Don't Be Modest, Mosk

In Md. Cabinet Member Says He Objected to Aide, reporter Matthew Mosk covers allegations about former Gov. Robert Ehrlich staffer Joseph Steffen during a Maryland legislative hearing, basically portraying Steffen as a bully hellbent to fire people. I have no idea about that. But I love this:

Steffen was fired by Ehrlich in February for spreading rumors about a political rival....

[Secretary of Human Resources Christopher J.] McCabe said politics did not play a role in the firings. But the secretary, one of five witnesses during more than nine hours of testimony yesterday, did provide the first direct evidence that Steffen was neither a rogue operative nor a bit player.

That's how Ehrlich and his top aides have described Steffen since February, after the governor fired him for describing in Internet postings a whisper campaign against Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D), one of the governor's chief political rivals....

But it was reporter Mosk himself who publicized the "internet postings," as we've noted here (and I thought these were emails, not postings on a public board?). And Mosk got his hands on the messages between Steffen and a Free Republic poster still only known as MD4Bush without, according to Mosk, knowing who MD4Bush is. As Soccer Dad noted recently:

David Collins of WBAL TV has done a little more digging and has discovered that the e-mail address of "Freeper" MD4Bush matches that of a former Democratic party operative who is associated with Mayor O'Malley. Now an e-mail address alone isn't enough to convict anyone of impropriety. E-mail addresses could be spoofed. However it seems pretty clear that MD4Bush was a plant who, according to Jim Robinson of FreeRepublic, may be involved in a dirty trick against Governor Ehrlich:

I feel that a (possibly criminal) political dirty trick has been committed against Governor Ehrlich and Joe Steffen and the evidence would lead any rational thinking person to believe that it was perpetrated by officials of mddems.org, perhaps working in concert with a reporter from the Washington Post....

Stay tuned.

Comments

[ClubPenguinCheats]

That's how Ehrlich and his top aides have described Steffen since February, after the governor fired him for describing in Internet postings a whisper campaign against Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D), one of the governor's chief political rivals....