Free Republic

Beto O'Rourke raised $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign, his campaign said Monday, in what amounts to the largest announced first-day haul of any 2020 Democratic contender to date. The former Texas congressman raised $6,136,763 in online donations from all 50 states in the first day, his campaign said. That tops the $5.9 million one-day total Sen. Bernie Sanders announced after he launched his campaign. The closest other 2020 Democratic candidate to publicize their first-day fundraising total was California Sen. Kamala Harris at $1.5 million.

The official launch of former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign has been marked by a series of very bad new cycles, briefly interrupted by some quite positive ones. After disappearing for weeks on some sort of Simon and Garfunkle vision quest to explore his own feelings and find the Real America, O’Rourke decided that he was “born to run” for the presidency. And that’s when the oppo research started dropping. Some of it involved things we’d already learned during his Senate campaign, but those were mixed in with brand new and disturbing revelations.But that’s all behind him now....

Reuters bragged Friday about its scoop that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke was once involved in a notorious hacker group, but revealed in the process that one of its reporters willingly sat on the story until after O’Rourke lost his Texas Senate race to incumbent Ted Cruz. Reuters’ Joseph Menn reported exclusively Friday morning that O’Rourke, a former member of Congress and the latest Democrat to join the 2020 presidential race, had a secret membership in an infamous hacking group. The group, known as the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC), is the oldest and perhaps most influential collection of...

Reuters reporter Joseph Menn exclusively revealed on Friday that Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke belonged to one of the best-known groups of computer hackers as a teenager. Within minutes, his special report was the most popular story on Reuters.com here and was picked up by other news outlets. But the origin of the story goes back more than two years. Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the...

Beto O'Rourke was a teenage computer hacker who posted fiction about killing children, it was revealed Friday - a day after he threw himself into the Democratic president race. O'Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview with the author of a forthcoming book that he belonged to the Cult of the Dead Cow, the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. Members of the hugely influential CDC, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, have protected his secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. But O'Rourke said in an interview conducted during his failed run for the Senate...