Hack Reporter At WISH-TV Reports Bogus FEC Complaint Against Mourdock As Legitimate News

It's not enough that the campaign of Sen. Richard Lugar had one of their supporters on the Indiana Republican Party's state central committee file a complaint with the party alleging that the Mourdock campaign violated the terms of use for a party e-mail database known as Salesforce, Lugar's campaign has also filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission knowing full well that the FEC has absolutely no jurisdiction to hear a complaint based on the misuse of a party-owned computer database. Despite the fact that the FEC can do nothing with the complaint because it lacks jurisdiction, a hack political reporter who is supporting Lugar's re-election, WISH-TV's Jim Shella, reported on the filing of the complaint as if it was legitimate news.

Richard Mourdock's Senate campaign is now the subject of a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission.

It has to do with the accusation that the Mourdock campaign improperly downloaded information from a GOP database. The state Republican Party last week cut off the campaign's access to the database known as Salesforce.

The complaint was filed by John McCane, a former mayor of Rushville, who alleges that Mourdock used a state campaign committee to pay the $125 fee to access Salesforce and then illegally transferred information including email addresses to his federal campaign.

McCane included an email sent to him by the Senate campaign. By phone, McCane said he has never filed an FEC complaint before.

"I would like them to investigate whether or not there's been a violation of the rules," said McCane, "and at that point what they do is up to them."

There is a flat denial from the Mourdock campaign spokesman, Chris Conner.

"We've not had access to Salesforce since the end of 2010," he said. "We never got into Salesforce. There's no way we could have done anything with the data."

Conner said this is merely an attempt by the Lugar campaign to smear Mourdock.

John McCane is a Lugar supporter. His name sounds like - but is spelled differently than - that of the Arizona senator who is scheduled to appear in Lugar campaign ads.

To illustrate just how biased Shella's coverage of the race between Lugar and Mourdock is, Shella refused to report on an earlier complaint filed with the Senate Ethics Committee by Greg Wright based on Lugar's admission that he illegally billed federal taxpayers for return trips back to Indiana. Lugar repaid nearly $15,000 to the U.S. Treasury after he learned that his political opponents had obtained his travel reimbursement records pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request to prove that he had violated Senate rules. Former Sen. David Durenburger (R-MN) faced censure and criminal prosecution for doing the same thing back in the 1990s. Shella did not consider that worthy of reporting, but he rushed to air a story based on a complaint that any election lawyer would have told the reporter is not actionable. It's just another example of how you simply cannot trust anything you are being told by the mainstream political reporters in this campaign. The establishment media has decided Lugar must be re-elected, and it will do anything it can to bolster him while tearing down Richard Mourdock no matter how baseless the allegations are. There's a reason Shella is derisively referred to as Jim Shallow.