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Rand Paul Keeps Saying That a Secret Scandal Will Wreck Hillary Clinton ‘Soon’ [+video]

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

In a speech yesterday to the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul made his third oblique reference to a scandal that—according to him—will grievously wound Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

“You ever hear ’em ask Hillary Clinton, this money she’s getting, whether it influences her decisions?” said Paul, referring to media questions about donors to the Clinton family’s charitable organizations. “There’s going to be stuff coming out about the Clinton Foundation and their donations from different companies that get special approval from the Secretary of State. Coming out in the next couple of weeks.”

Paul had debuted this theory on April 7, in the interview he gave Fox News’s Sean Hannity right after his announcement. “She’s in charge of approving business deals as secretary of state,” Paul said of Clinton. “They’re called CFIAs, anything that relates to our security. There’s going to be something coming out in the next few weeks about companies that she approved deals for.”

“That they were against, and then they became for after money went to the foundation?” asked Hannity.

“Significant amounts, over $100 million being given to her foundation coming out in the next two weeks,” said Paul. (Read more from “Rand Paul Keeps Saying That a Secret Scandal Will Wreck Hillary Clinton ‘Soon'” HERE)

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Rand Paul Strays from Libertarian Roots as He Courts GOP Base

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Rand PaulWhen the presidential buzz began building around Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) a couple of years ago, the expectation was that his libertarian ideas could make him the most unusual and intriguing voice among the major contenders in the 2016 field.

But now, as he prepares to make his formal announcement Tuesday, Paul is a candidate who has turned fuzzy, having trimmed his positions and rhetoric so much that it’s unclear what kind of Republican he will present himself as when he takes the stage.

“He’s going to get his moment in the sun,” said David Adams, who served as campaign chairman for Paul’s insurgent 2010 Senate campaign. “What he does with it from there will have bearing on the Republican Party.”

There are at least two areas where Paul has moved more in line with the conservative Republican base, somewhat to the consternation of the purists in the libertarian movement: adopting a more muscular posture on defense and foreign policy, and courting the religious right.

Where he once pledged to sharply cut the Pentagon’s budget, for instance, Paul late last month proposed a $190 billion increase over the next two years — albeit one that would be paid for by cutting foreign aid and other government programs. His tour following the announcement of his candidacy will include an event at Patriots Point in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor, with the World War II-era aircraft carrier USS Yorktown as a backdrop. (Read more from “Rand Paul Seems to Stray from Libertarian Roots as He Courts GOP Base” HERE)

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Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign

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Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul is expected to announce plans to join the party’s 2016 presidential field on April 7, multiple sources inside Paul’s camp told MSNBC on Tuesday. The announcement, scheduled to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, will serve as the official campaign launch for Paul, who has spent months traveling to early voting states to assess whether his largely libertarian message will catch fire with the party’s conservative base.

“This will be an official announcement, not an exploratory committee,” said a source close to Paul who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss his plans. “Everything will happen pretty quickly over the next couple of weeks,” another source close to Paul told msnbc.

Doug Stafford, executive director at RandPAC, Paul’s political action committee, had no comment.

Paul is set to travel to the four major early voting states immediately after the announcement, aides said. He will host events in Milford, New Hampshire, April 8; Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina on April 9; Iowa City, Iowa on April 10; and Las Vegas, Nevada on April 11.

Paul, a 52-year old ophthalmologist, is the son of Ron Paul, the well-known Texas libertarian congressman who sought the presidency three times, in 1988, 2008 and 2012. The younger Paul has worked to reassemble his father’s passionate supporter base while also extending his reach into more traditional Republican audiences. Rand Paul has also courted voters not traditionally allied with the GOP, including young people and African-Americans. He recently joined Democrats including Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Cory Booker of New Jersey to introduce legislation loosening federal restrictions on the use of medicinal marijuana. (Read more from “Rand Paul 2016 Announcement Date: Senator Eyeing April 7 To Launch Presidential Campaign” HERE)

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Here’s What Rand Paul Has to Say About Jeb Bush

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) slammed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as a “Democrat-light” who’s “almost like Hillary Clinton but not quite,” in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News at the South By Southwest conference.

Paul also laid out his vision for his pathway to victory, should he jump in with a race for the White House as many expect him to—and explained how he plans to build a unique coalition of voters to win the GOP nomination and then the general election.

Paul told Breitbart News:

“We believe that the message of ‘leave me alone’ that forms sort of the ‘leave me alone coalition’ forms this group of people that we think supports the things I’m trying to do is a big enough and broad enough coalition to win in a Republican primary but is also a big enough and broad enough to bring independents and others afterwards. There are two different tactics you could try to do if you want to bring in independents: You could be Democrat-light and run the Jeb Bush campaign that’s uncomfortable with the grassroots of your party and you could run this campaign that’s like ‘I’m almost like Hillary Clinton but not quite’ and then you can get the independents or I think you could run a truly principled campaign as a Constitutional conservative but also still show how the message that big government messes everything up from business to taxes to regulation also can be applied to criminal justice. That big government messes up criminal justice and doesn’t treat people fairly because big government is incompetent. Big government is incapable of feting out justice sometimes because it is too large. So I think there is a possibility, a great possibility, a truly principled Constitutional limited government conservative message, could resonate out to a bigger audience. We try to take it everywhere. We also try to go where Republicans haven’t been going, to the tech community, to historically black colleges, to Berkeley, to places like that with a hope of showing that we can broaden the message. That’s what people will want if we’re the nominee.”

(Read more from “Here’s What Rand Paul Has to Say About Jeb Bush” HERE)

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Watch: Rand Paul ‘Shushes’ Anchor During Interview

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By Hadas Gold. Sen. Rand Paul reproached CNBC anchor Kelly Evans on Monday afternoon for what he said was a “slanted” interview that got no “useful information.”

Evans asked Paul about his comments on how vaccines should be a choice and about a Washington Post article that reported Paul appointed his own family members to a medical board he started.

“You have taken an interview and you’ve made an interview into something where we got no useful information because you were argumentative and you started out with so many preoppositions [sic] that were incorrect,” Paul said after Evans asked whether Paul had a response to the Washington Post piece.

(Read more about what Paul did to the anchor during interview HERE)

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Rand Paul Gets Booster Vaccination to Prove He Believes They are Safe

By Jeremy W. Peters. Senator Rand Paul, facing a backlash over his comments that cast doubt on whether he believes vaccines can pose a health risk to children, asserted on Tuesday that he believes vaccinations are indeed safe and that all parents should have their children inoculated.

To prove his point, Mr. Paul invited a reporter with him to watch him get his booster vaccination for Hepatitis A.

“It just annoys me that I’m being characterized as someone who’s against vaccines,” Mr. Paul said as he settled into a chair in an examination room in the Capitol physician’s office. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Rand Paul: Vaccines Can Lead to ‘Mental Disorders’ (+video)

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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that while “vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we had,” he claims he has heard of children who got mental disorders from vaccines on Monday’s “Closing Bell” on CNBC.

“I think vaccines are one of the greatest medical breakthroughs that we had. I’m a big fan and a great fan of the history of the development of the smallpox vaccine, for example, but for most of our history they have been voluntary. So, I don’t think I’m arguing for anything out of the ordinary, we’re arguing for what most of our history has had” he said.

“I think public awareness of how good vaccines are for kids and how they are good for public health is a great idea, we just appointed a Surgeon General,” he continued. “These are some of the things that are things that we should promote as good for our health, but I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary about resorting to freedom.

“I’ll give you a good example, the Hepatitis B vaccine is now given to newborns. We sometimes give five and six vaccines all at one time. I chose to have my delayed. I don’t want my government telling me that I have to give my new newborn the Hepatitis B vaccine, which is transmitted by sexually transmitted disease and/or blood transfusions… so I had mine staggered over several months. I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines. I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea, I think they’re a good thing, but I think the parent should have some input. The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children and it is an issue of freedom.”

The discussion then turned to Paul’s proposed tax holiday that would allow companies who earn money overseas to bring it back to the US at a one-time corporate rate of 6.5 percent. (Read more about Rand Paul said HERE)

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Rand Paul: Audit the Federal Reserve (and Reject the Clinton-Bush Dynasty)

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By Ben Smith. Sen. Rand Paul is reviving his push to audit the Federal Reserve.

The Kentucky Republican and presumptive 2016 presidential candidate said he wants to bring several of the Fed’s monetary activities under congressional oversight.

In a statement released Monday, Paul said it was time to end the secrecy behind the Fed. He believes an audit is the best way to do it.

“[An] audit of the Fed will finally allow the American people to know exactly how their money is being spent by Washington.” Paul said.

He slammed the Fed’s current operating practices, saying it works “under a cloak of secrecy and it has gone on for too long.” (Read more about Rand Paul saying to audit the federal reserve HERE)

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Rand Paul Releases ‘Secret Tape’ of a Fake Phone Call Between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush

By Mike Allen. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the 2016 field’s most prolific adopter of social media, has posted what aides wryly call a “secret tape” of a fake phone call between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

RAND PAC, Paul’s political organization, used actors to portray the conversation, which hits both rivals on the dynasty issue.

“Bush” tells her he’s thinking about running for president: “I just wanted to call and give you a heads-up in hopes we could work something out.”

“Clinton” says: “We both agree on so many issues: bigger government, Common Core, and amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

[Listen to the “secret” conversation HERE]

Paul, who this week gave an interview to CNN via Snapchat, plans to distribute the audio via Twitter and other social platforms. (Read more from this story HERE)

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Rand Paul on Amnesty: ‘The 11 Million are Never Going Home’

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsIn New Hampshire yesterday, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul told a group of supportive Republican legislators that the country needed some immigration fixes. A few hours later, I asked whether, if elected president, Paul would move to overturn the Obama-era executive orders that have essentially legalized millions of immigrants.

“I’ve always been of the opinion that we should do things the proper way,” Paul said. “I am in favor of doing immigration reform, but it should be done in the proper fashion.” He cited the the need to tighten border security before attempting anything else, but added that “the 11 million, I think, are never going home, don’t need to be sent home, and I would incorporate them into our society by giving them work visas and making them taxpayers.”

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the House GOP was voting to defund Obama’s immigration orders. Paul didn’t necessarily disagree with the House objection—at one point, he quoted Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws” to explain why the executive orders couldn’t be sustained. But on policy, he was set apart from more than 200 Republicans ready to undo an order that granted legal status to minors brought into the country by their parents. In the summer of last year, in fact, Paul supported exactly that. And now, as a potential presidential candidate, he wasn’t leading with it. (Read more about Rand Paul on amnesty HERE)

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Rand Paul on Mitt Romney’s 2016 Run: ‘It’s Time for Some Fresh Blood’ (+video)

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney doesn’t have the support of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul as he explores a presidential bid.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal today, Paul dismissed Romney’s possible third run and said that Romney had previously failed to “attract a big enough constituency to win.”

“I think he’s had his chance,” Paul said, “and I think it’s time for some fresh blood.”

Romney won the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 but lost to President Barack Obama in the general election. (Read more on what Rand Paul says about the 2016 run HERE)

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Rand Paul Hints at 2016 Run in ‘Festivus’ Grievances

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, hinted at a possible 2016 run for president Tuesday in his annual airing of grievances for Festivus.

In a lengthy series of tweets — some mostly serious, all at least somewhat humorous — Mr. Paul said having a “fashion forward” campaign is one key to success in politics, posting pictures of both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former presidential candidate Rick Santorum in sweater vests, but said he prefers to wear something different.

“Of course, everyone has to be themselves, and I have my own style. I think this will be a popular item this year,” he said, posting a picture of a black sweatshirt that said “Rand Paul 2016.”

Mr. Paul and Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, have been feuding over the president’s recent change to U.S. relations with Cuba, but in the holiday spirit, Mr. Paul left the other possible 2016 contender out of his annual grievance list, a “custom” of Festivus.

“Tempting to air a grievance @marcorubio again, but we’ve done that enough for this week. Instead I will say an early Merry Christmas,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.