Rand Paul quickly turned reports of a collaborative effort against him by CNN’s Elise Labott and a former Hillary Clinton aide into a fundraising email, urging his supporters to not let the “media’s shenanigans” silence his message of liberty.
A new batch of State Department emails released to the website Gawker on Tuesday reveal that Labott, CNN’s Global Affairs Correspondent, and Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state, coordinated a series of tweets aimed at making Paul look bad for his line of questioning during a 2013 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Benghazi.
Emails show Labott also tweeted positive quotes from Clinton’s testimony before the committee, per the instruction of Reines.
“The truth is, I’m fed up with stories like this,” Paul wrote to his supporters Wednesday.
He continued, “First, it was news that former Clintonista George Stephanopoulos tried to hide fat contributions to the Clinton Foundation while masquerading as an objective news anchor. Then the American people witnessed the utter embarrassment of the CNBC debate. And now this?
“Is it any wonder why recent polls show 60 [percent] of Americans don’t trust the news media?” the Kentucky senator wrote.
Paul later suggest the “biggest story” the media should be covering is his “campaign’s growth over the past few weeks.”
“After winning the night with my strong performance during the last Republican debate, my campaign has seen a massive increase in momentum, fundraising and on-the-ground grassroots support,” he wrote.
Paul hauled in $2.5 million in the third fundraising quarter, roughly half the amount raised by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and less than a quarter of the $12.2 million Texas Sen. Ted Cruz raked in.
The libertarian firebrand, who’s seventh in the Washington Examiner’s latest presidential power rankings, is polling right on the line of being excluded from the fifth Republican prime-time debate in December.
