Former Republican Iowa State Senator Kent Sorenson says in this secretly recorded audio that top officials in the 2012 Bachmann For President campaign ordered and knew about theft of valuable mailing list from Bachmann worker.
How does this tie in with Ron Paul Inc.?
One of the selling points made by the negotiator of Sorenson's move to the 2012 Ron Paul campaign listed access to the list as one of the "benefits" of paying Sorenson to jump to the Ron Paul campaign.
Craig Robison of TheIowaRepublican.com explains:
Documents obtained by TheIowaRepublican.com suggest that State Senator Kent Sorenson sought and likely received financial compensation from Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign before he ditched Michele Bachmann just days before the Iowa caucuses[...]
The dealings between Sorenson and the Bachmann campaign also have prompted a series of federal investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Federal Election Commission, and the Office of Congressional Ethics.
To date, only Sorenson’s dealings with the Bachmann campaign have been made public. New information has been provided to TheIowaRepublican.com that details the courting of Sorenson by the Paul campaign, which began in October 2011, long before his public endorsement of Congressman Ron Paul on December 28, 2011. The documents also show that Sorenson was negotiating with Ron Paul’s national campaign chairman, Jesse Benton, who is now running Mitch McConnell’s 2014 re-election campaign in Kentucky, and John Tate, Paul’s 2012 campaign manager.
Also involved in the elaborate scheme to persuade Sorenson to defect from Bachmann to Paul is Aaron Dorr, the Executive Director of Iowa Gun Owners Association. Dorr served as an early negotiator between Sorenson and the Paul campaign. It was Dorr who drafted a three-page memo outlining Sorenson’s financial demands to get him to jump ship from the Bachmann campaign. This memo not only discloses the financial compensation Sorenson sought to obtain, but also details his financial agreement with Bachmann.
Dorr’s October 29, 2011, memo also outlined other benefits the Paul campaign would receive by meeting Sorenson’s financial demands. One of those benefits was the acquisition of a list of identified voters to Michele Bachmann. Dorr also admits that he and Sorenson are in possession of the list of the “main Iowa home-school group” in the state.
The theft of the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators (NICHE) list spawned a controversy of its own in December of 2011 when the Bachmann campaign sent multiple emails to the list without the group’s knowledge. The Bachmann campaign assured the group that the emails were inadvertent, but we now see that the NICHE list wasn’t just used to promote Bachmann’s candidacy, but was acquired by Sorenson through Chris Dorr for his own personal use and profit.
The secret audio is more of a problem from a direct legal perspective for Sorenson than it is for Ron Paul Inc. But it does indicate the amount of pressure Sorenson is going to be under to cooperate with the Feds and that may open up an entire new set of problems for Ron Paul Inc, from secret payoffs, intern problems etc. The curtain has only started to go up on this show. I predict the full cast won't be on stage until the Iowa Senate race moves from the primaries to the general election. If it breaks open at that time, it will do damage to Ron Paul Inc. and Mitch McConnell.
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