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Subscribe to RSSThe Herman Cain campaign is blaming the Rick Perry campaign for leaking the story about sexual harassment charges against him at the National Restaurant Association in the late-1990s, a charge the Perry campaign vehemently denies.
"The Perry campaign needs to apologize to Herman Cain and his family," Cain Chief of Staff Mark Block said on Fox this afternoon.
Perry campaign spokesman Ray Sullivan told NBC's Alex Moe today, "No one at our campaign was involved in this story in any way. Any claim to the contrary is patently false. The first we learned of it was when we read the story in POLITICO."
Cain earlier today in an interview with Forbes blamed a consultant who worked with him during his 2004 run for Senate in Georgia -- DC-based consultant Curt Anderson, who Perry recently hired. Anderson denies he was a source of the leak.
“I told my wife about this in 1999 and I’ve got nothing to hide,” Cain said. “When I sat down with my general campaign consultant Curt Anderson in a private room in our campaign offices in 2003 we discussed opposition research on me. It was a typical campaign conversation. I told him that there was only one case, one set of charges, one woman while I was at the National Restaurant Association. Those charges were baseless, but I thought he needed to know about them. I don’t recall anyone else being in the room when I told him.”
In response, Anderson told NBC's Carrie Dann in a statement: "I’ve known Herman Cain for about seven years. I was one of several consultants on his Senate race in 2004 and was proud to help him. I'd never heard any of these allegations until I read them in Politico, nor does anything I read in the press change my opinion that Herman is an upstanding man and a gentleman. I have great respect for Herman and his character and I would never speak ill of him, on the record or off the record. That's true today and it's not going to change."
Also today, Chris Wilson, a GOP pollster aligned with the pro-Perry Super PAC "Make Us Great Again," went on a local Oklahoma City radio show and said he witnessed inappropriate behavior on Cain's part while he was at the National Restaurant Association. Wilson was the pollster for the restaurant association, he said on the radio show.
But he told First Read he acted on his own and was not the source of any leaks.
"To be clear, and you can ask any of the reporters covering this story, I had nothing to do with leaking this in any way," he said in an email to First Read, "and I've never discussed or shared this story with any of my clients - period."
Wilson was not a source for NBC's independent reporting and confirmation of various aspects of this story. Politico first reported on the radio interview.
Wilson told KTOK that he expected the allegations to come out eventually, that they were widely known within the association, and that he personally witnessed inappropriate behavior "a couple times."
"I was actually around a couple times where this happened," Wilson said. "Anyone who was involved with the restaurant association at the time knew that this was going to come up."
He added, "My bet is the NRA ... is going to have no choice but to release her from the confidentiality agreement, because I think Herman Cain has already violated it by addressing it on the air last night."
Wilson described the woman who would like to come forward as a lower-level staffer, about two years out of college.
"This all occurred at a restaurant in Crystal City (Va.)," Wilson said. "And everybody was very aware of it. ... It was only a matter of time, because so many people were aware of what took place" and that she left and why she left. "If she does go on the air and talk about it, I think it'll be the end of his campaign."
He deferred on the specific details.
And Politico's Jonathan Martin reports tonight: "In a meeting at the Capitol Hill Club, Cain said he and his campaign had found out who was purportedly leaking word of his behavior toward female employees at the National Restaurant Association and that a report was coming out that would disprove the charges, according to the chief of staff to one of the Georgia members."
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Move along folks... nothing to see here...
Just one parasite devouring another!
I still can't get over how the party of 'personal reponsibilty' NEVER uphold their own standards!
I'm gonna whip up a fresh batch of *popcorn* while the finger pointing continues... lmao!
And now a conservative talk show host, Steve Deace is saying that Cain said inappropriate and awkward things to his staff. Read the story on Huffington Post.
Is this what your referring to NDD?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/herman-cain-sexual-harassment_n_1072275.html
Hard to believe that they were kissing each other a*** just a few weeks ago. That is what happens when you call "fiends"a bunch of vultures like the presidential hopefuls.
The Herman Cain campaign is blaming the Rick Perry campaign for leaking the story about
sexual harassment charges against him at the National Restaurant Association in
the late-1990s, a charge the Perry campaign vehemently denies.
It seems that Cain took a page from the Democratic Playbook, blame someone else for the problems.
If this is the type of person Herman Cain is, then he does NOT need to be considered as a candidate for the President of the United States, we have had enough infidelity in the White House, maybe it is time for some "wholesome" people to be there.
Cain is sucking wind here.
There isn't very much he can do at this point to breathe life back into his campaign.
Just shows to go you if you do not get the Rove blessing, then you will not be anointed the Repub Messiah. Who will bring the Repubs back to the promised land? Back from exile?
I don't know, but this is fun to watch them tear each other up and twist in the wind.
There isn't so much as ONE sane person left in that party.
That's it Feisty! And the dripping continues....
BigBear says maybe it is time for some "wholesome" people to be there."
We have a wholesome family there now whom we are very proud. They are an exemplary family of great family values.
LoL This just gets better and better.
More and more skeletons keep falling out of his closet! Interesting. What will they find on the rest of the candidates? Keeps getting better and better! Who will be the next flavor of the week....TPGOP is quickly running out of candidates!
"We have met the enemy and he is us!" Pogo by Walt Kelly
nurse,
the only possible way to say "keeps getting better and better" is in a sarcastic vein. The health of our system depends upon viable candidates on both sides. To me (despite, I grant you, moments of complete hilarity and "you gotta be kidding") the seeming inability of the Republican party to put forth a strong, respectable contender for the White House is just sad.
Being a independent, thinking conservative (an oxymoron to many of you here, but we do exist!) the "Anybody But Obama" mantra to me is as utterly ludicrous as the idea that the Republican party is deliberately trying to destroy America.
Mark in SoCal
You are right, they are not trying to destroy America.... they just are~! they don't know it because all they want to do is line up the pockets of the rich in "hopes" that it trickles down to the masses...
...the rich have shown that their primary goal is to make money in a free society capitalistic way (after-all that's how most get rich), while secondary to that is to create jobs (does not matter if its in the USA or somewhere else... guess what it's mostly somewhere else right now).
So while I applaud your free thinking conservatism, we need more free thinkers in you party to help shape it back to what it used to be - people with thoughts, rather than zombies (ala Bachmann) who stare like a deer in head lights when you discuss tangible matters of concerns to America's citizenry.
But they are destroying America as colateral damage from what they admitedly ARE trying to do: i.e. make the American Head of State appear to be a failure and thus insure he only gets one term.
Assinine!
Cut off their nose to spite their face, as the old saying goes.
I don't believe America wants nor should have that type leader - one who causes harm to this nation, can not put country ahead of Norquist pledge, can not get priorities straight, and does not have enough foresight to see the damage their actions cause before acting. JMO
"This just gets better and better."
No, Anna Molly. It's worse and worse. Now, we're probably going to know who the Republican nominee is before Thanksgiving. For us political spectators, that's a terrible situation.
And from the perspective of the incumbent, it's not much better. That likely Republican nominee is much less apt to put his foot in his mouth when not pressed by a challenging field of candidates. Slick Willard doesn't wear well on people. The Republicans know that. If this was a closely contested nominating race, eventually even some of his supporters would just slowly move away. Now, the party can hibernate its "safe" candidate, watch the development of economic events, and cherry pick the prominent issues next summer. This is the ideal for the Republican Party.
Tunde,
I believe we have met before on this board. I appreciate your comments.
Cheers!
Can anyone here plese explain in detail exactly what Herman Cain did, and with who?? ANYBODY??
na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, good bye.
I hope that I'm wrong on this, but if any one of these women is non-minority/white, the Pizza Man will really find out what a 'witch hunt' is! High-tech lynching.......
The Teavangelicals will have his hide and his fancy hat as they derail his non-candidacy!....but they will do it ever so cleverly, since they aren't racists!
Makes sense if Perry was the one to leak this story. But I doubt Perry's camp had the story.
Rove. Romney. That's where I'd look. Romney did a real smear campaign against one of our former governors. And Rove? Well, this is what Rove does. He sees Cain becoming more popular and this would hurt his candidate - Mitt. Also, I can't remember, but did this story originate in Politico? If so, Politico has received a great deal of negative publicity because of their so called interviews with Dick Cheney. They love Cheney.
Seems to me this would be the outfit that Rove would go to if he wanted something leaked. It takes the heat off Romney, where a bombshell was reported this week over @ Think Progress-
_________________
Mitt Romney, his son Tagg, and Romney’s chief fundraiser, Spencer Zwick, have extensive financial and political ties to three men who allegedly participated in an $8.5 billion Ponzi scheme. A few months after the Ponzi scheme collapsed, a firm financed by Mitt Romney and run by his son and chief fundraiser partnered with the three men and created a new “wealth management business” as a subsidiary.
Follow up:
Yesterday, ThinkProgress released our investigation of the Romney family’s investment firms, including Solamere Advisors and its parent company, Solamere Capital, which is run by Mitt Romney’s son Tagg. The report found that Tagg founded his firm using $10 million of Mitt’s money, and later partnered with a group of brokers who allegedly helped perpetrate one of the largest Ponzi schemes in modern history, the $8.5 billion Stanford Financial Group.
After our report, the Romney campaign released a statement to ABC News and the National Journal simply attacking ThinkProgress as a “a left-wing blog with a highly partisan agenda.” Despite calling our story “false material,” the Romney spokesperson did not directly dispute any of our assertions. The Romney campaign has not explained why, for instance, Tagg Romney falsely claimed that his Solamere Advisors partners were “cleared” of wrongdoing in connection to the Stanford Financial Group Ponzi scheme.
Now, it appears that one of the firms is trying to cover up its tracks. Sometime last night, Solamere Advisors, the firm run by brokers who allegedly took part in the Stanford Ponzi Scheme, deleted the section of their website that lists Tagg Romney and Spencer Zwick, the Romney for President lead fundraiser. View a screen shot of the current web address, which shows a “404 File or directory not found” error message-
In an interview last month, Tagg Romney told ThinkProgress that his partners were “cleared” from the Stanford Ponzi scheme lawsuit to retrieve what prosecutors believe are the fraudulent gains made by his partners, Tim Bambauer, Deems May, and Brandon Phillips. He also suggested that his former Stanford employee partners were the true victims since they had been promised bonuses that they had never received. In fact, in court documents obtained by ThinkProgress, none of the men have been cleared, and a court-appointed audit found that they made about $1.6 million in participating in the Stanford Ponzi scheme.
Oh yes -- it's a vast Perry conspiracy!! Get a clue Pizza Man -- Perry is way too stupid to pull this off. This was probably leaked by Karl Rove.
If you were sexually harassed by me(Cain)....Blame yourself!
Perry did this???
Well lets thank him and his campaign people for Exposing Herman Cains despicable dirty secrets!
Thanks Rick Perry, God bless ya!!
Wilson told someone else who leaked it.
I wonder what Palin's opinion is of this whole fiasco. Usually she is in the background tweeting some kind of nonsense. Oh yeah I forgot...she has a "black man fetish" and therefore would be a little bias. Never mind then...
Klondike Barbie can't get herself enough 'jump shots'! ;o)
Where is Sister Sarah?....She supported Slick Rick back last November in the Governors race........
Sarah, Rick need you!
Who planted that idea in Perry's head? ......to rip the covers off Herman Cain
Put nothing past Sarah
Ah, autumn in the USA. The leaves are turning and the GOP are 'Swifit Boating' each other. Don't you just love the change of seasons?
Rahm Emanuel has also now been named as a source for the sexual harassment stories about Cain.
The Obama rumpswabber brigades, aka the Soros paid monkeys, aka Feisty's fools, aka "libs R us", wont joke about that one.
No clever jokes about the Godfather, dead fish, Chicagoland hits...nothing to see here, move along.
BOB
Can't match Feisty's wit, still your superb name calling deserves a shout out:
Emanuel is a dem DON. Those filthy libs are all the same. He framed Nixon, consorts with the gays, helps lazy poor people, trucks in illegals, and was the mastermind behind 911. RAHM is a Muslim name! Birth certificate now!
Nighty night.
so it did us all a favor especially the republicans who wont nominate him then find out in october before the election....
Bob,
Call em what they are. These are Obama leg-humpers.
The idea is to deflect America's attention away from the horrible Obama depression. This won't work when Christmas draws near. Folks will be gazing at the empty landscape under their Charlie Brown Christmas trees, and who do you think they are going to blame??
Then they will be treated to a tv show on MSNBC, showing the Obamas opening up their fine presents and smiling, like they just hit the lottery.
Joe e. Parent They should blame Congress. Its not called the do nothing congress for no reason.
Hermy, stop blaming hairy Perry. I know who did this. Her name is KARMA: mother of all b!tches.
She's coming for payback. She's remembers when the GOP went uber-KKK in TN. They ran TV ads hinting that black candidate Harold Ford, DARED to hit on a white woman. The ultimate crime to many southern teabaggers. By the time Ford showed that the ad was false and blatantly racist, the teapublican won in by a hair.
Teapublicans just learned: when you live by the sword, Karma will b!tch-slap you, take your sword and use it for a too close hair cut. The only explanation for the biblical plagues that takes out every tp candidate.
Now a 3rd person ...cant blame Perry for that !
Don't blame the liberal press and your adversaries, if you had to settle allegations of sexual harrassment, blame yourself!
Just remember...don't hold your breath waiting for an apology from all the right-wing blowholes who blamed the left for this whole fiasco.
Ha,
Go back 2 days and read all the posts from the constantly misinformed Teaheads.....
They were sure this was coming from what they call, "The Obama Smear Machine"
Maybe his pizza deluxe 999 special made him horny and uncontrollable.
Btw, Perry does not owe anything .... zero .... nada!!! A Cain's personal life is open season to scrutiny by the public to judge whether or not he is fit to be a Presidential candidate .
an people say that television is the vast american wasteland...not anymore with 18 more gop debates...please someone throw in the towel my sides are killing me from laughing...
whats good with gop canidates eating eat other is it red wine or white....
this is the greatest who dunnit...karl rove my bet......
all on halloween always loved the holidays
Where is the accountability from Herman Cain? There are now numerous, serious allegations of sexual harassment against this joker. Instead of fingering everyone from the "liberal media" to rick Perry as the culprits, the blame should rest with the man himself. Cain's behavior has obviously met a pattern of disturbing disrespect for women. It's laughable that Cain's story has changed so much, more so now that he has shifted blame from the press to Perry's camp. He needs to come clean immediately. http://www.sunstateactivist.org
Mark in SoCal
You are right, they are not trying to destroy America.... they just are~! they don't know it because all they want to do is line up the pockets of the rich in "hopes" that it trickles down to the masses...
...the rich have shown that their primary goal is to make money in a free society capitalistic way (after-all that's how most get rich), while secondary to that is to create jobs (does not matter if its in the USA or somewhere else... guess what it's mostly somewhere else right now).
So while I applaud your free thinking conservatism, we need more free thinkers in you party to help shape it back to what it used to be - people with thoughts, rather than zombies (ala Bachmann) who stare like a deer in head lights when you discuss tangible matters of concerns to America's citizenry.
the republican party use to at least just be the party of bad ideas now its the party of bad people...they've moved so far right i don't remember the gop of my youth....
Very True Marc,,
Long gone are the Eisenhowers & Teddy Roosevelts
i'm missing newt ...with these guys
Libs don't get caught up in their little circus or it will be Mitt on the inside of the White House and Obama with out a job, at least he will be able to get 99 weeks.
Hillary 2012
i'm obama i'm throwing biden under the bus running hillary as v.p. getting her ready to run in 2016 and your right romney would be a great pres he agrees with both sides of the aisle....ha ha ha ha ha ha
perry and cain implode and romney wins palin third party....i'm taking bets she can't win but the pub....oh man...she'll be marie antionette
Marc I don't want Mitt in the White House,Palin can't win that's why she isn't running.You know for a fact if she thought she had any chance she would be on the tube EVERYDAY AND NIGHT. I don't want ANY GOPER but I'm done with Mr. Obama he should be a one termer we cant wait until 2016 for Hillary.
Hillary 2012
Mitt is going to be in the White House ! the only choice !!! Romney 2012