CLF is rapidly losing credibility with voters and local news outlets across the country
Speaker Paul Ryan’s Super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, has been universally condemned by editorial boards, reporters and Republican strategists alike for their blatant lies, shameless attacks on veterans and CIA operatives, and utter incompetence. Multiple news reporters this week revealed that the American Rising and CLF were illegally provided with former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger’s private unredacted personnel file and they spread it far and wide, violating her privacy and security. CLF has also been condemned for running ads that include race-baiting, blatant lies, and baseless and unhinged attacks, including against multiple veterans.
“It’s clear that Paul Ryan’s Super PAC is desperately flailing in their attempts to run campaigns against strong Democratic candidates with records of service. As evidence, CLF is resorting to lying, race-baiting, and launching un-American attacks on decorated combat veterans and CIA operatives – often playing right into Democrats’ hands and their stellar resumes,” said DCCC Communications Director Meredith Kelly. “Democrats will stay focused on the issues that actually matter to voters while the Congressional Leadership Fund continues to debase themselves in front of the American people.”
VA-07:
Washington Post: EDITORIAL: A security form became a political weapon. We should all be alarmed.
The use of an SF86 to score points during a congressional campaign is outrageous and worrisome. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate challenging Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), filled out the SF86 while applying for positions at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service, and at the CIA. She worked for a time at the postal agency while waiting for her CIA clearance. Then she served as a covert CIA case officer overseas for eight years.
[…] Something is rotten here. The CLF should have known better than to weaponize confidential personnel records used in national security vetting. The process of collecting, maintaining and disclosing information on the forms is protected by the Privacy Act; the document simply should not have been made public.
[…] It sends a terrible message to people who hold, and who want to apply for, national security positions. Mr. Ryan should investigate what happened and punish those who exploited the national security personnel process for cheap political advantage.
CNBC: Democratic House candidate Abigail Spanberger suffers the kind of election year smear John McCain would recognize
But prominent Republicans outside the party’s fight to hold their House majority share the Democrats’ outrage.
“The people who made the information public should be prosecuted,” said Kori Schake, a former National Security Council aide to President George W. Bush. “What the PAC did was a gross violation of her privacy.”
Schake’s ex-colleague Fran Townsend likened innuendo about Spanberger to someone linking Bush to terrorism because he had spoken at a Washington mosque after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
[…] Longtime Republican strategist Dan Schnur called it a multi-stage “atrocity” – beginning with improper release of the SF-86 and ending with the Fund’s exploitation of it.
Influential conservative radio host John Fredricks also condemned CLF:
Spent a lot of time w/ @SpanbergerVA07 on Docu-Gate.1.A USPS exec screwed up FOIA request big time 2. @DaveBratVA7th had no involvement 3. @SpeakerRyan PAC peeps should have not released her file to media:bad precedent 4. @realDonaldTrump had no involvement 5.Abbi is rightly mad https://t.co/9EdiXqs90U
— John Fredericks (@jfradioshow) August 30, 2018
Washington Post: Normal Leahy Column: The case of the unredacted Spanberger file
One big question is how both America Rising and the CLF handled the information once it was in their hands.
Did they understand what they had? These aren’t political naïfs, so it’s hard to give either group a pass on that score. Worse, they shopped the document. Fair game if they had received a redacted copy. But the full form? Nope — that’s a foul, and they have no excuse for it.
CO-06: VIDEO: NBC4: Reality Check: Republican Super PAC’s Ad Against Democrat Jason Crow
Bottom line, Republicans know Jason Crow’s service with and for veterans is an asset, so they’re attacking it. If this is the best they’ve got, shame on them.
CA-39, ME-02, NY-19, NY-22, NJ-07, OH-01:
Washington Post: Fact-checking Republican attack ads in tight House races
The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), has been running a series of negative ads about Democratic candidates in close races across the country. The super PAC has raised more than $100 million and, with control of the House up for grabs in November, the group’s wall-to-wall advertising strategy seems to make sense.
But the attack ads themselves don’t make much sense. We rounded up six 30-second spots released by the Congressional Leadership Fund over the last two weeks. These were literally the first six ads we clicked on while browsing the super PAC’s YouTube channel.
The ads almost unfailingly portrayed Democrats as dangerous and outside the mainstream. A Rhodes scholar with a Harvard Law School degree is depicted as a profane and “disturbingly radical” rapper. (He’s African American.) An ex-Marine gets an unsavory close-up of his tattoos and is accused of voting in the Maine legislature to allow others to buy tattoos with welfare funds (not quite). Two Democrats are wrapped up with terrorists in the ads, but neither claim really adds up.
For all six ads, we found that the Congressional Leadership Fund took a sliver of accurate information and spun it in a misleading way.
[…] Even by modern mud-slinging standards, these ads by the Congressional Leadership Fund stand out for their dark tone and their strained relationship with the facts. […] We give them a cumulative rating of Four Pinocchios.
ME-02:
Newsweek: Gop Supporting Super Pac Ad Attacks Candidate’s Marine Tattoos, Labels Him ‘Liberal Jared Golden’
Republican-aligned Super PAC put out a new television advertisement this week targeting a Democratic congressional challenger’s tattoos.
The battle for Maine’s 2nd District congressional seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin, an Oakland Republican, took an odd turn with the release of an ad targeting opponent Jared Golden, a Democratic state representative from Lewiston. The Congressional Leadership Fund ad ridicules Golden as a hand-out “liberal” while zooming out from tight shots of tattoos on his arms to tie this into his politics.
At least one of Golden’s tattoos, a “devil dog,” pays tribute to the Marine Corps veteran’s tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Press Herald reported.
NJ-07:
Star Ledger: EDITORIAL: New GOP strategy backing Lance: Sell fear
Rep. Leonard Lance is allowing a super PAC to lie about his opponent as he defends his 7th District seat, and someone should alert him that it’s best to rise above the stink bombs mass-produced by greasy political gasbags.
This is the campaign’s silly season, but that doesn’t excuse Lance from allowing his own good name to be soiled by an allegation that Tom Malinowski – a candidate who has dedicated his career to human rights and public service – is “so out of touch, he lobbied for terrorist rights,” as suggested in a deceitful ad produced by a PAC affiliated with Paul Ryan.
A tweet from John McCain’s former chief of staff criticized CLF for their Malinowski smear:
Tom worked with Republicans and Democrats who believed American ideals are worth protecting in war and peace. That’s a reason to vote for him not against him.
— Mark Salter (@MarkSalter55) August 16, 2018
Republican Strategist John Weaver also attacked the ad:
I'm honored to support Tom and repudiate this deceitful attack.
— John Weaver (@JWGOP) August 16, 2018
NY-19, OH-01:
Daily Beast: Dems Gear Up for an Ugly Election Season of Race-Baiting
In hard-fought congressional races, where Democrats are hoping to flip seats, the tacit racial fault lines are playing out as well. Earlier this week, the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is closely aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), launched an ad in New York’s 19th District against Democratic candidate Antonio Delgado.
It blasts the African-American Rhodes scholar and Harvard Law School graduate as “radical and extreme,” and uses music he released in a hip-hop album in 2007 to present the case. This line of attack has been fairly common in the district, even leading a professor at State University of New York at New Paltz to issue an apology after telling The New York Times: “Is a guy who makes a rap album the kind of guy who lives here in rural New York and reflects our lifestyle and values?”
A more recent Congressional Leadership Fund spot targets Democrat Aftab Pureval, a man of Indian-Tibetan descent who is challenging incumbent Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District. The ad attempts to tie Pureval to his law firm White & Case’s work for Libya and features images of the Lockerbie terrorist bombing, which prompted Democrats like Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, to call it “racist.”
OH-01: Cincinnati Enquirer: EDITORIAL: Enough with the dog-whistle politics
Many political attack ads stretch the truth and associations of an opponent to the extreme, but a television ad that began airing locally Wednesday that tried to link Ohio 1st Congressional District candidate Aftab Pureval to Libyan terrorists was an ugly low blow. The ad, funded and produced by a super PAC aligned with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, is a dog whistle that blatantly attempts to remind voters of Pureval’s “otherness” by making a misleading connection between the Democratic challenger and a settlement negotiated with Libyan terrorists by a law firm where he used to work. Never mind Pureval had nothing to do with the settlement the ad references. Flashing images of Muammar Gaddafi and the wreckage of a crashed airliner is a cynical play on people’s fears in an effort to paint Pureval as untrustworthy. Voters should reject this kind of ethnic tribalism and politics of personal destruction. The 1st Congressional District race between incumbent Congressman Steve Chabot and Pureval should be decided in the arena of ideas, not by preying upon prejudice and tired stereotypes. This tactic speaks to the high stakes of the race between Chabot and Pureval, which some political observers and polls say is tightening as Election Day approaches. As we lay Arizona Sen. John McCain to rest, let’s consider his example and encourage a respectful, truthful campaign down the stretch. The voters of the 1st Congressional District deserve it.
OH-01: Cincinnati Enquirer: Ad watch: Misleading ad tries to connect Aftab Pureval with Libya
Local television stations on Wednesday began airing an ad from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC devoted to electing GOP candidates to the House.
The ad shows how important the 1st Congressional District race is in the minds of national political leaders and could show how vulnerable the GOP thinks Chabot is.
NY-19:
Times Herald-Record: Editorial: Condemn both racism and those who fuel it
While those two have moved on, however, Faso is still where this started, still putting out statements about how “offensive, troubling and inconsistent with the views of the people” in the district are Delgado’s views. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee supporting Faso, is still ranting that Delgado’s “out-of-touch liberal views are too extreme for New York’s 19th Congressional District and his own words prove it.”
[…] Faso and the PAC that supports him are engaging in the familiar practice of dog-whistle politics, saying one thing — outsider, extreme, not one of us — to get across a more sinister message. Donald Trump long ago abandoned the dog whistle for a bullhorn but the more subtle message is still more effective in a swing district.
Hudson Valley 360: Editorial: The ghost of Willie Horton must be laid to rest
Just when you thought the battle for the 19th Congressional District seat would be fought over health care, jobs and the Russian investigation, along comes a good, old-fashioned culture war to take you through the dog days of summer.
[…] Now, the Congressional Leadership Fund, a conservative political group closely allied with House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has unveiled a radio ad that features an excerpt of Delgado’s lyrics accompanied by ominous background music and narration that describes the verses as “a sonic blast of hateful rhetoric and anti-American views.”
[…] Voters should walk away from campaign strategies that an editorial published on the New York Times News Service website called “race-baiting” and choose candidates based on the present, not the past. Returning to the days of Willie Horton, of stereotyping black men, is a mindless, pointless game.