UPDATE: McDaniel Campaign Asked Arrested Blogger to Take Video Down in Late April

Breitbart ^ | 18 May 2014 | Matthew Boyle

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On Saturday, April 26, at 8:54am, Melanie Sojourner, campaign manager for Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel's primary challenge of Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), sent an irate email.

“Someone has created a video about Thad and Kay,” Sojourner wrote in the email, a partially redacted version of which was provided to Breitbart News. “It must come down ASAP. Does anyone know where this came from?”

Sojourner was responding to a video posted online by Clayton Thomas Kelly, 28, a blogger who had been compiling documents and other information about Cochran's relationship with his executive assistant, Kay Webber.

Kelly was arrested Friday night for illicitly entering the residence of Cochran's wife Rose at a retirement home in Madison, MS. The photo Kelly allegedly took was in the video that Sojourner said she was angry about.

“If I find out anyone associated with our staff had anything to do with this it is immediate grounds for dismissal,” Sojourner wrote in the April 26 email. “We have to know we cannot engage in these attacks.”

Kelly's arrest has upended the race between six-term incumbent Cochran and McDaniel, providing Cochran a moment of sympathy when he needed it most, while putting McDaniel on his heels about what he knew and when he knew it.

The incident helped national GOP establishment figures swoop in to attack McDaniel, and offered a public exhibit of an inexperienced grassroots campaign in crisis mode. But the initial war over the incident has operated without a key fact: the McDaniel campaign knew about the video when it came out, and sent out a wide call to aides and volunteers to find the person who posted it and get them to take it down.

Hours later, a campaign aide contacted two local Republican activists who had been posting about the video on social media, who in turn

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	"If we must have an enemy at the head of Government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures." - Alexander Hamilton "We don't intend to turn the Republican Party over to the traitors in the battle just ended. We will have no more of those candidates who are pledged to the same goals as our opposition and who seek our support. Turning the Party over to the so-called moderates wouldn’t make any sense at all." -- President Ronald Reagan "A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice." - Thomas Paine 1792 "It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." - Samuel Adams "If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams