Fact Check: Did Buttigieg Campaign Pay for the Iowa Democratic Party’s Failed App?

Someone (Russia?) is circulating a rumor that the Buttiegieg campaign paid $40k for the Iowa Democratic Party’s app that failed. AP fact-checkers say, “no.”

CLAIM: Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg’s campaign funded the creation of the app that was used to tally votes during the Iowa Caucus.

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How Never Trumpers Became Ever Trumpers

“Pragmatism, compromise and even ideological agility have always been part of politics. But what is happening now is dangerous. The rationalizers aren’t just turning against their own principles; many are turning against fundamental norms of democracy. The constant rationalization has made them unrecognizable. Unlike the Republicans who were Trumpian even before Donald Trump, the rationalizers have forgotten that what they now believe they once made up.”

Steve Israel

Secret Service Pays Trump $650 Per Night at Trump Resorts

$650

“President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night,” the Washington Post reports. “Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government.”

O’Rourke: Dems Should be Alarmed by Iowa Turnout

“Perhaps the most alarming thing that came out of Iowa this week was not the incompetence of the party and the failed technology that leaves us still in the dark as to the final results of the caucus… what should most concern us is that turnout might have barely kept pace with 2016 levels, and fell well below the historic turnout of 2008. We’re in the middle of a national emergency, and people are staying home.”

Beto O’Rourke

Yovanovitch: ‘Our Institutions Need Us’

“I had always thought that our institutions would forever protect us against individual transgressors. But it turns out that our institutions need us as much as we need them; they need the American people to protect them or they will be hollowed out over time, unable to serve and protect our country.”

— Former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, writing in the Washington Post.