Alabama Republican Roy Moore’s racist lawyer –
Tag Archives: Senate
Republican Candidate Child Rapist Adds Another Accuser
Most pedopiles actually molest several hudred children before they are caught.I never is a “I did it once” for the Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roy More type of serial molester/rapist – they harm dozens if not hundreds.
That the folks in Alabama are defending this scumbag is a national disgrace. General Sherman obviously burned the wrong state during the Civil War.
Fifth Woman Comes Forward With Charges Against Roy Moore, Republicans Threaten Expulsion
Another woman has charged Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her.
In an emotional news conference, Beverly Young Nelson said Moore groped her and tried to force her head onto his crotch in his car behind the restaurant where the then 16 year old worked.
Nelson, appearing alongside attorney Gloria Allred, said the incident occurred in 1977.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday, “I believe the women” and called on Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama to “step aside.”
McConnell made his remarks at a news conference in Kentucky. Moore has been accused of initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old in 1979 when he was 32. Four other women have accused Moore of inappropriate contact when they were teens — one of whom came forward publicly on Monday.
McConnell had initially said last week Moore should end his candidacy “if” the allegations were true. McConnell had supported the incumbent senat
Luther Strange, in the primary. He said a write-in campaign for Strange is now “an option.”
Moore has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill to step aside prior to the Dec. 12 special election in Alabama. He has refused, saying the accusations were “false and untrue” and threatening to sue The Washington Post, which first reported the storyon Nov. 9.
Moore responded to McConnell via Twitter, saying McConnell “has failed conservatives and must be replaced.”
The person who should step aside is @SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell. He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has pulled out of a joint fundraising agreement with Moore, and the list of prominent Republicans opposing Moore’s candidacy has steadily grown.
The most recent is Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, who in a statement on Twitter Monday said she “did not find Moore’s denials to be convincing.”
I have now read Mr. Moore’s statement and listened to his radio interview in which he denies the charges. I did not find his denials to be convincing and believe that he should withdraw from the Senate race in Alabama.
Republican leaders in Alabama, however, have largely defended Moore. Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler said there is “just nothing immoral or illegal” about the allegations and compared them to biblical marriages. The comments drew criticism from some evangelical leaders.
Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has called the allegations against Moore “deeply disturbing,” but on Monday she said, “I will withhold judgment until we get more of the facts,” according to WSFA in Alabama.
Monday afternoon, another woman charged Moore with assaulting her. Beverly Young Nelson appeared at a news conference alongside attorney Gloria Allred. Nelson said when she was 16, Moore groped her and tried to force her head onto his crotch in his car behind the restaurant where she worked in Alabama.
Moore’s campaign chairman Bill Armistead released a statement calling Allred “a sensationalist leading a witch hunt,” adding that Moore “is an innocent man and have never had any sexual misconduct with anyone.”
Following Nelson’s accusation, NRSC Chairman Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., issued a statement:
“I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office. If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”
“Hail! Hail! The Witch is Dead!” – Republican Killercare Dies
Hopefully the end of this pathetic saga… And these clowns will get on with fixing the problems they caused in Obamacare trying to insert poison pills when the first Bill was passed.
Asking the Right – Why Are Republicans Hiding the Evidence of Trump Treason
Been saying for a while that the Russian hacking and collusion treason went far beyond just the Chumph and his merry band of morons and nitwit children.
Here, Digby begins asking the right questions at least.
Russia scandal goes well beyond Trump: GOP leaders definitely knew about hacking — did they benefit too?
Leading Republicans knew about Russian hacking long before Trump’s nomination. They said nothing and did nothing
Despite Europe’s clear disdain for President Trump it seems as though he’s over there every other week. In fact he’s arriving in France on Thursday at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron to help celebrate Bastille Day and have dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Considering that Trump has implied repeatedly that Paris is nothing but a hellhole these days, it’s a testament to just how desperate he is to get out of Washington. The heat is on and he wants out of the kitchen.
You have certainly heard that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort met with a Russian lawyer to get some promised dirt on Hillary Clinton that was represented as being part of a Russian government program to help Trump get elected. Now we know their breathless protestations that they didn’t know nothin’ about no Russians were lies, and we also know that this particular tawdry scheme reached into the highest levels of the campaign. We’ll have to wait for the next shoe to drop. There is always another shoe.
There was one new story on Wednesday that added an interesting detail to the saga and points to a possible larger conspiracy. McClatchy reported that House and Senate investigators as well as the Justice Department are looking at the Trump campaign’s digital operation, one of Jared Kushner’s pet projects (financed by big-daddy benefactor Robert Mercer), to determine if it may have worked with Russia’s sophisticated micro-targeting and propaganda program during the 2016 campaign.
McClatchy also reported that the Justice Department is looking into “whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions in key states – areas where Trump’s digital team and Republican operatives were spotting unexpected weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.” That’s an issue I’ve written about previously here on Salon, based on some post-election investigative reporting by the New York Times.
This raises once again the question of just what was going on in the Republican Party during this period. After all, it wasn’t just Donald Trump who benefited from Russian hacking. The GOP-dominated House majority was a major beneficiary as well.
Remember, the congressional leadership knew in 2015 that it was happening. Reuters has reported that the so-called Gang of Eight (Republican leaders in Congress) was told that Russian hackers were attacking the Democratic Party but that the information was so top secret they could not share it. As we know, hackers attacked the Democratic National Committee and the personal email of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. But they also hacked the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and information gleaned from that hack was put to use in some 2016 campaigns for Congress.
Also recall that one month before Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting with the Russian lawyer, House Majority Leader Kevin “loose lips” McCarthy was talking about Trump’s connections to Vladimir Putin in a room full of Republicans:
A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. […]
The Dumbf Blames Democrats for Blocking the 600 Nominations He Hasn’t Made Yet
The mentally unstable Chumph does it again – a pure fiction of his enfeebled mind.
Trump blames Democrats for slow confirmation process
President Donald Trump accused Democrats in the Senate of slowing the confirmation process for his appointees, including foreign ambassadors, even though Senate rules allow Republicans, the chamber’s majority party, to move appointees along without Democratic votes.
“Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including Ambassadors. They are nothing but OBSTRUCTIONISTS! Want approvals,” the president wrote on Twitter, directing his statement to the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends,” known to be a preferred program of his.
In the Trump administration’s opening weeks, White House officials were quick to loudly complain that the president’s nominees were facing an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Many of Trump’s nominees did indeed face controversy, in one instance prompting Labor Secretary-designate Andrew Puzder to withdraw from consideration and in another prompting Vice President Mike Pence to cast a tie-breaking deciding vote in favor of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
But while Trump has blamed Capitol Hill for the sluggish pace at which appointees have been confirmed, the White House has thus far left dozens of key roles unfilled.
According to a database maintained by the Partnership for Public Service and The Washington Post, the Trump administration has formally nominated just 63 candidates – 39 of which have been approved – for 559 key positions that require Senate confirmation. Overall, there are 1,200 government jobs that require say-so from the Senate to fill.
According to the database jointly maintained by the Partnership for Public Service and the Post, which is not exhaustive but is instead a sampling of confirmation-required jobs, Trump has just five formal ambassadorial nominations pending. Others, like former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman to be ambassador to Russia and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson to be ambassador to the United Kingdom, have been announced but not yet formally submitted.
Other roles for which the Trump administration has yet to put forward a candidate include the administrator for the Transportation Security Administration, the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s national security division and the deputy director of national intelligence.
More Evidence of GOP Collusion With Russian Spies
It wasn’t just the Chumph colluding with the Russians. This collusion was offered as a package which was taken by over 40 Republican candidates.
This is why the GOP is trying so hard to quash the Chumph Treason trial.
GOP operative asked Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0 for help — and got 2.5 gigabytes of stolen documents: report
The Russian hacker who helped President Donald Trump win the 2016 election also allegedly collaborated with a Republican consultant in Florida.
A Wall Street Journal report published on Thursday revealed that Republican operative Aaron Nevins made a plea last year to Guccifer 2.0, the same hacker who is accused of helping Trump by revealing stolen Democratic National Committee emails.
According to the Journal:
Learning that hacker “Guccifer 2.0” had tapped into a Democratic committee that helps House candidates, Mr. Nevins wrote to the hacker to say: “Feel free to send any Florida based information.”
Ten days later, Mr. Nevins received 2.5 gigabytes of Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee documents, some of which he posted on a blog called HelloFLA.com that he ran using a pseudonym.
The report said that the hacker then sent Trump ally Roger Stone a link to the blog post.
During conversations with the Guccifer 2.0, Nevins observed that the documents were “probably worth millions of dollars.”
“Hmmm,” the hacker replied, “ok u owe me a million :)”
In an interview with the paper, Nevins defended his actions as standard political practice.
“I just threw an arrow in the dark,” Nevins explained, noting that when he analyzed the documents, he “realized it was a lot more than even Guccifer knew that he had.”
“If your interests align,” the operative concluded, “never shut any doors in politics.”
Why the Evil Cabal of Rethugs Have to Go – NC Senate Cuts Funding to Democrat District Schools
Rethughy Majority in North Carolina goes after the children in Democrat Districts…
Why “Going Nuclear” By Senate Republicans May Be Catastropic
Republicans decided today to end the Democrat filibuster of Putin’s Bitch selection for the Supreme Court.
They just waltzed their way into a Constitutional crisis.
The Chumph is going to be impeached. The most likely reason is his collusion with Putin to submarine the election.
Ergo – Putin’s Bitch illegally “won” the election.
If (or when) that happens, everything done by Putin’s Bitch is illegitimate. It is the “Fruit of the Poisoned Tree”, meaning every executive order, law signed by the Chumph, or move made in terms of the Executive Branch gets reset to the day Obama left office.
Gorsuch’s nomination is illegitimate.
And that’s where things get really messy.
The issue being, how do you remove him?
Senate GOP goes ‘nuclear’ on Supreme Court filibuster
The historic move paves the way for Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed.
Senate Republicans invoked the “nuclear option” to gut the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees Thursday, a historic move that paves the way for Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation and ensures that future high court nominees can advance in the Senate without clearing a 60-vote threshold.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to change the Senate rules after Democrats blocked Gorsuch’s nomination minutes before, 55-45. All 52 Republicans then supported the vote to go nuclear, and Gorsuch subsequently advanced to a final confirmation vote with a simple majority.
The Senate May Go Nuclear Over Supreme Court Pick
Despite several defections, Democrats have enough votes to filibuster the confirmation of the Chumph’s pick to replace Scalia, Neil Gorsuch.
Republicans created this mess by refusing to vote on Obama’s pick, Garland Merrick for nearly a year.
Democrats Have The Votes To Filibuster Neil Gorsuch
Republicans will have to blow up Senate rules to confirm Trump’s Supreme Court nominee. It’s getting ugly.
Democrats have locked in the votes to block Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, meaning Republicans will have to take the extreme step of blowing up Senate rules to confirm him.
Democratic lawmakers have been vowing for weeks to deny a vote to President Donald Trump’s court pick, and have been inching closer to the 41 members they need to filibuster him. They hit the magic number on Monday when Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) announced he will join the blockade.
“I will be voting against cloture,” Coons said, using technical terms to mean he will join the Democratic filibuster, “unless we are able, as a body, to finally sit down and find a way to … ensure the process to fill the next vacancy on the court is not a narrowly partisan process.”
The news means Republicans have a choice: cave to Democrats’ demands that Trump put forward a different nominee (highly unlikely) or unilaterally change the rules so they can confirm Gorsuch without Democrats (likely). It currently takes 60 votes to advance a Supreme Court nominee. Republicans appear ready to use a procedural maneuver to lower that threshold to 51 votes.
Success! 1.5 Million Calls a Day Force Timid Dems to Action!
Whoever the dumb arsed Democrat Strategist was who came up with idea of trying to appeal to Republicans need to be permanently retired to an Arctic Island.
The Campaign to call Democrat legislators and complain about their chickshit cowardice has apparently succeeded, At least 1.5 million people called every day last week.
Can you say Uprising?
There are a lot of pissed-off people in this country right now – specifically pissed off at the Chumph and Republicans. Indeed, they are increasingly in numbers utterly belling any contention that Chumph had the numbers of voters the machines supposedly counted.
U.S. Senate offices received 1.5 million calls each day last week, many from opponents for Betsy DeVos
President Donald Trump uses the tools of the 21st century to express his views, demonstrating a singular ability to rivet the nation with little more than a series of late-night tweets. His opponents, on the other hand, have recently rallied around a communications tool that dates to the 19th century: the congressional telephone exchange.
Americans flooded Senate offices with 1.5 million calls each day last week, according to Matt House, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
Much of the recent traffic jamming congressional phone lines has been directed against Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee to serve as Secretary of Education. Her support for school choice and voucher programs has made her a target for teachers unions and public education advocates. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, has said she plans to vote again against DeVos in a confirmation vote scheduled for Tuesday after receiving “thousands” of calls from constituents. Another Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, also plans to oppose DeVos.
The communications network handling millions of calls dates back to 1897, when the Senate first adopted the telephone. The House installed its own exchange the following year. For decades, however, expensive long distance phone rates and cheap postage meant the congressional phone system was a minor player in people power. The phone lines were left primarily for conducting government business, not for fielding calls about Cabinet nominees and executive orders.
The game changed when activists started using 800 numbers to direct calls on single issues in the 1980s. The combination of toll-free calls and constituent organizing led to an avalanche of phone calls. An oral history of the Capitol Exchange, as the phone service is known, was conducted in 2006 by the Senate Historical Office. By that time, the Senate’s phone system was handling as much traffic as a rural telephone co-op, “We operate basically a small telephone company,” a Capitol Exchange manager told Senate Historian Donald Ritchie.
There’s a good reason for all the telephone traffic, said Emily Ellsworth, a former congressional staffer who wrote an online guide under the title Call the Halls. Emails can be answered by computer algorithm, and social media posts are easily brushed off, writes Ellsworth, but a ringing phone is hard to ignore.
Calls from actual constituents carry the most weight, though offices are also often flooded with robocalls. Nonprofit and advocacy groups offer options where their supporters can be automatically connected to the phone number of a local representative. In some cases, a robotic message advocating for that group plays before the supporter gets on the phone.
Concerned citizens are also turning to even more antiquated technologies, from congressional fax machines to pizza delivery guys. The digital service FaxZero has enjoyed a moment of popularity because it allows free faxing to numbers in the U.S. “People have told me they don’t like talking on the phone, or they feel email is too easily ignored,” said Kevin Savetz, who owns FaxZero. “Some want to reach out with every method possible.”
Elected officials are listening – or counting, at any rate. Sen. Diane Feinstein, the California Democrat, said her office received 55,000 phone calls urging her to reject Jeff Sessions appointment to attorney general. A spokesman for Sen. Patty Murray told Bloomberg News that the Washington Democrat has received over 50,000 calls and letters on the DeVos nomination.
There is no official count of the call volume, at least not one that can be publicly revealed. “As a matter of practice, we do not release statistics on the number of calls,” said Becky Daughtery, protocol officer for the Senate Sergeant at Arms, the office that handles many of the Senate’s administrative services. Daugherty wouldn’t say much else about the phone system, either, besides confirming that it serves both bodies of congress and operates around the clock.
That includes blizzards and terrorist attacks, according to the oral history of the congressional phone lines. The switchboard staff was sent home following the terrorist attacks on September 11th, then called back to the office to set up a conference call for the entire Senate. Although the oral history doesn’t collect statistics, the interview subjects cite school prayer, occasional budget appropriations debates, and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial as telephone-heavy issues. The hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice marked the busiest time in the switchboard’s pre-2006 history.
The telephone team expressed a general tolerance for the aggrieved taxpayers who call Congress through the main line. “They’re entitled to call the board, that’s how I feel,” one operator said. “They’re entitled to their opinions.”
For Republicans who spent much of the last eight years dreaming up new ways to oppose the Obama administration, the political game of telephone is old hat. The phone system has even become at prop for political theater. When outrage over Obamacare was at its peak, former House Speaker John Boehner invited television cameras into a room on the fourth floor of the Capitol Building. Michael Steel, Boehner’s press secretary at the time and now a managing director at Hamilton Place Strategies, recalls that as many as 10 staffers – from fresh-faced interns to Boehner’s chief of staff – would sit answering phones.
Not all phone calls are equal, though. “Right now, you’re seeing a lot of robocalls where an activist group can send 100 calls and spam an office,” said Ellsworth, who worked for two Republican congressmen in Utah from 2009 to 2014. “A large volume of calls from outside the state tend to discredit everyone who calls from outside the area code. I could tell if they couldn’t pronounce my boss’s name correctly,” she said. “We’re not that stupid.”
President Obama – Appoint a Replacement Supreme Court Justice…NOW!
It is perfectly legal for President Obama to appoint Merrick Garland as the next Supreme Court Justice, because the Senate has refused to give Garland a hearing.
STREISAND TO OBAMA: APPOINT SUPREME COURT JUSTICE NOW
Singer leads stealth campaign to thwart Trump
Singer Barbra Streisand, a major Hillary Clinton supporter and one of Hollywood’s most outspoken leftist activists, is calling on President Obama to bypass Congress and unilaterally appoint his pick for the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Senate declined to hold hearings or votes on Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination as part of its broad “advice and consent” power. Obama nominated Garland in March to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Now that Donald Trump has won the election and is set to nominate a judge, Streisand has circulated a petition urging Obama to quickly appoint Garland to the court before Trump can be sworn in as president.
“If you are concerned about the Supreme Court, please consider going to this website and signing a petition asking President Obama to appoint Merrick Garland,” Streisand wrote in a note to her supporters. “According to The Washington Post, he has the power to do this since Congress has refused to vote, and apparently that can be considered a waiver of its rights to advise and consent. If there are 100,000 signatures, the White House must give this its consideration.”
Streisand was referencing a Washington Post column by Gregory L. Diskant published in April. It was headlined, “Obama can appoint Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court if the Senate does nothing.”
The Appointments Clause of the Constitution states that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.”
Diskant claims the Appointments Clause actually grants two powers to the president: the power to “nominate” and the power to “appoint.” While the president must clearly seek the “Advice and Consent of the Senate,” Diskant argues, by deciding not to act and hold hearings or votes, the Senate has waived its right of advice and consent.
Somehow, Diskant claims, the Senate’s failure to act on the nomination allows the president to unilaterally appoint an individual to the court.
At the time of this report, Streisand’s petition had 107,464 signatures – more than the 100,000 required to get a response from the White House.
On several occasions, Democrats have filibustered and blocked judicial nominations made by Republican presidents. For example, in 1987, when Joe Biden served as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he fought to stop confirmation of Ronald Reagan Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork. Biden explained, “The framers clearly intended the Senate to serve as a check on the president and guarantee the independence of the judiciary. The Senate has an undisputed right to consider judicial philosophy.”
In August, Streisand told Australian journalist Michael Usher she would leave America if Trump won his race for the White House.
“He has no facts. I don’t know, I can’t believe it. I’m either coming to your country, if you’ll let me in, or Canada,” she said.
It remains unclear whether she will actually honor her promise to leave.
Democrat Senator Lays Out Republican Racism
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia too to the floor of the Senate a few days ago and exposed the reason Republicans are holding up the appointment of Merrick Garland by President Obama to the Supreme Court.
Kaine: Race an Issue in Opposition to Obama Supreme Court Nominee
Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.) said Wednesday that race may be a factor as to why President Obama is facing opposition in the Senate regarding his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow asked Kaine, a potential running mate for Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, if the Senate is delaying the nomination process due to a fundamental disrespect for Obama.
“I think that’s a very serious concern. The rationale that the Republicans use, ‘We want to wait until the next president and let the people decide,’ is what we call in civil rights, and I used to try civil rights cases, a complete pretext. That’s not the way it’s been done in the past,” Kaine said.
“There’s a lot of concern that this president’s nominee has been given second-class treatment, not because of the nominee but because of the character of the president himself and that is very painful for people to contemplate about the nation’s first African-American president, that they wouldn’t pay him the respect of having a hearing and having a vote on a nominee in the way they’ve done with other presidents.”
Maddow re-raised the issue of race, asking whether or not it is linked to the resistance Obama is facing from Republicans and the conservative movement over picking Garland.
“Raising the issue of this being the first African-American president, that issue of legitimacy, do you think that is the through line that explains the way Republicans and the conservative movement have treated President Obama? Do you think fundamentally it is about race, that there’s a racial element to the resistance to him that people should be more explicit in discussing?” Maddow asked.
“There is an attack on his legitimacy that I think is just fundamentally different than what’s come before,” Kaine said.
Man Attacks Democrat Senate Candidate With Brass Knuckles in West Virginia
A (likely) right wing thug blindsided and beat a Democrat Candidate for State Senate in West Virginia. The attack was planned, with the attacker first knocking out the candidate from behind with brass knuckles in another act of political thuggery.
West Virginia state Senate candidate Richard Ojeda, a decorated veteran is now hospitalized with serious injuries
West Virginia state Senate candidate, a veteran, brutally beaten
West Virginia state Senate candidate Richard Ojeda was brutally beaten during a cookout Sunday — just two days before his primary — and nearly run over with a pickup truck, Ojeda told NBC News.
Jonathan Stuart Porter, 41, was in custody Sunday. State Trooper Zachary Holden told NBC News he was being held on suspicion of malicious assault, malicious attempted assault and felony destruction of property.
In an interview from his hospital room in Charleston, Ojeda, 45, a Democrat and military veteran whose primary contest is Tuesday, said he had been at a barbecue in the mountains about 60 miles southwest of Charleston when Porter asked for a bumper sticker.
Ojeda, who said he has known Porter since they were kids, placed one on the rear bumper of Porter’s truck. Then Porter asked for a second one on the vehicle’s front grill.
“That’s all I remember,” Ojeda said. “When I woke up, my head was on a tree stump covered in blood. Everyone was looking at me.”
Ojeda suffered eight bone fractures and three lacerations to his face, as well as exterior swelling to his head, he said.
Ojeda’s primary opponent, state Sen. Art Kirkendoll, said in a statement that he was praying for Ojeda and wished him a full recovery.
“I was informed that my opponent was physically assaulted and injured at a political function today,” Kirkendoll said. “I do not now, nor have I ever, condoned violence. It has no place in our political campaigns or in our communities.”
Ojeda said witnesses told him that he was kicked and struck with brass knuckles, although Holden said he found no evidence of the weapon and Porter denied using them.
Afterward, when the assailant got in his truck, a neighbor who witnessed the beating jumped in between the vehicle and Ojeda.
“He feared Porter was going to hit him,” Holden said.
The attacker spun out in the gravel, and when a second neighbor tried to block his exit with an ATV, the driver rammed the quad several times, Holden said, adding that the man eventually ran over it — along with a second ATV whose driver also tried to block him.
Porter called police and peacefully turned himself in after hiding out in the mountains for six hours, Holden said.
Aside from a brief comment about the brass knuckles, Holden said, Porter refused to talk to authorities. A motive for the assault remained unclear, he said.
To Ojeda, however, it was clearly premeditated — and it was all about politics.
Citing what he described as the intense poverty, corruption and nepotism that plagues the region — and his campaign for transparency and good government — Ojeda said: “The moment you start asking questions, you become public enemy number one.”
