On Sunday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, political strategist Pat Caddell outlined his charge that Reuters tampered with its own daily tracking poll to manufacture a sudden surge for Hillary Clinton.
“They not only changed their formula, to put Hillary ahead. They went back and changed the results, for a week of results where Trump was ahead, and then they turned those into Hillary leads,” said Caddell. “They also erased all the former polling off the site. They didn’t tweak their procedure – they cooked it.”
“Never in my life have I seen a news organization, and a supposedly reputable poll, do something so dishonest,” Caddell continued. “What they have done is, they decided the people who said, ‘oh, I’m never for someone’ – oh, those must be Hillary votes. They used to be Trump voters.”
“They made a switch, as much as nine points, in their results from the beginning of last week, the 25th and 26th. It is, beyond doubt, the most outrageous thing,” he declared, noting that results in three- and four-way polls that include independent candidates Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were also skewed.
“This is what the media is willing to do, to try to elect her,” Caddell said. “This poll is nothing but a part of a media offensive. In the 45 years since I was a child, in top-level presidential campaigns, I have never seen the media on such a jihad, and so involved in hiding facts, and not following up. This is a crisis of democracy, what the press is now doing.”
He noted that Hillary Clinton made “big news” on Fox News Sunday when she claimed the FBI found her responses to questions about her secret email server to be honest and consistent, when in fact FBI Director James Comey said the opposite, when he declined to refer charges against her to prosecutors.
“That is language from another planet,” Caddell declared. “This woman, to make that assertion after all the proven lies, should be a big story, but it will not be.” He also noted the contrast between how Donald Trump’s appearance on ABC News over the weekend was immediately followed by a round-table of commentators attacking him, but Fox News staged no such ambush of Clinton.
Caddell furthermore dismissed Trump’s ABC News interviewer George Stephanopoulos as “a former Democratic operative, a Clinton contributor, and an absolute fraud as a newsperson.”
“It is unbelievable what he did. He interviewed Trump, and basically then had the Khan family – the Muslim mother and father of the soldier who was killed – and General Allen on to attack Trump after the interview. He showed them the interview and then let attack him, and then loaded a panel with people who are so negative,” Caddell complained.
He found the media far less willing to say anything about the “pall of corruption” hanging over the Democratic convention, or the Democrats’ reluctance to say a word about the issue, knowing how much it hurts Clinton.
“Not once, not once, was there a mention of the Clinton Foundation by Hillary, or Bill, or anybody, about what great work they do, because they dare not even raise it,” he observed. “Nobody said anything. The press, which have universally assaulted Trump, who got a big boost out of his speech – who won the speech by the way, of best speeches, beats her, and the press praises her, and they’re laying down, and this is ‘Reaganesque’ – this is about as Reaganesque as John Kerry in 2004, going up to the podium after all the admirals and generals surrounding him, and saying ‘I’m reporting for duty,’” he said. “I mean, that went over like a lead balloon.”
“My party never learns that you cannot just hoodwink the people,” said Caddell, a lifelong Democrat.
“Patty Smith, the mother of Sean Smith that was killed, who gave a very emotional speech at the Republican Convention – notice that she wasn’t interviewed by any of the Sunday shows. She wasn’t put on any of the networks. And she wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times,” he pointed out. “And that was about her son being killed because Hillary Clinton had directly lied about it.”
“The Trump campaign, and your listeners, and this election, understand – this democracy is under assault by a press, who I, in 45 years, have never seen so biased, and so on a jihad against one candidate,” Caddell declared.
He castigated Hillary Clinton’s rival Bernie Sanders for “taking a dive” in the Democratic primary.
“He deserted his movement,” said Caddell. “Could you imagine if he, on Monday, had said, ‘I told you this system was rigged. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, the DNC, it’s all there, the facts?’”
While Sanders backed away from making such an explosive charge on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, Caddell said the media was busy trying to reframe the issue as a story about Russian hacking, to distract voters from what the exposed DNC emails actually said about a rigged primary.
“The point is that Bernie Sanders could have gone out to his people – let me just give you this scenario. If he had gone out, and said to his supporters and delegates, ‘I’m withdrawing my endorsement of Hillary Clinton for now, I’m asking every delegate at this convention now to vote their conscience,’ he would have blown the convention up. He’d have blown politics in the country up. And there would have been 50,000 Sanders people surrounding that arena,” Caddell said.
“But that is one sold-out man, by the way,” he said of Sanders. “And at 74, you would think he didn’t have to do that.”
Caddell asserted that too many leading figures in the Democratic Party were more concerned with securing their positions, even in the twilight of their political careers, than standing on principle. He thought it should have been a big story that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and other Democrat leaders pressured Sanders into taking it easy on Clinton, furious that he would run against her at all.
“His supporters knew nothing about being sold out by Bernie Sanders, which is what they were,” said a furious Caddell. “They’re not going to get anything done with super-delegates. It is the same bait-and-switch the party has had to maintain power.”
“It’s not just the Democrats – remember what’s happening in Washington, the coalition against Trump, who stands almost alone, is also filled with these Bush-type Republicans, and establishment Republicans, who view him as a real threat to their ability to hold on to their party, and their own niche in this corrupt system,” he added.
Caddell charged that if the media had treated the DNC leaks as more than a two-day story, and done a bit more digging, they would have found “Bernie Sanders won Iowa, and they’re hiding the results.” He noted he was among the first, and most forceful, analysts to allege that the Iowa caucus results were rigged to make Hillary Clinton look like the winner by a hair, because even a razor-thin Sanders victory would have thrown the Democratic primary into chaos.
“You let yourself get raped like this,” Caddell said to Sanders. “Don’t tell me when you could fight back, and you don’t, that it’s okay.”
Looking ahead, he predicted that Trump would win over voters by continuing to attack media bias and a rigged political system. Caddell actually deployed some harsher language than Trump has to date, which is not an easy bar to clear.
“Reporters are like cockroaches,” he said. “I hate to say this to reporters, but anyway, you flip on a light in a New York apartment, and cockroaches run everywhere. That’s what happens when you start shining a light on the media for what they refuse to tell people. And the greatest crime is not that they’re saying you must vote against Donald Trump, that he’s evil. The greatest crime is that they are hiding facts from the American people, to fit their narrative. They are making themselves, as I’ve said before, the enemies of the American people.”
“The American people don’t think much of them now, and won’t think much of them,” he predicted. “But you cannot let them get away with this, the way people like Romney and others roll over and take a beating, because their consultants want to make sure they preserve their relationships in Washington with the political media.”
Caddell found encouraging signs that “the American people are clued in” about media corruption, citing research conducted by his colleague, Democratic pollster Doug Schoen, that the momentum of the 2016 race favors Trump, in part because of deep alienation against the existing political system, across the political spectrum.
“This election, right now, it’s hanging in the balance. Trump is the independent variable. If he can learn to hit big ground, and understand they’re going to go after him on everything, and discipline himself, he is the man to beat in this election,” Caddell declared, adding that Clinton “doesn’t have anywhere to go in this election, unless Trump blows himself up.”
Breitbart News Sunday airs from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time on Sirius XM Patriot Channel 125.
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