Linda McMahon, one of the Republican opponents of Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, spent the morning taking credit for the New York Times piece that showed Blumenthal had misrepresented his military service.
The McMahon campaign didn’t come right out and say they had tipped the Times to a 2008 video of Blumenthal saying he had served in Vietnam (he didn’t). But, when a Connecticut blogger claimed the campaign fed the video to the Times, McMahon blasted the blog post out in an email to reporters. The campaign also posted it on Mcmahon’s web site under the headline “In Case You Missed It: McMahon Strikes Blumenthal In NYT Article” and tweeted a link.
But her web site has now been scrubbed of the blog post, and the corresponding tweet has been deleted.
Here’s how it looked before the scrubbing:
(You can see the cached version of the full web page here, care of the Hartford Courant.)
The Times maintains that it was their own “extensive independent reporting” that got the scoop.
The campaign acknowledged to Greg Sargent that they took down the post.
“We took it down. The substance of the New York Times report is what’s important,” said spokesman Shawn McCoy. “The New York Times and Ray Hernandez researched, wrote and broke this report, and the questions it raises about Dick Blumenthal raise serious questions that only he can answer.”
A spokesman for McMahon did not immediately return a request for comment from TPM.
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