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Paul Sperry @paulsperry_ BREAKING: Sources say John McCain's longtime speechwriter and confidant Mark Salter wrote Cassidy Hutchinson's new "tell-all" book on Trump, "Enough"

Usually I’m reluctant to put words in the mouth of my late employer, Senator John McCain, other than those he instructed me to write at some point during our long association. Yet since his death I have so missed not only his company, but his voice in our national affairs, that I have at times been tempted to conjure it from my knowledge of the values and views that animated his distinctive appeals to Americans and the world. I wanted to hear him during President Donald Trump’s two impeachment trials. I wanted to hear him react to the travesty of...

Two former aides to the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) are publicly criticizing the Republican Party for seeking to cast doubt on the results of the Senate race in Arizona, where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is narrowly edging out Republican Martha McSally. The tweets by Mark Salter on Saturday and John Weaver on Sunday come amid ramped-up scrutiny of the race, in which Sinema leads by a little more than one percentage point.

WASHINGTON — Not long after Senator John McCain learned last summer that he had terminal brain cancer, he began convening meetings every Friday in his Capitol Hill office with a group of trusted aides. The subject was his funeral. He obsessed over the music, selecting the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” and several patriotic hymns. He choreographed the movement of his coffin from Arizona, his home state, to Washington. And in April, when he knew the end was coming, he began reaching out to Republicans, Democrats and even a Russian dissident with requests that they deliver eulogies and serve as pallbearers....

In a new book, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) writes that his battle with brain cancer has given him a sense of liberation to vote and speak his mind. “This is my last term,” McCain writes in his upcoming book The Restless Wave, which he co-authored with former adviser Mark Salter. An excerpt of the book was posted Monday on Apple News. “If I hadn’t admitted that to myself before this summer, a stage 4 cancer diagnosis acts as ungentle persuasion,” McCain continues. “I’m freer than colleagues who will face the voters again. I can speak my mind without fearing the...

Donald Trump's victory in Indiana came down quick as a guillotine—but even before the election results rolled in, the GOP faithful were jumping ship. Former John McCain aide Mark Salter declared his allegiance to Hillary Clinton earlier today. the GOP is going to nominate for President a guy who reads the National Enquirer and thinks it's on the level. I'm with her. — Mark Salter (@MarkSalter55) May 3, 2016 RedState blogger Ben Howe, who's promised to phone bank for Clinton if Trump gets the nomination, followed suit. #ImWithHer — Ben Howe (@BenHowe) May 3, 2016 Once it became clear that...

Longtime John McCain aide launched a scathing attack against Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Thursday, calling the former a con man with bad hair and the latter his accomplice. Mark Salter, who has worked for McCain for approximately two decades and co-authored numerous books with the Arizona senator, writes in RealClearPolitics that “either the phoniness in American politics has reached record levels or I’ve grown irremediably cynical in my old age” and that he was “referring, of course, to Donald Trump.”Trump, according to Salter, is a modern day P.T. Barnum, who enriched himself off of hoaxes and later started Barnum...

You might recall the name Mark Salter for the role he played as a speechwriter for Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) when he ran for president in 2008. In the years that followed his involvement on that failed presidential bid, Salter eventually evolved into a commentator and political analyst. Following McCainÂ’s failed campaign, Slater spent much of his time attempting to rehabilitate the image of his friend and former employer. In 2011, Salter wrote a meandering, discursive essay on how George W. Bush had failed to meet the expectations of posterity when he chose Dick Cheney as his running mate....

The phone rang and it was Ross Perot, who hasn't given an interview in years. Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, making him one of the strongest third-party candidates in American history, got straight to the point. "Remember what you wrote about John McCain in the March 13, 2000, NEWSWEEK?" "Sure," I lied. "When McCain called Perot 'nuttier than a fruitcake'?" The Texas billionaire, now 77, still has some scores to settle from the Vietnam era, and his timing is exquisite. Just days before the South Carolina GOP primary, he wants me to...

The environment the GOP candidate ran in, which grew worse the closer he got to Election Day, made a very difficult task close to impossible. In July last year, I boarded a flight from Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., to Manchester, N.H., in the company of Senator John McCain and his son, Marine Corps Private James McCain, who was scheduled to deploy to Iraq a couple weeks later. Raised in a military family, the senator was familiar with the experience of bidding good-bye to loved ones as they left for war. But Jimmy was the first of his seven...

With his electoral prospects fading by the day, Senator John McCain has fallen out with his vice-presidential running mate about the direction of his White House campaign. McCain has become alarmed about the fury unleashed by Sarah Palin, the moose-hunting “pitbull in lipstick”, against Senator Barack Obama. Cries of “terrorist” and “kill him” have accompanied the tirades by the governor of Alaska against the Democratic nominee at Republican rallies. Mark Salter, McCain’s long-serving chief of staff, is understood to have told campaign insiders that he would prefer his boss, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, to suffer an “honourable defeat”...

In his 2002 book, "Worth the Fighting For," John McCain offered this confession -- an acknowledgment of a restless mind: "Although I seem to tolerate introspection better the older I am, there are still too many claims on my attention to permit more than the briefest excursions down the path of self-awareness. When I am no longer busy with politics, and with my own ambitions, I hope to have more time to examine what I have done and failed to do with my career, and why."

For reasons of financial necessity, personal preference and plain politics, John McCain is gearing up to run one of the least traditional presidential campaigns in recent history. The problem is that even prominent strategists within McCain’s own party wonder if his unorthodox strategy will work. Facing the prospect of competing against a Democrat who is on track to shatter every fundraising record — and confronted by his own inability to rake in large bundles of cash — McCain and his key advisers have largely been forced into devising a three-pronged strategy that they hope can turn their general election weaknesses...