According to The New York Times, Neera Tanden, former Vice President Joe Biden’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), allegedly “punched” a reporter in the chest during the 2008 campaign when the reporter asked Hillary Clinton about her support for the Iraq war. Asked about the claim, Tanden said, “I didn’t slug him, I pushed him.”
The Times wrote in April 2019:
In 2008, Neera Tanden, then a top aide on Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign, accompanied Mrs. Clinton to what was expected to be an easy interview at the Center for American Progress, the influential group founded by top Clinton aides. But Faiz Shakir, the chief editor of the think tank’s ThinkProgress website, asked Mrs. Clinton a question about the Iraq war, an issue dogging her candidacy because she had supported it.
Ms. Tanden responded by circling back to Mr. Shakir after the interview and, according to a person in the room, punching him in the chest.
“I didn’t slug him, I pushed him,” a still angry Ms. Tanden corrected in a recent interview.
The Daily Beast reported on Monday that Tanden, who had issued 87,000 tweets since joining Twitter in March 2010, according to USA Today, had deleted over 1,000 tweets in the last month. The Daily Beast added, “A review of third party archiving services like the Internet Archive and Archive.vn show Tanden’s account began on Nov. 1 with 88,639 tweets, but had 87,588 as of Monday evening.”
“Tanden deleted some, but not all, tweets from her account lambasting prominent lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sens. Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Susan Collins (R-ME), and praising their Democratic challengers. It’s unclear when exactly Tanden deleted them, but many of the tweets were available at least until the fall, according to the Internet Archive,” The Daily Beast noted.
Appearing on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald stated:
Why Neera Tanden? She’s totally unqualified for this position. Like, she’s not an economist; she went to law school; she worked for Hillary Clinton, and then all she’s done at this think tank for the last ten years is raise millions of dollars from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, despots in the Gulf States, which is the real base in the Democratic party so they want here to oversee the regulatory and budgetary and economic policy of the administration on behalf of their real constituencies, which is all those people from whom she’s been raising millions of dollars. …
That just makes her an ordinary Democrat. She’s just a swamp creature in that regard. She’s a deranged and dangerous person. I don’t mean politically, I mean behaviorally. When she was working with Hillary Clinton to get Hillary Clinton elected, one of her own reporters at this think tank had arranged to have this interview with Hillary and asked Hillary about the Iraq war, and Neera Tanden was so angry she punched him. And then later she claimed she merely pushed him.
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