Some Dems out to deny colleague in own party a Senate seat
Here’s a prime example of liberal/progressive campaign tactic in action.
“The state Senate appears headed toward a historic confrontation Monday, when a group of Democrats plans to ask other senators not to seat an incoming fellow Democrat.”
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“The issue hinges on a dirty — and allegedly illegal — campaign tactic used by the liberal Seattle political consulting group Moxie Media, which was hired by unions and trial lawyers to defeat moderate or conservative Democrats and replace them with liberals.
Moxie Media successfully targeted incumbent Sen. Jean Berkey, D-Everett, with a widely denounced tactic of surreptitiously using money from those groups to create shell groups with names like “Conservative PAC” to attack Berkey for being too liberal.
The attorney general has charged Moxie Media and its directors, Lisa MacLean and Henry Underhill, with violating campaign-finance disclosure laws in trying to keep the true source of the funding from the public. That case is pending in Thurston County.
Kastama said a state Public Disclosure Commission (PDC) investigative report shows the tactic influenced the August primary, which Berkey lost by 122 votes.
“What makes this different from any other case is you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an illegal action led to a faulty election,” said Kastama, who, like Berkey, is a political moderate.”
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“The PDC’s 507-page investigative file, obtained by The Seattle Times in a public-disclosure request, shows that MacLean solicited money from the Washington State Labor Council, a coalition of trial lawyers and the Washington State Federation of State Employees to attack Berkey from the political right weeks before the August primary.
Berkey was in a three-way race with Harper, a progressive, and Rod Reiger, a Republican.
In e-mails obtained by PDC investigators, MacLean suggests methods of hiding the source of the money in ways “that would likely take much longer for any reporter or blogger to link it to any of you before election day,” she wrote.
After producing campaign materials and robo-calls that criticized Berkey for raising taxes — positions the funding groups had advocated for — Moxie Media did not file required disclosure reports on time and violated a new law requiring disclosure of the person truly running the independent expenditure attacks, the attorney general alleges.”