Bloomberg’s Halperin: Kristol Third-Party Candidate is National Review’s David French

Tuesday on Bloomberg TV’s “With All Due Respect,” co-host Mark Halperin revealed the third-party candidate being teased by Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is the National Review’s David French.

French and Kristol declined to offer comment to Halperin and his co-host John Heilemann, but Halperin offered a brief biography of French.

“[E]verybody wants to know who is the independent candidate who Bill Kristol has been touting?” Halperin said in the opening of his the show. “According to our sources, we can report that the man being eyed by Kristol is a conservative writer and Iraqi war veteran named David French. You may not have heard of him. We hadn’t either. The big guessing game had been going on since Kristol tweeted this weekend that he had a candidate in mind that he said would be a strong candidate. John [Heilemann] and I both talked to Kristol and French. Both of them declined to comment. But here’s what we know — French is a staff writer for the National Review. He lives in Tennessee with his wife and three kids. We reached him tonight. He was traveling. He declined to comment, but two Republican sources who are intimately familiar with what Kristol has in mind say while French is not made a final decision, that is indeed who Bill Kristol was talking about. And John, he wrote about French in the Weekly Standard, hiding him in plain sight.”

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