Thad Cochran accused of buying votes, threatens lawsuit

 I have only paid a small amount of attention to the GOP primary in Mississippi which culminated in a run off between Thad Cochran and Chris McDaniel that ended with the incumbent beating the Tea Party favorite, but this has to be one of the dirtiest and most despicable campaigns in recent history.

  We saw somebody who was working on the McDaniel campaign sneak into the nursing home room of Thad Cochran’s wife and take pictures of her–what he intended to gain from this I cannot fathom–and one person arrested in connection with this has committed suicide, and then we had somebody working for the Cochran campaign (rumored to be tied to Haley Barbour) post a flier which called Chris McDaniel a racist and tied him to the KKK.

  While there is no way to figure out what the whole nursing home stunt was about we do know what the flier was about; it was an attempt to persuade black Democratic voters to cross the line and vote for Thad Cochran in the primary. And it looks as though it was just enough to push him over the top.

  There is controversy surrounding this because apparently Mississippi law allows voters in one party to cross over the line and vote in the other party’s primary as long as they intend to vote for that same candidate in the general election as well. But of course there is no way to enforce this law because there is no way to prove intent so for all intents and purposes this is a non-issue.

  But today there was another twist to this strange story when Reverend Stevie Fielder made the claim that the Cochran campaign hired him to pay black Democrats to vote for him in the run off.

  Here is more:

Rev. Stevie Fielder, an associate pastor at First Union Missionary Baptist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, says Cochran’s campaign “told me to offer blacks $15 each and to vote for Thad.”

 Fielder, who was paid by freelance journalist Charles C. Johnson for the story, provided a new outlet launched by Johnson—GotNews.com—with four text messages from a person purporting to be Cochran campaign staffer Saleem Baird.

 The messages cite an official Cochran campaign email address—Saleem@ThadForMs.com—and include detailed discussions of the campaign providing envelopes of money to distribute to people who vote.

 “Send me individual names and amounts along with home address to saleem@thadforms.com and I’ll have money separated in envelopes at the office waiting for you,” one message, sent three days before the runoff, says.

 Fielder said he helped distribute the Cochran cash for votes on a promise of eventually getting paid $16,000—and because a key Cochran campaign staffer convinced him that Cochran’s conservative challenger state Sen. Chris McDaniel was racist.

 “They sold me on the fact that he was a racist and that the right thing to do was to keep him out of office,” Fielder said.

  The fact that the pastor was paid for his story leads one to wonder how reliable his account is but with what we have seen so far in this race nothing is beyond the realm of possibility, and if he has emails to prove it Thad Cochran is screwed. Rightfully so!

  The Cochran campaign fired back today, denying the allegations while threatening a lawsuit:

The campaign of Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran denied Tuesday that they bought the votes of black Democrats for $15 a piece in last month’s contentious GOP run-off, though acknowledged they had a working relationship with the man who made the allegations against them in a video posted online.

“There is absolutely no truth to these baseless and false allegations,” said Cochran campaign spokesman Jordan Russell.

Asked which specific laws the two may have broken, Russell said, “I don’t know, but the attorneys are looking through all of that right now.”

Russell also suggested that the campaign is considering legal action in response to the allegations. “It’s under active consideration,” he said.

“I think that if people are going to make wild accusations they can’t be surprised if they are held accountable for their actions.”

  For the life of me I cannot figure out why Pastor Fielder would make such a claim as this if he did not have the proof for surely he must have known a lawsuit would be forthcoming if it was a baseless claim.

  I do not know what to think about this story, what do you think?