Lying John, has a nice ring to it and twelve years ago had I known the man was like he is I wouldn't have supported him. Literally no other person in the state has as much invested in Bennett than I did, so if I am going after him you know he has it coming.
Many of you delegates had asked John Bennett during the GOP Chairman race who he was associated, some asked him directly if he was "my guy" or closely associated. Well, listen to this tape and make up your own mind. At 2:54 he says he will run.
The first tape is the day that Bennett agreed to run for the Chairman slot, a few minutes into the audio file. It is an interesting audio file, you get to see how things like this are done, the planning of the campaign team that generates the initial support, how and why people are considered as members of the team, a bit of how the sausage is made.
One interesting part is where Bennett and I talk about Speaker Charles McCall and Floor Leader Jon Echols flying down to Tahlequah to give Bennett thousands of dollars in campaign funds just to get him to speak to me about getting off their butts. Bennett had ran against McCall for Speaker of the House and I had been hammering McCall pretty hard. I laid off the guy and aimed at Chris Kannady instead, the #3 guy, as McCall could have stripped Bennett of his committee chairmanship. I understood the message even if Bennett didn't. Sometimes it is good tactics to pivot anyway. But how many people can say that the Speaker of the House wanted you to leave them alone bad enough to fly down and shell out serious cash to see if it could be done?
The second tape is just the back half of the first conversation.
For those that still think Bennett can be salvaged, well if anyone would think that it would be me after putting myself out on the line protecting him for twelve years. But some times you just have to realize you made a bad investment and to cut your losses. And if I put someone in office and they betray our movement, I feel morally obligated to take them out and fix my mistake.
The scandal on Miles Rahimi's Project 46 contract finally blew this week. We have known about this for months but you know, we just weren't ready to trash Bennett, thought he could be salvaged or others that helped him thought so so we were holding off on him personally. So around the end of May John Bennett, no doubt aided by his staff, signed a $4,000 a month contract with Miles Rahimi for video services. If you look up that project 46 website you will find it is some sort of pay to play activist or candidate thing. You spend between $500 and $1500 per month and get all sorts of campaign help and "unlimited" videos made for your campaign. I guess he was soaking Bennett and the GOP because the contract was for three times that amount and change and was for only four videos per month.
And you might ask, why do we need videos and why do we need to pay $4000 per month? Well they were mostly videos promoting Bennett and begging for donations. So I guess we really didn't need the videos, we being the GOP members.
Some people had asked about this deal for months and we are told that both Bennett and Executive Director Bob Dani denied that there was a "contract", it was said to be a "gentleman's agreement". In order to do the budget they needed to know how much was being spent, in fact that contract ought to have gone before the State Committee before a dime was paid. But in fact, these folks were lied to by John Bennett, the contract was signed in late May but people were told that there was no contract.
And those of you that have seen the Bennett videos, remember how he was telling us all that "no one was getting paid down here..."? Well Lying John strikes again.
Ya'll remember the chant "Lets go Brandon"?
How soon till it is "Lets go Bennett"?
