A question asked of Hillary Clinton during a Facebook Q&A on Monday looks suspiciously as if it was planted as a part of her campaign’s effort to limn her as a spontaneous, humorous humanoid.
Claire Celsi, a self-described public relations practitioner in West Des Moines, Iowa, who volunteered for Clinton’s 2008 campaign, asked Clinton if she were a “pumpkin spice latte kind of gal” on Facebook. Clinton replied, “Ha! The true answer is I used to be until I saw how many calories are in them,” prompting a frenzy of news coverage from the MSM, including The Hill, Fox News, The New York Daily News, TIME, and Reuters, changing the narrative from Clinton’s emails to her culinary habits.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that Celsi has been quoted by WeAreIowa.com and again in August by NBC News supporting Clinton; she told NBC, “She’s the most qualified candidate we’ve had other than a sitting president, why would we not give her our full support? Sorry Bern boy. Don’t get me wrong, I love Senator Sanders—but she’s the Eleanor Roosevelt of our time.”
Clinton’s campaign staffers have planted questions before, notably in her failed quest for the 2008 presidential nomination. In three separate incidents, questions were planted to ensure Clinton could stage-manage her responses. ABC news reported that a Clinton staffer used Geoff Mitchell, a 32-year-old minister, at an Iowa event on April 2, to ask a question about Iraq;the same month, according to The Nation, a Clinton staffer “suggested that audience members ask the Senator a question about her confrontation with President Bush over Iraq deadlines.” In November 2007, Clinton’s campaign admitted that it arranged for a senior Clinton staffer to address a college student, Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, and tell her to ask a question about Clinton’s energy plan. A Clinton spokesperson acknowledged, “On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton’s energy plan at a forum… this is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.” Patrick Caldwell, a writer for Scarlet and Black, the student newspaper at Grinnell College, who broke the story, alleged that the Clinton campaign attempted to plant numerous questions at the event.
Clinton’s campaign staffers have planted questions before, notably in her failed quest for the 2008 presidential nomination.
Barack Obama responded to questions about the Clinton campaign’s admission soon after the revelation became public, asserting, “When I go into a town hall meeting, I never know what questions to expect and that’s a good thing because the people of New Hampshire should expect that their candidates are going to hear what’s on the voters’ minds and not what’s been concocted by the candidate’s staff.” He continued that planting questions is “not a practice that we’ve ever engaged in and it’s not a practice that we ever plan to engage in.”
Yet in 2013, Lois Lerner, the director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, told Celia Roady, a Washington tax lawyer who served on the IRS Advisory Committee on Tax-Exempt and Government Entities, to ask her a question after Lerner’s remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, enabling Lerner to publicly apologize for her actions, and head off an inspector general report that lambasted the IRS for its handling of tax exemptions for Tea Party groups,. Roady admitted, “On May 9, I received a call from Lois Lerner, who told me that she wanted to address an issue after her prepared remarks at the ABA Tax Section’s Exempt Organizations Committee Meeting, and asked if I would pose a question to her after her remarks. I agreed to do so, and she then gave me the question that I asked at the meeting the next day.”
As far back as 2009, reporters suspected that Obama might have pre-briefed certain reporters before press conferences. They asked his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, “Is this going to become a regular feature of President Obama’s news conference, that you all are going to bring people in here that you select to ask questions?” Gibbs responded, “I don’t have any – I won’t make any apologies for that.”