“He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t upset, but I could see the hurt in his eyes,” Benton told WHAS, according to tweets by reporter and political editor Joe Arnold.
“He asked me how I could say something like that, and I just didn’t have a good answer. … I apologized from the bottom of my heart [and] I told him it’s not what I believe [and] that I am here because I believe in him.”
“It was just so dumb. I don’t feel that way at all,” Benton told the news outlet of his remarks about McConnell.
In a widely discussed voice recording of a January phone call unearthed last week, Benton told a conservative advocate that “I’m sorta holding my nose for two years” while running McConnell’s campaign, “’cause what we’re doing here is gonna be a big benefit to Rand in ’16.” Benton said shortly afterward he’s “100 percent committed” to McConnell’s re-election and called his job one of the “great honors of my life.”
