Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) campaign is up in arms about a Mother Jones piece posted this morning using a surreptitious recording from a meeting in which potential challenger Ashley Judd was reviewed.
“She’s clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it’s been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she’s suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the ’90s,” said one person at the meeting, not McConnell.
At the Feb. 2 meeting, McConnell compared this stage of the campaign to the carnival game Whac-a-Mole. “When anybody sticks their head up, do them out, and we’re even planning to do it with the Courier here shortly,” he said.
The recording was given to Mother Jones, which would not reveal the source.
McConnell’s campaign has demanded an investigation into illegal wiretapping. His campaign website urges visitors to “stand with Senator McConnell against the liberal media’s illegal and underhanded tactics.”
In a statement, McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton called the recording “Nixonian tactics.”
“Senator McConnell’s campaign is working with the FBI and has notified the local U.S. Attorney in Louisville, per FBI request, about these recordings. Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell’s campaign office without consent,” Benton said. “By whom and how that was accomplished presumably will be the subject of a criminal investigation.”
Mother Jones was behind the release of Mitt Romney’s speech to donors, filmed by bartender Scott Prouty, in which he talked about the 47 percent.
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