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| Speaker McCall is joined By Gov. Fallin & Rep. Josh West. |
The STP Dark Money Story Went National
House Leadership Denies Involvement in Hatchet Job
But they do Respect Us and the Check is in the Mail
Our story on September 9th on the efforts to replenish House leadership's PAC fund drew the attention of Associated Press Sean Murphy who emailed asking for the names of the other PACs used by House leadership to take down the conservative Republicans. We turned over the additional information that we had been researching on for the next story on the actual PACs and who was behind the dark money group. While the donors remain hidden, we did manage to ferret out the expenditures and track them back to local mail houses and consultants which we published the following week in this story.
The effort to collaborate with the AP writer turned into a major nationwide news story that outed the effort by House leadership, even with their denials their hatchet men admitted to doing the work as well as the political consultants named in our original report on the 16th of September.
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| Chris Kannady(left) & Majority Floor Leader Jon Echols are McCall's top 2 leadership team members. |
The story pointed out that it wasn't just the teacher unions behind the outing of a half dozen legislators; it was elements of House leadership and the political consultants that own House leadership. The story repeated what we had told you in the September 16th newsletter, the Conservative Alliance PACout of the Washington D.C. Area had spent almost $750,000 of dark money getting rid of the most conservative House members. The AP story quoted Rep. George Faught saying:
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| Rep. George Faught was ousted from office with a major infusion of dark money cash that Kannady, West, and unnamed other Republicans raised & spent. |
The story followed up on the Conservative Alliance PAC being sued and ran out of Ohio after defaming Republican state legislators.
The AP story also managed to get Rep. Chris Kannady to admit his role in the attacks, with Kannady claiming that it was Republican "hardliners" that called for challengers to run for office:
"All I did was have conversations with people and set things in motion to say that, this situation has to be addressed. We cannot let members of our own caucus actively be against the rest of us because we disagree on policy decisions," said Kannady, R-Oklahoma City:
"Sometimes you have to take leadership whenever it might be uncomfortable to do so, especially once we were provoked, and start having conversations with stakeholders in the community."
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| Rep. Leslie Osborn incited the war with her hostile floor debate, calling for primary opponents against her own party members. |
Kannady of course fails to mention that it was RINO Leslie Osborn that publicly screamed that conservative legislators ought to be challenged in primaries and this was the middle of March of this year.
Kannady flat out admitted that he led the attack against the Platform Caucus, so named because the members believed that following the GOP Party Platform was a given if one called themselves a Republican elected official. Kannady claimed that he acted separately from House leaders and claimed he didn't know who was behind the Conservative Alliance PAC, two bald faced lies for anyone that has common sense and has been following the fight between RINO and conservative Republicans.
Kannady funded several of the challengers to the Platform Caucus, spending thousands of dollars to unseat conservatives. The eight members were targeted for their votes against raising taxes on gasoline and diesel, cigarettes, and Gross Production Tax increases that went to pay one year's worth of a teacher raise.
The AP article also talked about Rep. Josh West's attack on Dr. Mike Ritze, claiming Ritze wore army medals undeservedly, which was a lie, Ritze had worn a lapel pin sold to supporters of Purple Heart recipients, not the actual Purple Heart pin. Ritze is well known for his pro-bono work getting disabled veterans through the bureaucracy at the VA. West claims he agreed to allow his picture to be used in the attack mailers but claimed he doesn't know who ran the PAC. Right.... a politician, ever careful of image, gives someone he doesn't know permission to use his picture and name on an effort he knows little about......right. That's the ticket....
We had found out and reported last week that both West and Kannady used the new Fount Holland group, CAMP, to run their campaigns, CAMP also admitted to working for the Conservative Alliance PAC:
"The only thing I can say is that I worked against two incumbents for an organization,"
Holland said, "and I was happy to do it."
The AP story also confirmed what we had said about Trebor Worthen being involved with the dark money attacks. Worthen claimed that he knew nothing about who was behind the attacks yet the man took money to do part of the attacks:
"There's widespread dissatisfaction with that element of the Legislature," Worthen said. "My guess is it was a whole bunch of people from the more mainstream, pro-business type of element that said: 'We need to get together and get rid of some of these people.'
The AP story went national within 24 hours yet few Oklahoma media outlets have pushed the story. We found one story from Oklahoma Watch carried by one of the NPR stations and one story in a Muskogee newspaper, both the Tulsa World and the Oklahoman do not show up in the Google search of the title of the article but they do show up if you put the name of their newspaper in the search string. Meaning that both papers have pushed their stories into sections of their website that can't be crawled by bots from the search engines in an effort to hide the story.
The impact on House leadership will be immense as they are implicated in the scandal or worse, allowed a couple of hatchet men to run wild regardless of any consequences. Ignorant or incompetent, pick one, both are bad.
But, this is a good thing as now the long simmering fight between RINOs and conservatives has boiled over and the public is aware of just how loathsome House leadership can be and how dangerous it is to allow the Chamber of Commerce crowd to own politicians. They can't put a happy face on the scandal other than using it to raise more money from the tall building crowd. But Rep. Chris Kannady is more than just a hatchet man for House leadership,he is a real American traitor that went on Russian TV to accuse the United States of torturing a prisoner, a prisoner that had signed a confession admitting that he threw a grenade into a jeep to harm two American soldiers. Read the story below, published in February of this year.
