United States presidential candidate Chafee criticizes Hillary Clinton

This video from the USA says about itself:

Lincoln Chafee Announces Run for President

3 June 2015

Rhode Island’s former governor is eying the Democratic nomination in 2016.

From daily The Guardian in Britain, about ex-senator Lincoln Chafee, who announced his candidacy for the United States presidency yesterday:

Chafee’s speech focused on the 2003 Iraq war and he repeatedly railed against “neocons”, making several references to the Project for a New American Century, a hawkish thinktank founded in the late 1990s.

Chafee read at length from a 2002 Guardian article about the run up to the war. He also urged the government “ to allow Edward Snowden to come home”. …

The son of the longtime Rhode Island Republican senator John Chafee, the presidential hopeful has a biography that tells how he “attended Montana State University horse shoeing school in Bozeman and worked as a farrier at harness racing tracks for seven years”. He was a high school classmate of Jeb Bush at the Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts.

Chafee’s candidacy seems targeted almost directly at Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy record – the Democratic equivalent of those conservative hawks who sought to enter the Republican primary solely to excoriate Rand Paul on the debate stage.

In April Chafee told the Washington Post that Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war should prevent her from becoming president. “I don’t think anybody should be president of the United States that made that mistake,” he said. Chafee has also criticized Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state and her mishandling of the so-called “Russia reset”.

On Wednesday Chafee offered veiled criticism of the former secretary of state and declined to mention her by name. He said: “It is critical that the integrity of the office of secretary of state never be questioned.” At one point, though, he went close to going after Clinton, saying neocons were advising “the main Democratic presidential candidate”.

Chafee got his start in national politics in 1999 when he was appointed to the Senate as a Republican after his father’s death. He was elected to a full term in 2000 before losing his re-election bid in 2006. While in the Senate he was the only Republican to vote against the Iraq war and bragged about writing in George HW Bush for president in 2004 as a protest against what he saw as the too-conservative policies of George W Bush.

After losing his re-election bid Chafee endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and was elected governor of Rhode Island as an independent in 2010. …

Chafee could face some skepticism from voters as a former Republican but his liberal record may mitigate some of those concerns. Regardless of which party he’s belonged to Chafee has consistently been a socially liberal supporter of abortion rights with strong environmentalist credentials. He even called for the abolition of capital punishment in his speech on Wednesday. …

Then again, as a onetime Republican who opposed the Iraq war and champions the metric system, Chafee doesn’t seem scared of an uphill battle.

By Sean Mandell in the USA:

During his speech, Chafee highlighted his strong opposition to military intervention in the Middle East, saying, ‘we have to find a way to wage peace.’ He said drone strikes weren’t working in the region. And he also said, ‘We must deliberately and carefully extricate ourselves from expensive wars,’ Chafee said. ‘Just think of how better this money could be spent.” Chafee stressed using that money for investment within America’s borders. “Education infrastructure, healthcare, environmental stewardship and a strong middle class are Americans’ priorities.

RICK PERRY RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT AGAIN “Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) announced on his website Thursday that he is running for president. Again. In a video featuring a montage of U.S. landmarks and Perry meeting with mostly white groups of people, he claims the country needs a leader that can revive ‘this American dream again.’ ‘You see a lot of candidates will say the right things. Whether it’s about the border, whether it’s about taxes, whether it’s about spending, but we need a president who has done the right thing,’ Perry said in the video. ‘We need a president who bridges the partisan divide rather than widens.’ The post came hours after a senior advisor tipped off The Associated Press that Perry was planning to run. According to the Washington Post, he’s scheduled to officially launch his campaign at an airplane hangar in Dallas later today.” [Paige Lavender, HuffPost]

Hillary Clinton launches her presidential campaign: here.

Hillary Rodham Clinton went to the Ferguson, Mo., area Tuesday night to deliver a speech on race relations — but a friend of slain teen Michael Brown blasted her arrival as too little, too late. “Where you been, Hillary?” Brown pal Robert Nettles said, according to the Daily Mail. “It’s been 10 months, girl!” Here.

THE STATE DEPARTMENT EMAILS HILLARY DIDN’T HAND OVER “The State Department said on Thursday that 15 emails sent or received by Hillary Rodham Clinton were missing from records that she has turned over, raising new questions about whether she deleted work-related emails from the private account she used exclusively while in office.” [NYT]

According to a report by the New York Times, the Justice Department has been asked by two inspectors general to open an investigation into the handling of classified information in relation to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account, which she maintained during her tenure at the State Department: here.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has been compelled to turn over the private email server that she used as the Obama administration’s secretary of state, her campaign revealed Tuesday. The handover represents a reversal of her previous refusal to surrender the server to federal investigators probing whether its use included the improper storing of unsecured classified information: here.

HILLARY CLINTON ADDRESSES EMAIL CONTROVERSY In an email. [Marina Fang, HuffPost]

CLINTON FOUGHT FOR UBS. THEN ITS DONATIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION INCREASED. After Hillary Clinton fought for UBS as Secretary of State, donations by the firm to the Clinton Foundation increased by a multiplier of ten. [WSJ]

A lengthy report in the Wall Street Journal Thursday details Hillary Clinton’s actions while US secretary of state,on behalf of the Swiss banking giant UBS. The bank reciprocated by means of large contributions to the Clinton Foundation and a fat paycheck for Bill Clinton to participate in a question-and-answer session with UBS executives: here.

INSIDE HILLARY’S LATEST BATCH OF EMAILS Details of how a staffer stayed awake for 100 hours writing a speech, the mysterious gefilte fish email and how the former secretary of state called out some “ogrish” men on her staff. [AP]

A series of news reports this past week have suggested that Vice President Joseph Biden is considering entering the race for the 2016 Democratic Party presidential nomination against front-runner Hillary Clinton. There has been no word from Biden himself as to whether he would challenge Clinton for the nomination. Instead, the reports, largely based on anonymous sources, appear to be a media trial balloon to test the waters for a potential candidacy by the vice president: here.

Glenn Greenwald lays out how Hillary Clinton has dug her own grave when it comes to mishandling classified information.

Edward Snowden says Hillary Clinton ‘ridiculous’ to think emails were secure. Snowden said in Al-Jazeera interview that ordinary government workers would ‘very likely face prosecution’ for sending classified emails over personal server: here.

BIDEN RUN COULD ATTRACT FLOOD OF OBAMA DONORS Stat of the day: Only 52 of the 770 people that were Obama’s bundlers have fundraised or signed on to be bundlers for Hillary Clinton. [WaPo]