This is very interesting:
…a scandal touching Virginia’s current Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, may also implicate Warner. Several Democratic figures in the Old Dominion are involved a federal investigation looking into the circumstances of the resignation of a former Democratic state senator. The Washington Post has the scoop that federal investigators have been told of Warner’s supposed involvement in offering that senator and his family political favors in exchange for his staying in the legislature…
For those who don’t remember: the state Senate flipped earlier this year when Democratic state senator Phillip Plunkett suddenly resigned, essentially in exchange for a judgeship for his daughter. More recently it’s come out that Governor McAuliffe’s chief of staff is on tape offering to make Plunkett an alternate deal, with kind of short-circuits any kind of righteous indignation on the Democrats’ part. It’s hard to take the high ground on an issue when your opponents can accurately note that your real problem is that you didn’t make a better offer than they did – which is what McAuliffe pretty much did. Now it’s come out that sitting US Senator Mark Warner is caught up in this entire, tawdry story as well.
Will this help Ed Gillespie? Hard to say, although having his opponent be possibly involved in a future federal investigation for corruption probably won’t hurt Ed. Mark Warner is currently hovering just under 50% in the averages, but there’s the usual third-party nonsense to consider. All in all, I’d have preferred to have had this story come out last month. Mind you, this is still an improvement on the way that these things can go with the Washington Post: they quite often wait to break stories like this until after the election…
Moe Lane