Report: Bill Kristol's pick to challenge Trump in the general election is a conservative lawyer

(Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

last updated 1 June 2016

The "impressive" independent candidate The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol tweeted about over the weekend is a constitutional lawyer named David French, Bloomberg Politics reports, citing "two Republicans intimately familiar" with Kristol's efforts.

The sources confirmed that French is open to running for president against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but hasn't made a final decision. French is a National Review staff writer, recipient of the Bronze Star, a veteran of the 2003 Iraq War, and the author of several books.

A source said some conservative donors are excited about the prospect of French joining the race. Kristol and French, who lives in Tennessee with his wife and three children, declined to comment to Bloomberg Politics, but in the June 6 issue of The Weekly Standard, Kristol wrote, "To say that [French] would be a better and a more responsible president than Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is to state a truth that would become self-evident as more Americans go to know him." During a press conference Tuesday, Trump said any independent candidates would be "fools."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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