Scott Rigell has accused Scott Taylor and Ben Loyola of copying his proposed Congressional reforms. Bearing Drift has learned that a Kansas campaign working with Rigell did email Taylor the plan on March 20, two days before Taylor and Loyola released their “Contract on Congress”.
Bearing Drift has obtained information that David Ray, formerly of Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign staff, is the leak that sent working papers from the Scott Rigell campaign to the Scott Taylor campaign.
Ray, current campaign manager for State Sen. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, received the documents because Rigell was seeking Huelskamp to sign-on to the proposal.
Additionally, we have learned that Gary Marx, a mutual acquaintance of both Scott Rigell and Tim Huelskamp, spoke with the Kansas candidate regarding both the candidate’s participation and the release of information.
Huelskamp said to Marx that he was unaware of the offer by Scott Rigell to participate in the congressional reform proposals, despite the information being sent to Ray and Ray’s participation in a nationwide conference call to discuss the reforms mere days before the proposed joint campaign announcement from the Republican candidates at the Lincoln Memorial.
What BD has obtained is information about an email with three attachments dated March 20 from David Ray with the subject line ‘DID NOT COME FROM ME’ to the Taylor campaign.
The email includes material sent by the Rigell campaign, including the nine proposed reforms.
We asked Ray about the email and the campaign’s relationship with Gary Marx.
Ray did not to address our question regarding the email, but did address the relationship between Huelskamp and Gary Marx:
“For a brief time, Gary Marx consulted on our race. Once it was decided we were no longer interested in retaining his services, Gary continued to contact our campaign repeatedly, pitching us on hiring him for other projects. Additionally, he attempted to leverage his past, but brief, relationship with our campaign to advance his efforts to service his other clients. I want to be clear: Gary Marx is in no way affiliated with this campaign — nor should he represent himself as being in any way affiliated with this campaign — nor will he be involved with this campaign in the future.”
Clearly Marx is persona non grata in Kansas; however, it is also clear that Ray did not deny his involvement in sending the email.
Marx, however, seems to think otherwise regarding the relationship.
“I became aware that David Ray was the campaign manager with Tim Huelskamp on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 3:32 PM when he relayed a request from Senator Huelskamp for me to take some action on behalf of the Huelskamp campaign,” said Marx. “I have been working for Senator Huelskamp since late 2008 until this very day. My activity of connecting my two clients, Scott Rigell and Tim Huelskamp, was done directly via phone communication with them separate and apart from David Ray. Both men will be tremendous conservative leaders in the next U.S. Congress.”
Marx went onto say that “I’ve never met nor spoken with David Ray, Scott Rigell’s campaign manager e-mailed him after Sen. Huelskamp requested, to inform him of this proposal by Scott Rigell after I had spoken with the senator.”
Marx, who normally works on national campaigns and is involved with the Huelskamp campaign as a favor, said he encouraged the senator to get involved with the Rigell proposals because he thought they were strong, commonsense, conservative proposals that the next Congressional freshmen class should rally behind.
“I called Sen. Huelskamp to encourage him to take the call from Scott Rigell and listen to these positive conservative reforms,” said Marx. “The senator asked Scott Rigell to have that information forwarded by the Rigell campaign onto his campaign manager, David Ray. From that point on, from what I was told by Sen. Huelskamp, Ray never passed the information on the senator, despite having also participated in a national conference call hosted by the Rigell campaign.”
The Taylor and Loyola campaigns also put forth the effort to bring fellow Second District GOP competitors Bert Mizusawa and Ken Golden into the scheme. Sources close to the Mizusawa and Golden campaigns acknowledge that they were approached by Taylor and Loyola to participate in coming out with the proposal to preempt Rigell, but each, for their own reasons, decided to not participate in upstaging Scott Rigell.
“I told Ben this was a bad idea,” said Golden.
The Taylor campaign responded to our query about the leaked email tonight by saying:
“Does the Scott Rigell campaign have an ideological trademark on term limits? Balancing the budget? Congressional pay cuts?
“The answer to all is NO. As I stated previously, we have been discussing these issues for months. In fact, I pulled up a lone press release, titled “The Freshman 50”, dated January 15th, 2010. In this single release it outlines 4 of the 8 “ideological trademarks” that Mr. Rigell’s campaign claims we have now taken.
- Term limits at 12 years. Point 2 in our freshman 50 release.
- Read the bill. Point 4 in our Freshman 50 release.
- Apply the law equally. Enrolling legislators in the same programs that citizens are in. Point 1 from the Freshman 50 release.
- Balance the budget. Point 6 in our Freshman 50 release.
“Have we accused the Rigell campaign of plagiarism? No we have not, because we are working on building consensus not tearing it down. To think that these ideas belong to them alone is the definition of arrogance.
“We are not focused on petty politics like the Rigell campaign continues to be. We are focused on helping right this downward economy, focused on making sure our military men and women overseas are safe, and focused on the issues important to our voters.
“Mr. Rigell’s campaign continues to harass and intimidate individuals that do not agree with them and it is sad to see this race hit such a disturbing low.
“We have been attacked online, had our consultant bribed from underneath of us, and dealt with the continued harassment of our supporters on our social networking mediums. Through this all, we have not complained to one media outlet, unlike the Rigell campaign who has spent two weeks focused on destroying our party with accusations and intimidation through the press.
“Also, according to a very reliable source, a recent poll that the Rigell campaign just completed had Scott Taylor right with Rigell and Ben Loyola very close behind. If you believe this is anything but a political stunt, you are wrong.”
Later, by phone call and email, the Taylor campaign accused Bearing Drift of illegally obtaining the email and threatened legal action. The information about the email was provided to BD by a source outside of BD contributors.
We did inquire about the poll with the Rigell campaign and they claim Rigell has a 4 to 1 advantage.
In the end, Scott Rigell used red meat Republican proposals, going back to the “Contract for America” and beyond, in an effort to unify several campaigns under the banner of “reform”. However, he used this well-known red meat as a pitch to other campaigns throughout the country and could not guarantee their willingness to participate, nor could he guarantee the privacy of the proposal.
Of the 16 campaigns approached by Rigell, nine campaigns officially participated in the conference call mere days before the proposed roll out of Mar. 23 (one of those campaigns being Huelskamp, represented by Ray).
Unfortunately, when we look at this whole process in retrospect, there are more than enough errors in judgment amongst all the campaigns to embarrass everyone involved, especially those who pride themselves on integrity and honor.
Meanwhile, Democratic incumbent Congressman Glenn Nye sits at over 50% approval in the district, has a solid conservative voting record in opposition to Speaker Pelosi (despite his having voted for her), has exemplary constituent services, and his assistance and access to the military member and family has been superb.
I would think the freshman incumbent is feeling pretty good about himself and his chances right now.
