Friday, March 1, 2019
Rebecca Ellis, deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, will begin work as Welch’s state director on March 25, according to a press release.
Ellis has been involved in Vermont state government since she became an assistant attorney general in 1997. Then-governor Peter Shumlin appointed Ellis to represent Waterbury in the House of Representatives in 2011, where she served until joining the DEC in 2015.
Ellis will oversee Welch's Vermont operations. The Burlington-based staff deals with constituent services, fields calls from local media and coordinates the boss' official schedule when he visits the state, among other things.
Tags: Rebecca Ellis , Julie Moore , Peter Welch , Peter Shumlin , Department of Environmental Conservation , Agency of Natural Resources , water quality , Congress , Image , Web Only
Wednesday, February 27, 2019
The operative, Tad Devine, has worked in nearly every presidential contest since Jimmy Carter's 1980 reelection bid. He became a key player on Sanders' most important campaigns, returning in 2006 to help the Vermonter win an open seat in the U.S. Senate and a decade later to serve as a senior strategist and ad man for Sanders' 2016 presidential bid.
"He has the capacity to run a serious campaign for president," Devine told Seven Days in December 2013, predicting that Sanders would inspire hundreds of thousands of small-dollar donors to contribute a collective $50 million. By the time the New Hampshire primary rolled around, he'd raised twice that.
On Tuesday — a week after Sanders launched his second White House run — Devine and his two business partners, Mark Longabaugh and Julian Mulvey, announced that they were severing ties with the fledgling campaign. "We are leaving because we believe that Sen. Sanders deserves to have media consultants who share his creative vision for the campaign," they said in a written statement.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Jane O'Meara Sanders , Tad Devine , Jeff Weaver , Image , Web Only
Welch, a member of the U.S. House Oversight Committee, got five minutes to question Cohen during a hearing that riveted the nation. Welch focused on the emails and Trump's foreknowledge of their release. Cohen testified that on July 18 or 19, 2016, he was in Trump's office when Trump's assistant said, "Roger is on line one."
She meant Roger Stone, longtime conservative operative and dirty trickster. Trump put the call on speakerphone, Cohen testified.
"[Stone] said, 'Mr. Trump, I just want to let you know that I just got off the phone with [WikiLeaks founder] Julian Assange, and in a couple of days there's going to be a massive dump of emails that's going to severely hurt the Clinton campaign,'" Cohen said.
Tags: Michael Cohen , Peter Welch , Donald Trump , David Pecker , Stormy Daniels , Robert Mueller , William Barr , Image , Web Only , Video
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
Within 24 hours of joining the race for president Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) reeled in more than $5.9 million, according to his campaign. The money came from roughly 223,000 individual donors.
The campaign said it also signed up $600,000 worth of recurring, monthly donations.
Sanders' fundraising haul shatters this cycle's record, which was briefly held by Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). In her first day on the trail last month, Harris picked up $1.5 million from 38,000 donors.
Four years earlier, Sanders himself raised $1.5 million from 100,000 donors on the day he joined the 2016 race for the Democratic nomination. By the end of that campaign, he had raised more than $234 million.
In his announcement Tuesday morning, Sanders called for a million voters to pledge their support. His campaign said that 330,000 had done so by Tuesday evening. His announcement video was viewed by more than 5.7 million people that day on social media.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Image , Web Only
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will make a second run for the White House in 2020, he announced Tuesday morning.
The senator disclosed his candidacy in an interview with Vermont Public Radio, telling host Bob Kinzel, “I wanted to let the people of the state of Vermont know about this first.”
Sanders elaborated on his plans in an 11-minute video and a 1,500-word email to supporters, in which he sounded many of the populist, progressive themes that have characterized his nearly five decades in public life — and made him a breakout star of the 2016 presidential election. “Our campaign is about taking on the powerful special interests that dominate our economic and political life,” he said.
Asked in a pre-taped interview with CBS News’ John Dickerson how this campaign would differ from his last, Sanders said, “We’re gonna win.”
"Our campaign is not only about defeating Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history," Sanders said in his announcement. "Our campaign is about transforming our country and creating a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice."
The 77-year-old independent joins a crowded Democratic field, which already features five other U.S. senators and is expected to include more than a dozen members of Congress, governors, mayors and business leaders. Sanders, however, is the highest-profile pol to enter the race thus far — and the only one to have previously sought the office. Only former vice president Joe Biden, who is reportedly eyeing a run, has garnered greater support in early public opinion polls.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , 2020 , president , Image , Video , Web Only
Friday, February 8, 2019
The federal Department of Justice is withholding more than $2 million in law enforcement grants from Vermont pending a review of the state’s compliance with a federal law that requires local officials to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
“These grants are the DOJ Byrne JAG grant and the DOJ COPS Anti-Heroin Task Force grant,” VSP spokesman Adam Silverman wrote in an email to Seven Days.
The feds are refusing to pay the state a promised $1.3 million toward heroin enforcement until Justice Department officials are convinced that Vermont is in compliance with federal law, according to Silverman. Another two grants, for about $480,000 each, are also on hold.
Tags: Donald Trump , opiates , bias free policing , fair and impartial policing , police , heroin , Department of Justice , Adam Silverman , Jeff Sessions , Image , Web Only
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
A Vermont judge has found that Stuart Stevens, a national political consultant and the architect of Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) 2012 presidential campaign, inflicted “emotional distress” on a Stowe woman through a yearlong barrage of unwanted communications.
Superior Court Judge Megan Shafritz issued a no-stalking order against Stevens last Friday, barring him from contacting or approaching the woman, Paige Hinkson, until July 2019. Stevens had been subject to a temporary no-stalking order since last June, when Hinkson filed her initial complaint; it was extended five times.
In her ruling, Shafritz wrote that Stevens had called or texted Hinkson or her husband, Craig DeLuca, 151 times between April 2017 and March 2018 — often late at night and always from a blocked phone number. The judge also found that Stevens stared Hinkson down at a Stowe café, sent DeLuca a threatening package and engaged in other behavior that led Hinkson to appear “frightened and distraught” in court.
“I am petrified of Stuart Stevens and I desperately need the protection of this court,” Hinkson said during a hearing last June, according to court transcripts. In an interview Wednesday with Seven Days, she called the situation “excruciating” and said she’d been “living in terror because of Stuart Stevens.”
He has denied the allegations, arguing in court that he had never met Hinkson and wished her no harm. His lawyer, Craig Nolan, said in a written statement Wednesday that Shafritz's ruling included "numerous factual and legal errors." He said that Stevens would appeal the case to the Vermont Supreme Court.
Tags: Stuart Stevens , Paige Hinkson , Craig DeLuca , Lisa Senecal , Inntopia , Stowe , Mitt Romney , George W. Bush , Image , Web Only
Friday, February 1, 2019
Between November 27 and the end of December, Sanders collected close to $560,000 and spent nearly $250,000. He finished 2018 with roughly $9.1 million in his Senate campaign account.
Sanders, who is reportedly close to announcing a second run for president, could legally transfer the funds to a presidential campaign committee. A separate, mostly dormant account affiliated with his 2016 campaign had more than $4.7 million in it at the end of the year, according to another FEC filing. A third account under Sanders' control, the Progressive Voters of America political action committee, reported $125,000 in the bank.
Sanders' latest Senate campaign report shows that he kept his reelection team of roughly a dozen people on payroll at least through the end of the year. That included several people who are expected to play a role in a potential 2020 presidential bid: 2016 campaign manager Jeff Weaver, spokesperson Arianna Jones, Senate campaign manager Shannon Jackson and senior adviser Joshua Orton. (CNN reported last month that Weaver would not reprise his role as campaign manager but would likely serve in another capacity.)
The senator also paid a Des Moines political consulting firm $2,500 in December, according to the filing. The company, PAD Consulting, is run by Pete D'Alessandro, who was Sanders' Iowa campaign coordinator in 2016. D'Alessandro did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his current role.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Patrick Leahy , Peter Welch , Vermont , campaign finance , president , Image , Web Only
Monday, January 28, 2019
Friends of Bernie Sanders, the senator's campaign committee, spent big on Facebook ads in January after lying largely dormant for the last three months of 2018. The splurge hit a high of $45,908 last week, around the same time that Yahoo News reported Sanders will launch a presidential campaign "imminently."
The campaign's most recent big buy landed it in the top 20 for weekly political ad spending on Facebook, trailing companies such as ExxonMobil, advocacy groups such as MoveOn, and presidential candidates Donald Trump and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). Sanders' campaign spent a total of $85,439 on Facebook ads over the past four weeks.
Friends of Bernie Sanders staff did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday afternoon.
Tags: Senator , Bernie Sanders , Facebook , campaign finance , Kamala Harris , Donald Trump , Vermont , president , election , spending , Image , Web Only
Friday, January 25, 2019
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will announce another run for president "imminently," Yahoo News reported Friday evening. The outlet cited two unnamed sources with direct knowledge of Sanders' plans.
The senator "was emboldened by early polls of the race that have consistently showed him as one of the top candidates in a crowded Democratic primary field," Yahoo reported. That field already includes three of Sanders' colleagues in the U.S. Senate.
“What [Sanders] has this time that he didn’t have last time is, he is the most popular elected official in the country right now,” a source told Yahoo News. “That’s light years away from 2016, when very few people knew who he was.”
Shannon Jackson, a senior adviser on the Friends of Bernie Sanders political committee, declined to comment on the report Friday evening.
Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. But he has established himself as one of the most popular politicians in the country. He won reelection to the U.S. Senate last November by a wide margin.
Tags: Bernie Sanders , Vermont , senator , president , 2020 , Image , Web Only