Democratic gubernatorial Ed FitzGerald claimed at a press conference Friday that there were emails from the Republican Governors Association linking the organization to efforts to spread a report that FitzGerald was with a woman who was not his wife in a parked car before dawn in October 2012.
FitzGerald, at the press conference, said that Westlake Mayor Dennis Clough (R) was working with the RGA to find damaging information about him. Clough denied being involved, but he said he did receive public-records requests concerning the emails.
The FitzGerald campaign on Friday provided those emails between the Westlake Police Department and the RGA, reported at Cleveland.com.
A collection of about 20 emails published by Cleveland.com shows the Republican Governors Association’s Kevin Wright corresponding with Westlake Police Department officials in trying to get audio records related to the police call about FitzGerald when he was seen in the car as well as phone logs, text messages, calendars, and emails between Andrea Rocco, the Clerk of Courts for Cuyahoga County, and FitzGerald.
One email, for instance, includes the line from former Police Chief Richard Wallings which said “The dirt somebody was looking for was that this was Fitzgerald and Andrea Rocco. I spoke to the officers and Andrea Rocco was not in the car.”
You can read all the emails here.
Wait, you mean to tell me that all these stories we read like the one about FitzGerald being “caught” in a car with a (oh, Nelly, fetch me my smelling salts!) woman to whom he was not married, are fed to our Intrepid Mainstream Media Ace Reporter Hawks by shadowy partisan operatives and vomited out to the reading public without much vetting or concern regarding whether the innuendo attached to them is accurate? I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you.
It’s definitely pearl-clutching night on TPM
This is looking more and more like a bungled attempt at Republican ratf*ckery.
And that’s your real scandal. How can the Republicans run Ohio if they can’t even run a negative smear campaign properly?
That’s aout the state of our media today and it is beyond pathetic.
About 30 years ago or so, Westlake, OH, in western Cuyahoga County, was pretty solidly Democratic and a quaint, mostly-wooded suburb with a small population. But new money Repubs flooded in and transformed the town, and now it’s basically one gigantic upscale mall interspersed with mega-McMansions and mega-churches, it’s almost complete de-forested, and it has become a right-wing bastion.
Speaking of right-wing idiots, true story about Westlake’s Mayor Clough, I swear: When he first ran for mayor years ago, he and his wife were going door-to-door doing meet-and-greet, and came to my friend’s house where we were watching a movie. My buddy answered the door, and Clough and his wife were there. Clough said, haltingly, "Hello! Are you the ‘Will-cahm-may’ family? My buddy and I looked at each other, and asked “What?” Clough repeated: “Is Mr. Will-cahm-may” at home? We looked at each other, thinking “WTF?” and told him that there was no one by that name that lived there. He then pointed down and said, “Oh, I thought that must be the family’s name” . . . and we realized he was pointing at THE ‘WELCOME’ MAT! We laughed for the whole night about what a total jackass the guy was, and he obviously hasn’t changed in all these years.