◼ Alleged McConnell Bugger Visited White House - John Stanton/Buzzfeed
Days before Progress Kentucky launched a Twitter offensive against Mitch McConnell, its executive director met with White House officials....
For days, Democrats in the state and nationally have sought to cast the duo as a pair of bungling amateurs who simply got in over their heads and made a series of bad decisions. But the White House visit suggests the distance from Reilly to his party's leaders may not have been quite that far.
The White House visitors log, showing Reilly met with administration officials Dec. 5th, appears to have been signed in by Victoria McCullough, a staff assistant to Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett.
◼ According to Reilly’s twitter feed, his trip to Washington included stops at the White House to discuss the fiscal cliff and a meeting at the Center for American Progress, a left leaning think tank. - Sean Higgins/Washington Examiner
◼ Investigation: Why did David Corn Run with a False McConnell Tape Transcript? - Bryan Preston/PJM
...The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint shortly after the tape’s release, amplified by the liberal Huffington Post, claiming that it provided evidence that Sen. McConnell has used official congressional staff to conduct opposition research on Judd (who, not to belabor the point, is no longer even a candidate and never officially was one).
The blockbuster that Corn believed he had was encapsulated in a few words: “thank them three times.” Those words are the basis of the CREW charge that McConnell has used legislative assistants or legislative aides (“LAs” on the tape) for political opposition research. Corn transcribes that passage as follows:
Presenter: So I’ll just preface my comments that this reflects the work of a lot of folks: Josh, Jesse, Phil Maxson, a lot of LAs, thank them three times, so this is a compilation of work, all the way through. The first person we’ll focus on…But what if no one on the tape ever said those words in bold?
The Louisville Courier-Journal took the noisy 12-minute audio and cleaned it up to determine what the speaker actually says on the tape. The newspaper determined that the legislative aide did not say “thanked them three times,” but instead said “on their free time.” So the transcript should read:
Presenter: So I’ll just preface my comments that this reflects the work of a lot of folks: Josh, Jesse, Phil Maxson, a lot of LAs, on their free time, so this is a compilation of work, all the way through. The first person we’ll focus on…The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Helper came to a similar conclusion. Those words make all the difference in the world. If the “thank them three times” interpretation is correct, then the phrase may be evidence backing up CREW’s complaint. But “on their free time” makes it clear that the work was not done on the taxpayer’s clock and therefore there is no basis for the complaint at all.
Corn says that he had the audio for two weeks before he released it into the wild, while he vetted it with lawyers. But did he ever have a sound engineer attempt to clean up the audio, if only to make sure that he was getting the transcript and interpretation correctly? (Audio, at the link)
