Cochran Camp Fights New Racially Tinged Claims From Tea Party Dead-Enders | TPM
DANIEL STRAUSS – JULY 1, 2014, 4:33 PM EDT
Things are getting ever weirder in Mississippi.
The latest broadside in the tea party's long-shot effort to overturn Sen. Thad Cochran's (R-MS) primary runoff win over state Sen. Chris McDaniel (R) is a claim by an obscure conservative blogger that Cochran's campaign bought African-Americans' votes at $15 a pop.
The claim is centered on a report by blogger Charles C. Johnson, who reported at his website GotNews.com that African-American activist Stevie Fielder brought "hundreds or even thousands" of African-Americans to vote for Cochran. Johnson alleges that Fielder motivated the voters by calling McDaniel a racist. Johnson identifies Fielder as a pastor at the First Missionary Baptist Church in Meridian, Mississippi, located in Lauderdale County, but a deacon at the church told the Clarion-Ledger that Fielder is not a pastor there and is instead a "self-proclaimed minister."
Here's a paragraph from Johnson's report:
At the direction of the Cochran campaign, Reverend Fielder went "door to door, different places, mostly impoverished neighborhoods, to the housing authorities and stuff like that," telling fellow blacks that McDaniel was a racist and promising them $15 per vote. "They sold me on the fact that he was a racist and that the right thing to do was to keep him out of office," Fielder says.The Cochran campaign strongly denied Johnson's report.
The Cochran campaign strongly denied Johnson's report.
"It comes from a blogger who in the last 24 hours has accused a Mississippi public official of being responsible for an individual's death and had to retract other outlandish accusations regarding another Mississippi elected official," Cochran spokesman Jordan Russell told the Clarion Ledger. "The author of this article admits he paid his source for the story."
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