The lawyer for Daily Kos is not mincing words when it comes to accusing Research 2000 of outright fraud in its poll data.
“He handed Daily Kos fiction and claimed it was fact and got us to put our name on it,” said Attorney Adam Bonin of R2K president Del Ali.
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Bonin, of the firm Cozen O’Connor in Philadelphia, says he will file suit against Research 2000 in the next week in the Northern District of California, where Kos is based. The suit will allege “breach of contract, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, and a number of other counts.” It will seek damages for “the amount that was paid for this polling, and … things like reputational harm and punitive damages.” Ali and his attorney have forcefully denied the allegations.
“I think the facts are devastating and they speak for themselves,” says Bonin, pointing to the statistical analysis posted by Kos that alleges that R2K poll data is “bunk” and possibly the product of some kind of randomizer.
Ali’s attorney, Richard Beckler of Howrey LLP in Washington, told TPMmuckraker in an interview, “This guy is completely all wet. This allegation of fraud is absurd.” He added, “These guys are basically ruining Mr. Ali’s business.”
Beckler promised to take “some kind of action soon against all of them” — referring to Kos and the three authors of the analysis calling R2K’s data into question. He declined to elaborate. Beckler also questioned the credentials of the three authors — who Kos called “statistic wizards” — Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman. They are respectively described in the Kos post as political consultant, a retired physicist, and a wildlife research technician.
Kos’ lawyer, it’s worth noting, told Greg Sargent that they also consulted other polling experts who agreed that there were problems with R2K’s data.
Beckler claimed that Kos “wont even pay his goddamn bill. He owes [Ali] $50, $60, $70,000 dollars, something in that neighborhood.”
Kos responded in an email to TPMmuckraker:
I wish this was a dispute about billing, because whether we’ve paid or not is irrelevant to the fact that they didn’t deliver the polling they were supposed to. Do they really want to argue that a billing dispute justifies delivering false data?
By the way, that $50-70,000 number is nonsense. We’ve paid for all the polling we were supposed to have received.
