Actually, I do, which is a problem for you. I think 80-85% of Free Republic posters are completely aware of the nature of Rafael Edward Cruz and his campaign now; in the beginning the con was effective, but no longer.
In 2005 Governor Matt Blunt appointed Ed Martin as chairman of the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners .[5] He also headed the leadership team[citation needed] that designed and implemented the Missouri Accountability Portal, an Internet search engine developed by the Blunt administration to track state government spending in order to increase transparency.[11]
In 2006 Governor Matt Blunt appointed Martin as his Chief of Staff.[12] While serving as Blunt's chief of staff, Martin was linked to the controversial firing of Scott Eckersley, then Deputy General Counsel for Blunt. In the summer of 2007, Martin's office had resisted providing his emails to an investigative reporter from the Springfield (MO) News-Leader, who was investigating whether Martin used his office to influence outside groups against political opponents. Martin claimed there were no emails that pertained to the issue. A Blunt spokesman said the administration did not have a policy of retaining emails, although the state Sunshine Law requiring retention for 3 years is widely known.[13]
The administration claimed it had fired Eckersley because he had violated internal policies. He filed a lawsuit against Martin and Blunt for his firing, saying he had been trying to enforce the state law for retention of emails.[14] Several major media outlets filed suit to gain access to Martin's and other emails of the administration. Martin resigned as Chief of Staff in November 2007, followed by Blunt's General Counsel, Henry Herschel.[13]
After a year-long battle to gain access, in November 2008, the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch analyzed and reported on 60,000 pages of emails obtained from the administration. They found that Martin had used his state office in 2007 improperly to encourage opposition to Attorney General Jay Nixon among anti-abortion groups, as the Democrat Nixon was likely to oppose Blunt in the next election.[13] He had also pressured political appointees of state agencies to criticize Nixon's handling of some issues as AG. In addition, the newspapers reported that Martin had encouraged outside groups to oppose the nomination of Patricia Breckenridge to an open seat on the Missouri Supreme Court, although Blunt supported her.[13] On May 22, 2009, the Missouri Attorney General's office announced that Eckersley's lawsuit against Blunt and others had been settled for $500,000.[15][16]