NEW AD: BIDEN’S FORMER COUNTERTERRORISM DIRECTOR, CAIT CONLEY, SAYS AMERICA’S GREATEST THREAT IS “WITHIN OUR OWN BORDERS” FROM VOTERS WHO DON’T VOTE HOW SHE WANTS, NOT TERRORIST GROUPS
October 12, 2026
The Lawler for Congress campaign is putting five figures behind “Tell Her No,” a one-minute spot built almost entirely out of Cait Conley’s own words saying that Hudson Valley residents who have voted Republican are a greater threat to the country than Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
Pearl River, NY — October 12, 2026 — Today, the Lawler for Congress campaign launched “Tell Her No,” which will be running on digital, text, and streaming platforms. “And then my last two years in uniform, I was at the White House as the director for counterterrorism,” Conley told an interviewer last November, and the ad lets that sit for a second before it plays what she’s been telling Democratic audiences ever since.
On a July fundraising Zoom, Cait Conley said, “I truly believe the greatest threat to America’s future is coming from within our own border right now.” On Sept. 2 she said this Republican Party “is not the real Republican Party” and called it a “cult.” She’d told a Democratic committee much the same thing on July 16 (“You know, the Republican Party is a cult”), and six days before the June primary she went on Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles, said the greatest threat to America was coming from inside our borders, and then added, “And Mike Lawler’s been complicit in that.”
Over footage of Al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters, the ad’s narrator tells viewers what she thinks of them: that anyone who voted for Trump is a bigger threat to America than radical terrorists. The New York Post broke the story on her comments in an exclusive this morning, and her campaign doubled down on them, instead of apologizing.
“Cait Conley spent two years as Joe Biden’s counterterrorism top staffer at the NSC, so she, of all people, knows who actually wants to hurt Americans. And yet she keeps telling voters in the Hudson Valley that the greatest threat to our country is inside our own borders and calling the party about half this district votes for a cult,” said Lawler for Congress Campaign Manager Ciro Riccardi. “Close to 200,000 people in the Hudson Valley voted to send Mike Lawler back to Congress in 2024. Does she think each of those voters is more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda? We’d honestly like to hear her answer, and until she gives one, voters should vote to send her back to Virginia.”
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