MSNBC The Rachel Maddow Show - 3 August 2009.
RACHEL: "The entire 2008 election was a disaster for the Republican Party, but for the Republican Party in the Senate, it was worst than disaster. They lost everything they tried for and then some. And that was even before Sen. Arlen Specter added insult to injury by flipping parties to the Democrats. Now who was responsible for the Republican Party's fiasco in the Senate in the 2008 election. Who was in charge of the Republican Party's efforts to hold onto its seats in the Senate - efforts that failed so epically?
Hey! It was Sen. John Ensign of Nevada.
He was in charge of the National Republican Senatorial Committee for 2007 and 2008. That's the campaign arm of the Republican Party responsible for the Senate. While he was supposedly getting busy then overseeing the run-up to his party's 2008 shellacking in the Senate, you may recall that he was also getting busy with one of his staffers - putting her son on the NRSC payroll, finding jobs for her husband, and asking his own parents to give financial gifts, lots of them, to his mistresses family.
Well, tonight there is evidence that Sen. Ensign was not the only one at the National Republican Senatorial Committee who might have been distracted by his extramarital affair while preparing for that ill-fated election.
The Las Vegas Sun has obtained emails from the political director and the finance director of the NRSC. The emails are from their NRSC email accounts, and they are written to Sen. Ensign's mistress and to her husband, and they, yes, are emails that refer obliquely but fairly obviously to the affair and to its fallout.
These are emails that were sent while the national Republican Senatorial Committee was employing Ensign's mistress's son.
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