Won’t Answer Why He Paid Implicated Staffers through at least September
Yesterday Congressman Scott Taylor dodged his way through a CNN interview on the petition forgery scandal bogging down his campaign and specifically refused to say why he went back on his word to immediately purge his campaign of staffers implicated in wrongdoing.
WATCH Taylor’s interview on CNN here
At least four times during the interview Taylor declined to comment or answer specific questions, including when he was asked if he had done any type of internal investigation intro wrongdoing. But the big tell came during this exchange when Taylor was asked about a Roll Call report that he continued to pay staffers after they were implicated in wrongdoing:
Anchor: “On August Sixth, Facebook live broadcast you said ‘you have my word that if anyone on my campaign did anything that was wrong, that was illegal, that was inappropriate or something like that, I would fire them in a second.’ […] Roll Call has taken a look at your financial disclosures, and it turns out that up until at least mid-September that these four individuals who are being investigated, they were still being paid by your campaign.”
Taylor: “So again I can’t completely comment on everything as you very well know […] no one who has been involved in that at all, with any wrong doing, is still in my campaign.”
On September 4th, nearly a month after reports began piling up that four Taylor staffers had submitted fraudulent petitions, the staffers indicated through their lawyers that they would plead the fifth if asked to testify. On September 5th, a Virginia judge threw out all of the petition signatures gathered by those four Taylor staffers, saying he had found “out and out fraud.” According to his own FEC filings, Taylor gave each of those staffers a paycheck on September 12th.
And then there is this from Roll Call: “Scott Weldon, a spokesman for Taylor, indicated that the staffers involved in the petition fraud scandal no longer work for the congressman’s campaign — even though they were each cut paychecks multiple times after reports of their alleged malfeasance surfaced in early August.”
Roll Call also found that Taylor disbursed more than $10,000 to four law firms in August and September who his campaign had not previously paid.
“It’s clear that Rep. Scott Taylor broke his own commitment to immediately fire staffers implicated in wrongdoing, but the real question is: why? Why did Taylor pay these staffers after they plead the Fifth and were named in the judge’s decision? And if he is telling the truth and they no longer work for the campaign, what changed that he decided now to fire them?”
“Congressman Taylor’s maneuvering and inconsistency about why he continued to employ staff who had been implicated by a judge in election fraud raises serious questions about what Rep. Taylor is hiding.” – DCCC Spokesperson Jacob Peters