{"id":184930,"date":"2011-12-06T21:59:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T02:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/12\/06\/thats-guilty-guilty-guilty-guilty\/"},"modified":"2011-12-06T21:59:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T02:59:00","slug":"thats-guilty-guilty-guilty-guilty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/12\/06\/thats-guilty-guilty-guilty-guilty\/","title":{"rendered":"That’s Guilty, Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

This referring to the conviction of “Bad Hair Bob” Erhlich’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign manager of attempted vote fraud<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Paul E. Schurick, the 2010 campaign manager for former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., was convicted Tuesday by a Baltimore jury of four counts stemming from a robocall that prosecutors said was intended to suppress the black vote.<\/p>\n

The call, which Schurick acknowledged authorizing, was placed on Election Day to 112,000 voters in Baltimore and Prince George\u2019s County, the state\u2019s two largest majority-African American jurisdictions. Recipients were told by an unidentified woman that they could \u201crelax\u201d because Gov. Martin O\u2019Malley (D) had been successful.<\/p>\n

The guilty verdict not only sullied the three-decade career of one of Maryland\u2019s best-known political operatives, it also served as a major embarrassment for Ehrlich, the state\u2019s only Republican governor in a generation.<\/p>\n

Although prosecutors have never suggested that Ehrlich approved the calls, he is pushing a new book that draws anecdotes from his four years in Annapolis and contends his failed comeback bid last year was \u201cswamped\u201d by the black vote.<\/p>\n

The jury convicted Schurick \u2014 who got his start in politics working for Democrats \u2014 of trying to influence votes through fraud, failing to identify the source of the call as required by law and two counts of conspiracy to commit those crimes.<\/p>\n

Schurick\u2019s defense argued during the week-long trial that he relied on the judgment of a campaign consultant hired to reach out to black voters, who said the calls would make use of \u201creverse psychology\u201d and motivate potential Ehrlich supporters to go to the polls.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is where it gets interesting, because now that prosecutors have gotten a conviction, people are going to start thinking about rolling over.<\/p>\n

While I think that prosecutors are probably right when they say that, “prosecutors have never suggested that Ehrlich approved the calls,” after all, when you break the law, you make sure that the candidate has no direct knowledge of it.<\/p>\n

That being said, I think that he had to know that the central pillar of his campaign was suppressing the black vote, and he had<\/b> to know that, and I’m hoping that this come out at trial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This referring to the conviction of “Bad Hair Bob” Erhlich’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign manager of attempted vote fraud: Paul E. Schurick, the 2010 campaign manager for former Maryland governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., was convicted Tuesday by a Baltimore jury of four counts stemming from a robocall that prosecutors said was intended to suppress the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1000,972,1019],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-184930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-elections","category-justice","category-schadenfreude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}