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Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) appeared on Fox News’ “Hannity” this week to discuss the origins of the Steele dossier. He said it should really be called the “Simpson” dossier. Although Christopher Steele likely contributed “stories” to the dossier, and his years of experience in British intelligence lent credence to the document, Nunes believes that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson may actually have written the majority of it. In his book “Spygate,” journalist Dan Bongino makes the same case. He points out the striking similarities between articles Simpson and his wife, Mary Jacoby wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 2007...

Back on April 26, 2016, liberal reporter Michael Isikoff reported on Trump’s chief campaign aide Paul Manafort connections to a billionaire Russian oligarch. This was a week after Donald Trump sealed the Republican nomination in the 2016 primary. Paul Manafort was questioned by officials in the Cayman Islands about his ties to billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate. Manafort was questioned by officials from the Cayman Islands in connection with a $26.2 million investment by Deripaska. Yahoo reported: A lawyer for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s chief campaign aide, acknowledged Tuesday evening that the longtime GOP operative has...

John McCain has been hammering rival Barack Obama for being little more than a vapid "celebrity" and "elitist." But The Nation has obtained a photo revealing just how star-struck a straight-talking maverick can become when offered the chance to celebrate his birthday aboard a yacht filled with celebrities--even if one of those celebrity types turns out to be an A-list con man. The photograph substantiates reports that in late August, 2006, McCain celebrated his 70th birthday aboard a yacht, the Celine Ashley, rented by A-list con man Raffaello Follieri and his then-movie star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. In the current edition...

Rick Davis, the campaign manager for 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is the loser in former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's decision to endorse businessman Donald Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination. "You win every day or you lose every day in a campaign at this stage down to the wire. And it was a big win day for Trump and a big lose day for Cruz," Davis said on "CBS This Morning." There's a "battle for the dwindling Carson vote," he said, which is why both Trump and Cruz are pushing so hard to build...

By Roger Stone The continued attacks on Sarah Palin by campaign Aides to Senator John McCain are almost beyond belief. Continued attacks on Palin, and on her performance as the Vice Presidential candidate by McCain Aide Steve Schmidt, are particularly ridiculous given Schmidt's track record of incompetence and missteps by the senior McCain aide during the Presidential campaign. Schmidt is, after all, part of the gang that had McCain suspend his presidential campaign and rush back to Washington to take the exact same position as Barack Obama on the first Federal bailout bill which in the end, only bailed out...

Combing through Colorado GOP Senate candidate Jane Norton’s campaign filings this week, Congressional Quarterly finds Rick Davis among the many notables on the impressive Norton donor list, a collection of interested parties that generated a cool half million dollars in 16 days. Who is Rick Davis? Grassroots Colorado Republicans not in the know already will be interested to learn he was an adviser to John McCain during last year’s failed presidential bid. Davis is yet another McCain connection for Norton, who has been taking heat from state conservatives as a doomed McCain-driven national party pick since even before she announced...

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, have you thought back to the 2008 election? Have you asked yourself who was responsible for that loss? Have you asked yourself who really should shoulder the blame and the burden for the defeat of Senator McCain? A lot of people have been speculating this, a lot of postmortems on the election. Let's go to the BBC. BBC World Service, host Stephen Sackur spoke with former McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and asked Rick Davis on whose shoulders rests the burden of the McCain defeat. DAVIS: We didn't successfully reach out to them. I mean, but...

News has been circulating around GOP insiders for weeks that McCain campaign honchos Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt were planning to blame Sarah Palin for McCain’s loss. This was expected to be an effort to punt the blame for their own failures to the side of the ticket that was most popular with the base, attracted the largest rally crowds, and scared the living bejeepers out of the opposing party.

Rick Davis vs. George Stephanopoulos on ABC Polling (video)

The Talk Shows Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain; David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.; former Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn.FACE THE NATION (CBS): David Axelrod, campaign adviser for Barack Obama; Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and John Ensign, R-Nev.THIS WEEK (ABC): David Axelrod, campaign adviser for Barack Obama; Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain.LATE EDITION (CNN) : Sens. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.; Govs. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Mark...

John McCain's campaign manager says he is reconsidering using Barack Obama's relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue during the election's closing weeks. In an appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt's radio program, Davis said that circumstances had changed since John McCain initially and unilaterally took Obama's former pastor off the table. The Arizona Republican, Davis argued, had been jilted by the remarks of Rep. John Lewis, who compared recent GOP crowds to segregationist George Wallace's rallies. And, as such, the campaign was going to "rethink" what was in and out of political bounds. "Look, John McCain has told...

WASHINGTON – Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse. In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI's chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain's campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

-snip- With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice. I’m told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to...

Few advisers in John McCain's inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis's high-powered consulting firm. "Rick is a friend, and I trust him," McCain told NEWSWEEK last year. Last week, though, McCain's trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the...

The lobbying firm of John McCain's campaign manager was paid $15,000 a month for several years until last month by one of two housing companies taken over by the federal government, a person familiar with the financial arrangement said Tuesday night. That money from Freddie Mac to the firm of Rick Davis was on top of more than $30,000 a month that went directly to Davis for five years starting in 2000. The $30,000 a month came from both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the other housing entity now under government control because of the crisis in the financial markets....

Excerpt - WASHINGTON — One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement. The disclosure undercuts a statement by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years. ~ snip ~

McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis asked Sunday for a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to protest what the campaign called signs that the network is "abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race." Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to counter news coverage he considers critical. Politico has asked NBC for a response and will post that here when it arrives.

Rick Davis, the manager of Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, is a typical Washington insider in many ways, having long worked as both a lobbyist and a political operative along the intersection of politics, policy and money. Now Mr. Davis is overseeing new lobbyist-related guidelines that the campaign has issued in an effort to safeguard Mr. McCain’s reputation as an opponent of special interests. The plan, among other things, bars “registered” lobbyists, those who must file disclosure reports listing their clients, from working on the campaign. Mr. Davis, who last worked as a registered lobbyist in 2005 and took a...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) built a name for himself fighting to reduce the influence lobbyists have over Washington. Now his 2008 presidential ambitions may rest with a handful of lobbyists. After a disappointing first-quarter fundraising effort, McCain put two lobbyists -- Tom Loeffler and Wayne Berman -- in charge of raising cash for his campaign. This week, after burning through campaign cash in the second quarter, he moved another lobbyist -- Richard Davis -- into the role of campaign manager. In effect, that means lobbyists now both raise and spend McCain's campaign cash, fundamentally tying the most recognizable name in...

Disturbed by troubling connections and unflattering publicity, John McCain has just purged several prominent Washington lobbyists from his presidential campaign. Surely his intentions are laudable, but if Sen. McCain is consistent in ridding his campaign of such compromised people, he will find himself riding lonesome on the Straight Talk Express. That's because nearly all of his advisers, fundraisers and top staffers have worked on K Street, starting with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, and his senior adviser and spokesman, Charles Black. From the beginning, the McCain team has been thoroughly infested with representatives of corporate special interests, from the campaign's...