Breitbart attack on Shaun Kenney conflict of interest claim fails to disclose Breitbart’s conflict of interest

For those who want to know how easy it is to play the “conflict of interest” game, here’s a perfect example:

Yesterday, Breitbart News’ Michael Patrick Leahy wrote a piece highlighting David Brat, the “long-shot challenger” to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and his demand for an investigation into the relationship between RPV Executive Director Shaun Kenney and K6 Consulting. The piece includes quotes critical of Kenney from Brat, as well as Larry Nordvig of the Richmond Tea Party.

The essence is this – Dave Brat and his surrogates are accusing Shaun Kenney of a conflict of interest in the Cantor race because of his brother’s work for that campaign.  So, one would think, given the issues brought up in this column that the author would go out of his way to disclose any potential conflicts of interest he has with writing this story.

Did that happen? Nope.

Michael Patrick Leahy failed to disclose the relationship between Breitbart News and David Brat’s campaign media consultant.

A review of David Brat’s FEC filing, which can be found here, lists Concentric Direct as one of Brat’s major vendors.  In fact, Concentric Direct is Brat’s single largest vendor, with checks worth $11,172.74 going to the firm – almost a fourth of the money he spent first quarter, and over 10% of the paltry $89,000 his campaign raised. For those who don’t know, Concentric Direct is a grassroots and grasstops communications firm, founded and owned by John Pudner.

John Pudner also happens to be a columnist for Breitbart News.

As many in the blogosphere have sneered at me and Shaun over the last few days, let’s “follow the money.”

David Brat hires Pudner. Pudner writes for Breitbart. Michael Patrick Leahy is colleagues with Pudner at Breitbart. Breitbart writes hit piece on Kenney, demanding he answer questions about his business dealings with Cantor – questions he’s already answered.  At the same time, a variety of ankle-biting blogs take advantage of the story to get in a few cheap shots at Bearing Drift and Shaun, nearly all of them quoting the Breitbart story. 

Clearly, there’s an appearance of impropriety here.  Did Pudner pitch this story to Leahy?  Did Pudner get a monetary benefit from Brat’s campaign for getting Leahy to write this story?  And would all of those blogs take seriously a story written by Breitbart News if they knew Breitbart was affiliated with Brat’s campaign consultants?  How can we ever trust Breitbart to be fair in the Cantor/Brat race? 

See how easy this is? 

The chances of Pudner actually having anything to do with Leahy’s post are unlikely – but far more likely than Shaun having anything to do with the Cantor campaign (because he didn’t).  But this is how the “conflict of interest” game has been played over the last few days. Even if Leahy comes outs and says (which is probably true) that Pudner had nothing to do with his story, we “just have to take his word for it,” which hasn’t been good enough for Shaun or Jim Hoeft.

In Virginia, it’s not hard to play six degrees of political separation with anybody who has been around the block more than few times. That’s why these kinds of calls for disclosure, conflicts of interest and the like are patently ridiculous.  Brat’s campaign is clearly failing before it ever got started, and not even crossing the six figure threshold in fundraising when your opponent has millions in the bank is the death knell.  So you gin up a story designed to take the heat of yourself, and voila – we have this kerfluffle.

That there are so many folks with axes to grind against Shaun, Eric Cantor, me, Jim Hoeft and Bearing Drift – basically anybody who has stood up for principle and done the right thing regardless of the popularity – is just another part of politics.  That they’re so transparent about it? 

Well, that just tells you about their character.

Enough nonsense.

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