The Republican National Committee is clamming up about a top official who said it’s no big deal that the executive director of the Arizona GOP allegedly used the party’s voter registration database to stalk a woman.
An Arizona woman has filed a criminal complaint against Brett Mecum, the executive director of the state Republican party, charging that he stalked her*. Mecum, the woman alleges, used the GOP’s Voter Vault system to find her address, then showed up uninvited to a party at her home, in a way that she found threatening.
In response, Mecum’s boss and ally, state party chair Randy Pullen, had this to say:
The Republican National Committee owns Voter Vault … It’s a private list. We own the list. We can do what we want with the list, quite frankly.
That’s not the way the law sees it. According to The Huffington Post, it’s a felony to use a voter registration database for anything other than official purposes.
In addition to being state party chair, Pullen is also the treasurer of the RNC. So what did Michael Steele and co. have to say about Pullen’s devil-may-care attitude?
Nothing. We called the RNC yesterday at noon, and again this morning. Crickets.
The Arizona GOP, for its part, has tried to walk back Pullen’s response. A spokesman told us yesterday: “The chairman has the utmost respect for that data, and we would never ever use it for anything other than what it was intended to be used for.”
By contrast, the RNC apparently sees nothing wrong with Pullen’s attitude.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Pullen tried to play down the issue on Mecum’s behalf. As we’ve detailed, the two men appear to be close. When Mecum was arrested earlier this year for having been photographed driving 109 mph, he’s said to have yelled “Get the chairman” as he was being hauled off.
* This sentence has been corrected from an earlier version.
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