excerpt: "In February, during a private meeting at his 2014 reelection campaign headquarters in Kentucky, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and several campaign aides met to discuss opposition research collected on potential challengers. The discussion centered around actress and activist Ashley Judd, and one could argue the subjects discussed were unethical from a fairness standpoint, but Republican politicians are notorious for unfairly characterizing their political opponents as a matter of course, and campaigns are messy affairs. However, the ethics violation charges are not about what McConnell’s aides said about Judd, but about McConnell illegally using paid congressional staff time or resources for his re-election campaign. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), McConnell did use “taxpayer-funded resources to pay staffers to dig up dirt on political opponents,” and CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan charged “it isn’t just an ethics violation, it’s a federal crime.” CREW filed an ethics complaint with the Senate Select Committee on Ethics to investigate whether McConnell spent taxpayer dollars to dig up dirt on potential opponents, and a separate complaint with the FBI to investigate McConnell for violating two federal laws.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:03:37 +0000
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