Campaign Threatens APN with Libel Suit after Campaign Apparently Aims to Deceive Readers
(APN) ATLANTA — The Chief of Staff, Mitch Esmond, for District 6 City Council Candidate, Miguel Gallegos, has threatened Atlanta Progressive News with a libel lawsuit after APN published a blog post on our sister site, www.atlantaprogressiveblog.com, concerning the campaign’s apparent attempt to deceive APN readers. Esmond copied Mr. Gallegos and another staff member on the email.
“As you all know, we recently published our results from the District 6 candidate questionnaire, where Bahareh Azizi, Steve Brodie, and Liz Coyle responded, while the other 3 candidates–including Miguel Gallegos–didn’t. We thought Azizi’s responses were the most progressive,” APN wrote in the blog post dated September 18, 2009.
“Well, for some reason Gallegos’s Chief of Staff, Mitch Esmond, copied APN on an email he apparently sent to Gallegos, apparently laying out a plan to deceive APN readers that they had sent in the questionnaire days ago (when they knowingly had not),” the blog post states.
“Further, Esmond states that he prepared answers to the questions and wanted Gallegos to approve the answers; typically, our readers expect that when they’re reading a candidate questionnaire that the answers are from the actual candidate, not a staff member,” the blog post states.
Here is the full text of the body of the email sent from Esmond to Gallegos, having copied APN: “Well you did not answer me about the questionnaire but I have gone ahead and prepared some answers to the questions and if you are ok with them and believe them to be good solutions I can send it to Matthew and say we have no idea why they did not receive the answers as we had sent them a few days ago and although we understand if they can’t accept them we hope that they would accept them so that the voters can have a full picture of those who did take an active interest in preparing answers.”
Since publication of the blog post, candidate Liz Coyle asked whether Esmond’s email address could be verified. When advised that the email came from Gallegos’s campaign domain name, Coyle wrote, “I hope Miguel will replace his Chief of Staff immediately. That is outrageous.”
Today, APN received a follow-up email from Esmond in which he attempts to explain the previous email, but in doing so provides an explanation that does not make logical sense and appears to be furthermore untrue.
In the 1,355 word email, Esmond wrote, “The reason you have not been provided the final document is simple. I failed to follow up to make sure you had received our document last Wednesday when the e-mail delivery receipt had not come back to me. When I addressed the issue with Mr. Gallegos I told him I would simply be honest and tell you I didn’t know why you had not received it and ask you to publish our now late entry. Mr. Gallegos had not replied when I followed up again with him, which is the e-mail you received in error.”
However, this explanation does not make sense. Specifically, Esmond is now trying to imply that the campaign did send in the questionnaire responses on time. However, in the email copied to APN two days after the deadline, Esmond wrote that he was still waiting on Gallegos to approve the answers that Esmond prepared before he would send them to APN. If Esmond was indeed still waiting on the approval from Gallegos, it would have been contradictory for him to have allegedly already sent in the responses days before.
APN has also twice requested copies of the alleged earlier email, but the Gallegos campaign has not been able to produce it.
The Gallegos campaign also charged APN with not contacting their campaign to get their side of the story. In fact, APN responded to the September 18 email, but the Gallegos campaign failed to respond.
Esmond pointed to a subscript in the email stating that it could not be disseminated by anyone other than the intended recipient. However, APN had every reason to believe it was an intended recipient, as we were named in the email and apparently carbon copied on the email, whose subject was concerning our publication.
Esmond threatened APN with a “liable” [sic: mis-spelling] suit, if APN does not issue a retraction and public apology.
“We believe that this retraction or correction if you prefer will take us off the road of considering this a liable issue and return it to just a poor decision that has been corrected. We hope you will… make right was has been done wrong, however time is of the essence and we welcome you reply by 5:00pm today or will have no choice but to address this with our own press release,” Esmond wrote.
Esmond also addressed the fact that he, not the candidate, had prepared responses to the questionnaire. Esmond wrote that Gallegos is too busy to respond to all questionnaires and carry out his other campaign responsibilities. It should be noted that three other candidates in the race who did respond–Azizi, Brodie, and Coyle–were able to respond personally; it is clear that Brodie spent a great deal of time on his responses as they included several pages.
“He presents his position to me, I research the facts and law if required and present those to him. In turn he formulates a draft and I finalize the document incorporating his complete opinion,” Esmond wrote.
However, that is not what happened, according to Esmond’s earlier email. Apparently, Esmond himself prepared the responses and was waiting on Gallegos to approve them.
While Esmond stated that the campaign will issue a press release regarding the matter, to date, APN has not received any such press release.
Editorial note: At APN, we are outraged that a campaign would apparently attempt to take advantage of our readers in this way and will not tolerate the deception. It is also unfair to the candidates who did respond on time. But more importantly, this kind of apparent tactic of deception is the very thing that turns people off from the political process and Atlantans deserve a higher level of integrity in their public officials. If this does not represent Mr. Gallegos in terms of what kind of elected official he might be, we also hope that Gallegos will distance himself from what has occurred.
About the author:
Matthew Cardinale is the News Editor for Atlanta Progressive News and is reachable at matthew@atlantaprogressivenews.com.
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