NEW YORKWASHINGTON WASHINGTON — Howard Paster, a public-relations executive who served as President Clinton’s chief congressional liaison, has joined Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign as chief operating officer, senior strategist Mark Penn said.
The two men are colleagues in the business world — Paster heads WPP, the global advertising consortium, and Penn serves as CEO of Burson- Mars tel ler, one of WPP’s companies. Paster recruited Penn to join Bill Clinton’s political team before Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.
Paster has been an adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign and was courted to join the team in a more formal capacity when it added staff early last year.
McCain’s fundraising still behind Dems’New reports filed with federal election regulators show that John McCain raised $11 million last month, and ended it with $8 million in the bank.
McCain also had $4.3 million in debt, mostly for a loan that has become the focus of a stalemate between his campaign and federal regulators.
The reports were filed with the Federal Election Commission.
McCain’s $11 million total marked his second month of solid fundraising, but it lagged behind the huge sums raised last month by Barack Obama — $55 million— and Hillary Rodham Clinton: $35 million.
State Department fires two for looking at Obama’s filesThe State Department said Thursday night that it had fired two contract employees and disciplined a third for accessing Sen. Barack Obama’s passport files.
Spokesman Sean McCormack said that for now it appears that nothing other than “imprudent curiosity” was involved in three separate breaches of the Illinois senator’s personal information.
It is not clear whether the employees saw anything other than the basic personal data such as name, citizenship, age and place of birth that is required when a person fills out a passport application.
Obama’s presidential campaign immediately called for a “complete investigation.”
The employees were caught because of a computer-monitoring system that is triggered when the passport accounts of a “high-profile person” are accessed, he said. The system, which focuses on politicians and celebrities, was put in place after the State Department was embroiled in a scandal involving the access of the passport records of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton in 1992.
