Kentucky Scandal: What Did Democrats Know?

The fallout continued today from Thursday’s revelation that members of the activist group Progress Kentucky were behind a secret recording of Mitch McConnell’s meeting with aides, and new questions are now being raised about whether Democrat officials were aware of this act of political espionage. Investigative journalist Matthew Vadum reports at the Daily Caller:

Shawn Reilly, the executive director of  Progress Kentucky, the controversial super PAC allegedly involved in the  recording, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community  organizer.
If Reilly has ceased to be a senior  Democratic Party official, it is a very recent  development.
Reilly  attended the 2012 Democratic national convention in Charlotte, N.C, describing  himself in a photo on his Twitter account as a delegate to the convention. He also describes himself as a delegate in another photo that shows him in a television screen grab from CNN coverage of the convention.
“Before  starting Progress Kentucky, he was a member of the executive committee of the  state Democratic Party,” according to a Huffington Post article from January that Progress Kentucky posted on its own website.
Although Reilly appears to be a member of the Democratic Party establishment, media outlets are now propagating a version  of the illegal bugging story in which Democratic officials claim to have been blindsided by a scandal foisted on them by an unaccountable outside group.

Sean Higgins at the Washington Examiner reports that Progress Kentucky’s Reilly has “lawyered up” and adds:

Not only did the tapes’ revelations about the McConnell team’s private comments elicit a collective yawn in DC but they appear to have boosted McConnell by making him look like the victim of dirty tricks.
Meanwhile Kentucky Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from Progress Kentucky, which embarrassed Bluegrass State liberals earlier this year with a series of paranoid, racial attacks against McConnell’s wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

Bloggers at liberal sites BuzzFeed and Salon rushed to condemn Progress Kentucky as laughably incompetent:

Progress Kentucky: Worst super PAC ever?
- Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon

The Disastrous Collapse Of Kentucky’s
Least Effective Liberal Group
- Evan McMorris-Santo, BuzzFeed

The question of connections between Progress Kentucky and Democrat officials is not merely a matter of public relations, but also a matter of federal campaign law, which regulates “coordination” between political campaigns and outside groups. A phone call Friday to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in an effort to get their official comment on the Kentucky scandal was put through to the voicemail of DSCC press secretary Justin Barasky. There was no immediate return call from Barasky, so I contacted him on Twitter:

A Kentucky Democrat said Thursday that the Progress Kentucky activists bragged to him about their secret recording of McConnell. Did anyone at DSCC have knowledge of Progress Kentucky’s recording prior to its publication by David Corn at Mother Jones? McConnell has asked the FBI to investigate the recording, and it is not yet known whether potential violations of federal campaign law are part of that investigation.

 

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