Congress
An Elderly Lawmaker’s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?
A few weeks ago, my Blue Light News colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC’s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? “Yeah, sure,” Norton said.
Coming on the heels of multiple stories about Norton’s alleged cognitive decline, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton’s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat “wants to run again but she’s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what’s best,” a spokesperson told Wu. There was still no final decision.
It was all awkward and embarrassing — and did little to buttress Norton’s insistence that she’s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she’s running: “Yeah, I’m going to run for re-election.” And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that “no decision has been made.”
The spokesperson, Sharon Nichols, did not offer any explanation for the discrepancy. She also didn’t respond when I asked her for details of what happened or whether journalists should take future Norton statements at face value.
That last question is relevant even if you don’t much care about the electoral plans of one non-voting delegate. For people interested in how Washington works, it’s an increasingly common issue in our era of gerontocracy: Just how are you supposed to interact with an elected official who might not be all there?
It’s an ongoing private conversation among reporters, animated by a sense that the watchdogs haven’t been zealous enough — but featuring no real agreement on how to handle these moments.
“I’m on the fence about it,” said New York Times congressional reporter Annie Karni, the author of her own recent piece about Norton’s struggles. “Is it newsworthy to be even doing this dance where you ask her a thing, she says something that makes no sense, and staff has to walk it back? Like, what are we doing? Or are we showing the problem? I don’t know what the answer is.”
“Every reporter has a story about this,” said Kristin Wilson, who was a BLN Capitol Hill producer until last year. Incidents that couldn’t be explained away sometimes made news, like the time the late GOP Sen. Thad Cochran got lost in the Capitol, or the time a colleague had to instruct late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to “just say aye” at a vote. When Texas Rep. Kay Granger struggled with dementia at the end of her term last year, it fell to a Dallas news site to reveal it. But many quieter interactions involving nonsensical quotes never got published. “I think we have pulled punches,” Wilson said.
Wilson recalled an incident when her team was interviewing the late GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch for a story on senators’ hideaway offices: “Hatch kind of went off on a tangent of a story, and as he’s telling the story, his aide is just like looking at me and his eyes are just massive, like he knew Hatch had just sort of gone down a bad path.”
In the end, the tangent wasn’t germane to the story. “Blue Light News is like living in a small town,” Wilson said. “And you know all these people, and you’re around them all the time. Are you going to be that person in that small town that you’re in?”
For journalists, the answer to that question is supposed to be: Yes, that’s exactly who we are! But the exigencies of managing a Hill beat that requires a daily stream of scoops makes it tough to latch onto every potentially embarrassing comment. Publishing them, after all, might enrage the staffers who tip you to those scoops — and confuse readers who just want accuracy.
It turns out Norton’s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss’ comments without it becoming a story: There’s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.
Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. “My rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,” said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News. “People misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.”
Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be the substance. “Seems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,” Gillman told me. “Are you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?” Until Joe Biden’s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn’t always self-evident.
And it comes up particularly often in the Capitol, one of the strangest media environments in America, a place where beat reporters can count on running into VIPs in public hallways and asking for quotes on even the most obscure matters. It’s as if Hollywood reporters could count on buttonholing Clint Eastwood every time he was at the office.
For staffers, this means a lot of work keeping track of potential messes. Brad White, who ran Cochran’s senatorial office before the Republican’s retirement amid health problems at age 80, said his colleagues’ clean-up work was more often about vernacular than mental capacity. “He would confuse some reporters because somebody would say, ‘Well, how are y’all coming on the budget negotiations?’ And he would say something that was more of a generational statement from Mississippi, like, ‘Well, we’re getting down to the lip lock.’ And nobody knew what the hell that might mean.”
All the same, as Cochran struggled, White managed around the edges. “He was an older guy,” White said. “He’d have good days and bad days, and there were days maybe that I would decide today is not the day we need to talk about this issue.” In Cochran’s case, he said, the senator was planning to resign but the timing was complicated by a budget process. “If you’ve got a member that is facing those types of issues, and you can tell that they’re working their way out, then that deserves some grace,” he said. “If you got a member that has no business being there and they’re clutching onto it like the Pope, then maybe that’s worthy of a discussion.”
To their credit, Wu and Kapur both reported the interactions with Norton as they happened, and reported the office’s statements to the contrary. It was an easy call, they both told me: The question at issue — would Norton run again? — was personal and ultimately can only be answered by her. It’s not the same as flubbing details of a 1,000-page bill.
Ed Wasserman, the former dean of the University of California’s graduate school of journalism and a longtime writer about media ethics, thinks the journalistic hand-wringing about how to describe cringey moments may actually make it harder to enlighten the public: “One of the problems is that reporters routinely handle incoherence and inconsistency by ignoring it, so a decision to convey it to readers as significant already rests on a belief that there’s some underlying dysfunction,” he said.
Wasserman said the principled position ought to be that lawmakers’ moments of confusion are news, period. Cleaning it up “is not really an option,” Wasserman said. “This is clearly performance related. And their job performance is your job to report on.”
The challenge is that it’s also a reporter’s job to cover the day’s debate about a bill or a nomination. Inserting incoherent comments from a lawmaker can confuse most readers — even if it enlightens a subset of folks interested in that particular lawmaker’s state of mind. “It’s weird that in the Capitol, people know which lawmakers you can’t really talk to substantively, and avoid them,” said Karni. “When you’re not reporting on the age issue, which I have reported a lot on, I think it’s important to just know who is not able to participate like that.”
By way of example, she cites yet another kerfuffle over yet another Norton comment: In April, the lawmaker told a reporter that she might try to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. The news kicked off a round of Democratic agita about aging leadership clinging to power. Hours later, her office put out a statement from Norton taking herself out of contention. The incident may have said something about Norton, but it didn’t really help the (probably larger) number of people who just want to be up to date about the committee’s future.
“Is this productive? Is this fair? She’s clearly not running for Oversight. So having her say that, it created a dumb news cycle with this kind of faux outrage,” Karni said. “You could say, ‘Are you thinking about running for president?’ And she might say, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ So what are we doing when we’re asking that question?”
It makes for a weird status quo: One set of lawmakers who can be grilled about legislative issues, another who are considered out to lunch, everyone keeping secret mental lists of who’s who, and no one feeling able to publish them because, after all, who can really prove what’s going on in someone’s head?
“The conundrum is you’re not going to be able to reach that judgment without applying certain standards that you’re not necessarily able to reach because you’re not a psychiatrist or you don’t really know them,” Wasserman said. “But at the same time, you know enough. You see what’s an indication that they’re not enough in command of the intellectual challenges of the job. … You have no reason to apologize for that. It’s your job.”
Rep. Max Miller gave more than $70,000 in campaign cash to over a dozen congressional Republicans in the cycle’s most competitive races.
So far, most of those members aren’t saying whether or not they will return it.
The Dependable Conservative Leadership PAC kicked money to 16 vulnerable GOP candidates for Congress, according to FEC filings. The PAC is aligned with Miller, who has continued his reelection bid while denying allegations of domestic abuse.
The donations put these members in a politically delicate position as they have welcomed the cash in their fights to hold onto their seats this November — and help the party protect its fragile majorities in both chambers.
Spokespeople in the congressional and campaign offices for 13 of the 16 candidates who took the Miller-aligned money did not respond to requests for comment on if they planned to return the funding.
Only the campaign for Rep. Brad Finstad said it had already returned its contribution.
Meanwhile, a campaign spokesperson for Rep. Mike Lawler said the incumbent Republican had no plans to relinquish the money. He instead slammed Democratic challenger Cait Conley for attending a fundraiser hosted by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 after allegations of involvement in a prostitution ring.
And Derrick Van Orden, asked Tuesday night about the contribution he received from Miller during about an interview about the results of his state’s primary elections, refused to discuss the matter, calling the accusations against Miller “allegations” he had heard about “the day before yesterday.”
The recipients of Miller’s campaign cash who didn’t respond to inquiries include: Reps. Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Zach Nunn, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Nick Begich III, Tom Barrett, Juan Ciscomani, Gabe Evans, Tom Kean Jr., Jen Kiggans, and David Valadao.
Sen. Jon Husted is also staying quiet about whether he’ll return the cash. He previously said Miller should not run for reelection after Emily Miller — Max Miller’s ex-wife and Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno‘s daughter — accused her former husband of assaulting herself and their young child.
Democrats are already seizing on the matter, with a campaign spokesperson for Mackenzie’s opponent, Bob Brooks, saying in a statement the GOP incumbent is “open for business for whoever’s willing to pay up, no questions asked.”
Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said Tuesday Democrats are “shameless hypocrites who conveniently look the other way when their vulnerable members are bankrolled by scandal-plagued Democrats like [former Rep.] Eric Swalwell.”
The NRCC also claimed that some of the Democrats who said they’d give away Swalwell campaign contributions have, in fact, not returned the money as promised.
Unlike Miller, Swalwell resigned in April and ended his gubernatorial bid in California amid intense pressure from inside his own party over sexual assault allegations he denies.
What else we’re watching:
— NANCY PELOSI CORRECTS THE RECORD ON BIDEN: For the first time, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi disclosed what she told President Joe Biden before he withdrew his 2024 presidential reelection bid. “I only said to President Biden, ‘I’ve come to question the polling that you have and how your campaign is being conducted. I think there has to be a better campaign to win the White House,’” she shared Tuesday. Pelosi’s comments — shared on stage with Jonathan Martin at Blue Light News’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit — shed new light on the scramble that led to Biden dropping his campaign. But she pushed back on the narrative that she puppeteered the president’s withdrawal. She added she advised Biden to hear from outside pollsters and told him, “I think the public would like to hear that you’ve had testing that demonstrates that you can serve.”
— JEFFRIES VAGUE ON IMMIGRATION AGENDA: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday said Democrats are “committed to an accountability agenda” on immigration should they take the majority. But the New Yorker offered few specifics on what immigration policies a future House Democratic majority might pursue. “We’ll have a conversation about what dramatic change looks like” after November, Jeffries said, adding that what “unites the entirety of the House Democratic caucus family” is that “immigration enforcement should be fair, just and humane in this country.”
Riley Rogerson and Joey Fox contributed to this report.
Rep. Max Miller has kicked campaign cash to more than a dozen fellow Republicans competing in some of the midterm’s tightest races. Few are saying whether they now have plans to return the money as the Ohio lawmaker seeks reelection despite serious allegations of domestic abuse.
According to records filed with the Federal Elections Commission, Miller’s Dependable Conservative Leadership PAC has made contributions to 16 GOP incumbents struggling to hold onto their seats in Congress.
The money — more than $70,000 in all — has largely been donated in increments of $1,000, $2,500 or $5,000. In a few cases, such as with Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), the PAC maxed out with $10,000 donations.
Of these 16 Republicans who received money from Miller this cycle contacted this week by Blue Light News, only the campaign for Rep. Brad Finstad of Minnesota said it had already returned its $5,000 contribution.
A campaign spokesman for Lawler, meanwhile, said the incumbent Republican had no plans to relinquish the money, noting that Democratic challenger Cait Conley had attended a fundraiser hosted for her by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 amid a prostitution scandal.
But spokespeople in the congressional offices and campaigns for the other 14 candidates did not return requests for comment, underscoring the uncomfortable situation Republicans find themselves in as they seek to distance themselves from Miller without giving up any cash advantage in the final weeks leading up to the November elections.
Those staying silent now include Husted, who is facing a tough election against former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Husted said Miller should not run for reelection after Emily Miller — Max Miller’s ex-wife and fellow Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno’s daughter — accused her former husband of assaulting her and their young child.
Miller has denied the accusations. Spokespeople for his campaign and PAC did not respond to requests for comment.
Other Republican candidates who have remained quiet in recent days about whether they’ll give Miller back his money are Pennsylvania Reps. Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick, as well as Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
They also include Reps. Nick Begich III of Alaska, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, David Valadao of California and Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin.
Van Orden, asked Tuesday night about the $2,500 contribution he received from Miller during about an interview about the results of his state’s primary elections, refused to discuss the matter, calling the accusations against Miller “allegations” he had heard about “the day before yesterday.”
Miller will be the GOP candidate on the ballot this fall in Ohio’s 7th Congressional District after he rejected calls to get out of the race before a legal deadline this past week to replace him — forcing Republicans to support him if they want the party to hold onto the seat. Members of President Donald Trump’s political team also urged Ohio Republicans to hold off on a public pressure campaign to get Miller to drop out so as not to risk the party appearing ununified.
Polling now shows Miller trailing his Democratic challenger, Brian Poindexter, which could force the GOP to spend precious resources in a district that would otherwise be safely red — and possibly cost them a seat Trump won by double digits. Poindexter, a city councilmember and union ironworker, was added Tuesday to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “red-to-blue” program, reserved for congressional candidates who are seen as standing a chance of flipping a Republican-held seat.
But Miller’s baggage may not be confined to his race alone. Some Democrats are already using the unreturned campaign donations as fodder to hammer Republicans running in other contests around the country.
“Ryan doesn’t care,” said Benny Stanislawski, communications director for Democrat Bob Brooks, in attacking Brooks’ opponent Mackenzie. “That’s who he is: open for business for whoever’s willing to pay up, no questions asked.”
Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement Tuesday called Democrats “shameless hypocrites who conveniently look the other way when their vulnerable members are bankrolled by scandal-plagued Democrats like [former Rep.] Eric Swalwell.”
The NRCC also claimed that some of the Democrats who said they’d give away Swalwell campaign contributions have, in fact, not returned the money as promised.
“Nobody should take these slimeballs seriously when their supposed principles disappear the second they become politically inconvenient,” Marinella added of Democrats.
Unlike Miller, Swalwell resigned in April and ended his gubernatorial bid in California amid intense pressure from inside his own party over sexual assault allegations he denies.
Viet Shelton, a spokesperson with the DCCC, shot back that it is, in fact, Republicans who “spend all their time virtue signaling about how self righteous they are just to turn around and take dirty money from disgraced, disgusting, and abhorrent men … They should stop with the fake outrage.”
Some House Republicans continue to rally around Miller as the party seeks to hold onto its razor-thin majority: Just last week, Miller and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.)filed a new joint fundraising committee with the FEC.
Lunasaid in a recent text message to POLITICO that she would not get in the middle of a private matter between the Millers. Tuesday night, she said the committee was “not active,” adding: “nothing more to it.”
Samuel Benson, Lisa Kashinsky, Madison Fernandez and Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.
Democratic lawmakers are readying aggressive oversight of Paramount Skydance’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount’s top lawyer said Tuesday the company is “happy to cooperate.”
“We’re not naive to know that politics does not exist,” Paramount Chief Legal Officer Makan Delrahim said. “We’re not shocked about that. We’ll be happy to cooperate and really engage with Republicans and Democrats about any issue and aspect. This merger is actually going to be good not only for California, it’ll be good for America.”
Paramount has been “transparent” and responsive to lawmaker’s concerns,” Delrahim — who served as Trump’s antitrust chief in his first administration — said at Blue Light News’s The California Agenda: Sacramento Summit.
The merger of the media companies has become a flashpoint for Democratic outcry, as the party outlines a range of grievances that could resurface as a sweeping oversight effort if they take control of one or both chambers of Congress next year. Top Democrats already insist Paramount CEO David Ellison and his company have been less than forthcoming.
Democrats have blasted Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery as a gross antitrust violation with serious national security implications due in part to the involvement of foreign investment in the deal. And they have slammed Ellison for paying a $16 million settlement to President Donald Trump, which Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts claimed could be “bribery in plain sight” in exchange for the administration’s approval of the company’s merger with Skydance last year.
Ellison also last week tried to tamp down Democratic concerns he would influence the independence of news network BLN after the deal, after Paramount’s takeover of CBS News last year led to outrage from journalists that leadership was pressing for more favorable coverage of the Trump administration.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is leading 12-states in a lawsuit to block the company’s current merger with Warner Bros., and last week, a federal judge scheduled a March trial to decide whether the acquisition violates antitrust law. Paramount agreed to punt the merger until next year — precisely when Democrats hope to be back in power.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement to Blue Light News that Ellison “has evaded Congressional oversight of his work to create a mega-media empire designed to serve Donald Trump’s political agenda. If he thinks he can run out the clock on Congressional scrutiny of his massive media mergers and blockbuster corporate deals, he’s mistaken.”
Raskin called the investigation a “priority” and said “anyone involved should be prepared to answer under oath for their role in this brazen campaign to bend America’s free press to Donald Trump’s political, financial and personal will.”
Presented with Raskin’s statement, Delrahim said, “You can allege all you want. There is no corruption here.”
“We’d be happy to engage with Congressman Raskin and provide him, as we have, information,” Delrahim continued. “It sounds good, and I get it. It’s politics. But we respect his role and his important role in oversight. But just because he said so doesn’t mean that there is any corruption.”
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