UPDTAE: This just broke:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/...
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) campaign manager, Jesse Benton, announced his resignation amid questions about his alleged role in 2012 Iowa bribery scandal.
According to the Kentucky Herald-Leader, Benton met with McConnell on Friday afternoon and gave the top Senate Republican his letter of resignation, which McConnell accepted.
Benton's resignation is effective Saturday.
The major staff change comes amidst a bribery scandal from when he was the political director for Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) during the 2012 presidential campaign that could spill over into McConnell's re-election fight. Benton has stressed that he is innocent and blamed "inaccurate press accounts and unsubstantiated media rumors." - TPM, 8/29/14
This is getting interesting:
http://www.courier-journal.com/...
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's campaign manager and a former campaign consultant have emerged as figures in investigations surrounding an Iowa legislator who flipped his endorsement in the 2012 presidential contest after being paid.
The legislator, former Republican Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson, pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to concealing payments from U.S. Rep. Ron Paul's campaign and obstructing the investigation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice and federal court documents.
Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager, was Paul's political director at the time, and former McConnell campaign consultant Dimitri Kesari also worked for the Paul operation then.
Benton and Kesari didn't reply to emails seeking comment.
The McConnell campaign said in an email that "Senator McConnell obviously has nothing to do with the Iowa Presidential caucus or this investigation so it would be inappropriate for his campaign to comment on this situation." - Louisville Courier-Journal, 8/29/14
Here's some more info:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Kent Sorenson standing behind Ron Paul.
It is unclear if Benton knew about the payments made to Sorenson, but emails published last year by the TheIowaRepublican.com and OpenSecrets.org show that Benton wrote to a Sorenson associate in the fall of 2011, asking if the then-state senator would be “joining our team.”
Neither Benton nor the McConnell campaign returned requests for comment.
A key point person from the Paul campaign who urged Sorenson to defect was Dimitri Kesari, then Paul’s deputy national campaign manager. At a December 2011 meeting at an Altoona restaurant, he gave Sorenson’s wife a $25,000 check to secure the state senator’s support. The check was never cashed.
Jesse Binnall, an attorney for Kesari, declined to comment.
Two days after the check was written, Sorenson made a surprise appearance at a Paul campaign rally in Des Moines and announced that he was switching his endorsement. A furious Bachmann accused Sorenson of switching to Paul for money.
Sorenson denied any payments. "I was never offered a nickel from the Ron Paul campaign," he told Fox News's Megyn Kelly.
The state senator resigned from his post last year after a four-month investigation by a state court-appointed independent counsel, Mark Weinhardt, found probable cause that he violated the Iowa Senate Code of Ethics.
Weinhardt’s investigation discovered that Bachmann’s presidential campaign and leadership PAC routed nearly $60,000 to Sorenson through a consulting firm owned by Guy Short, a political consultant working for Bachmann’s PAC. The state investigation also determined that a consulting firm owned by Sorenson had been paid $73,000 by a film production company called ICT.
Federal court documents filed Wednesday confirmed that the $73,000 originated with Paul’s campaign. - Washington Post, 8/28/14
The timing for all of this couldn't be worse for McConnell, especially with this breaking the news this week:
http://www.thenation.com/...
Last week, in an interview with Politico, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) outlined his plan to shut down President Obama’s legislative agenda by placing riders on appropriations bills. Should Republicans take control of the Senate in the 2014 elections, McConnell intends to pass spending bills that “have a lot of restrictions on the activities of the bureaucracy.”
What McConnell didn’t tell Politico was that two months ago, he made the same promise to a secret strategy conference of conservative millionaire and billionaire donors hosted by the Koch brothers. The Nation and The Undercurrent obtained an audio recording of McConnell’s remarks to the gathering, called “American Courage: Our Commitment to a Free Society.” In the question-and-answer period following his June 15 session titled “Free Speech: Defending First Amendment Rights,” McConnell says:
“So in the House and Senate, we own the budget. So what does that mean? That means that we can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board [inaudible]. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.”
McConnell’s pledge to “go after” Democrats on financial services—a reference to declawing Dodd-Frank regulation—is a key omission from his Politico interview. He has been a vocal opponent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in particular, and presumably under his Senate leadership funding for the CFPB would be high on the list of riders for the appropriations chopping block. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Wall Street was the number-one contributor to McConnell’s campaign committee from 2009 to 2014. - The Nation, 8/26/14
And Alison Lundergan Grimes (D. KY) is hammering McConnell on his remarks:
http://thehill.com/...
In her first nationally televised interview, on MSNBC late Thursday night, Grimes said the tape was further evidence that “after 30 years of Mitch McConnell being in D.C., Kentuckians, those all across this nation, can no longer trust him.”
“The distinction between us, well it couldn’t be more clear: McConnell wants to work for the Koch brothers, for millionaires and billionaires. I want to work for the people of Kentucky,” she said, repeating a common refrain from her stump speeches that came into stark relief with the release of a tape of McConnell’s comments earlier this week.
McConnell told a gathering of conservative donors and leaders, at a strategy conference hosted by the billionaire Charles and David Koch brothers in June, he would drop “all these gosh-darn proposals” that Democrats have been pushing. He would drop proposals such as increasing the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits if he controls the Senate next year. The comments went viral, and Democrats have used them this week to hammer McConnell as out of touch and beholden to billionaires. On Friday Democrats were blasting out a report revealing McConnell and his PACs have received at least $65,800 from the Kochs this cycle. - The Hill, 8/29/14
And hammering McConnell on this could play very well for Grimes:
http://touch.latimes.com/...
The dilemma facing the true grass-roots tea party believers -- the dilemma they do not acknowledge -- is that their primary goal of whittling and whacking away at big government undercuts their secondary goal of saving the middle class from the greedy grip of big corporations.
If Democrats have a unifying philosophy, it is that government needs to be effective enough to curtail the economic and environmental abuses of unfettered capitalism. Republicans, on the other hand, preach the dogma that smaller government and unrestricted corporate power serves the best interests of the common man and woman.
The tea party folks have largely bought into that belief, but still are uncomfortable with Republicans who appear to be too much in thrall to big business. That is partly why a big tea party effort was mounted against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky’s Republican primary. McConnell was rightly seen as the epitome of the GOP establishment that the tea partiers so disdain. Yet, even with major support from national tea party organizations, such as FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund, challenger Matt Bevin could not depose the incumbent senator.
Now McConnell faces a robust challenge from Kentucky’s Democratic secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, who, at age 35, has been alive exactly as long as McConnell has been in the U.S. Senate. Polls show Grimes is in striking distance of beating the old veteran.
Right now, to help Grimes, Democrats are making a big deal out of a private speech McConnell gave two months ago at a clandestine strategy conference sponsored by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers. Caught on an audio recording, the message the minority leader gave to that gathering of super-rich campaign donors might dissuade the more populist-leaning tea party voters from ever giving their support to the man who stands a very good chance of being majority leader come January. - Los Angeles Time, 8/28/14
Grimes has a great chance to defeat McConnell, we just have to get our base out to the polls. Click here to donate and get involved with Grimes' campaign:
http://alisonforkentucky.com/