TPM Reader AT on John McCain finally getting asked about why he hired a new ‘senior advisor’ who’s implicated in two of the biggest campaign corruption scandals of recent years …
Actually the saddest thing about the whole Nelson thing is that it took a random person calling into a talk-show in Seattle before someone actually asked [McCain] about the whole thing. How many times has he been interviewed or questioned since he hired Nelson? And how many times has the press asked these types of questions? Zero. Where’s Tim Russert? Oh that’s right, fawning over Mr. Straight-talk.
Agreed.
One paper stole our story and ran it as their own. Aside from that though this pretty obvious bit of hypocrisy hasn’t garnered much attention.
Late Update: Just to keep everyone in the loop, here’s the exchange the Seattle caller had with Sen. McCain …
CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I’m kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor.
Here’s a guy who was actually in the indictment of DeLay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from DeLay’s PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor of James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote lines in New England a couple years ago.
So I’m curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?
MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.
CALLER: You don’t believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?
MCCAIN: No.
CARLSON: All right.
[nervous laughter]
MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I’ve never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I’ve never heard of them before.
Needless to say, what the caller said was precisely true, as you can see demonstrated in this post about the DeLay case and this one about the phone-jamming case.
I’m curious to learn what the senator’s investigation turns up about his new right hand.
