Chris McDaniel
There's another weird, suspicious story coming out of Mississippi's Senate race and centering on supporters of Chris McDaniel being somewhere they weren't supposed to be: a county courthouse, on election night. Janis Lane, Rob Chambers, and Scott Brewster—the latter actually a high-ranking McDaniel staffer—were
locked in the Hinds County Courthouse at an unknown point on election night, and were there until 3:45 in the morning:
McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch issued a statement late Wednesday saying the campaign "sent people to the Hinds courthouse to obtain the outstanding numbers and observe the count." The statement reiterated the people were allowed in by "uniformed personnel" and then being locked inside.
"Predictably, a close Cochran ally wants to make hay out of this. Sadly, the Cochran campaign wants to make this election about anything but issues. Mississippians deserve better than this sort of distraction politics," Fritsch said in the statement.
When you're with the campaign that gained national notoriety after an ally broke into a nursing home to record your opponent's bedridden wife, trying to brazen your way through having a staffer and two supporters found inside a locked courthouse where ballots are being stored on election night ... well, it's brazen. Questioning the possibility of attempted election fraud is not actually distraction politics under those circumstances. And if they were there to observe the count in an aboveboard manner, why didn't they observe the count ending and leave with the people doing the counting? These are serious questions, not distractions, when you're dealing with a tight Senate race and the ethics of someone who could become a United States senator.
Officials say the ballots stored at the courthouse were not at risk, so there's that. The sheriff's department is investigating after receiving conflicting statements from the three lock-ins.