A newly surfaced video of the rally that Matt Bevin said he thought was a general states’ right event suggests that the Kentucky businessman had to know he was at a cockfighting rally.
Bevin, who is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the GOP primary, previously said he thought he was merely at a state’s rights event.
But footage of the rally taken by a reporter for Kentucky’s WAVE 3 News who went undercover at the event, shows that right before Bevin spoke, American Gamefowl Defense Director Dave Devereaux delivered remarks to the crowd in which he said they were there for the “sole purpose of legalizing gamecock fighting at the state level.”
Following Bevin’s remarks Devereaux asked if he would support efforts to “legalize gamecock fighting in the state of Kentucky.”
“I support the people of Kentucky exercising their right, because it is our right to decide what it is that we want to do, and not the federal government’s,” Bevin responded. “Criminalizing behavior, if it’s part of the heritage of this state, is in my opinion a bad idea. A bad idea. I will not support it.”
WAVE 3 News caught up with Bevin to ask him about whether he actually knew he was at the cockfighting event in response to the video. Bevin said he wasn’t aware of Devereaux’s remarks.
“I honestly wasn’t even paying attention,” Bevin said. “I was thinking about what I was going to say. I don’t even remember him saying that.”
Bevin has also tried to defend his association with cockfighting by saying America’s Founding Fathers were very involved in the affair.
In response to the new video, McConnell’s campaign said that the cockfighting event will go down as “one of the most disqualifying moments in Kentucky’s political history.”
“Matt Bevin’s cockfighting episode will go down in history as one of the most disqualifying moments in Kentucky political history,” McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore said. “Twenty years from now, we will all remember the time when the East Coast con-man thought so little of Kentuckians that he pathologically lied to us about absolutely everything until an undercover camera caught him red-handed at a cockfighting rally.”
