Republicans: Eric Greitens' resignation 'huge monkey off our back' in race against Claire McCaskill

The resignation of embattled Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens should cement Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill’s defeat in the midterm elections, Republicans confidently predicted on Wednesday.

Multiple scandals plaguing Greitens since January threatened to derail the Senate bid of Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, the presumed GOP nominee. But with Greitens sidelined — his resignation takes effect Friday — Republicans expect the Senate campaign to become a referendum on McCaskill, to their advantage in a state where a majority approve of President Trump.

“It’s a huge monkey off our back,” a senior Republican strategist in Washington said.

“McCaskill’s clearly the loser in the current scenario,” added Gregg Keller, a Republican consultant based in Missouri who had sounded the alarm about the harm Greitens could do to Hawley’s Senate campaign. “With the Greitens debacle behind him, Josh now has every opportunity to win the seat and hold the Senate for Republicans.”

Greitens announced late Tuesday that he would resign June 1 after spending the five months defending himself against allegations of sexual misconduct and mismanagement of a charity. Charges against the governor, a political outsider first elected in 2016, appeared to mount as he resisted calls from within his own party to step down or face impeachment by a Republican legislature.

The soap opera proved a lifeline to McCaskill.

The vulnerable Democrat, in trouble for her liberal voting record and opposition of Trump’s agenda, was buffered as Hawley’s campaign was hampered by the Greitens affair. Hawley, in his capacity as state attorney general, was involved in investigating the governor, an effort that angered the GOP base on the one hand and was deemed unsatisfactory by the broader electorate on the other.

Democrats involved in the Senate contest claim the issue will linger as a problem for Hawley long after Greitens exits the scene, even though he previously called on the governor to resign and said in a statement that “Gov. Greitens has done the right thing” in finally doing so.

“They may think the immediate pressure has been relieved,” a Democratic Senate campaign aide said in an email. “But Hawley’s vulnerabilities on this scandal remain: he took $50,000 from Greitens — which he still hasn’t returned — then looked the other way for a year until he ran a ‘widely mocked,’ ‘sub-standard’ investigation of the governor.”

Wishful thinking, retort Republicans who have for months openly fretted that Greitens would tank an otherwise sure-thing Senate race for the GOP. It wouldn’t be the first time McCaskill got lucky. In 2012, she appeared just as politically endangered, but won a second term after then-Rep. Todd Akin, the unlikely GOP nominee, made offensive statements about rape.

McCaskill is running competitively with Hawley in recent public opinion polls; she held a 45 percent to 43.3 percent lead in the RealClearPolitics average. But the Democrat’s personal standing in a state that approves of Trump by 50 percent is falling short of her position in the horse race, suggesting trouble ahead.

According to Morning Consult data that surveyed nearly 300,000 registered voters across the country from Jan. 1–April 30, Missouri voters gave McCaskill a paltry 38 percent approval rating.

These numbers, combined with what some Republicans are describing as a newly aggressive Hawley after initial criticism for how he was running his campaign, are problematic for McCaskill without the Greitens scandal to offset her inherent political weakness.

Republican insiders said McCaskill might have mitigated her challenges by syncing herself with the politics of her state through support of a few prominent items on Trump’s legislative agenda, or high profile nominees, whether Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch or just-confirmed Central Intelligence Agency Director Gina Haspel.

“Claire’s path to re-election has always been to get a lot of Trump voters. To do that she had to support a lot of the Trump agenda. She refused. It was probably a career-ending mistake,” a Republican strategist said.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/republicans-eric-greitens-resignation-huge-monkey-off-our-back-in-race-against-claire-mccaskill

Arizona governor meets with McCain ahead of special election deadline: Report

Republican Gov. Doug Ducey joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his wife Cindy McCain at their Arizona home earlier this week, a move that comes just ahead of the projected date for Ducey's appointment of a successor to fill the senator's seat if it becomes available, a new report says.

McCain was diagnosed last summer with a form a brain cancer known as glioblastoma and has been receiving chemotherapy and radiation treatments. He has remained in Arizona since December.

If McCain resigns from the Senate on Wednesday, a special election would be held that would line up with the 2018 midterms. But after Wednesday, the person Ducey would appoint to fill the seat would keep the office until the 2020 elections.

Daniel Scarpinato, a spokesperson for Ducey, told The Hill that Ducey and McCain met on Tuesday. However, he lambasted the Beltway’s “obsession with this when there is no issue.”

“John McCain is our senior senator. He and the governor work on a variety of issues together. Like others, the governor wanted to spend time with Senator McCain and it was a great visit,” Scarpinato said in an email to The Hill.

“To anyone who uses this as an opportunity to speculate or fan the rumor mill: Washington DC’s obsession with this when there is no issue to be discussed is disgraceful,” he added. “John McCain is our senator until 2022, and the governor is looking forward to him returning to the U.S. Senate.”

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/arizona-governor-meets-with-mccain-ahead-of-special-election-deadline-report

Ben Rhodes: Obama team blindsided by FBI's Trump campaign investigation because they just assumed Clinton would win the election

A new book from former White House adviser Ben Rhodes claims that President Barack Obama and his top administration staff did not know about the FBI's investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia until they left office.

A preview from the New York Times of Rhode's memoir, "The World as It Is," states that the former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications learned about the counterintelligence investigation in the same manner as the rest of the country: through media reports. He also explicitly wrote, per the Times, that Obama was not informed of the investigation until after the election.

Rhodes seems to suggest that the administration was caught off guard by the investigation because they were so sure Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton would win, yet still should have seen that defeat coming.

"When you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used," he wrote. "She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change.”

Rhodes also makes the claim that election night seriously shook Obama's confidence in his own legacy.

"What if we were wrong?" he reportedly asked his aides in late November. "Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

"Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early."

"The World as It Is" is set to hit shelves next week.

https:// www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/ben-rhodes-obama-team-blindsided-by-fbis-trump-campaign-investigation-because-they-just-assumed-clinton-would-win-the-election

>>1591594

I know, very creepy, chilling at the same time.

>>1591492

Must be salacious what ever it is, he is known for cheating on his wife, so there is that also.

>>1591628

>>1591614

I really don't understand how they think what really happened isn't cold hard fact now since the evidence has been produced, yet the lies still commence.