The DCCC defends the Air Force improperly leaking GOP candidates’ records
Zachary Faria
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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has finally addressed its repeated success in improperly obtaining private records of GOP congressional candidates from the Air Force. The DCCC is claiming it did nothing wrong.
Two more former Republican candidates have been revealed to be the targets of these record leaks, J.R. Majewski and Robert Bremer. That makes seven Republicans targeted by Due Diligence Group, which was paid over $110,000 by the DCCC from January 2021 to December 2022.
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A spokeswoman for the DCCC dismissed every concern about this breach of information, saying, “Public records requests are a standard part of the research process. Republican and Democratic campaigns and organizations file hundreds of requests for information from government agencies every cycle.”
This was not a simple public records request, though. Abraham Payton, the background investigation analyst with Due Diligence Group who made the records requests, had the social security numbers of the candidates in question. According to the Air Force, Payton “represented himself as a background investigator seeking service records for employment purposes,” which was clearly a misrepresentation.
On top of that, the DCCC or Due Diligence Group (it isn’t clear which) used these ill-gotten files to leak to Politico that Indiana GOP House candidate Jennifer Ruth-Green was a survivor of sexual assault. Whoever leaked this information to Politico also misrepresented how it was acquired, as the outlet claimed it was available “by a standard [Freedom of Information Act] request,” which was untrue.
At best, the DCCC was misled by the Due Diligence Group about the records that it evidently received. But by choosing to dismiss this as a nonissue and instead whine about “MAGA hypocrisy” and Republicans wanting an investigation into who at the Air Force violated procedures to approve the document leaks, the DCCC is forfeiting any best-case assumptions.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is not in the clear either. The DSCC paid the group over $172,000 during the same period, and Bremer had been running for Senate in Colorado. The DSCC’s silence, along with the DCCC’s defiant defense, raises more questions about how Democrats were involved in this scandal.
This calls for a full-scale investigation. People within the Air Force need to lose their jobs over this, of course, but the DCCC and DSCC should not be allowed to bypass scrutiny for their roles in this either.