Yet another scandal is rocking the campaign of Republican US House candidate Carl DeMaio as accusations of secretly authoring a UT San Diego editorial that slammed his opponent, Democratic Rep. Scott Peters have surfaced today.
From NBC 7 in San Diego:
Former DeMaio staffer Todd Bosnich said he and campaign spokesman Dave McCulloch were the authors of an editorial entitled “Scott Peters and the Mount Soledad Shuffle.”
Bosnich accused DeMaio of improper sexual conduct in an interview with CNN on October 10. The DeMaio campaign says Bosnich was fired for plagiarism.
“I worked with Dave on it,” Bosnich said. “So it was, basically, the two of us who wrote it.”
The December 2013 editorial says that “The newly renewed debate over the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial — and how Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, actually feels about it — isn’t just a tiff over trivia. Instead, it’s a revealing reminder that Peters has a history of being both slippery and in substantive.”
The emails provided to NBC 7 indicate that after the editorial ran, McCulloch reached out to a consultant, other campaign staff and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) boasting that “UT San Diego scorched Peters over the Soledad Cross today, saying ‘Peters has a history of being both slippery and insubstantive’ and that ‘rewriting his own history and ducking responsibility for his actions have always come easy to Scott Peters.’”
In response, Alleigh Marree of the NRCC said: “This is great. Will be able to use these lines A LOT.”
In the email thread provided to NBC 7 Investigates, DeMaio wrote back, “Well, we did wrote (sic) it ourselves.”
William Osborne, editorial/opinion director of UT San Diego, told NBC 7 Investigates that UT San Diego editorial writer Chris Reed wrote the editorial. According to Osborne, the DeMaio campaign claimed the email thread had been fabricated.
“If that email is authentic, I cannot explain it and won’t speculate,” Osborne said. “I can only tell you that Carl DeMaio personally denied to me that he wrote it and said it (the email) was a ‘fabrication.’”
Bosnich said the email thread was not altered in any way, adding that the editorial appeared almost “exactly word for word” as he and McCulloch wrote it.
It’s worth noting that UT Sand Diego has endorsed Carl DeMaio for Congress.
San Diego City Beat reporter Kelly Davis took her thoughts public when she felt she was being stonewalled by the DeMaio campaign:
(via JMG)
