Go figure.
Try to act surprised as we learn that Sen. Ted Cruz tends to surround himself with sleazy people that even other Republicans
are loathe to associate with.
By last summer, [Cruz] was making key hires for his campaign crew. And this included recruiting a controversial Missouri-based political operative named Jeff Roe, who is known for his ruthless, bare-knuckled style and who has recently been in the news due to a tragic death.
To say Roe has become known for a "bare-knuckled" style is apropos, given that one of his signature moves has been to deploy campaign trackers whose actions against his political opponents are so belligerent that they sometimes border on "assault."
Graves' opponents in these campaigns have described their encounters with Graves' staffers as "close to assault" and "evil." Graves' 2002 challenger, a Democrat named Cathy Rinehart, says she filed a police report after a group of Graves' campaign aides "accosted" her during a parade. (No charges came from her report.) "It was intimidation, it was very threatening," Rinehart, the Clay County assessor, recalls. "They did it the whole campaign." [...]
Graves' 2004 opponent, Democrat Charlie Broomfield, says he filed a police report after an encounter in a dark parking lot with a camera-wielding man who turned out to be a political operative for Graves. Broomfield was afraid as the man, who refused to identify himself, got in his face and began snapping his picture. Broomfield wrote down the man's license plate number, which police traced to Graves' deputy press secretary.
Mother Jones dubs Roe as Ted Cruz's Karl Rove. That's probably not quite right, he seems an operative more in the spirit of a
Charles C. Johnson. In any case, Roe hasn't been shy about using hardball tactics against fellow Republicans if that's what he's being paid to do, so it looks like the Republican primaries are going to get very nasty, very fast. Oh, goodie.