Moments after he began speaking on the phone with TPM on Thursday, Jacob Conway interrupted himself and began yelling.
“No, I have to go talk to the FBI, I will call them back!” Conway told someone on his end of the line. “The FBI takes precedent!”
It had been that kind of day for Conway, the Jefferson County, Ky. Democratic Party official who outed two Democratic super PAC operatives in the Mitch McConnell secret tape case. Earlier in the day, Louisville’s NPR station had published a story in which Conway claimed that Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison, local activists from the group Progress Kentucky, had admitted to him that they were the source of the recordings published by Mother Jones earlier this week. Over the next several hours, Conway had received calls from a number of media outlets interested in talking to him, along with the FBI. (In fact, he said, he was going in to be interviewed Thursday at the bureau’s Louisville, Ky. office.) By the time TPM spoke with him, Conway confided that he felt “emotionally drained.”
“They told me about it the day that it happened, and that’s how I knew,” Conway said of Reilly and Morrison. “When I heard the Mother Jones leak come out, I put two and two together. They told me what was on the tape, I had never heard the tape. They told it all to me.”
According to Conway (whose version of events is already being disputed by a lawyer representing Reilly), he heard the story from each of the activists, independently. He described Reilly and Morrison as “acquaintances” but also said they “were friends.”
“I didn’t mean any malice by this,” Conway said. “I didn’t want them to get in any trouble. I just — a reporter called and asked me a question and I honestly answered it.”
Conway (no relation to Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway) sits on the executive committee of the Jefferson County, Ky. Democratic Party, and said he serves as the party’s official spokesperson. He is also vice president of sales and marketing at a Louisville company called Website Mentors, which describes itself “a full-service digital media & interactive marketing agency.” To hear Conway tell it, he wasn’t the only person who knew Reilly and Morrison were behind the recording of the McConnell meeting, in which McConnell and aides discussed their potential opponent, Ashley Judd. However, Conway wasn’t exactly clear about how he knew it.
“The way it was told to me was that several people had implicated them in this, and I just confirmed it,” he said. “And I was the only person either, as some people would say, [who] has the balls to go on record, [or] as I would say, stupid enough to go on record.”
He said he knows both the activists from the Louisville political world, but he was quick to draw a line between what he does and what they do.
“They are active in the Louisville political scene,” Conway said. “I am a leader in the Democratic Party. There’s a difference. They are political activists, and that’s why I came forward, because I wanted to generate a boundary between our party, that I love, and their behavior, with which I do not agree.”
While he had not given the county party advance notice of his comments to the NPR station, Conway said he had spoken with county Chairman Bill Ryan on Thursday, and that Ryan “backs me up.”
After spending the whole day telling the same tale, Conway said he was not even sure he had the full story of how the recordings were made.
“I think this is an important thing that needs to be at least put out in the conversation: how did they know anything was going to be going on there?” Conway wondered. “I guess the point I’m trying to make is maybe a tip came from inside McConnell’s office to tell them, ‘Show up here, at this time.’ Like, ‘There’s going to be a strategy meeting, maybe you want to hang out outside,’ or something like that.”
Did he really think that, TPM asked.
“I mean, I don’t know, that’s just my thought process as I’ve had the entire day to think about,” he replied.
