When the comm director for the Republicans files a lawsuit stating that the sexual harassment claimant had sex with the former speaker, and when both the speaker and the claimant later say that that never happened, then someone is lying.
Who is it?
Could be Daisy Olivo, the comm director who filed a fairly detailed and specific whistleblower lawsuit on Monday, claiming she had her duties taken away and suffered harassment in return for telling people about the inappropriate relationship between the sexual harassment claimant and Jeff Hoover, the Speaker.
Could be Jeff Hoover and the claimant, both of whom responded with “didn’t happen.”
Do we know who’s lying? No. But we DO know two questions that we would like the answers to:
- Why would Olivo lie about the sexual relations and the settlement money coming from donors? Neither story adds much to her whistleblower claim. If the timeline of events is correct—and no one has disputed the timeline—then she has a relatively good case without including the sex and the money. Why include them? Is the purpose to win the lawsuit, or is it to damage Hoover?
- Is anyone else behind this, and if so, to what end? If the claimant got what she wanted with the settlement, then why would she release the text messages? And if she didn’t release them, who did, and how did they get the messages to release? Was the claimant running the fake Jeff Hoover account on Twitter, where the messages appeared, even though she was on staff? Was Daisy running it, making fun of Hoover, while she was comm director for the Republicans?
It is difficult for me to believe that either Daisy or the claimant created the fake Jeff Hoover account, while serving on the Republican staff — UNLESS they were playing a dangerous game behind the scenes.
So, until we get answers to the questions above, we are left with two scenarios:
The Straight-Forward Scenario: Hoover and claimant had some level of inappropriate relationship, which got settled after the claimant got a lawyer. Claimant told Olivo, who told others, who took away her duties. Other than the question of who is lying about the sex and the donor money for the settlement, this fits the surface facts. BUT, it doesn’t answer the question of the creator of the fake account and how they got the text messages.
The Game of Thrones Scenario: Hoover and claimant had some level of inappropriate relationship, which got settled after the claimant got a lawyer. Claimant told Olivo, who told others, including people who saw that this could be used to force Hoover (and others?) out of both the speakership and out of the House completely. These mystery people (with or without Olivo) leaked the texts via the fake Twitter account, assuming that the scandal would cause Hoover to step down. When this didn’t work, they persuaded Olivo to file the whistleblower lawsuit, assuming that THIS would finish the job.[mepr-show if=”loggedout”]
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Couple of final notes on this:
- If Hoover and others had not had inappropriate relationships, there would be no text messages and no possibility of a plot (if there is one). So, however much we might want to game out the possibilities, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact of inappropriate sexual relationships in the workplace.
- Somewhere out there is the person (or persons) who created that fake account, and posted the screen shots of those text messages. However the rest of this finally plays out, and no matter who is lying, and no matter whether this is some giant plot or just humans being fallible humans, that person still exists, and the motivations of that person are still a mystery.
And if YOU know anything about that person or that account, I’d love to hear from you.
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