The Herman Cain campaign has backed off — sort of — from chief of staff Mark Block’s false contention Tuesday night that Karen Kraushaar, one of the women who made a sexual harassment complaint against Cain when he headed up the National Restaurant Association, was the mother of reporter Josh Kraushaar.
During his appearance on Sean Hannity’s TV show, Block said: “You have all of these allegations coming out, you know, eight nine days ago from Politico. You start connecting the dots and trying to figure out whether it’s coming from our opponents on the left or opponents from the right. I mean, just at the press conference it was brought up that Karen Kraushaar had come out as one of the women. So, we’ve come to find out that her son works at Politico, the organization.”
He also added: “We’ve confirmed that he does indeed work at Politico and that’s his mother, yes.”
The problem: A bit earlier Tuesday evening, Josh Kraushaar was already tweeting that he was not related to Karen Kaushaar, calling it a “strange coincidence.”
Also, Josh Kraushaar no longer works at Politico. He used to be there, but left for National Journal in July 2010.
Shortly after Josh Kraushaar’s initial tweeting, he found out what Block had just said on Hannity, and fired back: “For a presidential spokesman to go on TV and make up blatant falsehoods doesn’t speak well for his boss, either.”
Now, in an exchange with the Daily Caller, the Cain campaign is acknowledging the error — and chalking it up to some sort of information that they had at the time.
“Based upon information available at the time of Mr. Block’s Tuesday night interview on Fox News, the campaign was led to believe that Mr. Josh Kraushaar, currently with the National Journal and a former employee of Politico, was the son of Karen Kraushaar,” campaign spokesman J.D. Gordon said. “We have since learned that is not the case.”
