Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign hired several staffers privately recommended by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a spokesperson for the couple confirmed to TPM on Monday.
So long as there’s nothing clearly illegal, Buttigieg can hire whomever he wants to hire, of course – and the rest of us, if we have the information, can decide what we think about it.
That includes Warren and the other candidates, obviously.
Kudos to Bloomberg News.
Gee, one wonders if this has anything to do with recent polling results??
He’s dead to me now.
FB is a Russian/GOP attack vector. FB was heavily funded by Russian capital when cash was in short supply in the early years.
That’s not a good look…yikes 
On the surface this doesn’t seem like a real issue, people from all over the place work for campaigns and there shouldn’t be limits based on where you might work or what you do in your personal life.
On the other hand, this kind of thing is how we ended up with the crazy Republican party, when billionaires decided to subvert the process (in that case by creating places like the Heritage Foundation to build up the “conservative academia”). Zuckerberg has an agenda, and lots of money, and he’s already shown that he will aggressively interfere in politics to support that agenda…if people that work with/for him push for the same things then it’s a stealth mission to shape a campaign. We already have way too much of that in our politics.
This will probably hurt Buttigieg a little bit, just because he tries to make a pretty clean cut, honest kind of impression, and tying himself to Zuckerberg isn’t going to help that image. He also just gave Warren an attack…she’s running a small donor campaign, Pete’s not, and Pete has people who work for the guy who wants to take her out, so the optics aren’t great. Yes, they should be able to, but that’s politics…we’ll see if it goes anywhere, though I don’t expect Warren to say anything about it, she’s not one to hit people on stuff like that (with Trump being the exception, but that’s about anti-corruption).
FB/Zuck just needs to stop allowing FALSE and FOREIGN Funded advertising - political or otherwise!
Congress really need to have safety legislation for FB etc ASAP!
At first glance this is not troubling. But the more I think about Zuckerberg and his wife’s involvement the more troubling it becomes.
Zuke is close to being as toxic as The Chosen One ™ hisself.
I liked Buttigieg before he decided to go all-in on this attack-dog strategy, and taking personnel advice from Mark Zuckerberg (who is a cancer on the very soul of civil society) kinda doesn’t help him win back any favor with me.
"Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith brushed off the criticism as “a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“We get recs from hundreds of people and we’ve received thousands and thousands of resumes,” she tweeted.
I have no issue with them hiring who they want, but this statement is disingenuous at best. People don’t care about the 100s of recommendations you didn’t hire, just the handful you did.
By the time that Mayor Pete hires Tulsi Gabbard as FEC chairman and nominates Jill Stein to the Supreme Court, it will already be too late.
When spokespeople brush off criticism my hackles rise. The next step is “get over it.”
Disappointing. Not my choice anyway, so…what’s next?
I see Zuckerberg as being extremely corrupt, so I won’t mind the other candidates piling on this. I certainly will not vote for Buttigieg.
Wouldn’t it be funny if all along Buttigieg was Putin’s preferred candidate rather than Gabbard.
Well, well. Seems like Pete had a price after all.
It isn’t so much that I think Zuckerberg is corrupt… it’s more like if he had built the atom bomb and refused to acknowledge that he might be partially responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s Zuckerberg.
Well why not?
Is Zuckerberg hittin’ on Buttigieg?
Anybody else remember Cambridge Analytica? My problem is I don’t have an confidence at all in Zuckerman or Facebook. They profited off the Russians in 2016 at the expense of the American people.
Warren is right in wanting to break up these social media behemoths. This reveal is a black mark for Buttigieg as far as I am concerned.