Klobuchar aide loses job for viewing leaked Kennedy ad
09/21/2006
Communications director was asked to resign after watching an unreleased Kennedy ad on the Web.
Conrad Defiebre, Star Tribune
Last update: September 21, 2006 – 12:17 AM
A high-level staffer on Amy Klobuchar’s U.S. Senate campaign has lost her job and the DFLer’s race against Republican Mark Kennedy has veered into intrigue and controversy over the leak of an unreleased Kennedy TV ad.
Tara McGuinness, Klobuchar’s communications director, agreed to resign for watching the advertisement after a blogger sent her a Web link to it, campaign manager Ben Goldfarb announced late Wednesday.
Klobuchar, who is Hennepin County’s chief prosecutor, ordered that the incident be reported to the FBI for a possible criminal investigation. But a Minneapolis man who said he was the source of the leak met reporters Wednesday night and denied any wrongdoing.
Klobuchar also publicly apologized to Kennedy for what Goldfarb called McGuinness’ “poor judgment.”
Kennedy’s campaign manager responded by calling on Klobuchar to answer a long list of questions he said were raised by the revelations. The avowed blogger, Noah Kunin, 24—who maintains the political website http://www.blanked-out.com—may have cleared up some of them when he came forward.
Goldfarb said the blogger had claimed to have used passwords, but Kunin denied circumventing any computer security measures to find the ad on the website of Kennedy’s advertising consultants, Scott Howell and Co. of Dallas.
“It was in no way secure,” Kunin said. “I was doing nothing wrong.” He also apologized to Klobuchar for causing a diversion from campaign issues.
Earlier, however, Klobuchar issued a statement saying that “what happened here was wrong. ... Some people may believe that this happens on campaigns all the time, but it is not acceptable on our campaign.”
Goldfarb said he told the blogger that leaking the ad was wrong and not to do it again. He added: “Neither Amy Klobuchar nor I have personally seen this advertisement, and no campaign strategy or decisions will be changed because of it.”
Campaign heating up
The development comes as the Senate contest intensifies with increasingly sharp rhetoric and polls showing Klobuchar with a solid lead. Kennedy’s campaign recently began airing the first pointedly negative TV ad of the race.
Kennedy was in Washington on Wednesday for U.S. House votes and unavailable for comment. But at an evening news conference at his campaign headquarters in St. Paul, his grim-faced campaign manager, Pat Shortridge, said the congressman “was surprised, like all of us.”
The leak of “very sensitive Kennedy campaign property” prompted immediate security checks of websites maintained by the campaign and the Howell firm, Shortridge said.
Shortridge said he was most troubled that it may have taken the Klobuchar forces five days to inform Kennedy of the breach of campaign secrets, and he demanded that her campaign explain the delay.
Goldfarb said the blogger contacted McGuinness on Saturday and that he and Klobuchar learned of it “over the weekend.” The campaign called the FBI on Monday and formally filed a report on Wednesday, he said.
“We took immediate action, and everything we knew was reported to the FBI,” Goldfarb said. “But we didn’t want to announce anything until that process was complete.”
He declined to identify the blogger or answer other questions “because law enforcement officials will now be reviewing this matter.” He added: “The Klobuchar campaign will cooperate fully with law enforcement.”
Shortridge said the Kennedy campaign accepted Klobuchar’s apology as “a good first step."Now she needs to help us get to the bottom of these questions so we can get back to debating the issues,” he said.