The sixth person who received the email from RPVB chair David Bartholomew was Kenny Golden, the independent candidate in the 2nd CD and the immediate past chair of the RPVB. Golden’s email address was deliberately removed from the copy of the email that was sent around yesterday. This raises two possibilities in my mind:
- The email was distributed by the Golden campaign, or
- The email was distributed by someone seeking to make it look like it was the Golden campaign.
I called Golden this morning to discuss this. He told me that he called his staff together last night and asked if any of them had sent out the email and they all said no. I wouldn’t expect any other response. I pressed Golden on this, and reminded him that one of his staff members had engaged in a mis-information campaign surrounding the last press conference Golden held. (In that case, the staff member had helped to perpetuate that Golden was going to announce that he was dropping out of the race.) Golden called that stunt “stupid” and agreed that it certainly made this possibility look feasible. He reiterated, though, that he, personally, had nothing to do with the distribution of the email and that he could only rely on the word of his staff that they had nothing to do with it, either.
Golden and I discussed who else could have sent out the email and he immediately named the same person that Bartholomew did in my conversation with him yesterday. That person has a personal grudge against Bartholomew and may have just had getting rid of him as chair as the motive for releasing the email.
We also discussed the possibility that someone from either the Rigell campaign or the Nye campaign distributed the email. I couldn’t see that Rigell would gain anything by doing this and I don’t believe that Nye’s campaign would do anything this dumb, even if it would benefit the campaign.
One possibility that I did not discuss with Golden was that someone was trying to make this look like it came from his campaign with an eye towards it backfiring on him and trying to get him to drop out. There have been a number of folks who believe Golden should drop out and that his doing so would enhance Rigell’s chances of winning.
Bottom line is that without the email having been sent directly to me (every copy I received was copied and pasted into an email), I can’t go any further on decoding who sent the email yesterday. If the goal was to get Bartholomew to resign, the distribution had its intended effect. If the goal was to paint Rigell as a racist – via his relationship with Bartholomew – then that goal was not met. And if the goal was to blame it on Golden, I don’t think that one was met, either.
Can we get back to the issues now?
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Oh look! A shiny thing!
Nah, we should pay attention to all this other garbage instead of the governance of our country.
I think we have enough to do without this type of thing, not to mention, are we in middle school?
Meh.
And another possibility is that Bartholomew’s email was hacked.
Actually, that is not a possibility as he has acknowledged sending the email.
Then why does your previous post say, “He had no specific recollection of that particular email but said that he did forward jokes that others had sent him to some people.”
Um, because it was written before he acknowledged that he sent the email. That information was reported in an article in today’s paper.
I spoke with Bartholomew before any posting of his email had taken place. A lot of additional information has come out since I spoke to him.
OK Thanks.
Busy week for you! I hadn’t had time to pay attention to VA politics at all for the past few weeks. And then I saw this on Rachel Maddow.