Washington Free Beacon editor-in-chief Matthew Continetti appeared on "Fox and Friends" Monday to discuss his column on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.)'s career of cronyism.
The most recent allegations against Reid are that he funneled more than $31,000 in campaign money to his granddaughter in the form of gifts.
"What Harry Reid was doing was using campaign contributions to his account and then using that money to pay for jewelry," he said. "He said he was giving these gifts to his supporters, to his friends, but the beneficiary of this money was his granddaughter, so it's nice to have Harry Reid as a grandfather."
Although Reid asserted he had done nothing wrong, he still said he regretted the situation and that he would pay for his granddaughter's work "out of his own pocket."
"There's a real contradiction between those two statements," Continetti said. "Which is it?"
Continetti's piece touched on Reid's hyperbolic rants against the Koch brothers on the Senate floor that include accusations of manipulating the economic system to benefit themselves.
"When you talk about rigging the system for yourself, I think Harry Reid can just look in the mirror," he said.
He wrote:
The fact that Harry Reid’s political and influence operation includes his five children has been established for some time. A few weeks ago, when I first heard Reid accuse private citizens of being un-American, I dredged up a Los Angeles Times article from 2003 with the headline, "In Nevada, the Name to Know Is Reid." Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper’s meticulously researched and reported article begins with the story of the "Clark County Conservation of Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002," a land bill of the sort that puts people to sleep. "What Reid did not explain" when he introduced the bill in the Senate, Neubauer and Cooper wrote, "was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations, and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms." I wonder why he left that part out.
Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 "from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington." How much more have they earned in the 11 years since this article was published? Land, energy, water, gaming, and mining—the Reids manage a diversified portfolio. They are not financial investors but political ones. Reid’s four sons are lawyers, as is his son-in-law. They make their money furthering the interests of paying clients, clients operating businesses in the state represented by Reid.
It's the latest in a series of unflattering headlines for the embattled Democrat. In addition to regularly going off on the Koch brothers, who are more popular than him with the American public, Reid claimed that all negative stories coming out about Obamacare were "lies" and people struggling to sign up on healthcare.gov simply weren't educated on how to use the Internet.