am muckrakers
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American Muckrakers political action committee (PAC) is said to have been partly responsible for Madison Cawthorn’s failed reelection bid in the 2022 Republican primary – they’re now seeking to “fire” Lauren Boebert. Who is David Wheeler, the co-founder of the American Muckrakers, and what do we know about his career to date?
Who is David Wheeler, the man behind the American Muckrakers political action committee?
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, David B Wheeler is the co-founder of the American Muckrakers PAC. His fellow founder is Colonel Moe Davis, whose background is in the US Air Force.
Wheeler is a Democrat, while his co-founder is politically unaffiliated, according to Business Insider.
Per his bio on the Fire Madison website, he’s a “30+ year veteran of executive leadership in the event management industry”.
His professional experience includes founding the management company Protocol International (which he sold in 2005 after 16 years), founding event services firm Embark LLC (which he helmed for nine years) and founding the events directory Conference IQ.
His interest in politics has early roots
American Muckrakers may represent a switch in direction towards the world of politics, but David B Wheeler has an enduring interest in the field.
He attended Norwalk Community High School in the early 1980s and earned his bachelor’s degree in political science and economics from the University of Iowa in 1987.
Among the extracurricular activities, he became involved in student court.
In 2020, he ran for election to the North Carolina state senate to represent district 47. However, he lost to Republican candidate Ralph Hise, who won 68% of the vote. The election was a repeat of what happened two years earlier.
David Wheeler is ‘having a ball’ with the American Muckrakers PAC
Wheeler posted on LinkedIn on Sunday that he is “having a ball holding terrible politicians accountable every day”.
He included a link to his PAC’s new Fire Boebert website.
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Liberals Rush to Spread Bogus Lauren Boebert Escort and Abortion Rumors
TOO GOOD TO CHECK
Democrats say they’re proof of Boebert’s hypocrisy. But they’re getting conned themselves.
Will Sommer
Politics Reporter
Updated Jun. 15, 2022 5:06PM ET / Published Jun. 15, 2022
Democrats have seized on a political action committee’s allegations that Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) worked as a prostitute and had multiple abortions—claims that rest on zero actual evidence.
On Tuesday, American Muckrakers PAC, co-founded by Democrat and former North Carolina state Senate candidate David Wheeler,published allegations claiming that Boebert had previously worked as an escort on a sugar-daddy website and underwent at least two abortions, one of which was related to her supposed sugar-baby work.
For Boebert’s critics, the idea that the anti-abortion rights conservative had in fact had multiple abortions herself offered irresistible proof of Boebert’s hypocrisy. The allegations quickly circulated in anti-Trump “Resistance” communities online. Occupy Democrats, a popular liberal Twitter account, conceded that it wasn’t clear whether the allegations were accurate. But it urged its nearly 400,000 Twitter followers to retweet the claims “IF YOU THINK THAT IT SOUNDS TRUE” anyway. Boebert’s name trended on Twitter.
The allegations against Boebert were echoed by other prominent online liberal Twitter pundits, including some current and former Democratic politicians, such as former House candidate Brianna Wu, Bernie Sanders ally and former House candidate Nina Turner, and current Kentucky Senate hopeful Charles Booker.
Boebert tweeted about the allegations on Tuesday night, giving them “four pinocchios.” She is consulting with her lawyers about a potential legal case, a senior staffer in Boebert’s office said.
The salacious Boebert accusations were fueled, in part, by the fact that American Muckrakers PAC’s founders backed up their outlandish claims against another Republican congressman. They rose to some level of political fame earlier this year after releasing several lewd videos of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) that helped doom his reelection campaign.
[Inside the Relentless Campaign to Ruin Madison Cawthorn
OPPO DUMP
Sam Brodey,
Roger Sollenberger]
This time, though, the group doesn’t have videos to support their allegations. Instead, they have heavily redacted text message screenshots with an anonymous party supposedly close to Boebert. In the messages, the anonymous source sketches out a tale that enters the realms of lurid liberal fan fiction. The text messages describe Boebert as a sex worker plucked from obscurity on a sugar-daddy website by one of her clients, a member of the Koch family. That client, in the PAC’s telling, then introduced Boebert to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who urged her to run for office.
Wheeler argues that the text messages are enough proof, since he knows the person behind them.
“They’re not anonymous to me,” Wheeler told The Daily Beast. “I know who this individual is.”
When the source’s story isn’t wild enough, the interviewer on the other end of the text conversation—one of the PAC’s staffers—pushes the source further. After the anonymous source writes that they “don’t get” why Cruz would support Boebert’s political aspirations, the interviewer asserts, without any proof, that Boebert was blackmailing Cruz.
“It’s obvious,” the interviewer writes. “She blackmailed him.”
“Omg I never thought about that!” the source responds.
“Yep,” the interviewer writes back. “You know her. She’s a kniving (sic) little witch.”
At least one of the source’s claims can already be disproven. In the text message log, the source provided the PAC with a picture of what’s described as a picture of Boebert, wearing a short white dress, sitting on a bed. The source claims the photo was taken from Boebert’s profile on a sugar-daddy website. But the woman in the picture is actually Melissa Carone, a supposed voter-fraud witness cited by Rudy Giuliani, according to a Daily Mail report from 2020.
After The Daily Beast published this article pointing out the discrepancy, Wheeler deleted the white-dress picture from his anti-Boebert website. Wheeler says he’s investigating whether the Daily Mail accurately identified Carone as the woman in the picture.
“Now, if our source got it wrong or she mixed the photo up, we’ll correct it,” Wheeler said.
Boebert doesn’t have a particularly close relationship with the truth herself. Among other things, in 2020, Boebert said she hoped QAnon, the conspiracy theory that posits that Democrats sexually abuse children in Satanic rituals, was real. She has also claimed that she started carrying a gun after a man was beaten to death outside her restaurant. But CNN reported in 2021 that the man died of a meth overdose, not murder.
Wheeler claims his PAC has more information it could release about Boebert, but concedes they may soon direct their attention elsewhere.
“We may have done everything we can do in Colorado at this point,” Wheeler said. [got nothin else sounds like]
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Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado told Fox News on Wednesday she intended to take legal action against the political action committee widely credited with making Madison Cawthorn the youngest member of Congress to lose a primary.
Following Cawthorn's defeat in May, the American Muckrakers PAC announced they were targeting Boebert, who is also a first-term Republican.
On Tuesday, the PAC published salacious allegations about Boebert working through a "sugar daddy" website prior to her election to Congress.
The group said "their team and volunteers have uncovered thatLauren Boebert was an unlicensed, paid escort and met clients through SugarDaddyMeet.com. Text messages show she was bankrupt at the time and looking for some 'side income' and called her work 'pay to play.' She was paid to 'escort' with wealthy men," the group alleged.
"According to our investigation, Boebert was hired by a wealthy male client in Aspen, Colorado, who was a Koch family member.Boebert's rich client subsequently introduced her to U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in Aspen," the group alleged."After meeting with Senator Cruz, Boebert was encouraged by Cruz to run for political office. When Boebert announced her campaign for Congress in December 2019, Senator Cruz donated at least $136,250.00 to the Boebert Campaign and helped her raise large sums of money during trips Boebert made to Texas."
Boebert is now denying the accusations.
"Boebert's attorney sent a letter to the American Muckrakers PAC regarding the claims that she was an 'unlicensed paid escort' who had 'two abortions,' pledging to bring 'civil defamation' lawsuits against the PAC," Fox News reported.
Boebert said she would be undeterred by the "blatantly false and disgusting accusations."
"I am not going to stand by and pretend this is normal behavior," she told Fox News.
On Twitter, Boebert threatened criminal legal action.
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in an interview with theDaily Beast's Matt Lewis, one of the members of the conservative group that pulled out all the stops to make sure that Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) lost his primary last Tuesday claimed that they are focusing their energy on also making Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a one-term House member.
According to the conservative Lewis, it is possible that Boebert will be "Cawthornized" with an onslaught of attacks about her scandals that could be more effective in her case because her district is not as solidly red as it was when she won in 2020.
As David Wheeler of the American Muckrakers PAC explained, his group would never go as far as releasing a nude video of Boebert like they did to Cawthorn in the primary campaign's waning days, but said they would attempt to capitalize on her personal life which, like Cawthorn's, seems to be "an absolute mess."
With columnist Lewis going over Boebert -- and her husband's -- well-documented brushes with the law, he added, "there will be no dearth of material to use against Boebert, including things that are yet to emerge(scandals are sort of like cockroaches—for every one you see, there are probably a hundred hiding)."
RELATED: Things are 'likely to get ugly' as Madison Cawthorn makes threats after election loss: analyst
Speaking personally Lewis, wrote, "As a conservative, I’m certainly happy to trade toxic Republicans like Cawthorn and Boebert for more mainstream conservative Republicans," before adding, "Obviously, we are talking about negative campaigning here.There’s something about that feels inherently dirty, even if these candidates are beyond the pale. I think part of the story, though, is that groups like American Muckrakers are fulfilling a niche that was once performed by political parties and local newspapers."
"It won’t be easy, but it seems at least possible that Boebert will continue the trend that started last week with Cawthorn’s defeat. If that happens, it’s game on," he added before suggesting, "Defeating flawed politicians like Cawthorn and Boebert after one term would serve as a sort of course correction and send a message to everyone else."
"Not everyone is Harry Houdini. Not everyone is Donald Trump. Sometimes people are held accountable. Sometimes, the empire strikes back," he concluded.
You can read more here.
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