Former Trump Staffer Follows Up Battery Conviction With Alleged Dog-Kicking

Is the GOP the party of animal cruelty, precisely towards man’s best pal? Without having understanding the specifics, lots of men and women would most likely guess yes—though as it turns out, the points also support this summary!

On Tuesday, Politico described that Brandon Phillips, a longtime Republican operative centered in Georgia who has been hired as chief of staff members for incoming Representative Mike Collins, was arrested and charged with misdemeanor animal cruelty in November for allegedly kicking a puppy. According to the arrest warrant affidavit, the dog belongs to a girl named Tifani Eledge, and the alleged kick induced “a minimize to the dog’s tummy.” (Phillips and Collins did not react to Politico’s requests for comment.) Phillips formerly served as Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign director in Ga, till he resigned following reports from many news stores that he pleaded responsible in 2008 to felony trespassing and battery, for which he was sentenced to a few decades of probation, many dozen several hours of group provider, and a high-quality of $1,567 wonderful. (His probation was in the long run reduced.)

Phillips joins a long line of Republicans with a record of allegedly not remaining quite great to canines, a single of whom used to be his manager. In 2007, the environment figured out that presidential hopeful Mitt Romney—for whom Phillips served as Ga condition director through the 2008 primary—once strapped his Irish setter, Seamus, to the roof of the family station wagon for a 12-hour travel. (Though Romney—who completely copped to the incident—had only prepared to make predetermined stops along the way, that strategy was disturbed when a Seamus suffered a bout of what we can only presume was terror-induced diarrhea.)

Of study course, that Seamus episode—which might or may well not have expense Romney the vote of pet enthusiasts, and so the election—pales in comparison to the report that emerged in October that then Pennsylvania Senate applicant Dr. Mehmet Oz was was allegedly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of pet dogs and an “entire litter of puppies.” As a reminder, that report, from Jezebel, disclosed that, according to a evaluate of 75 reports printed by Oz among 1989 and 2010, his analysis experiments killed at the very least 329 canines and inflicted “significant struggling on them and the other animals applied in experiments.” (Pigs, rabbits, and rodents ended up also reportedly harmed.) In May possibly 2004, Columbia College, Oz’s employer at the time, was requested to pay back a $2,000 penalty for violating the Animal Welfare Act. Later on, the college defended Oz as “a really revered researcher and clinician” but did not deny any of the allegations of animal cruelty. (In a assertion to Patriot-News, Oz campaign spokesperson Brittany Yanick called the Jezebel tale “totally false and preposterous” and insisted “Doctor Oz in no way abused any animals, and suggesting normally is absurd.” For the duration of the reality-checking process for an short article about the US Senate race in Pennsylvania, Oz’s campaign, for every the publication, “did not deny the allegations about the puppies.”)

Oz in the end missing the Senate race to John Fetterman, whose have pup seems to be addressed like prince.

In the meantime, however there are no documented incidents of Donald Trump bodily harming pet dogs, he famously dislikes the animal. “Donald was not a canine enthusiast,” Ivana Trump wrote in her memoir, Increasing Trump, noting that he hated her puppy Chappy (and that the emotion was mutual). He also spent significantly of his tenure in Washington denigrating ex-personnel and other perceived foes by evaluating them to canine, tweeting that his enemies “choked like a doggy,” been “dumped like a doggy,” been “fired like a canine,” and “kicked out of the ABC Information discussion like a dog.”