The lifelong Republican who wrote the powerfully emotive and slanderous speech given at the Republican National Convention by Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the Benghazi victims, Sean Smith... says he won’t vote for Donald Trump this fall and could end up voting for Hillary Clinton.
Richard Cross, a former staff member for Maryland Republicans such as former Gov. Bob Ehrlich and former Rep. Helen Bentley, wrote in a Baltimore Sun op-ed that he authored the scathing televised remarks delivered by Patricia Smith at the Republican convention.
Once again in my opinion, Republicans have perpetrated another fraud upon America. We were made to believe that Patricia Smith’s speech was her own.
The person who (actually) wrote it can't vote for the person his speech was meant to help and will probably vote for the person he meant to hurt. Is there anything real about Republicans other than their lies, misrepresentations, hypocrisy, bigotry, racism, homophobia and misogyny? You can't believe a single word these people utter.
I am a lifelong political animal and a longtime Maryland Republican. I worked on the staffs of Maryland Congresswoman Helen Bentley and Congressman/Gov. Bob Ehrlich. I also served on the GOP staff of the House Financial Services Committee.
In fact, I personally drafted the speech of the "Benghazi mom," Patricia Smith. In that speech, I concluded with the following line: "If Hillary Clinton can't give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?" As a political speechwriter, that was something of a home run moment for me. The New Yorker called the speech "the weaponization of grief."
But weeks after the end of the 2016 GOP convention, I am confronted by an inconvenient fact: Despite what I wrote in that nationally televised speech about Hillary Clinton, I may yet have to vote for her because of the epic deficiencies of my own party's nominee.
President Eisenhower would have never proposed banning Muslims from America. Nor would President Nixon. Nor would President Reagan. Donald Trump has betrayed and perverted their legacies. Consequently, I no longer recognize my party.
I have never voted for a Democrat for federal office, but when I hear the president criticize the GOP nominee, I can't honestly disagree with him.
Regardless, the reality is, I cannot vote for Donald Trump. I could never vote for Donald Trump.
Remember this speech by Patricia Smith where she said that she holds Hillary Clinton personally responsible for her son’s death? Everybody thought she wrote it, but it turns out that the speech was written for her, which really makes it nothing less than a political ploy, notwithstanding the grieving that the mother has gone through.
x YouTube VideoAnother Irony here is that Donald Trump maintained in numerous television interviews, rallies and speeches that the speech that Khizr Khan gave before the Democratic convention was written for him by “Hillary Clinton and her people”...Mr. Khan emphatically insists that his speech wasn’t even written down, it was spontaneous and heartfelt, whereas Patricia Smith’s speech was actually written for her, using somebody else’s words.
"Who wrote that? Did Hillary's script writers write it?" Trump said in an interview with with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that will air Sunday. "I think I've made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard."
Politifact disputes Patricia Smith’s claims about Hillary Clinton: