Christine O'Donnell, writing in Rupert Murdoch's
New York Post,
lifts the veil on what she claims was a plot involving the IRS, Democrats, and the Obama administration conspiracy to prevent her from winning the 2010 GOP nomination for U.S. Senate in Delaware:
On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware.
Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes.
It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says.
That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS claims.
After a lot of huffing and puffing, O'Donnell demands to know:
Let’s imagine if the situation was reversed. What if, while a Republican was president, the IRS leaked the tax records of Democratic candidates to the press? What would the reaction look like then?
Please read below the fold for more on this story.
First of all, you don't need to know a thing about O'Donnell's tax situation to know that this story couldn't possibly be true. There's simply no way on Earth any living Democrat would have tried to take out Christine O'Donnell six months before the GOP primary. The fact that she won the Republican nomination in 2010 was an inexplicable gift from the Heavens for Democrats; it's vastly more likely that she is in fact President Obama's mistress and a Democratic double-agent than that Democrats tried to stop her from beating former Rep. Mike Castle, who would have been a lock to win the open seat.
But even if you set aside all that (which in the real world, you would never do), O'Donnell's story is still an amazing pile of malarkey. For one, she seems to be a bit confused about the difference between the Delaware Department of Revenue (a state agency) and the Internal Revenue Service (a federal one), but the bigger problem is that almost nothing about her story is true.
While O'Donnell claims that her tax records were leaked to the press by political enemies, the reality is little less sexy and a lot more plausible. The reporter who wrote the story about her tax issues is Ginger Gibson, at the time a reporter for the Delaware News-Journal and now a reporter for Politico.
According to Gibson, she obtained the records on her own by without any leaks or help from opposition researchers. Her secret? Legwork. Gibson requested a public records search at the New Castle County Registrar's office and as you can see in this picture, the registrar found what Gibson was looking for at March 9, 2010, at 4:04 PM ET.
But contrary to O'Donnell's claim, Gibson didn't call her about the story on March 9. In fact, she didn't call O'Donnell until the week of March 20, when the story was published. Obviously, that's a tiny detail, and on its own would hardly be enough to impeach O'Donnell's credibility. But it's a nice reminder that for Christine O'Donnell—and the right-wing media that amplifies her bizarre conspiracy theories—no detail is too small to fudge.