Read it on Salon
Join HULU, SEINFELD and SALON to celebrate Festivus!
Sponsored Post
Friday, May 31, 2013 3:08 PM UTC
Why I secretly recorded Mitch McConnell
EXCLUSIVE: My effort to expose the Senate minority leader's ugly campaign upended my life. Here's what happened VIDEO
Topics: Video, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senate, FBI, U.S. Justice Department, Editor's Picks, recording, Surveillance, Progress Kentucky, John Yarmuth, Ashley Judd, Howard Zinn, Elections News, Politics News
Earlier this year, I secretly made an audio recording of Sen. Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican on the planet, at his campaign headquarters in Kentucky. The released portion of the recording clocks in at less than 12 minutes, but those few minutes changed my life.
I leaked the recording to Mother Jones, which published it with a transcript and analysis in April, and over the days that followed, blogs and cable news shows lit up with the revelations from that one meeting. At the time, McConnell was prepping for a race against the actress Ashley Judd — it was “the Whac-a-Mole stage of the campaign,” McConnell said smugly — and the recording captures his team in some Grade-A jackassery, including plans to use Judd’s history of depression against her.
But also up for debate was the the ethics of the audio recording itself. Here’s the latest: An assistant U.S. attorney, Bryan Calhoun, telephoned my attorney yesterday, asking to meet with him next Friday as charges against me are being presented to a grand jury.
In a technology age marked by vigilante heroes like Julian Assange and Anonymous, the line between journalism and espionage has grown thin. McConnell was quick to frame himself as the victim of a crime, which was to be expected. It was the guilty repositioning of a politician who has been caught being craven.
What I never expected was the pushback from my own political side. One day in April, I turned on MSNBC and saw U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Louisville and one of my personal heroes, rip me a new one:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
“These are like petty thieves,” Yarmuth said, referring to me and my friend, Shawn Reilly, who had accompanied me as I made the recording. “They’re an embarrassment to the system. They’re an embarrassment to politics.”
In the days that following the audio leak, I lost my friendship with Shawn. I lost my apartment. I lost my job and my career path.
Unlike Mitch McConnell, I will not paint myself as a victim. I’ve learned a lot in these weeks. But nothing stung like hearing Yarmuth brush me aside like that. I was so upset that all I could do is go for a long run. Frankly, I had a good cry. And as I pounded away the stress and frustration of that moment, I had to wonder: Did I make a mistake?
____
I’m a liberal activist in Kentucky. I’m also a citizen journalist — at least I used to be — because I don’t subscribe to the lie that activism and journalism can be separated. Howard Zinn wrote,“You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” That’s how I see it: Journalism is a moving train, and we all choose which perspectives to bring along on the ride. Needless to say, journalists tend not to like me.
Since 2009, I’ve run a blog that hoped to fill a narrow void in Kentucky media by covering a ridiculous amount of public meetings, civil disobedience actions and political events, where I’m often the only person who shows up with a tripod. My blog’s YouTube channel has more than 100 videos. I started it because I have a long-standing interest in improving the collective knowledge of Kentuckians. The more informed we are, the better decisions we make. But I have other interests as well. One of my goals is to unseat Mitch McConnell.
I don’t personally dislike McConnell, but I believe he has failed Kentucky. He has prioritized his personal agenda du jour over the needs of Kentuckians for more than three decades of his so-called public service. It took the two years leading up to the 2012 election — during which his only aim was to sabotage President Barack Obama — for a wider audience to catch on to his disgraceful behavior. To hell with the Commonwealth of Kentucky, to hell with the country.
According to Public Policy Polling in their December 11, 2012 poll results, McConnell was “the most unpopular Senator in the country.” And now he faced a high-profile, high-stakes face-off with a Hollywood star.
Of course I was watching, but I also became invested. I’ve never met Judd, but I identify with her. We’re both the same age, have endured similar personal struggles. We both spent our 20s looking out for ourselves while suppressing a calling to higher service. Her transition into a life devoted to public interest has been more streamlined and effective than mine, but I root for her. (Frankly, I hope she reconsiders her decision not to run, and jumps in the race by January.)
I learned about McConnell’s February campaign launch a week prior to the event, through a tip from a reader of my political blog. The tipster did not tell me the time or precise location, but I discovered in only a few days that his HQ was only 1,000 feet from where I then lived. If Sarah Palin had said she could see the McConnell campaign HQ from my deck, she would have survived a fact check.
The meeting was on Groundhog Day, a holiday that would seem to have great ironic meaning for the American political system, and it was freezing cold that morning. I skipped my shower, threw on sweats, enjoyed hot coffee while I checked my email. Typical Saturday on my Mac. In the course of a few minutes, a few hours had passed. I didn’t want to go outside — I didn’t want to go anywhere — but I remember thinking if McConnell’s launch was so close to my home and I spent the day hibernating, then I suck at both journalism and activism. And since I don’t have aptitude or passion for much else, that would be problematic for my self-esteem. So I put on my coat and shoes, grabbed my Flip camera, and headed out the door.
At the last minute, I recruited my neighbor, Shawn Reilly, to come with me. Shawn had a phone with access to Twitter, which I thought might provide clues on the meeting’s exact location, and my smart phone had not survived a fall from atop the roof of my moving Jeep.
So we drove to Bishop Lane and scoured the parking lots for McConnell’s black Suburban or any BMWs with “Friend of Coal” license plates. No luck. Twitter was no use either. But that’s when my phone rang.
On the other line was the source who first let me know about the HQ opening. He told me I had missed the launch, pronouncing the donuts cheap and stale and the coffee cold, but the meeting was still going. And he told me the location of the headquarters: the second floor of a building named Watterson Towers.
We headed over.
The front door to the office building was unlocked, and there was no one behind the reception desk. Walking down the hall of the second floor, I recognized McConnell’s voice. He was talking about Sen. Rand Paul’s strategic use of the Tea Party in procuring his 2010 election.
The voices were coming from the other side of a nearby door, which had a window. I pulled out my Flip camera and started to record.
I don’t need to tell you what a weapon the pocket video camera has become. Bartender Scott Prouty changed the trajectory of the entire 2012 election when he captured Mitt Romney in his now classic “47 percent” speech. You just never knew when a politician was going to open his mouth and accidentally reveal his true agenda. And as I held my Flip up to the window, that’s what I was hoping for, but I soon realized that the video I was capturing was the back of a projection screen, and only the audio was of value. So I held the Flip closer to the door vent instead of the window, and began recording the 11:45 minutes of footage later released by Mother Jones.
I was sweating. My heart was racing. I tried to record backup audio on my phone, but my cheap replacement phone would only let me record voice memos of one minute in length. Every time the minute was up, the phone would beep, which was excruciating for the person crouching by a door vent. When a gentleman walked out of the campaign headquarters and into the hall, I put my Flip and phone back in my pocket, and headed to the elevator.
Shawn was already there. We made our escape.
At the time, I wasn’t clear exactly what I had captured on tape. It wasn’t until I listened back to the recording that I heard the entirety of what was taking place. I heard his campaign staff revealing the ugly nature of their pending electoral strategy. I heard an oppo research presenter, whose identity is still a tightly guarded McConnell secret, suggesting that the senator may have used his legislative aides to gather the dirt on Judd. It’s unlawful to use government resources for campaign work, a lesson McConnell should have learned in 1981, when the Louisville Times and a subsequent lawsuit allege he did the same, back when he was serving as the Jefferson County Judge/Executive.
Most Read
Comments
0 Comments