Plausible Deniability

While eating our morning pastries at the editorial table of Boring Diatribe, we've been kicking around the idea of a special feature called Digruntled Employee, Defender of Liberty. In the meantime, Salon has a Sproul & Associates update:

Despite the recent chatter among librarians and some former employees about Sproul's practices, the various threads of the Sproul story weren't pulled together until Eric Russell, a 26-year-old in Las Vegas, came forward last week with his explosive account. Russell, who has acknowledged a beef with the firm over pay, told his local CBS affiliate that supervisors at the company routinely discarded Democratic registration forms. The station, KLAS 8, managed to fish some from the trash, and when it contacted the affected voters they were, understandably, shocked.

Republicans have responded by questioning Russell's motives and his political affiliation. "There's no way to prove what he says either way. He's a disgruntled employee who had access to those forms. There's no way to prove he didn't tear them up," says Brian Scroggins, chairman of the Clark County Republican Party. "I was told he had a prime seat at the Michael Moore event the other day," Scroggins added. According to a report in the Arizona Republic on Friday, Nathan Sproul responded to Russell's allegations by filing a defamation lawsuit against him. "The lawsuit claims that after Russell was fired, he returned to the office holding what appeared to be voter registration forms and told workers he would claim that he saw a supervisor tear up the forms unless he was paid what he wanted," the paper said.

Read the rest of the article here.