McConnell freaks out over recordings — and he should

By now, you’ve probably heard about a recording of a Mitch McConnell campaign meeting where he discussed smearing Ashley Judd as mentally unbalanced and not a true Christian. If not, the story is here and the transcript is here. Suffice it to say that it makes Mitch seems like a real jerk.

Mitch’s reaction was pretty much immediate.

CNN: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s re-election campaign is “working with the FBI” on how Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, obtained a recording of political aides meeting with McConnell and discussing opposition research on Ashley Judd, McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton told CNN Tuesday.

In the recordings, political operatives huddling at the senator’s campaign headquarters in Kentucky, are heard discussing potentially attacking Judd’s mental health, as well as her left-leaning politics, if she had decided to make a bid against McConnell, who’s running for a sixth term in office next year.

“Obviously a recording device of some kind was placed in Senator McConnell’s campaign office without consent. By whom and how that was accomplished will presumably be the subject of a criminal investigation,” Benton said in a statement.

“We’ve always said the Left will stop at nothing to attack Sen. McConnell, but Watergate-style tactics to bug campaign headquarters is above and beyond,” Benton also said.

I literally laughed out loud at that last paragraph. McConnell can’t possibly believe that someone in a ninja suit snuck in in the dead of night and planted a bug, like some episode of Mission: Impossible. The recording was released by David Corn, the same person who released video of Mitt Romney’s disastrous “47%” comments.

And it seems far more likely that Corn got this recording the same way he got the 47% video. Someone at that meeting recorded it on their phone surreptitiously, which means McConnell is not surrounded exclusively by friends.

Right now, McConnell is going into standard disaster management mode and trying to change the subject from what the recording says to how the recording was obtained — i.e., he wants to make the switch from villain to victim. But he’s got a much bigger problem: who is it that’s gunning for him and why? There are going to be a lot of awkward conversations at McConnell campaign HQ in the coming weeks.

[photo by Titanas]