Daniel Cameron demands stations pull ads hitting him on Matt Bevin's pardons

An attorney for Republican gubernatorial nominee Daniel Cameron sent a letter to Kentucky television stations last week demanding they pull a Democratic group's ads from their airwaves, alleging they falsely criticize him.

So far, the stations haven't complied.

The ad in question is from Defending Bluegrass Values — a PAC led and funded by the Democratic Governors Association, which is supporting Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in the race. It criticizes Cameron for hiring two top officials in his attorney general office who pushed for controversial pardons while working for former Gov. Matt Bevin in late 2019.

However, the letter from Cameron's attorney Chris Ashby to TV stations claims the DGA ad is "false, deceptive and misleading," asserting that the ad actually accuses Cameron of hiring a "murder and child rapist" in his office, not just attorneys who advocated for the pardons of people convicted of such crimes.

An attorney for Defending Bluegrass Values countered that in a letter to five TV stations, calling the demand to pull the ad "a desperate attempt to silence those trying to hold him accountable for his record as Attorney General."

More:Andy Beshear vs. Daniel Cameron: An early look at the showdown in Kentucky governor's race

The dueling letters were sent June 14 — five days after the ads started airing on the five stations.

Dale Woods, the general manager for WDRB in Louisville, told The Courier Journal last week the station would not follow Cameron's demand to pull the ad, saying it appeared to be in compliance with their rules for political advertisements.

Here is a look at the specific claims of the ad, the arguments for and against its veracity offered by attorneys for Cameron and the PAC, and the facts of what actions Cameron's staffers took in regard to Bevin's pardons:

'The same people who helped push Bevin's pardons'

The Defending Bluegrass Values ad is actually its second ad since the primary election in May that attacked Cameron on the issue of Bevin's pardons.

Whereas the Democratic group's first ad criticized Cameron for not appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bevin's pardons of "rapists and murderers," the second ad went further by criticizing him for hiring Bevin's aides who had pushed for some of those pardons.

Opening again with Cameron's promise to look into Bevin's pardon scandal and TV footage covering it, the ad's narrator states that Cameron "used taxpayer money to hire Bevin's top aides instead, surrounding himself with the same people who helped push Bevin's pardons."

While the narrator voices this line, the screen quotes "Two key members of his staff" from a May 2020 column by Joe Gerth in The Courier Journal, which was reacting to a story in the newspaper the previous week that showed at least one top attorney in Cameron's office pushing for one of Bevin's most controversial commutations of a man convicted of sexually assaulting a child.

Just after the narrator's line, the ads cuts back to audio of TV footage of reporters speaking about the pardons, saying "one a child rapist, the other who killed his parents," while the screen shows footage of one pardon recipient's mugshot and another being led in handcuffs by a police officer.

'A brazen lie'

According to Ashby's June 14 letter on behalf of Cameron to Kentucky TV stations, the Defending Bluegrass Values ad was not actually claiming that Cameron hired Bevin aides who had pushed for the pardons, but that he actually hired a child rapist and murder to his attorney general office.

Quoting the ad, Ashby claims the TV reporters' words of "one a child rapist, the other who killed his parents" are a continuation of the narrator's sentence that Cameron was "surrounding himself with the same people who helped push Bevin's pardons."

"Tellingly, the ad provides no citation or other support for the claim that Mr. Cameron hired a murderer and a child rapist to work in the Office of the Attorney General, because it cannot, because it is a brazen lie," Ashby wrote.

Ashby told stations he was writing "to demand that you remove from rotation" the "false political advertisement," warning that as a broadcast licensee, they have a legal obligation to refuse to air ads that are "false, deceptive and misleading." He added that "your station is not protected from legal liability" for airing such ads from third parties supporting candidates.

'Illogical and disingenuous'

After receiving an inquiry from five stations who received Cameron's demand to pull the ad, an attorney from Defending Bluegrass Values wrote back to those stations the same day to defend the accuracy of the ad and for it to remain on the air.

The five stations inquiring about the ad and receiving the reply were WDRB, WHAS and WAVE in Louisville, as well as WKYT and WLEX in Lexington.

Attorney Courtney Weisman wrote that the ad never claims Cameron hired actual rapists and murders, arguing it "clearly delineates between those 'who pushed for the pardons' (the staff members) and those who benefited from the pardons (the criminals)."

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"It is illogical and disingenuous for Mr. Cameron to suggest that the two are one in the same," Weisman wrote. "That would require viewers to believe that those in jail for these heinous crimes were also working for Mr. Bevin at the time the pardons were issued."

Weisman added that the reason Cameron waited nearly a week to complain about the ad is that he "is realizing how unpopular the pardon scandal is, and he doesn't want voters to know the truth. And this is the best argument his lawyer could come up with in six days."

Cameron's hiring of Steve Pitt in question

While not named in the ad, its citation of The Courier Journal column clearly indicates it is referring to former attorney general staffers Steve Pitt and Chad Meredith.

Pitt had served as Bevin's general counsel and Meredith as his deputy general counsel through all four years of the governor's term, then were hired into top positions in Cameron's office in December 2019 when Bevin left office after his reelection defeat and Cameron's election as attorney general that November.

While Bevin faced bipartisan backlash for his most controversial pardons and commutations of people convicted of violent crimes — including from Cameron, who requested the FBI to investigate Bevin's pardons by the end of that December — the direct involvement of these top aides in pardons was not known until a Courier Journal report the following May.

The Courier Journal uncovered a document in which Pitt advocated for Bevin to either pardon or commute the sentence of Dayton Jones, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for brutally sodomizing a passed-out 15-year-old boy in Christian County. After Jones was freed, he was charged and convicted again by federal prosecutors for sharing a video of the same assault.

Other documents in the report showed possible involvement of both in the pardon of Patrick Baker, the brother of a Bevin fundraiser host who was convicted of killing Donald Mills in a drug theft before being freed by Bevin, and then reconvicted on federal charges related to the killing in 2021.

One printed spreadsheet of pardon applicants showed "Chad working" written beside Baker's name, while a handwritten note from Pitt recommended Bevin consider a commutation for an unnamed applicant whose description matched characteristics of Baker's case.

Pitt, Meredith and Cameron's office did not respond to inquiries about these pardons at the time, though Pitt abruptly resigned from his position as adviser to the attorney general just five days after the story was published. Asked if Cameron called for Pitt's resignation, his spokeswoman at the time said the office did not comment on personnel matters.

A subsequent Courier Journal story from that July detailed additional hundreds of documents related to attorneys in Bevin's office making pardon recommendations — the majority of which were written by Pitt, but also including some written by Meredith and two other attorneys who had moved into Cameron's office, Matt Kuhn and Barry Dunn.

Meredith's role in Bevin's pardons would come up again when President Joe Biden indicated in 2022 he was going to nominate him to a lifetime federal judgeship. Beshear was among the Democrats to criticize that potential appointment, citing his involvement with Bevin's pardons at the end of his term, though Biden only pulled the pending appointment after it was blocked by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

Meredith’s personal lawyer, Brandon Marshall, told The Courier Journal in 2020 Meredith had "no meaningful involvement with any of the most controversial pardons," while an adviser to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested the FBI giving Meredith a "clean bill of health" from his background check for the judgeship in 2022 means he was not involved in wrongdoing related to the pardons.

Meredith left Cameron's office in late 2021 to work at a private law firm in Cincinnati.

WDRB not pulling ad

Woods of WDRB said Friday the station received Cameron's letter and had reviewed it, but they would not pull the ad from the air, as "it did seem like everything was in compliance with the way it should be."

He said a disputed ad "has to be really obvious that it's not truthful, and/or content that we deem unacceptable to be on the air," but the Defending Bluegrass Values ad did not fit in either category.

Background:Steve Pitt, top adviser to Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, resigns

Woods added that campaigns demanding for political ads to be pulled from the air is not unusual, expecting to receive more demands by the general election in November, as "nobody likes what they say about the other person."

General managers from WKYT, WLEX, WHAS and WAVE have not responded to multiple voicemails since last week, though all four stations continue to air the ad.

One recent example of a campaign unsuccessfully demanding for a station to pull the ad of a PAC in Kentucky came in 2018, when Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Barr called for removing an ad it deemed misleading from a PAC supporting his opponent Amy McGrath in his reelection race.

Reactions of Democrats, Republicans

Cameron's campaign manager Gus Herbert and Republican Party of Kentucky spokesman Sean Southard did not respond to multiple inquiries about the newest Defending Bluegrass Values ad and Cameron's demand for stations to pull it from the air.

Herbert did respond in May to the first ad hitting Cameron for not appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Bevin's pardons, noting that the attorney general "acted in a bipartisan manner to refer the matter to the FBI for investigation, a move that was praised by now Congressman Morgan McGarvey."

While the FBI has declined to comment on any potential investigation into Bevin's pardons from 2019 to this week, a federal prosecutor in Kentucky's Eastern District and FBI agent both indicated in court during Baker's second prosecution in 2021 that there was an ongoing federal investigation of the pardons. Asked last week if that pardon investigation is ongoing or closed, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Louisville office said she could not provide an update.

A PAC led by the Republican Governors Association is also attempting to fire back at Beshear on the issue of pardons in their new ad, taking issue with commutations the current governor issued in 2020 to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in crowded jails.

More:Beshear's COVID commutations rarely led to more violent crimes — with a few glaring exceptions

As for Cameron's attempt to pull the ad, Democratic Governors Association spokesman Sam Newton said in a statement that this was a "desperate stunt to try to avoid accountability."

“It looks like the first big move from the babysitter Mitch McConnell sent down to watch Daniel Cameron’s campaign was a major flop," Newton stated, adding that he "should explain to Kentuckians why he hired the same Matt Bevin attorneys who helped push for dangerous pardons for rapists and murderers to senior roles in his own office.”

Reach reporter Joe Sonka at jsonka@courierjournal.com and follow him on Twitter at @joesonka.