U.S. veterans “died at the hands of politicians” such as former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., Department of Veteran Affairs whistleblower Ryan Honl charged in a new ad attacking the Democratic Senate candidate.
“I found out that Russ Feingold got a memo in 2009 that outlined veteran harm and nothing was done,” Honl said in the ad released Monday by Freedom Partners, a Koch-backed organization. “All those veterans who’ve come back wounded, and they die at the hands of politicians who look the other way.”
Freedom Partners is spending $2 million to promote the ad, a significant investment that coincided with the kick-off of Sen. Ron Johnson’s re-election campaign. Johnson is one of the most vulnerable Republicans facing re-election and trails Feingold by nearly 6 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average, but the size of the ad buy and the fact that Freedom Partners announced the amount of money they’re spending suggests that outside groups won’t abandon Johnson.
Feingold denounced the ad as a “smear” and blamed Johnson for the ad. “Johnson knows for a fact that this attack is false,” spokesman Michael Tyler told the Wisconsin State Journal. “That’s why he’s shamefully hiding behind the Koch brothers while they lob up smears on his behalf.”
The underlying issue pertains to a VA facility in Tomah, Wis., that was found to have a doctor overprescribing opioids to veterans. A local union official, American Federation of Government Employees chapter president Lin Ellinghuysen, wrote in 2009 that a memo detailing the Tomah abuses was “hand-delivered” to Feingold.
Feingold, who served as a senator until he lost to Johnson in 2010, denies ever having received the memo and now Ellinghuysen has retracted the claim. “We assumed the documents had been delivered to several members of the Wisconsin delegation at that time, but we can’t confirm that they actually made it to those offices,” she told the Post-Crescent, another Wisconsin media outlet.
The Post-Crescent emphasized, however, that “Ellinghuysen was an obsessive recorder of her work for the union, detailing what happened at every meeting she attended, down to exact quotes,” and noted that she wrote in two separate documents from the time that Feingold had been given a summary of the allegations.
Another conservative group that has tied the Tomah facility to Feingold suggested that Ellinghuysen had political reasons for absolving the Democratic Senate nominee. “I’m more inclined to believe what someone wrote down at the time and submitted in an official police report than what they are now saying five years later under immense political pressure,” Chris Martin, of the Wisconsin Alliance for Reform, said in January.
