Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Hours after the polls closed Tuesday, nervous network execs still hadn't called Kentucky's Democratic presidential primary. By midnight, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton was leading Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by fewer than 2,000 votes out of 455,000 cast, with all but four precincts reporting.
Across the country, the results were far clearer: Sanders won Oregon by roughly six percentage points. His wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, delivered the news to him as he addressed thousands of supporters at a rally in Carson, Calif.
Though Sanders likely netted several delegates to the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday, Clinton crept ever closer to the majority she will need to seal the party's nomination. Including some but not all of those awarded Tuesday, Clinton was leading Sanders 1,767 to 1,488 among pledged delegates, according to the Associated Press. Counting superdelegates, Clinton had reached 2,291 — less than 100 shy of the 2,383 she needs.
But as he does nearly every election night, Sanders declared in Carson that he would remain in the race "'til the last ballot is cast."
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Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Earlier that day, the Pomfret businessman had called on Leahy to “come clean” on his involvement with the federal EB-5 investor visa program, which is at the heart of a massive fraud scandal rocking the Northeast Kingdom. Among Milne’s requests was for an accounting of any flights the senator had taken with the accused — Jay Peak principals Ariel Quiros and Bill Stenger — and various government officials.
Leahy told reporters that he had appeared at EB-5 investor-recruitment events abroad, but that he had not gone out of his way to do so.
“On some of my official travel for other things, they’ve had some meetings I’ve dropped by, but I’ve not done an EB-5 trip,” Leahy said, according to VTDigger.org.
Then he went a little further: “I’ve done that with companies that have done business on military matters and others, but no, I [have not], nor have I ever had any business in my 40 years here pay for any of my travel.”
Public records contradict that last statement.
Tags: Patrick Leahy , Scott Milne , EB-5 , Image , Web Only
First there was "Low-Energy Jeb" Bush. Then there was "Crooked Hillary" Clinton. Now, at long last, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has landed on a nickname for Vermont's junior senator: "Crazy Bernie" Sanders.
Trump, who has made it a mission to generate reductive, insulting monikers for each of his foes, first employed "Crazy Bernie" Wednesday morning on Twitter after he — and Sanders — prevailed in Tuesday's West Virginia primaries:
Big wins in West Virginia and Nebraska. Get ready for November - Crooked Hillary, who is looking very bad against Crazy Bernie, will lose!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 11, 2016
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Tuesday, May 10, 2016
The senator was leading his Democratic presidential rival 50 to 39 percent Tuesday evening with 45 percent of precincts reporting.
Sanders' victory came a week after he notched a surprising win in Indiana. He has now won 19 states to Clinton's 23.
In a statement issued by his campaign, Sanders noted that West Virginia "is a working-class state and many of the people there are hurting."
"They know, like most Americans, that it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics," he said. "They want real change."
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Monday, May 9, 2016
"Peter Shumlin and Patrick Leahy have both displayed a lack of competence and a lack of leadership in the way the EB-5 program has been structured and managed," Milne said, lumping Leahy in with the Democratic governor he nearly defeated in 2014. "On the federal level, I think it just wasn't structured with auditability and transparency built into it."
The once-popular EB-5 program, which provides permanent residency to foreign nationals who invest at least $500,000 in qualified development projects, has come under fire recently in Vermont. Last month, federal and state authorities accused Northeast Kingdom developers Ariel Quiros and Bill Stenger of orchestrating a "Ponzi-like" scheme that allegedly defrauded investors of more than $200 million raised through the program.
Milne also accused Leahy of "travel[ing] the world to help recruit investors into this alleged Ponzi scheme." The senator's office has said that he promoted Vermont's EB-5 regional center during unrelated trips to China and Vietnam in 2014 and Ireland in 2008 but that he did not advocate specific projects.
Leahy's hardly the only one who's taken part in EB-5 promotional activities abroad. In October 2009, Milne traveled to China and South Korea with then-governor Jim Douglas, Stenger and other Vermont business leaders to meet with potential EB-5 investors. At the time, Milne was considering raising money through the program for his proposed Quechee Highlands development project, which has been stalled for years by land-use regulators.
Tags: Scott Milne , Patrick Leahy , Peter Shumlin , EB-5 , Image , Web Only
Thursday, May 5, 2016
But the crowd of GOP legislators appeared uninterested in weighing in on the the man who became their party’s de facto presidential nominee a day earlier: New York reality television star Donald Trump.
When Seven Days asked for a show of hands of those who would vote for Trump in November, Scott quickly intervened.
“I will say that this press conference is about electing me,” he said. “So I would like to ask everybody that’s going to vote for me to raise their hands.”
Scott’s fellow Republicans cheered and raised their hands.
Tags: Phil Scott , Bruce Lisman , Donald Trump , Image , Video , Web Only
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
But on Tuesday, he outperformed the polls and pulled off a surprise victory in Indiana. With 93 percent of the state’s precincts reporting, Sanders was leading former secretary of state Hillary Clinton 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent.
“The Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over. They’re wrong,” Sanders said Tuesday night. “Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment, but the voters in Indiana had a different idea. The campaign wasn’t over for them.”
Sanders’ victory came as New York businessman Donald Trump all but locked up the Republican nomination. After Trump walked away with Indiana, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suspended his campaign, leaving only Ohio Gov. John Kasich to challenge the front-runner.
Earlier Tuesday, Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell that she was “really focused on moving into the general election.” But in his post-primary remarks, Sanders made clear he would not let her, vowing once again to fight on through the June 7 California contest.
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Monday, May 2, 2016
The senators led a panel featuring Gov. Peter Shumlin, Chittenden County State’s Attorney T.J. Donovan, U.S. Attorney Eric Miller, Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo, Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger and others.
Booker, a former mayor of Newark and a darling of the left, introduced a bill last year that would reexamine federal sentencing laws and reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders. Leahy cosponsored the bill.
“If you really look at the data of who we imprison, we are painfully moving away from our values,” Booker said. “We are a nation that treats you better if you are rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Our prison population is overwhelmingly poor ... It is overwhelmingly addicted … It is overwhelmingly mentally ill, and [it includes] victims of trauma and sexual abuse. And it is disproportionately minority.”
Tags: Patrick Leahy , Peter Shumlin , Cory Booker , Eric Miller , T.J. Donovan , criminal justice , Brandon del Pozo , police , drugs , Image , Web Only
Sunday, May 1, 2016
“In other words, it will be a contested convention,” he told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
In a 17-minute address, Sanders turned his attention to those he said would have to push either candidate over the finish line: the Democratic Party’s 719 superdelegates. Unlike pledged delegates, those elected officials and party leaders can vote for whichever candidate they choose.
Sanders made two distinct appeals: First, he said that those hailing from states that voted overwhelmingly for him should “seriously reflect on whether they should cast their superdelegate vote in line with the wishes of the people in their states.”
Second, he said, “It is incumbent upon every superdelegate to take a hard and objective look at which candidate stands the better chance of defeating [Republican front-runner] Donald Trump. And in that regard, I think the evidence is extremely clear that I would be the stronger candidate to defeat Trump or any other Republican.”
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Wednesday, April 27, 2016
A day after losing four out of five East Coast primaries, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the New York Times that he would lay off “hundreds” of presidential campaign staffers and turn his attention to winning California.
“We have had a very large staff, which was designed to deal with 50 states in this country,” Sanders told the Times’ Yamiche Alcindor. “Forty of the states are now behind us.”
The campaign will move many of its remaining employees to California, where the candidate said he planned to hold rallies for “hundreds of thousands” of people. California, which awards 546 Democratic delegates, does not vote until June 7.
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