Free Republic

Jeanine F. Pirro, the Republican candidate for attorney general, sharply criticized her husband this afternoon for driving 51 miles an hour in a 25-mile-an-hour school zone on Thursday — only the latest instance of Albert J. Pirro Jr. causing trouble for his candidate-wife. “You didn’t want to be in my house last night,” Ms. Pirro said at a news conference. Mr. Pirro’s speeding ticket in White Plains came two weeks after he accepted a plea deal over another ticket, for driving 98 miles an hour on a 55-mile-an-hour stretch of Interstate 95 in July. Mr. Pirro, a lobbyist with many...

March 23, 2006 G.O.P. Challenger to Clinton Inflated Résumé, Records and Interviews Suggest By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ When Kathleen Troia McFarland stepped forward as a Republican challenger to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, she was a relatively obscure figure with two intriguing claims to fame: She had worked on President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" speech and had been the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon. But interviews with former Reagan administration officials and a review of documents show her claims were not entirely accurate. Though she helped write the "Star Wars" speech, its most famous passage — the one that announced the...

NEW YORK -- It didn't take long before the wheels started coming off Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland's campaign to unseat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Things got off to a promising start in early March, with favorable publicity and several national TV interviews for the wealthy, 54-year-old McFarland, a Reagan-era Pentagon official who spent the last 20 years raising a family and has never held elective office. But then McFarland was hit with embarrassing disclosures about her voting history, including her registering in two places and missing several elections. Records suggest she did not even vote in 1984, when Reagan, her...

ALBANY, Dec. 12 - After weeks of messy public squabbling, leaders of the New York Republican Party met in a smoke-free back room here on Monday and reversed course, urging Jeanine F. Pirro to quit her bid to unseat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and run for state attorney general next year. Ms. Pirro, the district attorney of Westchester County, immediately issued a statement rejecting the suggestion, saying, "I remain a candidate for U.S. Senate, but I greatly respect the opinion of the county chairs and their confidence in my abilities as a statewide candidate." The shift by the party came...

Jeanine Pirro is preparing to call off her challenge to Sen. Hillary Clinton, but she might be boxed out of the state attorney general's race, too, Republican insiders said yesterday. Well-placed GOP sources said there could very well be no room for Pirro on the Republican ticket because potential attorney general candidate Chauncey Parker has impressed county leaders. Parker, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is the state criminal justice czar, now has the inside track on getting the party nod to vie for the attorney general post being vacated by Democrat Eliot Spitzer, the sources said. Pirro apparently has fallen...

As if the sun were finally shining upon her, Jeanine F. Pirro strode coatless onto a chilly Manhattan sidewalk yesterday and declared to reporters that her campaign to unseat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was "going extremely well," and she was in it to win it. As if, only minutes earlier, Gov. George E. Pataki had not talked to her about withdrawing from the race, which he had. Michael Long, the head of the state Conservative Party and an ally of Ms. Pirro's in some past campaigns, said yesterday that her Senate candidacy was in a "meltdown" and indicated that his...

ALBANY, Nov. 29 - Jeanine F. Pirro's bid to unseat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suffered an embarrassing setback on Tuesday when the State Legislature's most powerful Republican said she should call the whole thing off and run for state attorney general instead. The remarks by the official, Joseph L. Bruno, the majority leader of the State Senate, forced out into the open simmering concerns about Ms. Pirro's candidacy, which has been beset by gaffes and fund-raising difficulties. And it heightened the sense that the state Republican Party is nervous about its future and riven by squabbles as its de facto...