David Bossie, a conservative activist, propagandist, and con artist, was Donald Trump’s deputy campaign manager when he ran for president and then Trump hired Bossie as an adviser once he became president.
Perhaps no one better fit Trump’s particular personality – and this is not a compliment.
Bossie was “a Republican political operative with a history of dirty tricks and smears,” according to Media Matters, a self-described “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/about-us
https://www.mediamatters.org/david-bossie
Republicans hired Bossie for the same reason Dean Vernon Wormer hired Doug Niedermeyer in the movie Animal House – because he was “sneaky little shit.”
In the 1990s, Bossie was put in charge of investigating the campaign finances of then-President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater investigation. The New York Times reported that Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in a shady investment deal involving the Whitewater Development Corporation when he had been governor of Arkansas.
But Bossie’s methods were so extreme and so egregious and so illegal that they offended House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, who headed the House Government and Reform Committee.
Gingrich and Burton fired Bossie because he released the private prison conversations of Clinton’s jailed former associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell.
This was so objectionable that it offended Gingrich’s sense of ethics.
This was so objectionable that it offended Gingrich’s sense of ethics.
I repeated this sentence because it has never appeared in print before.
Bossie then served as an advisor for Trump after he became the U.S. president and became a regular contributor on Fox News.
Fox News’ Ed Henry was moderating a discussion between Bossie and a Black Democratic strategist Joel Payne when Payne referred to Trump’s dog-whistle racism and implied that Bossie, too, had made dog-whistle remarks, or the use of suggestive language to appeal to the GOP’s extreme right.
“I remember a simpler time when we didn’t have a president who was courting white supremacists from the White House,” Payne said, adding, “You don’t have to be a golden retriever to hear all the dog whistles coming out of the White House these days and from my friend David here.
Bossie then angrily responded: “You’re out of cotton-picking mind!”
“Cotton-picking mind?” Payne interjected. “Brother, let me tell you something, I got some relatives who picked cotton and I’m not going to sit back and let you attack me on TV like that.”
Fox News then issued the following statement: “David Bossie’s comments today were deeply offensive and wholly inappropriate. His remarks do not reflect the sentiments of Fox News and we do not in any way condone them.”
Bossie apologized.
Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Fox News knew what they were getting when they hired Bossie.
“Fox News got what it bargained for. Hire a Trumpite to hold forth on television, and it’s only a matter of time before something ugly, disrespectful or memorably stupid emerges,’” Wemple wrote.
Wemple then referred to CNN contributor Jeffrey Lord who was fired from the network for including a Nazi salute in a tweet in response to an activist with the liberal organization, Media Matters of America. Wemple also mentioned Corey Lewandowski, who was described as a “Trump guy,” who made “mocking sounds – ‘womp womp’ – after another commentator cited the case of a 10-year-old migrant with Down’s syndrome” who was reportedly separated from her family at the U.S.-Mexico border.
SEE COREY LEWANDOWSKI
Bossie than ran afoul of Trump after Trump became president after Bossie was accused of scamming “donors by flaunting President Trump’s name” and that “little of the money he was raising” was going to fund Trump’s political activity, as intended.
“The president was pissed,” one Trump campaign official told Axios. “He doesn’t like the idea that his supporters would be tricked into donating to things they thought were the campaign. . . . and he doesn’t like it when people benefit from using his name, especially financially.”
https://www.axios.com/2019/08/18/david-bossie-presidential-coalition-ceases-fundraising
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/07/trump-campaign-david-bossie-1309709
Trump’s beef with Bossie was not that he was scamming donors, it was that he wasn’t giving Trump a piece of the action.
So Bossie had now been fired for violating the sense of ethics of Newt Gingrich and Trump’s sense of right and wrong.
Trump ended his association with Bossie but then brought him back into Trump World because he needed people like Bossie to accomplish the sorted things he wanted to accomplish.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/07/trump-campaign-david-bossie-1309709
