I’ve read through the new Duncan Hunter court filing. And it’s rather remarkable. Prosecutors list five extra-marital affairs Hunter carried on with various GOP lobbyists, operatives and congressional staffers (one of whom worked in his own office) and funded out of his campaign funds.
The funding included everything from paying for weekend getaways, to ubering back and forth to different girlfriends’ homes for overnight and basically all the miscellaneous stuff one might do while carrying on an affair. Highlights include double dates with another member of Congress, the time Hunter kept an extra night of his wife’s hotel reservation in DC and used it to spend the night with his girlfriend.
Prosecutors argue persuasively if rather archly that they must introduce evidence of Hunter’s affairs because otherwise Hunter might argue that the expenses were tied to his work in Congress. As they note, each girlfriend was tied either to Congress or political work in general. So tying the meetings to his campaign is not inherently implausible unless you know they were having sex.
So for instance, while noting that an lobbyist identified as “individual 17” was a lobbyist who had organized events and fundraisers for Hunter, prosecutors make clear that certain meetings were clearly not tied to his campaign: “That night, however, was not about business: at around 11:00 pm, Hunter and I-17 departed the Hamilton together for her home, where they engaged in intimate personal activities unrelated to Hunter’s congressional campaign or duties as a member of Congress.”
The filing includes numerous examples like this with five separate individuals.
The oddest part of the filing comes at the end when prosecutors note another instance of “sensitive conduct” apparently so sensitive they didn’t include it in the filing. It apparently deals with a group of DC pals (seemingly men?) and seems separate from assignations with individual women.
Your guess is as good as mine on this one. But the reference to “improperly tainting the jury” seems to suggest that this is more than simply personally embarrassing information like the affairs the filling mentions.
