Alan Grayson erupts as Senate bid looms

As he faces the pressures of a potential Senate bid in the nation’s biggest swing state, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson has hurled angry expletives at reporters and described his likely rival in crude terms during a tense conversation with the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

For all of his outbursts, Grayson has been inventive with his slurs. On Wednesday, he bizarrely accused one reporter of being a “s—-ing robot” — a phrase that’s sure to become part of his legacy of incendiary remarks, which include branding a lobbyist a “K Street whore,” likening the tea party to the Ku Klux Klan and accusing a Christian conservative opponent of being a member of the Taliban.


Grayson, who wouldn’t comment on his tirades, didn’t dispute participating in a difficult phone call a few weeks previously with DSCC Chairman Jon Tester, who informed the representative that the committee would likely soon endorse Rep. Patrick Murphy. Grayson denied he directly swore at Tester — as two sources alleged — but he wouldn’t comment on what he said.

“What’s the deal here? You publish whatever colorful lies people toss your way, for their own obvious political purposes?” Grayson asked via text message.

Tester’s spokesman at the DSCC declined to comment. However, in multiple interviews with Democrats from Washington to Florida, it’s clear that the Montana senator tried to pressure Grayson to stay out of the Senate race because Democratic establishment figures believe he’s unelectable in a statewide race.

“You’re making a mistake,” Grayson said, likening Murphy to a piece of excrement. “When I’m a senator, it’s going to be hard to work together.”

If that happened, Tester chuckled, he was certain they would be able to work together after all. After the conversation, sources said, Tester made up his mind not only to support Murphy but to publicly endorse him and steer more money to his campaign.

The DSCC decision and conversation clearly surprised Grayson, who is still mulling whether to officially get in the race. Weeks before, he made sure to boast about meeting with the DSCC, and he went out of his way to cast doubt on a previous POLITICO report that said Murphy was favored by Senate Democratic leaders.

Already known for his outspokenness, Grayson became more irascible after the conversation with Tester and lost his cool with three separate reporters from different media outlets.

The most recent case occurred Wednesday when Tampa Bay Times political editor Adam C. Smith phoned Grayson to ask the Orlando Democrat about having incorporated a couple of Cayman Islands hedge funds where potential investors could avoid taxes. At the same time, Grayson has built up his public persona as a populist Wall Street-bashing firebrand who criticizes conservative tax-avoiders.

“When I set up my investment funds I set it up like everyone else,” Grayson told Smith, saying he established the funds on the advice of an unnamed attorney. The paper, he said to Smith, was trying to find “some stupid, bull—— story. … You want to write sh— about it, and you can’t because not a single dollar of taxes has been avoided.”

Since no funds had yet been invested, Smith asked about the propriety of establishing the funds in anticipation of getting foreign investors.

“Are you f—-ing kidding? I set up a fund that might solicit foreign investors. … I have no present intention of soliciting foreign investors,” Grayson said, according to the report. “Your perception issue is bulls—-.”

Grayson then began complaining about a POLITICO story last week that reported his girlfriend, biotech entrepreneur Dena Minning, had reached out to at least one Democratic-leaning group to put herself forward as a potential congressional candidate to run for Grayson’s Orlando-area House seat if he runs for the Senate. Neither Grayson nor Minning would comment to POLITICO, but he brought up the story to Smith when he trashed the new line of questioning about his finances.

“This is even worse than Grayson’s girlfriend might run for Congress 18 months from now,” Grayson said, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “This is a whole ’nother level of bulls—-. … Are are you some kind of s—-ing robot? You go around s—-ing on … people?”

Smith wasn’t the only reporter to bear the brunt of Grayson’s rage recently. After a POLITICO story ran last week, Orlando Sentinel reporter Scott Powers finally reached the congressman on his cellphone. Grayson refused to comment but instead swore at Powers using the f-word.

Powers wouldn’t comment on the conversation but confirmed he was unable to get anything printable from Grayson.

After the incident with Smith came to light on Wednesday, a National Journal reporter, Eric Michael Garcia, said via Twitter that he was “chewed out” by Grayson recently for asking about whether the congressman’s girlfriend was angling for his seat if he ran for Senate. “It’s becoming a rite of passage,” Garcia wrote. “He told me it was so speculative he wasn’t even going to answer it and then tore into me.”

While Grayson’s outspoken nature and trenchant wit have earned him a following of dedicated liberal activists — he’s fond of saying it would make him the favorite in a primary against Murphy — many Democratic operatives and establishment figures believe he’s essentially unelectable.

“He is not a shoo-in in a Democratic primary. He is a powder keg waiting to be lit,” said Steve Vancore, a Democratic consultant who’s unaffiliated with a candidate. “Yes, he might appeal to some liberals. But how does he win in North Florida, how does he win Tampa Bay Democrats, where the sentiment is much more moderate?”

Vancore likened Grayson to Allen West, the outspoken former Republican congressman and tea party darling who lost a conservative-leaning seat because of his over-the-top antics. “Alan Grayson can raise money from a portion of the MSNBC-watching crowd, but he has zero appeal in the middle,” said Vancore. “And in the end, Democrats are like Republicans: They want a candidate who can win a general election.”

Democrats hope Murphy’s fundraising ability and his centrist voting record will be a plus in the general election. But Grayson and his backers say Murphy’s record hasn’t been Democratic enough and make him vulnerable in a primary.

At the same time, conservative GOP Rep. Ron DeSantis has announced his Senate candidacy and is expected to face a challenge from Lt. Gov. Carlos López-Cantera. Just as DeSantis is running to the right, Grayson looks like he plans to run to the left in his primary.

Grayson gained a measure of fame among liberals at the height of battle over Obamacare. The little-known Florida freshman leapt into the national spotlight when he said on the House floor that Republicans’ health care plan was, “Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.” When GOP lawmakers demanded an apology, Grayson went back to the House floor to mock the request and said: “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

The controversy worked — to a degree. Grayson became the progressive counterweight to the tea party. And campaign contributions flowed.

Later that year, he started a website called NamesOfTheDead.com, aimed at drawing attention to a Harvard University study that said every year, more than 44,000 Americans die because they don’t have health insurance. Republicans said the site violated House and campaign finance rules because it linked to Grayson’s campaign website, while Talking Points Memo noted that several fake names were on the list, including “Wile E. Coyote, 55, Sedona, Arizona.” The website was eventually removed.

But he still lost reelection in the 2010 Republican wave. A new Orlando-area Democratic district drawn after the state gained two seats in reapportionment allowed him to return to the House in 2013.

The “die quickly” incident was not Grayson’s only controversial incident. In 2009, he called lobbyist Linda Robertson, an adviser to then-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, a “K-Street whore,” in a radio interview. He later apologized for the comment.

Grayson saves no kind words for his Republican counterparts. In 2009, he called them “utterly unscrupulous … these are foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who know nothing but ‘no.’” He compared former Vice President Dick Cheney to a vampire on MSNBC, saying that he had “trouble listening to what [Cheney] says sometimes because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.” At a fundraiser with Vice President Joe Biden, Grayson joked that Cheney gave Biden a tour of the White House “dungeon” and invited him to “go waterboarding” with him, the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2009. He also told a liberal blog that Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio show host, was “more lucid when he was a drug addict.”

During his 2010 race, Grayson’s campaign misleadingly edited a speech from Republican opponent Daniel Webster that made him sound as though he believed women should blindingly “submit” to their husbands. The ad, which called Webster “Taliban Dan,” was given a “Pants-on-Fire” designation by PolitiFact.

In 2013, his insults reached new heights when he compared the tea party to the KKK in a fundraising email that included an image of a burning cross and added “[T]ea Party” to the picture. Despite criticism, he did not backtrack, telling ABC’s Orlando affiliate that he is “calling them out on their hate.”

Meanwhile, Grayson has been involved in an ugly divorce from his wife, whom he accused of bigamy. She, in turn, has accused him of infidelity. Though he won reelection in 2014 amid the divorce, it’s likely to surface in a statewide race, ushering in a new round of uncomfortable questions from reporters and potential outbursts from Grayson.