| Newly-surfaced video footage shows proven loser Laurie Buckhout cynically tried to dodge the law by invoking the title of a Pentagon general during her 2017 drunk-driving arrest.
According to the police body cam footage, Buckhout tried to “talk her way out of” a blood alcohol test by telling the officer that a “two-star at the Pentagon asked me to stay late” – but the police officer told her, “I can’t un-arrest you, because you’re under arrest.”
Buckhout “pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving” after testing above the legal limit.
DCCC Spokesperson Madison Andrus:
“Eastern North Carolina voters can recognize corruption when they see it, and they will reject Buckhout’s sleazy record for Don Davis’ principled leadership in November.”Read more…
- A retired Army Colonel running for Congress in one of the most competitive districts in the country tried to talk her way out of a drunk driving arrest in Georgia by invoking a two-star general at the Pentagon, according to body camera footage from the 2017 incident.
- The footage… shows Laurie Buckhout — who ran in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District — telling the officer who pulled her over: “Tonight the two-star at the Pentagon asked me to stay late there to discuss our strategy for tomorrow.”
- The arresting officer was unmoved.
- “I can’t un-arrest you, because you’re under arrest,” the officer told her, according to the footage.
- [Buckhout] initially refused a voluntary blood-alcohol test — a refusal that triggered her immediate arrest under Georgia law.
- When a breathalyzer was eventually administered, it returned a reading of 0.088 percent, just over the state’s legal limit of 0.08 percent.
- The Pentagon name-drop didn’t work.
- Buckhout pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving, paid a $500 fine, and the case was closed.
- Her campaign later acknowledged the incident, with adviser Jonathan Felts saying she “deeply regretted” the decision to drive that night and praising the professionalism of the officers involved.
- What the campaign didn’t address was what the bodycam showed: a retired colonel, accustomed to rank mattering, learning in real time that it doesn’t — not on the side of a Georgia road at night, and not with a breathalyzer reading above the legal limit.
- The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee piled on, using the reckless driving plea to brand her as exhibiting an “appetite for lawlessness.”
- The footage, now in hand, shows something the campaign memos couldn’t fully capture: not just a candidate with a DUI on her record, but one who — in the moment of accountability — reached for her rank instead of her license.
|
