Two Republicans posed as members of the Northern Arizona University Communist Party to make a damaging donation to Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-AZ), who is running for reelection next month, according to a Friday Guardian story.
The two men’s attempts to tie the congressman to communism seem to have been clumsily done.
They came into O’Halleran’s campaign office bearing a jar of $39.68, demanding a receipt paid to the communist organization.
Per the Guardian, finance director Lindsay Coleman immediately drove to the local Republican field office to return the money. One of the men posing as a communist emerged and accepted the jar. Coleman said that his partner in the donation attempt was a field organizer for the Arizona Republican Party.
The state party did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I am amazed at the lengths my opponent and her supporters will go to to undermine the credibility of our election this Fall. This stunt is just one more shameful chapter in Wendy Rogers’ failed attempts to win a political office,” said Rep. O’Halleran in a statement through a spokesperson.
“She has skipped debates, aired blatant lies in her advertising, and now her team is committing fraud in some bizarre, misguided effort to embarrass my campaign. Team O’Halleran demands answers about what Wendy Rogers knew and an apology for this deception,” he added.
Real Clear Politics classifies Arizona’s first district, in which O’Halleran is facing Republican challenger Wendy Rogers, as “leans Democratic.”
Desperate people do desperate things…
Sounds like the Arizona GOP is auditioning to be a Project Veritas West. Their stunt was definitely O’Keefe-ian enough.
The headline that should have been:
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in [Arizona],
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in [Arizona].
Clearly not graduates of the Donald H. Segretti School of Professional Ratfuckers. O tempora, o mores!