McNinney Gets Green Party Nod

The Truthers have their candidate.

McKinney, 53, held off three rivals to win the party's nomination during its convention in Chicago, Illinois. She picked journalist and activist Rosa Clemente as her running mate.

Green Party spokeswoman Scott McLarty acknowledged McKinney was a "long shot" for the White House, but said, "Every vote that she gets helps the Green Party."

Update: Nico points us to some interesting information on McKinney. In 1992, McKinney's office apparently paid $23 to a man named Khaled Elgindy in 2002 (Elgindy was a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and McKinney must have used him for something that required reimbursement). There are claims that Elgindy worked for McKinney on a regular basis, but I can find no record of that in the congressional salaries database.

Khaled Elgindy's brother is Amr (Tony) Elgindy, who was once accused by prosecutors of attempting to inside trade on foreknowledge of the 9-11 attacks.

In a court hearing in San Diego, Kenneth Breen, an assistant United States attorney, said the adviser, Amr Ibrahim Elgindy, tried to sell $300,000 in stock on the afternoon of Sept. 10 and told his broker that the stock market would soon plunge. ''Perhaps Mr. Elgindy had preknowledge of Sept. 11, and rather than report it he attempted to profit from it,'' Mr. Breen said.

Let me point out two things here. First, every single day of every year there are thousands of people who are convinced that the stock market will soon plunge. It is only when the market does plunge that those people look prescient (or complicit).

And second, this accusation was made as Amr Elgindy was on trial for insider trading based on tips he was getting from an FBI agent--not about 9-11 but about companies that the FBI was investigating, and whose stock would inevitably take a hit when that became public.

I don't think there's anything there to implicate McKinney, and the charge about foreknowledge on Elgindy's part is probably just hype from an overzealous prosecutor. But Troofers have made a whole lot more of even less tenuous connections than that.