The group caused an earlier controversy with racially-based attacks on McConnell’s wife. Progress Kentucky official resigns

Pressure is growing Thursday afternoon on a liberal super PAC in Kentucky accused of surreptitiously recording a strategy session held by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Jacob Conway, the Jefferson County Democratic Party’s executive committee member who originally accused Progress Kentucky of making the recording, told NBC News he was on his way to talk to the FBI about the allegations. And the group’s treasurer confirmed he had quit his position after the audio was published.


“At this time based on advice of both friends and counsel, I will be not be making a public statement available until everything has been reviewed by an attorney at this time,” Douglas L. Davis told NBC News. “I have resigned my position as treasurer and did not and do not condone any allegations of illegal activity that might have taken place.”

Conway told Louisville’s NPR affiliate earlier Thursday that two Progress Kentucky employees bragged to him about recording the meeting through a door in McConnell’s office.

Conway said Shawn Reilly and Curtis Morrison told him they snuck into McConnell’s freshly-opened campaign office February 2, not long after McConnell held an open house for GOP activists and media members. They heard the meeting going on through a closed door and recorded it.

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“When I guess they heard the tasteless and offensive and tacky things the McConnell campaign was saying, they decided to record it,” Conway told Fox News in a later live phone interview. “They told me about it later that day, or maybe it was the next day. I don’t really remember, it was a couple months ago.”

McConnell campaign manager Jesse Benton told the radio station the door in question has a large gap at the bottom and a vent the duo could’ve recorded the meeting through.

The audio of the meeting, which shows the McConnell campaign discussed potential candidate Ashley Judd’s mental health, was eventually leaked to Mother Jones, a liberal magazine, and posted earlier this week. The McConnell campaign immediately accused “the Left” of engaging in “Nixonian” tactics and “bugging” their office. They requested the FBI investigate the matter, and FBI officials met with McConnell staffers on Wednesday.

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“WFPL’s reports that left-wing activists illegally recorded a private meeting inside our campaign headquarters are very disturbing,” Benton said in a statement Thursday. “At this point, we understand that the FBI is immersed in an intensive criminal investigation and must defer any further comment to them.”

Conway told Fox News he came forward to clear the names of the state and national Democratic parties.

“As a party official, I thought it would — You know, the McConnell campaign is going to try to tie the Democratic Party here, locally, and on the state level and nationally, and they already have, to Progress Kentucky,” he said. “The only reason I came forward with what I knew was to protect the Democratic party.”

Conway said the FBI had not spoken to him.

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Kentucky is what’s known as a one-party consent state, meaning if one party of a conversation knows they are being recorded, the recording is legal.

Benton said there was no way any of the meeting’s 10 participants gave Progress Kentucky consent to tape the meeting.

“These are people that have been with Mitch a long time, and they love Mitch McConnell,” Benton said on Fox News. “They are supremely loyal.”

Benton said the FBI was examining surveillance footage from the building’s lobby, but hadn’t directly asked about Progress Kentucky, Reilly or Morrison. The FBI declined to comment on any of the recent developments.

Benton, a longtime aid to former Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Rand Paul, also defended the campaign’s discussion of Judd’s mental health.

“What we were discussing was not a strategy, we were just discussing simply what was out there in the public record,” he said on Fox News. “These reports and accounts were things that she wrote about in her own autobiography. These were things that she brought in to the public record. We didn’t find these on some dumpster dive, we weren’t dragging skeletons out of her closet.”

Progress Kentucky, which was founded in December and is dedicated to defeating McConnell, was little known until late February, when the group came under fire for making racially-based attacks on McConnell’s wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. The group, which raised less than $1,000 in December, its first month of existence, was criticized by both the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm and the state Democratic party.

Speaking to reporters in the Senate on Tuesday, McConnell had directly accused Progress Kentucky, although he later backed off the charge.

“As you know last month my wife’s ethnicity was attacked by a left-wing group in Kentucky and then apparently they also bugged my headquarters,” he said. “So I think that pretty much sums up the way the political left is operating in Kentucky.”

Officials for Progress Kentucky did not immediately return e-mails or phone calls requesting comment, but so far, the group’s work seems to have backfired. They eventually apologized for attacking Chao, and McConnell turned the controversy into his first campaign ad. McConnell’s campaign also worked to raise money off of the controversy surrounding the secret audio.

McConnell is up for reelection in November 2014, and the five-term senator’s poll numbers have sagged. While attacks from McConnell and other Republicans manage to scare Judd out of the race, McConnell still could face a challenge from Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. The race is expected to be one of the country’s nastiest and most expensive.

National Republican Senatorial Campaign spokesman Brad Dayspring continued to pressure national Democrats in a statement.

“It is becoming more and more likely that this was a coordinated hit by the left, and it’s telling that the DNC and DSCC remain silent about what they knew about the illegal tape and when they knew it,” Dayspring said. “There’s no telling where this trail ends.”

But in an interview on Fox News not long after Conway appeared, DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse said the national committee had nothing to do with the secret tape and wasn’t aware of its existence.

“I don’t know the people he’s referring to,” Woodhouse said of Reilly and Morrison. “But I will say this: We would never condone a secret taping. … If we want to tape your conversation, we’ll walk right up to you with a camera.”

David Corn, the Mother Jones reporter who first posted the audio, declined to comment.

“It’s a confidential source, until the source comes forward, we don’t comment,” Corn told POLITICO.

Tarini Parti and Dylan Byers contributed to this report.