An anonymous staffer for Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign ripped into his conservative opponent, state Sen. Chris McDaniel, for challenging the election results, calling McDaniel a “phony.”
“The guy is basically Joel Osteen,” the Cochran campaign staffer, described as a “source on the Cochran campaign” by Business Insider, said Wednesday. “He’s such a phony, and he’s taking advantage of these people to stay in the spotlight. This is such a publicity stunt. He can’t stand the fact that he lost.”
The anonymous source on Cochran’s campaign told Business Insider that McDaniel is a “clinically diagnosable narcissist” because he’s building an “Election Challenge Fund” to raise money from grassroots donors to launch a legal battle–which is likely to be expensive–against the election results.
The Cochran staffer went even further, calling McDaniel the “the sorest loser I’ve ever seen.”
“What he’s mad about is the fact that he got outsmarted and outworked,” the source said. “What happened is, he’s been doing a victory lap since June 3, and he thought he was going to be coronated. We went back to work. We kicked his ass, and he’s mad about it. He’s the sorest loser I’ve ever seen.”
McDaniel’s team says they’ve already found 3,300 ineligible ballots in less than half of Mississippi’s counties. That number, spokesman Noel Fritsch says, is just from Democrats who voted in the June 3 Democratic primary then in the June 24 GOP runoff–something that would not be legal.
Breitbart News has not independently verified the McDaniel campaign’s claims about those ballots.
They plan to continue reviewing the rest of the counties around the state, and Fritsch said they expect to find enough votes to cast doubt on the election’s final results. Cochran beat McDaniel by just under 6,700 votes, so if McDaniel finds that many or more allegedly fraudulent votes he could get a judge to order a new election.
“The problem is that court cases are expensive, and we don’t currently have the resources to mount the legal challenge that this case deserves,” McDaniel’s campaign emailed to supporters. “Please, take a moment to contribute to the Election Challenge Fund to help me contest this corrupt election.”
In the email, McDaniel’s campaign reiterated the 3,300 number and said that was found in just 38 of Mississippi’s 82 counties.
“That’s just not true,” the Cochran campaign’s source told Business Insider. “Chris McDaniel is a trial lawyer, and he’s acting like one. He’s throwing out false flags and things that just aren’t true, and trying to get them into the news stream.”
The Cochran source went on to call McDaniel a “total egomaniac.”
“This is all about him and his 15 minutes in the spotlight,” the source said. “The second he concedes, the circus moves on.”
UPDATE: McDaniel campaign spokesman Noel Fritsch told Breitbart News on Wednesday afternoon that McDaniel now has 4,900 ballots he says he can challenge, the vast majority of which are “ineligible crossover votes”–meaning Democrats who voted in the June 3 primary but then voted in the June 24 GOP runoff. Fritsch said this number–about 1,800 shy of the approximately 6,700 vote margin of Cochran victory–is with 31 counties left to count and with none of the more than 19,000 absentee ballots checked yet.
Breitbart News has not independently verified the McDaniel campaign’s claims about those ballots.
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