Hinds County Sheriff’s Dept concludes no laws were broken in McDaniel courthouse caper.
So we have the innocent explanation that three doofuses from the McDaniel campaign (one official, two supporters) showed up at the courthouse in the middle of the night, accidentally locked themselves in the building and then had to be rescued. Got it.
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So this is cool. The McDaniel staffer who was the main guy involved in that courthouse/ballot weirdness in the middle of the night basically live-tweeted the whole thing – or rather live-Facebooked it. At 11:16 pm on election night, just as the election officials were locking down the Hinds County courthouse, Scott Brewster messaged “Going to come down to Hinds county. We will win the night but might be runnoff.” Four hours later Brewster and two other Tea Partiers had to be rescued from the courthouse, where the county ballots are secured, after somehow managing the lock themselves in. The Sheriff’s department says their story about how they ended up there is a “fabrication.”
The sheriff’s office in Jackson, Miss., is blowing up the Chris McDaniel campaign’s account of how three of its team members ended up locked in the courthouse with the ballots on election night, calling it a “fabrication.”
The McDaniel campaign is seriously trying to disrupt our membership drive. But we can’t let that happen. So between the posts on the rapidly moving McDaniel Courthouse story, don’t forget, we need you to subscribe to TPMPrime. So don’t get locked in a courthouse or anything and lose your chance to sign up. Now back to our regular programming.
Key witness in the McDaniel Ballot/Courthouse caper explains that the trio’s stories are not adding up or even matching up.
One fun takeaway …
The sheriff deputy also conveyed to Perry during their interview that the stories given by Lane and company were not in sync with each other or Perry’s version of events.
“He said, ‘That doesn’t match with what Janis said this morning, but what she said this morning doesn’t match with what she said this afternoon,” Perry told TPM. A sheriff spokesman also told the Clarion-Ledger on Wednesday that the trio had given “conflicting stories.” Then on Thursday, the department was more assertive in astatement to the newspaper.
Read the rest here.
Just a reminder that “Sons of Wichita” author Daniel Schulman will be answering questions in a live chat (sub. req.) about his book on the Koch brothers this afternoon at 3 p.m.
I’ve arrived at the only reasonable explanation for the emerging situation in Mississippi. Chris McDaniel is in a desperate battle to revive Thad Cochran’s career but Cochran simply will not throw him a bone. There may even be some Odysseus type sh#t going on. McDaniel is essentially telling Cochran, “How crazy a thing do my people need to do before you bury me with it? We broke into the nursing home. My people showed up to chill with the ballot boxes in the middle of the night after the election officials left. And just to close the loop, we put out a statement saying that we, the campaign, me, us, me, told them to go there.”
As I said on election night, the real question here, the centerpiece of the campaign is, what crazy thing with Team McDaniel manage to do next and how will Thad Cochran manage not to capitalize on it?
Late this afternoon Dylan Scott reported on the quite odd story of how a close ally of Senate challenger Chris McDaniel had ended up locked in the Courthouse where ballots are stored at around 2 am the morning after primary night. Well, things seem to have gotten a good deal more interesting over the last six hours or so. Now it turns out that one of the two other people with Janis Lane, President of the Central Mississippi Tea Party, was none other than an actual campaign official with the McDaniel campaign. And there’s more.
Rickey Stokes, the bail bondsman who chained those two black men to the courthouse door in Dothan, Alabama, was trying to help out these two guys out and suggests – kinda – that they were cool with being chained up, even though that’s pretty different from their version of events. Stokes’ explanation after the jump …