News/Commentary

GOP candidate reams Politico reporter, Dem candidate for publishing details of sexual assault for politics

October 11, 2022 | | Print Article

A congressional race in Indiana could result in a criminal investigation of Politico and an incumbent Democrat lawmaker after a “disgusting, ugly smear piece” about the Republican challenger detailed her report of sexual assault while serving with the U.S. Air Force via alleged “illegally obtained” records, “all because there was a man who wanted some sort of gratification.”

Friday, Politico released a lengthy piece about Jennifer-Ruth Green’s background as she seeks to unseat Rep. Frank Mrvan (D) in Indiana’s first congressional district. While the post was considered mostly typical, a line was said to have been crossed by the outlet after it was suggested the Democrat’s team had taken her dubiously acquired military records and began “farming it out to several different press outlets,” as she told Fox News Digital.

Politico writer Adam Wren had apparently taken the opportunity and wrote of an incident that occurred in Sept. 2009, “according to her military records, when she and a small group of officers visited the national training center. She left the group to climb into a cramped guard tower where Green says an Iraqi serviceman sexually assaulted her by grabbing her breast and exposing himself.”

Brad Dayspring, Politico’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications asserted that the documents had been obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but conservative commentator Matt Whitlock got to the heart of the story and countered that narrative including a link to what is “publicly available” and wrote, “The reason the Green campaign said Politico obtained her sexual assault records ‘illegally or by egregious error’ is there are incredibly strict rules about what can be released by a ‘standard FOIA,’ and they are not publicly available. So, this is actually a big deal.”

Whitlock contended it would be “Genuinely hard to imagine a Democrat candidate getting this kind of treatment.”

Meanwhile, Green ripped into the outlet for moving ahead with the story even after she had specifically requested they leave the details of the sexual assault out of the story.

”The reality of it is—like I said at one point in my life to my assailant, ‘No. Please stop. Don’t.’—and he did what he wanted to do … This is the exact same situation all over again, all because there was a man who wanted some sort of gratification,” she told Fox News. “Congressman Frank Mrvan gets his gratification of trying to think he’s smearing my name. Adam Wren gets his gratification of thinking he’s going to get a good smear story out of it. And all it does is essentially reopen wounds for victims.”

“I’m surprised because Adam Wren spent time in this article focusing on every single detail down to the skirt I was wearing, down to the color of the skirt I was wearing, down to every single know I touched, all of those things, but yet he writes clinically about one of the worst days of my life,” the candidate railed. “He has no idea the concept of being forced to be in a four by four, round circular area, 30 feet…in a tower where you only have windows and a 30-foot drop on the other side, 30 foot drop to escape somebody who was blocking your path [with] somebody who has a clear intent with a weapon in hand, who is focused on trying to take advantage of you, and you’re able to escape that with minimal physical harm.”

”And he wants to reduce that to 50 characters,” Green slammed.

In an Oct. 3 letter to the Air Force Inspector General, the Department of Defense and a U.S. attorney, she sought a criminal investigation, “into the unauthorized, unlawful release of my Air Force personnel file. The fact that my file has been leaked in the course of my campaign for United States Congress leads me to believe that it was politically motivated.”

As she told Fox News Digital, “I believe Congressman Frank Mrvan illegally obtained those documents and was floating them around to press. That’s what our political team told us, that they were farming it out to several different press outlets to see who could write a very disgusting, ugly smear piece against me with the intent to paint me as a disgraced military officer.”

“If I were on the other side of the ticket,” Green argued in line with Whitlock, “they would weep for me, they would mourn for me. Only because I’m a Republican do they feel this is acceptable. But it’s unacceptable for every vet, it’s unacceptable for every woman, it’s unacceptable for everybody who has ever been a victim of sexual assault in their entire life.”

Other commentators ripped into Politico for running the story “under the guise of the excuse of a balanced piece” while further asserting that the records could not have been acquired as Dayspring had suggested.

What’s more, proving Green and Whitlock’s point about the political hypocrisy, in 2014 Dayspring had contended, “Exploiting sexual assault cases for personal and political gain should be a fireable offense.”

https://twitter.com/WazzusJobu/status/1579484931033825285

 

Kevin Haggerty
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