Blunt's Eckersley Scandal, Day Nine

"Everyone is a liar except for me."  That is precisely what Matt Blunt wants us to believe about the entire Eckersley saga, notwithstanding all the evidence --video and otherwise-- proving that he's got a significant truth-telling problem.  

More proof of this today in a story by Jo Mannies of the Post-Dispatch, in which she reports about conclusive evidence offered by Scott Eckersley's internet service provider that Eckersley has ceased forwarding his emails on September 28.  This makes it clear that someone in Blunt's office, which offered several of Eckersley's emails from after that date to the press, had gained unauthorized, criminal access to Eckersley's private account.

For its part, Team Blunt offers an implausible and weak excuse:­

Rich Chrismer, Blunt's deputy chief of staff for communications, denied
any wrongdoing. He produced what he said were records of Eckersley's
forwarded e-mail routings on Sept. 24 and Oct. 18, to back up Blunt's
staff contention that AppRiver continued to forward Eckersley's private
e-mails into his state account after his firing.

In other words, the response of the Blunt administration is to suggest that AppRiver --a third-party service provider-- is lying about having stopped forwarding Eckersley's emails.  Sounds familiar, no?  It seems as though Matt Blunt and his squad of angels are beset on all sides by people and corporations that want to lie, lie, lie just to bring him down.  Who knew that AppRiver --a Florida-based ISP-- was such a big Jay Nixon supporter with an ax to grind against our governor?

Irony of ironies is that the only defense proffered by Blunt has been a tortured assault on the credibility of his accusers, and that those attacks have served only to stretch the credibility of Blunt's administration past the breaking point.

Unfortunately for Blunt, he and his staff put all their rotten eggs in the same basket by focusing immediately and unyieldingly on efforts to make people think that Scott Eckersley is a bad person.  Turns out that was the wrong basket.  The question of Eckersley's credibility (though the facts of the story have proven him to be quite credible) is now irrelevant to the question of criminal wrongdoing by the Governor's office.  Those allegations now rest wholly on evidence provided by a third-party corporation.  And so they're stuck.

But judging by Chrismer's effort in Mannies' story, the Bluntees are sticking by their game plan: lie to the press about what they've done and hope they can ride out the story to its conclusion.  But every lie meant to short-circuit the story is another lie that a reporter will expose.  They are in a death-spiral now, and every move they make to try to make things better winds up only deepening the hole they've dug.

If your defense relies on convincing the world that you're the only one in the game who isn't a liar, you've really no defense at all.

*Photo from flickr.com user erogers.