GOP Super PAC Responds To Obama Cease & Desist

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President Donald Trump and his allies carried out a comprehensive election meddling scheme ahead of the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina last weekend. That included one pro-Trump super PAC’s refusal to abide by a cease-and-desist letter sent by a legal firm for former President Barack Obama, who demanded that they stop airing an ad featuring the former president’s likeness. The clips of Obama’s own past commentary were selectively edited to make it seem like he was criticizing his former second-in-command, Joe Biden, and the pro-Trump group — called the Committee to Defend the President, or CDP — pettily and punitively told Obama’s counsel that they’d show the ad to tens of thousands of more voters in response to the cease-and-desist demand.

The criticism that the ad tried to make apply to Biden was from Obama’s 1995 memoir  titled Dreams from My Father. Calling their ad a “lawful expression of political speech,” the group got pretty melodramatic in their response. They insisted:

‘CDP rejects these banal attempts to abuse the legal process and shut down grassroots-driven political speech your firm disagrees with, as doing so is wholly un-American. Our commitment to free political speech is absolute. Thus, in response to your outrageous attempt to disrupt the sharing of political ideas you disagree with to African American voters, CDP will not only refuse to take “Enough Empty Promises” down but will distribute this advertisement to an additional 50,000 South Carolina Democratic primary voters.’

Good for them! They’ve decided that their petty usurping of a widely liked former president’s likeness for their short-term political aims is some kind of grave issue affecting the very foundation of the Republic. Their response certainly fits well with the perpetual “poor me” pity party coming from the president himself.

No matter their efforts to smear Biden, the former vice president won the South Carolina Democratic primary, which took place the day after CDP’s own legal counsel sent the above-quoted letter. It’s unclear what their future advertising plans might be now that there won’t be another election in the state for awhile — and it’s also unclear whether Obama’s law firm, Perkins Coie, might decide to pursue this matter any further.

On his own time, Trump personally has repeatedly zeroed in on Biden for criticism, deriding the former Vice President as “Sleepy Joe.” Last month, for example, he tweeted:

Crazy Bernie takes the lead in the Democrat Primaries, but it is looking more and more like the Dems will never allow him to win! Will Sleepy Joe be able to stumble across the finish line?’

More recently, he rattled off a list of Biden’s supposedly disqualifying gaffes, tweeting:

Sleepy Joe Biden also said that guns killed 150 million Americans last year, wants to win Georgia on Super Tuesday (not up), and got his speaking location wrong again!’

Criticism of gaffes is rich coming from the guy who’s lied thousands upon thousands of times and proudly asserts that he’s “never understood wind,” among other things. Currently, despite Trump’s criticism, Biden generally leads in polls measuring hypothetical general election match-ups between the two of them.