STRATEGY APPEARS TO BE SECOND-BALLOT VOTE AT CONVENTION
by Sharon Rondeau
(Apr. 27, 2016) — In a tweet on Wednesday evening, 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz encouraged American voters to support his campaign, which earlier that day embraced former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential pick.
The Cruz campaign appears to have established a new website to introduce Fiorina as his running mate with the url “cruzcarly.com.”
“@TedCruz can and will win this nomination,” Cruz wrote in his tweet, with a link to the new website and new hashtag, #CruzCarly. His original campaign website, tedcruz.org, now redirects there.
Fiorina began campaigning with Cruz shortly after she endorsed him on March 9.
Some were surprised at her endorsement of the Texas Senator given her previous remarks about his campaign when she was a presidential candidate herself just two months before. “Ted Cruz is just like any other politician. He says one thing in Manhattan, he says another thing in Iowa,” CNN reported she said on January 3.
Fiorina suspended her campaign in early February following a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary.
In primary voting in five northeastern states on Tuesday, neither Cruz nor Republican presidential candidate John Kasich fared well against front runner Donald Trump, who swept all five Republican contests with a large plurality of votes.
After the publication of a National ENQUIRER article on March 23 claiming that Cruz has had extramarital affairs with five women, some of whom were coworkers, Fiorina stepped to Cruz’s defense in response to reporters’ questions. Both Fiorina and Cruz blamed the story, which was followed by a sequel in early April, on having started with Donald Trump.
Trump and his campaign have denied being the source of the ENQUIRER’s stories on the matter.
On October 1 of last year, CBS News reported that a political action committee supportive of Cruz, “Keep the Promise I,” was shown on FEC filings to have donated $500,000 to a PAC supportive of Fiorina, an “unusual” move, according to The Washington Post. In a standard letter, the FEC asked that the PAC provide additional details as to why the “disbursement” was made.
Keep the Promise I is reported to have received $11 million from hedge fund investor and billionaire Robert Mercer. Mercer also reportedly funds two other PACs under the “Keep the Promise” namesake and finances Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis company working for the Cruz campaign.
Last July, Politico and Newsmax reported that Mercer is a major supporter of Breitbart News, which has been viewed by some as providing “favorable” coverage to both Cruz and Trump.
Following the ENQUIRER’S allegations against Cruz, some speculated that the donation to Fiorina’s PAC was “‘hush money to keep Fiorina quiet about the alleged affair.'”
RealClearPolitics reported the results of Tuesday’s primaries as having increased Trump’s delegate count to 987, with Cruz at 562 and Kasich with 153 delegates. Various blogs reported that Cruz could no longer claim a mathematically-plausible path to winning the 1,237 delegates the RNC has set as necessary to be awarded the Republican nomination.
On April 19, following the New York State primary, the Associated Press reported that “Ted Cruz was mathematically eliminated Tuesday after Trump’s big win in the New York primary.” The following day, Cleveland.com echoed the AP’s computation.
Many groups, PACs and individuals have joined in a “Stop Trump” movement intended to deny Trump the nomination even if he succeeds in reaching or surpassing the 1,237-delegate count. Cruz and Kasich on Monday announced a political alliance with the purpose of taking delegates from Trump in the remaining primaries.
Beginning on April 20, Cruz and Kasich began to say that a “contested convention” was a certainty at the RNC convention in Cleveland in July. At that time, it did not appear that the two would combine their efforts to try to deny Trump the delegates needed to be considered the winner.
Many of those opposed to the specter of Trump’s receiving the nomination have issued tweets expressing their sentiments under the hashtags #DumpTrump and #NeverTrump.
Today, Fiorina claims that Cruz is “a man who is what & who he says he is.”
Trump has questioned Cruz’s constitutional eligibility to seek the presidency given that Article II, Section 1, clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution requires the nation’s chief executive to be a “natural born Citizen.” Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada on December 22, 1970 to a Cuban father and presumably a U.S.-citizen mother. In a number of interviews and campaign rallies, Cruz has insisted that the child of a U.S.-citizen parent born anywhere in the world is a “natural born Citizen.”
Five years ago today, the White House released what it said was the scan of a certified copy of Barack Hussein Obama‘s long-form birth certificate allegedly obtained from the Hawaii Department of Health several days before. The image was posted on the White House website in an apparent response to Trump’s vocal and strident calls for Obama to prove his birthplace and therefore eligibility, as up to that time, only a “short-form” Certification of Life Birth had been available from an unconfirmed source.
Following the declaration of several professional document examiners that the long-form image on the White House website is fraudulent, Maricopa County, AZ Sheriff Joseph M. Arpaio commissioned his volunteer Cold Case Posse to conduct an analysis to put fears to rest among his constituents that their votes would be disenfranchised in the upcoming 2012 presidential election.
Much to Arpaio’s surprise, after several days of examination in September 2011, Cold Case Posse lead investigator Michael Zullo informed Arpaio that the image exhibited a number of anomalies pointing to forgery and necessitating additional investigation.
On March 1, 2012, Zullo and Arpaio gave the first of two formal press conferences in which they declared the long-form birth certificate image, as well as Obama’s Selective Service registration form, “computer-generated forgeries.”
As with Obama, Cruz has not been willing to release documentation proving that he is a U.S. citizen, irrespective of the narrower meaning of “natural born Citizen” contained in Article II.
On April 13, the Indo Asian News Service reported that Cruz “is close to ensuring that Donald Trump cannot win the GOP nomination on a second ballot at the party’s July convention in Cleveland, scooping up scores of delegates who have pledged to vote for him instead of the front-runner if given the chance.”
On April 26, The Washington Post reported, “Cruz must survive to Cleveland and hope that Trump’s first-ballot strength will be his high-water mark.”
Even Carly has questioned Cruz being Canadian, but now she’s on the team, so it doesn’t matter anymore I guess.
Reference:
Fiorina: It’s ‘Odd’ Cruz Didn’t Renounce Canadian Citizenship Until 2014 Link: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/fiorina-ted-cruz-canada-birth-odd
Other important element to the Enquirer article include:
– the Enquirer also denied that Trump had anything to do with the article despite endorsing him, and having a CEO who is a friend of Trumps.
– the obstructed photo of one of the women seemed to match a public picture of Sarah Isgur Flores, head of the Carly campaign.
– at least 7 reporters have confirmed a video tape of Cruz and a female staffer visiting the same restaurant and hotel in DC every Tuesday and Thursday for weeks leaving the hotel at 2 am the following morning together. Multiple sources have confirmed the tape being shopped by Rubio affiliated operatives.
– the lawyer for the deceased DC Madam who died under mysterious circumstances has declared that one of the candidates left in the race is named in the Verizon phone logs sealed by a Supreme Court order. Wayne Madsen, who worked with this lawyer and as an investigator on the original list, firmly believes Ted Cruz is listed. The request to unseal the records are currently on appeal and the attorney has threatened to release them if his case is not heard by the Supreme Court.