McCain Flack Pushed Hoax Attack Story

Looks like I spoke too soon.

TPM is reporting that, in the early stages of the Ashley Todd fake attack story, the McCain campaign's Pennsylvannia communications director was pushing unconfirmed details to the media.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

None of those details were confirmed by police at the time.

The McCain campaign, according to MSNBC, denies this and blames the attribution on "sloppy reporting." That explanation holds about as much water as Todd's original story did.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also has a pretty thorough roundup of blogs that shamed themselves by chasing after the hoax.

The McCain campaign needs to deal with this story right away. State communications directors are not the equivalent of your local campaign office. These guys are trained, and know that they speak for the candidate. And, heaven forbid the national campaign knew about or encouraged this. If she was feeding this story directly to the campaign, and the state campaign checked with HQ, there may be severe damage done to McCain over this, similar to Fox News' Executive Vice President John Moody's assessment.

John McCain has benefited far too often from the fruits of surrogates' attacks, and his subsequent denouncements, to have earned a pass here. The question needs to be asked.

Tommy Christopher co-hosts "Unusable Signal",on BlogTalkRadio, Tues through Thurs at 10pm, and Fri, and Sat at 11pm. (Eastern) Click here for the Unusable Signal homepage.