Georgia Republican Party Apparently Maintaining and Spreading an ‘Enemies List”

Appar­ent­ly, with­in a short time after the Repub­li­can State Com­mit­tee vot­ed to remove Bri­an Pritchard from his elect­ed office as par­ty first vice-chair­man, a pos­si­ble Repub­li­can ene­mies list com­prised of those vot­ing NO on the ques­tion of removal, was com­piled and sent out to oth­ers in at least one ancil­lary Repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tion, the Atlanta Young Repub­li­cans (AYR).

The first ques­tion any­one should be ask­ing is how such a thing could hap­pen? After all, each indi­vid­ual attend­ing the tri­al of Bri­an Pritchard is com­pelled to secre­cy by the rules of the meet­ing held in exec­u­tive ses­sion. They are allowed to NEVER DISCLOSE the accounts of that meet­ing, not even dur­ing a deathbed con­fes­sion. That is what exec­u­tive ses­sion means.

So, who vio­lat­ed the sanc­ti­ty of the tri­al of Bri­an Pritchard held in exec­u­tive ses­sion?

Appar­ent­ly, thechain of lost cus­todybegan, as I would nat­u­ral­ly expect, with par­ty stage­hand and data gath­er­er, Brant Frost, the par­ty oper­a­tive Chair­man McK­oon appar­ent­ly entrust­ed to com­pile and secure the vote totals. Frost, it seems, is the par­tys keep­er of the click­ers, those hand­held trans­mit­ters the par­ty uses to quick­ly reg­is­ter votes dur­ing meet­ings or con­ven­tions. Frost, as report­ed, hand­ed out the pro­grammed click­ers,each click­er asso­ci­at­ed with the name of a State Com­mit­tee per­sonto vote. When the vote occurred, the click­ers trans­mit­ted their data, includ­ing which names vot­ed FOR or AGAINST Pritchard, to Frosts lap­top.

Lat­er that after­noon, sur­prise! A screen­shot of a list of names, sort­ed to dis­play only those vot­ing NO on the ques­tion of remov­ing Bri­an Pritchard from office, end­ed up an image trans­mit­ted appar­ent­ly from the lap­top to the cell phone of Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Travis Bow­den. From there, Bow­den, the evi­dence sug­gests, sent those screen­shots to an indi­vid­ual pur­port­ed­ly serv­ing as Trea­sur­er and Finan­cial Wiz­ard of the Atlanta Young Repub­li­cans, as indi­cat­ed on an AYR Insta­gram chat screen­shot.

Sub­se­quent­ly, the Finan­cial Wiz­ard, appar­ent­ly, shared the same screen­shots on the AYR Insta­gram chat page. Ooop­she was not sup­posed to do thatuhor was he? Once he (appar­ent­ly) shared the names, local AYR Pres­i­dent Winslow took note of the list of shame and asked a few per­ti­nent ques­tions. At some point, leak­er Bow­den showed up on the chat, engag­ing Mr. Wiz­ard, calm­ing his nerves for pub­li­ciz­ing infor­ma­tion none of those peo­ple should have had access to, say­ing,No wor­ries. Glad you did it. The State Com­mit­tee vot­ed to pub­li­cize our votes.The Wiz­ard respond­ed that he knew it was okay to share because hecleared it with a few peo­ple before shar­ing,adding,Im not a rule break­er.

You can laugh now.

Bow­den then fin­ished the con­ver­sa­tion let­ting his fel­low leak­er know thatthey planned on post­ing the record­ing of the argu­ments for and against Pritchardover the week­end, a plan which we now know has been post­poned.

So, here we have it direct­ly from the fin­ger­tips of the Geor­gia Repub­li­can Par­ty Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, that pri­or to any pub­lic remarks by Bri­an Pritchard or those who sup­port him, there was a plan in place to release the record­ing of the argu­ments for and against Pritchardover the week­end.

Thus, as of this moment, the evi­dence sug­gests that ever since par­ty exec­u­tive direc­tor Bow­den, a for­mer AYR mem­ber him­self, leaked what is appar­ent­ly the offi­cial Repub­li­can Par­tys ENEMIES LIST to the finan­cial wiz­ard, and got doxed him­self for doing so, par­ty Chair McK­oon has found him­self in a predica­ment. McK­oon is the one who set all this into motion, call­ing the FIRST TRIAL AND REMOVAL OF AN ELECTED PARTY OFFICER IN THE HISTORY OF THE GEORGIA REPUBLICAN PARTY, which, accord­ing to Roberts Rules, must have been con­duct­ed under strictest exec­u­tive ses­sion pro­to­cols, only to dis­cov­er after­ward his two freck­le-faced, for­mer young Repub­li­cans, Frost and Bow­den, could­nt stand their excite­ment hold­ing pos­ses­sion of such a list of shame with­out glee­ful­ly leak­ing it to oth­er young Repub­li­can gig­glers, who then shared it again. Appar­ent­ly, that cat was out of the bag, pos­si­bly before McK­oons report­ed limo dropped him off at his home, too late, of course, to go back to work at his job with the state, the chair­mans next task appar­ent­ly becom­ing to cov­er all this up and make it look like its not his, or their faults. So, what does McK­oon do? Of course, he logs on to Twit­ter and blames the need to pub­li­cize the accounts of the entire tri­al on the defen­dant, Bri­an Pritchard, and his sup­port­ers, none of whom had any­thing to do with the afore­men­tioned:

McK­oon writes that it was the First Vice-Chair­man Pritchard who request­ed exec­u­tive ses­sion, a claim that is not true at all. The require­ment for exec­u­tive ses­sion for a dis­ci­pli­nary hear­ing is writ­ten in Roberts Rules (63.33). Pritchard did­nt write that. McK­oon wrote the invo­ca­tion of exec­u­tive ses­sion would occur as a result of the State Com­mit­tee pass­ing a draft res­o­lu­tion McK­oon him­self pre­pared and sent out sev­en days pri­or to the tri­al. Pritchard had no role in writ­ing a res­o­lu­tion for his own removal. Last­ly, Josh McK­oon nev­er even spoke to Bri­an Pritchard after the much pub­li­cized Zoom call with State Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee mem­bers over a month pri­or to the tri­al. That was the call in which McK­oon, with no direc­tion from his Exec­u­tive Com­mit­tee, asked for Pritchards res­ig­na­tion. So, the First Vice Chair­man is not the one who request­ed exec­u­tive ses­sion. A tri­al of this sort can­not hap­penunlessit is under exec­u­tive ses­sion.

All of what I describe notwith­stand­ing, McK­oon con­firms in his Tweet,the pro­ceed­ingsare sup­posed to be con­fi­den­tial.So, what does McK­oon decide to do then? Well, he ought to fire Travis Bow­den and hold a tri­al for Brant Frost for alleged­ly vio­lat­ing the sanc­ti­ty of an exec­u­tive ses­sion. But instead, Josh McK­oon announces hes going to dou­ble down on the leaks and ask the State Com­mit­tee, which meets again this Thurs­day, to vote to release ALL the records, includ­ing audio, video and a full court reporter tran­script to the pub­lic!

McK­oon blames inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion for the neces­si­ty to now make all the tri­al records pub­lic. Thus, accord­ing to Josh McK­oon, this is all Bri­an Pritchards fault, and the fault of those spread­ing inac­cu­rate infor­ma­tion on Pritchards behalf. And since its Pritchards fault in the first place, Roberts Rules some­how no longer apply, and the ques­tion whether Frost and Bow­den broke the sanc­ti­ty of the exec­u­tive ses­sion has become a moot point.

And peo­ple won­der why I called the pro­ceed­ings under con­sid­er­a­tion a kan­ga­roo court.

Georgia Republican Party Now Maintaining an Enemies List?

Once again, accord­ing to Mr. Finan­cial Wiz­ard, the list of com­mit­tee mem­bers vot­ing NO com­pris­es alist of shame,and any­one who vot­ed NO on the ques­tion of Bri­an Pritchard,should be shamed for their vote.Ques­tion:Does one shame ones friends? No, one only shames ones enemies.The mere fact that par­ty oper­a­tives would have sort­ed the final vote totals, sep­a­rat­ing YES votes from NO votes, reveals that they had pur­pose in doing so. What would be the pur­pose of sort­ing those names except for par­ty lead­er­ship to iden­ti­fy at a glance, and pro­mul­gate a list of who is with them, and who is against them? We all know the answer to that ques­tion.

Appar­ent­ly, it was­nt just Bri­an Pritchard on tri­al last Fri­day. The evi­dence I see indi­cates there was method in the mad­ness dis­cov­ered by Bri­an Pritchard when he and his attor­ney walked into the court­room. That is when, unbe­knownst to any­thing Pritchard had been led to believe, he dis­cov­ered that cam­eras had been set up to cap­ture video and audio, and even a court reporter had been hired to cre­ate a tran­script and per­ma­nent record of the pro­ceed­ings.If what the par­ty exec­u­tive direc­tor says in the AYR chat is true, it appears there had always been plan to make all that pub­lic.

So, let me ask you this, if the tri­al of Bri­an Pritchard was, as in Chair­man McK­oons words, sup­posed to be con­fi­den­tial, what would be the pur­pose of col­lect­ing such a high lev­el of doc­u­men­ta­tion, not­ing that none of the accounts of the secret tri­al of Bri­an Pritchard could ever be released? Fur­ther­more, why was this not a secret bal­lot as the click­ers were used dur­ing last Junes con­ven­tion?The only action­able infor­ma­tion that could result from col­lect­ing such detailed accounts of the tri­al, includ­ing the iden­ti­ties of the yeas and nays, would be that which might be used in the future by those in con­trol of that infor­ma­tion.That would be a very small group com­pris­ing McK­oon and his inner cir­cle. That pur­pose would not sim­ply be to pro­vide enter­tain­ment over a bowl of pop­corn.

It is unavoid­able to con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that the pur­pose of record­ing such detailed accounts of the pro­ceed­ings, includ­ing the pri­vate delib­er­a­tions of the com­mit­tee mem­bers, was also to cap­ture the sen­ti­ments of those offer­ing com­ments dur­ing the one-hour closed ses­sion fol­low­ing the tri­al. Why would the Repub­li­can Par­ty lead­er­ship divulge such a list of names to ancil­lary Repub­li­can orga­ni­za­tions such as the AYR, unless they want­ed those whose names are on the list to be known to that par­tic­u­lar group, some of whom are obvi­ous­ly high­ly-charged and unre­strained par­ti­sans?

This does­nt look good, a polit­i­cal par­ty main­tain­ing a poten­tial ene­mies list like this. If his­to­ry be our teacher, repres­sive regimes are those who gath­er and main­tain ene­mies lists. A polit­i­cal par­ty gath­er­ing and main­tain­ing names of polit­i­cal ene­mies is dan­ger­ous for a free soci­ety. We all know that and under­stand where it goes.

Expect the Repub­li­can regime to act as if what I pos­tu­late here is non­sense. But, why would Josh McK­oon make up a sto­ry that Bri­an Pritchard is the one respon­si­ble for the secret tri­al? Why would he blame Pritchard and Pritchard sym­pa­thiz­ers for the alleged neces­si­ty to release the detailed accounts of the secret tri­al when they had noth­ing to do with any of those deci­sions? I believe there is some­thing not right in all of this. Josh McK­oon and every­one in his inner cir­cle should resign and find them­selves excom­mu­ni­cat­ed from the Repub­li­can Par­ty, just like they did to Bri­an Pritchard. Turn­about is fair play.