to northern Minnesota where she watched Connolly meet with what turned out to be a retired Minnesota Highway Trooper who’d pulled a young James Thomson over for drunk driving nearly thirty years ago, a violation that had long been buried. The day before the Wellesley campaign was going to spring the revelation, Thomson and the Judge defused it by leaking the arrest. The governor then held an hour-long news conference and answered any and all questions. Thomson stood before the press for an hour until they ran out of questions. The campaign took a hit, but only a little one, and certainly not as bad as if the Wellesley campaign, and Heath Connolly in particular, had controlled the story.
The motorcade’s taillights indicated they were leaving the interstate for Highway 124. The GPS system showed the motorcade turning east, which would take them towards the small town of Cadiz. Five minutes later, the motorcade was through Cadiz and a mile south of town, turned right onto Highway 274 and Wire started to wonder if they might be heading towards Lake Barkley.
It wouldn’t be the first time Wire trailed Connolly to water.
First there had been the Florida Keys.
Two months ago, Wire tailed Connolly and Wellesley Jr. to Florida, first to Clearwater Beach and a boat trip and then to the far western end of the Florida Keys. The two men took a boat to a small island that held an estate across a small bay. Wire set up shop on the opposite side of the bay at a small resort. It was Florida and she was in the Keys, so she took advantage of her tall, slender yet athletic look. She blended easily with the beautiful people and lounged on the beach in a series of string bikinis. While lying on the beach, she used a small high-test camera to snap photos and record video of Connolly and Wellesley Jr. as they partied on the estate across the bay. The pictures revealed the political operative and vice president’s son mingling with at least twenty other men, soaking up the sun, drinking cocktails and eating seafood while on the patio and decks of the mansion.
Each night, Wire uploaded the photos and video to the Judge. While the whole thing instinctively smelled to her, she wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at.
The Judge took care of that.
The Judge knew exactly what he was looking at, knew each of the players and knew precisely what to do with it all.
The United States Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision had rewritten the country’s campaign finance laws, allowing citizens to contribute as much as they wanted to political action committees. The old contribution limits, such as those found in the McCain-Feingold law, were no more. The campaign contribution spigot had been turned on full throttle and the money flowed like a flooded river into Super PACs across the country supporting candidates of both parties, although Republicans had the clear advantage in the largesse of contributions to such PACs.
The only catch was that Super PACs are not permitted to coordinate directly with the candidate or candidates they seek to support.
Now, nobody in their right mind thought that candidates and Super PACs supportive of them wouldn’t indirectly coordinate their messages in some way, shape or form. Yet this is where Connolly’s hubris got him. What Wire stumbled across in those two days with her pictures and video was Connolly and Wellesley Jr. clearly, unequivocally and blatantly coordinating with the Super PACs. It had been reported that during the summer, the Republican Super PACs combined had raised nearly $700 million dollars for use primarily on the vice president’s campaign. A tiny fraction of it had been spent prior to the meeting in the Florida Keys. Wire caught Connolly and Wellesley Jr. meeting with the leaders of the Super PACs with the intent of mapping out spending the hundreds of millions of dollars over the final two months of the campaign. It was clear that Connolly was shooting not only for the White House but a Republican majority in the House and Senate as well. He was shooting, not just for a win, but for a political sea change.
The photos and video that Wire took gave the Judge all he needed to feed a weeks-long fundraising scandal for the Wellesley campaign that moved the poll numbers in the governor’s favor, a place they remained.
The scandal in the Florida Keys made Connolly a desperate and dangerous man.