In a shocking hidden camera video, Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes has been accused by her own campaign team of telling bald-faced lies about supporting the state’s coal industry.
The video captures Grimes’ staffers and employees of local Democratic Party affiliates claiming that she’s pushing the industry purely for political purposes in a desperate bid to defeat Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell,
reports The Washington Free Beacon.
Produced by conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe, the video opens with footage from a Grimes’ ad, in which she says, "I’m not Barack Obama. I disagree with him on guns, coal and the EPA. I’m going to stand up for what keeps the light on her in the state of Kentucky, and that is our coal industry."
But it then goes on to show an undercover videographer asking a Democratic Party aide, "If we can get her elected do you think she is going to do the right thing and she’s gonna try to wipe out that coal industry and go for better resources?"
Fayette County Democratic Party operative Gina Bess, then replies, "I absolutely think she is."
Story continues below video.
Ros Hines, a staffer in Grimes’ Lexington campaign office, was also secretly recorded suggesting that the Democratic candidate was just defending the coal industry to woo voters.
"She’s saying something positive about coal because she wants to be elected," said Hines. "And in the state of Kentucky, if you are anti-coal, you will not get elected, period, end of conversation."
And Juanita Rodriguez of the Warren County Democratic Party went so far as to call it "a lying game," and assumed that Grimes does not, in fact, support the industry to the extent that she has declared in public, according to the Free Beacon.
"She has to say that," says Rodriguez. "But you know what? Politics is a game. You do what you have to do to get [elected]. It’s a lying game unfortunately. I really don’t think her heart is 100 percent in backing coal.
"But she has to say she is because she will not get a high number of votes in this state if she doesn’t. But she’s got to get in there first, and she’s gonna say whatever she has to say or do. And that’s the way the political game is played."
In the run-up to the midterm elections, Grimes has jumped on McConnell’s longtime opposition to the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to crack down on the coal industry’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Although McConnell had introduced a bill in the Senate, to curtail EPA measure, Senate Democrats voted it down, according to the Free Beacon.
Now McConnell’s campaign spokeswoman, Allison Moore, has denounced Grimes, who has been backed by
former President Bill Clinton, for conducting a deceitful campaign.
"It is absolutely shocking that Alison Lundergan Grimes’ own staff now admits that she has no intention of protecting the coal industry," Moore told the Free Beacon. "The level of deception that Alison Grimes and her campaign engages in to appear pro-coal despite virulent opposition is both disturbing and dangerous."
O’Keefe said his Grimes video from his Project Veritas Action group "is the beginning of a nationwide undercover investigation into the upcoming elections."
The video was unveiled as a recent poll by Real Clear Politics showed she was trailing the GOP incumbent 47 percent to 42 percent, while Nate Silver’s election model reportedly revealed that has just a 12 percent chance of victory in November.