AG: Probe examined vote-buying allegations
Attorney General Jim Hood said his office investigated claims of vote-buying that he said appear to have been made after a political blogger paid a Meridian man to lie in a recorded interview.
During his speech at the Neshoba County Fair on Wednesday, Hood called for more civility and integrity in political races and pointed to the Republican primary for U.S. Senate as being out of control.
“It’s bothersome to me when political bloggers … pay someone $2,000 to lie on a video … We need a higher level of political discourse in this state,” Hood said in his speech.
Hood confirmed in an interview after his speech that he was alluding to the situation in which Stevie Fielder of Meridian told Charles C. Johnson of GotNews.com that campaign staffers for U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran paid him to pay people $15 each to vote for the incumbent. Fielder recanted most of his story in an interview with The Clarion-Ledger. The Cochran campaign has denied the allegations.
Hood said his office investigated the claims and that Fielder told investigators that he was paid $2,000 to lie about being asked to pay people to vote for Cochran. According to Hood, Fielder says he was told what to say by the political blogger and others involved in recording the interview.
Johnson refused to answer questions that were emailed to him but later posted the questions and his answers to his website. In that post, he denied that he or anyone involved with the interview asked Fielder to lie.
Johnson on several occasions has admitted to paying Fielder for the interview. Most recently, he posted on Twitter, “... I paid a black reverend cash for voter fraud story ...” However, on Wednesday he said that was not the case.
“No, I paid for the text messages, not the story,” Johnson wrote. He would not disclose how much he paid, saying, “I don’t want to create a market with clear prices for information. Every negotiation is a case by case.”
Hood said that no crime has been committed by paying someone to lie or for lying. However, he said his office is still seeking the source of the funds used to pay Fielder.
Johnson avoided a question about whether anyone with the Chris McDaniel campaign helped him raise the money to pay Fielder.
“So what if I did? So what if I didn’t?” he responded when asked if he coordinated with the McDaniel campaign to finance the interview.
Contact Sam R. Hall at srhall@jackson.gannett.com or (601) 961-7163. Follow @samrhall on Twitter.