrounding Secretary Clinton’s server over the last two years.
“The revelation that Secretary Clinton used a private company, Platte River Networks, to maintain her personal server raises questions about what steps the company took to preserve and secure sensitive information in Secretary Clinton’s email,” Johnson said.
The DSS provides clearances to 30 federal departments and agencies, including the State Department.
Alex McGeorge, the head of threat intelligence at the IT cybersecurity firm Immunity told TheDCNF that all facilities approved for access to classified materials need a “SCIF” — or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — also known as a hardened room.
“It’s a room that is resistant to eavesdropping and unauthorized entry limited to personnel with security clearances. That would be a room that where data coming in and out of the room is tightly controlled,” he said.
According to the Associated Press, the intelligence community inspector general reported to Congress Monday that Hillary’s emails contained at least two messages with information considered Top Secret.
For servers that contain Top Secret information, “you would have to have very compartmentalized clearance to see. Those standards are much higher,” McGeorge said.
The DSS current mission is carried out under the National Industrial Security Program (NISP), the rules of which were established by President Clinton in 1993 with Executive Order 12829.
Platte River has not responded to requests for comment from TheDCNF.
I will keep my eye open for more developments on this story.
remember when I was talking about how Kentucky law makers to strange things for Rand Paul to keep him in the running? Well take a look at this mess.
At issue is a Kentucky law preventing any candidate's name from appearing on the same ballot more than once, meaning Paul could not run for Senate and president on the same primary ballot. But after trying to change the law failed, his campaign pushed for the Republican Party to change the presidential primary into a caucus and move it earlier in the spring.
The Kentucky GOP executive committee unanimously advanced the proposal in March, charging a special committee with developing a plan for how the change would actually be implemented. That work is done, and now the full central committee of 334 members will decide the fate of the primary in less than two weeks.
That means if they do approve this effort of Rand's, If he loses the nomination for The Republican Party, he will not loose his place as senator? Is that strange or not?
Brother Deacon, Obama was still a senator when he was elected President. What's the difference?
Sunday, August 16th 2015 at 12:10AM
Steve Williams
Brother Steve,
The difference is that then Senator Obama took his chances to run for The Democratic Presidential nominee for the office for President of The United States. Here is the difference, then Obama did not need the law to bend around him to fit his needs if he lost his bid and the fail candidacy.
Now in Rand's case in Kentucky has already have in place such laws in place because Rand's campaign knows that he is in trouble already and they don't want him to lose his senate seat.
That means if they do approve this effort of Rand's, If he loses the nomination for The Republican Party, he will not loose his place as senator. Is that strange or not?
It really sounds like the good old boy's coming together in the state of Kentucky to save one of their own.
Anybody who knows Rand's failed attempts to run as the libertarian/republican presidential nominee for the office for president knows if you can't get only 6% of the Kentuckians polled who know you, in the most resent poll knows he cannot make it in Rand's own state, then he has less of a chance to win on a national platform.
Rand Paul on Spending and Debt As I travel across the country and speak to my constituents, I have found that their top concern is our national debt.
We are currently spending roughly $7 million per minute and this reckless habit has gone on for way too long. We currently face a debt of over $18 trillion. This is unsustainable. The fiscal crisis that faces our nation must be taken seriously and immediately addressed.
As President of the United States, I will work to balance our budget and only spend what comes in. We must cut spending in all areas, particularly areas that are better run by state and local governments.
In 46 states across the nation, a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) has been enacted in their state constitutions. I have long been a proponent of adopting the same principle for the Federal Government. As President, I will work to authorize common sense solutions that will solve our nation's fiscal crisis.
I like to speak to Rand to tell him that the country cannot continue to give tax breaks to multi trans national corporations and the ultra rich in this country which now pay less in taxes then a middle class blue collar worker.
if you can't get only 6% of the Kentuckians polled who know you, in the most resent poll knows he cannot make it in Rand's own state, then he has less of a chance to win on a national platform.
Rand must not be representing his constituents well at all. A little over 6% of the Kentuckians poll is really speaking volumes of Rand's current leading position in Kentucky.
The people in his own state don't believe him at this point in time..
Brother Steve, what I am saying is that Rand Paul will not be the libertarian/republican presidential nominee for the office for President of The United States of America.
They know he'll keep his seat in the Senate.
Saturday, August 29th 2015 at 12:05PM
Steve Williams
Rand Paul has served more time in the senate than Obama did. If he doesn't run in 2016 his likely next chance will be 2024. Do you think he should be penalized because he is one of the 1/3 of senators who are up for reelection in this presidential election year?
Saturday, August 29th 2015 at 12:17PM
Steve Williams
That decision is not up to me. that, man is the law in Kentucky.
