Replies

I will say that I’m a little apprehensive, too. I was in one of my insomniac moods last night and I happened to look at FR shortly after this came out. At first I was very pleased, but the more I thought about it, the more one question bothered me: why would this minister come out and admit to a total stranger that he had done something that was completely illegal?

Black ministers are not very well educated, as a whole, and some of them may not be very bright (hence their fondness for the Dems), but they are canny. And I can’t believe he wouldn’t have known vote-buying was illegal and that, knowing this, he would still have announced to some unknown reporter that he had done it numerous times.

I think this needs to be investigated very thoroughly. I thought, from the tweets that he was showing off, that the minister was probably contracted to hire other people in a GOTV drive. In other words, each of these people would then be getting $15 for every voter they contacted who then went to the polls, while he would be getting a cut for having hired them. This isn’t illegal; both parties routinely hire people to do voter registration or canvassing, and pay them on the basis of the number of registrations, successful visits, etc.

It sounds as if the Cochran campaign either didn’t pay fast enough or wasn’t going to pay at all, once they’d gotten what they wanted. But if all they were paying for was people to go door to door to registered Democrats urging them to vote for Cochran...well, it may be underhanded, but it wasn’t illegal.

The article was more specific and incriminating, but I’m just going by the tweets that the minister was showing off in the photos, since I don’t know a thing about the reporter and how reliable he is. I feel like I’ve been burned too many times by excited reports of this “smoking gun” or that - and it usually turns out to be nothing but wishful thinking and makes people who believe it look like fools. Breitbart was reliable, but I think caution is required here and it should be investigated by someone else before we take it as the truth.

And I think the McDaniel campaign should continue amassing evidence of irregularities, but shouldn’t get openly involved in this until it’s clarified a bit.