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EXCLUSIVE: Virginia Gov. Pardons 60,000 Felons, Enough To Swing Election
Photo of Luke Rosiak
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) (R) gets a kiss from her campaign manager Terry McAuliffe at an election night rally at the Marriott Hotel May 20, 2008 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) (R) gets a kiss from her campaign manager Terry McAuliffe at an election night rally at the Marriott Hotel May 20, 2008 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe has granted voting rights to as many as 60,000 convicted felons just in time for them to register to vote, nearly five times more than previously reported and enough to win the state for his long-time friend, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
McAuliffe sought to allow all of Virginia’s estimated 200,000 felons to vote, but state courts said each individual felon’s circumstances must be weighed. To get around that, McAuliffe used a mechanical autopen to rapidly sign thousands of letters, as if he had personally reviewed them, even as his office was saying the total was 13,000.
Now, The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned that McAuliffe — who managed Clinton’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign — churned out five times as many letters before the registration deadline than publicly claimed.
Virginia’s recent political history has seen multiple races that were decided by tiny margins. The 2014 U.S. Senate race, for example, was decided by only 17,000 votes, while the attorney general’s race came down to a mere 165 votes.
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McAuliffe is a close friend of Hillary and former President Bill Clinton, even personally guaranteeing a loan for the purchase of their Chappaqua, New York, mansion in 1999. He also served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee where he was a prodigious fund raiser.
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The Virginia chief executive claimed to have “no idea” how felons would vote and said he had never thought about it. Clinton’s staff emailed him after the 200,000-voters move to call it a “great announcement” and set up a call about it.
McAuliffe also did a major favor for the wife of a senior FBI executive who was running for a Virginia legislative seat at the same time the bureau was investigating Clinton’s use of private email addresses and a home-brew server to conduct the official diplomatic business of the U.S.
Virginia officials expressed surprise that McAuliffe had signed so many more letters than previously reported. Registrars and state legislators told TheDCNF they had no idea, and even officers of the state Board of Elections were kept in the dark.
Registrars could look up a felon’s status one name at a time in a Secretary of the Commonwealth database, if they had his or her Social Security number, but the system didn’t display the total number of those restored.
Lashawnda S. Singleton, spokesman for Virginia’s Secretary of the Commonwealth, did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for the data.
After TheDCNF asked Clara Belle Wheeler, vice-chairman of the Virginia Board of Elections and a Republican, she was told by Edgardo Cortes, Commissioner of the Department of Elections, that the total was somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000.
“Cortes stated that the names were available to the general registrars thru the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s website. He stated that the number was between 50 and 60,000 names. He was unable to be more precise,” Wheeler told TheDCNF.
“He assured me that the entire 216,000 felons were not sent voter registration cards. He stated that only those who had completed voter registration forms which were submitted to the general registrars either in paper forms or via the on-line citizen portal were registered to vote. He did not know the number of felons whose rights had been restored who have registered to vote,” she said.
Those who received McAuliffe’s letter also got voter registration forms with pre-paid return postage. No others in Virginia received such a service.
When TheDCNF pointed out that 60,000 could tip an election, Wheeler said “I am acutely and chronically aware of that.” She also noted that McAuliffe has explicitly asked felons to vote for Clinton.
Wheeler said the last-minute, highly unorthodox flood of individual restorations had to be processed by registrars who were already overwhelmed by failing computer systems.
She also said that, while McAuliffe claimed to only be restoring voting rights of felons who had completed their sentences, his use of the autopen might not satisfy the court’s specific vetting requirement.
“I think the General Assembly caucus that brought suit made it abundantly clear that you must look at each person and evaluate each individual person’s record: have they served their time, have they paid their restoration if it was due, have they finished their probation, are they citizens, have they not been arrested for some other crime,” Wheeler said.
“The code of Virginia requires that each person is treated as an individual rather than as a bulk because each individual has a different set of circumstances and those should be evaluated,” she said.
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The Tangible Difference Between Activism And Industry Is Summed Up In Three Words: Disaster In Greeley
Michael Sandoval
10:35 PM 11/07/2016
Wendy Hoffenberg helps Sophia Cornell up the side walk as rain starts getting heavier during the near Biblical amount of rain that hit Colorado in 2013. This is Boulder, but several counties, including Greeley, were essentially demolished. REUTERS/Mark Leffingwell Wendy Hoffenberg helps Sophia Cornell up the side walk as rain starts getting heavier during the near Biblical amount of rain that hit Colorado in 2013. This is Boulder, but several counties, including Greeley, were essentially demolished. REUTERS/Mark Leffingwell
Colorado’s third largest county has spent the past three years rebuilding after a devastating 2013 flood and, to top it off, negotiating a regulatory debris field aimed at its prized natural resource development—oil and gas.
The historic flood fueled that regulatory and legal fight targeting hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. A storm of activist group activity and a slew of natural disaster impacts fueled a left-wing ballot campaign to keep companies from accessing the one resource that could keep the county’s infrastructure and revenue afloat.
While environmentalists sat out the dirty work, using the flood’s aftermath to spin spill stories not borne out by reality, energy companies were quick to respond to the disaster in a way that tangibly helped people in need.
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noble-energy
(Noble Energy tank and production facility next to agricultural land. Photo: Michael Sandoval/TheDCNF)
A ‘Devastating’ flood: 2013
Unprecedented.
Descriptions of the massive rainfall and subsequent flood that struck the foothills and adjacent high plains of Colorado’s Front Range in September 2013 border on Biblical.
Russ Schumacher and Bob Glancy, scientists at Colorado State University and the National Weather Service, called it a 1,000-year rain event producing a 100-year flood.
Eventually, 19 counties had a Federal Emergency Management Agency major disaster declaration, and a swathe of land 4,500 square miles lay under water or experienced flooding. Ten Coloradans were dead, and thousands were displaced, with still thousands more evacuated by air.
The Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management estimated $3 billion in damages as of 2014, with 31,000 homes and structures damaged and destroyed.
washed-out-road-1
(Approximately 650 miles of roads in Weld County were destroyed, damaged, or rendered impassible, along with crippled infrastructure, by the September 2013 floods. Source: Weld County Office of the Board of Commissioners, October 2013)
Rebuilding would take time. A luxury those affected by the deluge could least afford.
But before the rains stopped, the flood waters crested along the South Platte, Cache la Poudre, Big Thompson, Boulder Creek, or Saint Vrain rivers, and before the clouds began to dissolve revealing a sun that had been absent for nearly 10 days, there were frantic calls for help.
Hundreds of them.
‘After the Floods in Colorado, a Deluge of Worry About Leaking Oil’
Tisha Schuller, then president of Colorado Oil and Gas Association (COGA), told the New York Times that while the “Twitter world was aflame with these massive contamination stories,” the reality on the ground was measurably different.
“No, nothing has changed at all. If you look back at some of the reports in the aftermath, from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and others, they found nothing, no pollutants from oil and gas spills,” Doug Flanders, director of policy and external affairs at COGA told TheDCNF.
It was, he said, “activists making sure that no good crisis goes to waste.”
Activists like Gary Wockner of Clean Water Action described the situation to the Times with hyperbolic alarm. “The flood plain is just littered with oil and gas wells.”
Wockner did not respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
The Sept. 20 edition of the Denver Post ran an above-the-fold headline “Oil spilling into mix.” It took the Post more than a week to issue a correction. There was no oil spill present, the correction read, it was simply leftover floodwater.
“There were 220 million gallons of raw sewage released versus approximately 48,000 gallons of oil and gas. If all the waters released in the flood was represented as one gallon, oil and gas would be 0.044 of one drop,” Flanders explained.
The Environmental Protection Agency concurred.
In an interview with EnergyWire in 2013, EPA Region 8 spokesman Matthew Allen said, “the total reported amount of reported [oil] spills is small compared to the solid waste that has spilled from damaged sewer lines and household chemicals from destroyed homes.”
Any oil and gas that was emitted wasn’t the fault of the industry.
“The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission did a flood ‘lessons learned’ in the aftermath of the flood. And a lot of the [lessons] were already in existence when the 2013 flood hit,” Flanders said.
reinforced-berm
(Tanks with reinforced berm near Cache La Poudre River, east of Greeley. Photo: Michael Sandoval/TheDCNF)
Averting a double disaster: oil and gas industry helps with temporary road repairs
People were pouring into shelters, even from neighboring counties. They had lost everything.
“We needed immediate help. St. Vrain’s sanitation was knocked off-line, and we needed water in the Frederick area. Milliken was completely cut off,” said Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway.
“Getting our transportation system back in shape was our first priority as a county,” Conway wrote in 2013. “The flood hit during the start of harvest, and we knew that opening our roads as quickly as possible was going to help us avert a disaster within a disaster.”
Commissioner Mike Freeman agreed.
“The industry stepped up and said ‘Let us help with this road – this one is ours.’ They did that with several roads throughout the county,” Freeman said.
rebuilt-roads-2
(Oil and gas companies helped restore flood-damaged roads in Weld County, like the one seen above. Source: Weld County Office of the Board of Commissioners, October 2013)
“The operators and service companies began to help their neighbors dig out from underneath the debris using the equipment they had on site. Get the bad stuff out so they could find what was left and begin to rebuild. They were voluntarily using the equipment,” COGA’s Flanders said.
Noble Energy provided more than 200 portable toilets to the City of Evans to assist while the no-flush rule was in place.
Doug Campbell, landman and Noble Energy incident command team member, summed up the immediacy of the need.
“What we realized in that moment was that in a matter of a few short minutes, we were picking up people’s lives,” said Campbell.
map-of-damaged-roads-in-weld-county
(Map of damaged roads in Weld County, September 2013. Source: Weld County Office of Emergency Management)
‘The county was cut off’
Republican State Sen. John Cooke of Greeley, who now represents portions of Weld County, served as the Weld County Sheriff in September 2013.
The floodwaters essentially severed the county in two, cutting off almost all north-south transportation. This presented Cooke and his colleagues with a dual problem–assisting with rescue and other emergency efforts while also serving the rest of the county with more than 160 roads and hundreds of surface miles of roadway washed away.
“It was very hectic for us, very busy. Not only do you have flooding going on, you have your normal calls you have to take too. The flooding wasn’t countywide. Fort Lupton and Greeley were affected, as were Evans, Milliken, and Johnstown,” Cooke explained.
“But we were cut off. The county was cut off,” Cooke said.
County sheriff reserves and other employees were called out, not only to assist human victims, but also to rescue the county’s animals, like cows and horses.
“We didn’t lose any lives. From deputies on up, they did a fantastic job,” Cooke said.
milliken-1
(Milliken experienced some of the worst flooding in September 2013. Photo: Michael Sandoval/TheDCNF)
One thing the industry leaders didn’t want–publicity.
“They shunned publicity. I told them we need to give them credit. They said no,” Conway insisted. “‘We did this because it was the right thing to do,’” they told him.
Bob O’Connor, Executive Director of the Weld Food Bank, gushed about one company’s efforts in a video released just seven weeks after the floods had passed.
“When we realized that the devastation was so widespread, and realized that we were going to have to mobilize and get food into people’s hands right away, we sat down and had a quick discussion about what we needed, and it was Noble Energy,” O’Connor said.
“The next morning 55 members showed up at the door, worked the entire day. Normally that type of food takes us weeks or a month to sort. By the end of the day, they had sorted all 56,000 pounds of that food,” he added.
Weld Food Bank began an immediate food drive from local grocery chains, but lacked the volunteers necessary to sort out the food in a timely manner.
weld-food-bank
(Weld Food Bank, Greeley, Colorado. Photo: Michael Sandoval/TheDCN)
O’Connor said that’s when Noble Energy, Anadarko, and others stepped up and stepped in. Golf carts were used to deliver food where roads were difficult or impossible to negotiate, he said.
Donations also included $95,000 for a compressed natural gas-powered truck from Noble Energy, O’Connor said.
‘Different approaches’
Had local environmental activists responded similarly?
“In fact, quite the opposite. Not one time, and up to today, not one environmental group, not one entity involved in spending money over the debate about fracking, has ever called me and said, ‘Commissioner Conway, our group would like to help victims of the flood,’” said Conway.
“My phone rang off the hook from the oil and gas industry. I received hundreds of phone calls, and I’m probably underestimating that,” said Conway, expressing his contrasting feelings for the way the two sides of a very public and embattled policy squabble handled the flood and its aftermath.
While the oil and gas industry was proactive, environmental activists were inactive, or worse, making recovery efforts in the county more difficult by diverting media attention, he said.
While oil and gas was reaching out, fracking activists were busy creating a negative media narrative.
A raft of ballot measures in 2016—as many as 11 separate initiatives at one point—included an amendment aimed squarely at limiting the available space in the state for fracking or any other activity related to oil and gas, according to the state’s Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Another measure would have allowed local restrictions that exceed state regulations.
The COGCC estimated that 85 percent of Weld County’s surface area would be located within 2,500 feet, under the initiative’s language, of “occupied structures” and “areas of special concern.”
Removing that valuable resource, as the anti-fracking activists hoped, would have closed off the county from an assessed property value that has doubled to more than $11 billion since 2009, and away from recovery that one county commissioner called an “economic depression” just a few years earlier.
“They were literally trying to exploit a natural disaster for their political benefit,” said Conway.
Ultimately, the pair of anti-fracking measures proposed by anti-fracking activists didn’t make it onto the ballot. Though Initiatives 75 and 78 received thousands of signatures, they were found insufficient by the Colorado Secretary of State’s office, the Denver Post reported Aug. 29.
As the county approached the three-year anniversary of the 2013 flooding that destroyed so much and upturned so many lives, it could exhale, even if just temporarily.
The oil and gas industry, its life-line during the economic downturn of 2009 and a generous neighbor during the historic rains and aftermath of the September 2013 flood, was not going anywhere.
Yet.
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Tags: Colorado, Environmental Protection Agency
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Ron Johnson’s Final Push With Voters Could Lead To A GOP Win In Wisconsin
Photo of Juliegrace Bru****e
Juliegrace Bru****e
Capitol Hill Reporter
10:11 PM 11/07/2016
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker attend a rally in Waukesha, Wisc. (Photo: Juliegrace Bru****e/TheDCNF) Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Gov. Scott Walker attend a rally in Waukesha, Wisc. (Photo: Juliegrace Bru****e/TheDCNF)
WAUKESHA, WIS.- Just one day before the election, GOP Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson seemed optimistic about his chances of retaining his seat in the upper chamber — a critical win in Republicans’ battle to retain the majority.
Johnson was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of roughly 250 supporters in Waukesha, Wis., the last stop on his four-day bus tour with House Speaker Paul Ryan. After speaking with thousands of Wisconsinites during the final stretch, the senator said he was confident in what he was hearing from voters.
“Just the five hours I spent at Lambeau Field yesterday, working the crowd, talking to all the tailgaters and stuff, I was very pleased with the warm reception, with the reactions from people,” Johnson told reporters at a campaign stop at PACUR, the manufacturing company he helped build in Oshkosh, Wisc. “They are seeing through Sen. Feingold’s lies, they know he had 34 years of trying to figure these problems out and he created the problems.”
Despite once being considered a lost cause by many in his race against former Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, whom he unseated in 2010, he managed to close what was once a 16-point gap.
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With the race now in a virtual dead heat, a list of politicians — including vice presidential nominee Mike Pence, Ryan, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republican Policy Committee Chairman Sen. John Barrasso — have come out to stump for the senator during his final push.
The Johnson camp has largely attributed the momentum it’s seen to its strong ground game, fundraising numbers and positive messaging.
“Senator Feingold sent an email on September 24th where he cites knocking on 84,000 doors for the cycle. At that point, we were knocking on 84,000 doors per week – and now we plan to hit an additional 750,000 doors before election day,” an internal memo obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation reads. “Our fundraising prowess and lean operation have allowed us to have an advantage on the airwaves going into this final stretch.”
A source familiar with the campaign’s strategy said they anticipated being down in the polls in early months due to Feingold’s early cash advantage, leading the Johnson camp to remain strategic about when and how their resources were being utilized.
“We knew that if Feingold kept spending the way he did on an ineffective message we would end with more money than him, which happened,we have more cash on hand than him, and we knew that the race would start to tighten, which happened,” the source told TheDCNF. “Now it comes down to just these last few points and really what it came down to, it’s kind of like the saying ‘wait until you see the whites in their eyes,’ this was a ‘whites in their eyes’ strategy.”
As the race grew tighter, Democrats decided to dump $2 million into Feingold’s campaign in late-October, signaling the seat was in play.
“He wasted all that money at a bad time, with a bad message,” the source told TheDCNF. “Harry Reid tried to rescue Russ Feingold because we, on our own essentially, brought it to within the margin of error. So, all the groups that are coming in now for us is icing on the cake, which is just a very big layer of icing.”
Between the campaign’s strategy of highlighting Johnson’s experience in job creation while painting Feingold as a career politician, and the emphasis it’s placed on grassroots efforts — which they say can make a difference of around two to three points, they believe the senator is well positioned to upset the Wisconsin Democrat on Nov. 8 .
“We knew that if it came down to ground game, we could win,” the source said. “That was always the x-factor, and now that the polling is tight and now that we have more resources going than Feingold and now that all the groups are in, it just comes down to turning people out and that’s what Wisconsin Republics do, so we are feeling really good.”
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Tags: Elections 2016, Paul Ryan, Ron Johnson, Scott Walker
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