A Channel 9 reporter asked Bob Ehrlich’s new running mate Mary Kane about allegations that her family business cheated taxpayers. It didn’t go very well. When will she and Ehrlich answer these questions?
Bob Ehrlich has some pretty serious questions to answer about his vetting process. The Bush Justice Department investigated a Federal False Claims Act case filed against the company owned by Mary Kane and her husband for defrauding Federal taxpayers. In 2009, the Justice Department formally joined the lawsuit and is now attempting to recover millions of dollars in taxpayer monies from the Kane Company.
UPDATE:
According to the Baltimore Sun, Ehrlich dismissed a question about the Federal case against Mary Kane’s company by saying, “Nobody wants to hear about that stuff.”
Maybe Bob Ehrlich doesn’t want to talk about it, but does Bob Ehrlich really believe that voters do not want to hear about his Lt. governor candidate’s company that is being sued by the federal government for ripping off taxpayers? And that her company received millions in state contracts that during his one term as governor?
Maybe Bob Ehrlich doesn’t want to talk about it, but voters deserve to know.
8 Questions for Bob Ehrlich About Mary Kane
Four years ago, Bob Ehrlich perpetuated the biggest voter fraud in modern Maryland history by using fliers to mislead Marylanders into voting for him. Ehrlich has now realized that he can’t get away with this deception and is instead trying to suppress voting in Maryland.
On Election Day 2006, the campaigns for Ehrlich and Michael Steele paid to bus 300 mostly poor African Americans, many of them homeless or ex-offenders, from Philadelphia to distribute fliers in Prince George’s County and inner-city Baltimore. The fliers falsely claimed the endorsements of several African American Democratic officials and suggested that Ehrlich himself was a Democrat. The Washington Post reported that the fliers “appeared to be designed to trick black Democrats into voting for the two Republican candidates.” When the workers learned the true intent of the fliers, many became upset. Some even appeared at a Democratic news conference to vent their concerns. Ehrlich still hasn’t fully explained his actions in 2006 and even declared, “if folks are here from out of town, that’s fine with me.”
The Washington Post also cited an anonymous Ehrlich aide who said the purpose of the fliers was to peel away one or two percentage points in jurisdictions where Ehrlich would be running behind. The aide said that no one in the campaign expected the strong reaction.
Now, four years later, as Maryland begins to implement early voting the upcoming elections, it appears that Bob Ehrlich is back to his old tricks. On his radio show last weekend, Ehrlich called on his radio show listeners to monitor early voting places and to challenge “questionable” voters. Bob Ehrlich is encouraging voter suppression despite claiming that voting is “the ultimate expression of speech. It’s what the country is all about.”
He then went on to claim that early voting could lead to fraud and warned that Republicans need to guard against it advising, “You have people there challenging a particular questionable person voting…it’s diligence and vigilance. It’s having people there — if there’s a questionable person voting, it’s challenged on the spot.”
The only questionable person that voters should be concerned about is Bob Ehrlich and he knows it. And he’s going to do everything he can to mislead voters again. It’s anybody’s guess what he’ll do or say next on his radio show to mislead voters.
