Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:11 pm
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hammered Republican nominee Donald Trump’s lack of accountability and transparency Friday morning.
Team Clinton released a statement Friday morning citing “20 Questions Trump Is Avoiding By Not Holding A Press Conference,” based on the revelations of Donald Trump’s troubling foreign business interests and the ramifications for our national security.
The Clinton camp said it’s more urgent than ever that Trump release his tax returns, citing revelations in Newsweek by Kurt Eichenwald about the conflicts of interest inherent in the Trump organization’s business dealings in “more than a dozen countries on five continents — including Russia, Ukraine, Libya, Turkey, China, and Brazil.”
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The twenty questions are based on a tweet storm of Clinton’s on Wednesday.
Clinton is doing the press’ job for them, showing them where the bodies are buried in a way that she is uniquely qualified to do on this matter of foreign conflicts of interest based on her vast knowledge gleaned from her time as Secretary of State.
Of course no one can ask Trump anything right now, and his surrogates are busy making the usual empty non-statements that mean nothing, especially given that Donald Trump himself has said no one should listen to what the media reports his own campaign says. So there is no point in interviewing Trump surrogates.
Trump surrogates are also found of telling the press Trump won’t answer if he doesn’t want to, and how dare they ask questions with “negativity”. Just last night Katrina Pierson said, “Mr. Trump is going to be Mr. Trump. He will respond when he feels like it.â€
So… that’s a Trump middle finger to the press and the American public.
Just as there is no point in interviewing Trump unless you come prepared to hold on to the facts with a death grip, lest you make a fool of yourself by letting Donald Trump use you as propaganda fodder.
Donald Trump is the master magician who can distract the media with a big show while he gets away with saying and revealing absolutely nothing. (See his medical records show on Dr. Oz.)
After Trump joked that he would release his medical records because they were good, and he wouldn’t if they weren’t, Hillary for America chair John Podesta asked the logical question, “If Trump is only willing to release information that makes him look good, what else is he hiding?â€
The twenty questions are “a reminder of why Trump’s utter lack of transparency and disclosure have become an urgent concern with just over 50 days left in this election,” the Clinton team explains.
This is yet another reason why I took the position that Hillary Clinton needed to do press conferences. She is running against a man who demands that the media take him at his word and as long as Clinton refused to do a presser, it was hard to push back on Trump’s refusal to be accountable and transparent. Now that she’s taking questions from the press, Clinton is able to point to Trump’s lack of transparency on almost every issue, from his tax returns to his medical records.
Hillary Clinton is taking the lead with the media and is using her position to set narratives. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the reason Clinton can ask narrowly pointed questions on this specific matter is because she has actually been there, done that.
Hillary Clinton is not a reality TV personality running a slick flimflam scam on the American public. Hillary Clinton is a lifelong public servant who has lived her entire adult life in the public eye. We’ve even read 30,000 of her emails.
Yet we know almost nothing about Donald Trump that hasn’t gone through his publicity team’s propaganda machine, protected by vicious lawsuits and non-disclosure agreements for even the phone bankers.
The press needs to get on it ASAP because the countdown to race for the White House is on. Time to stop chasing what Trump says like a dog chasing its tail.
Tick tock, media.
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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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