THE PANTSUIT REPORT: Campaign Staff Recruited ‘Everyday’ Iowans for Staged Photos

Coffee Shop Visit Staged from Beginning to End

David Martosko reports from Des Moines, Iowa: Hillary Clinton’s astroturf candidacy is in full swing in Iowa.

Her Tuesday morning visit to a coffee shop in LeClaire, Iowa was staged from beginning to end, according to Austin Bird, one of the men pictured sitting at the table with Mrs. Clinton.

Bird told Daily Mail Online that campaign staffer Troy Price called and asked him and two other young people to meet him Tuesday morning at a restaurant in Davenport, a nearby city.

Price then drove them to the coffee house to meet Clinton after vetting them for about a half-hour.

• Austin Bird sat for coffee on Tuesday morning in the town of LeClaire, Iowa, chatting with Hillary Clinton as photographers snapped pictures
• News reports called him a ‘student’ and her campaign called it an unscripted event
• But Clinton’s Iowa political director Troy Price drove Bird and two other people to the coffee house
• Bird is a hospital government relations official who interned with Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign
• The Iowa Democratic Party, which Price ran until a month ago, tasked him to be Joe Biden’s driver during an October Senate campaign trip in Davenport

The three got the lion’s share of Mrs. Clinton’s time and participated in what breathless news reports described as a ’roundtable’– the first of many in her brief Iowa campaign swing.

Bird himself is a frequent participant in Iowa Democratic Party events. He interned with President Obama’s 2012 presidential re-election campaign, and was tapped to chauffeur Vice President Joe Biden in October 2014 when he visited Davenport.

‘What happened is, we were just asked to be there by Troy,’ Bird said Wednesday in a phone interview….(read more)

Daily Mail Online