Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer, in Anchorage Monday to support Joe Miller's campaign for U.S. Senate, would not condemn her group's spokesman, Mark Williams, after his "controversial blog post about what he called "Colored People." Kremer said the post was wrong but the Tea Party Express isn't dumping him.
"I'm not going to throw a fellow conservative under the bus. I don't agree with what he wrote, I wish he hadn't wrote it, but that's not what we are here to focus on," Kremer said in an interview.
Kremer and other Tea Party Express leaders were in Anchorage to talk about their support for Miller's Republican primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The California-based group said the Miller-Murkowski race would be its "singular focus" between now and the Aug. 24 primary, and that it will do whatever it takes for him to win.
"You're going to see several hundred thousand dollars spent on this race in television, in radio, in get-out-the-vote efforts," said Bryan Shroyer, the political director for the Tea Party Express.
The Miller campaign was focused on a different issue Monday, going after Andrew Halcro, a former state legislator, for claiming on his blog that Miller was fired from his job as an attorney for the Fairbanks North Star Borough last summer. The borough on Monday afternoon released a stack of heavily blacked out documents as a result of a public records request from the Daily News and other media. The documents include the letter of resignation Miller wrote last year but provide little more insight.
There was no suggestion of wrongdoing by Miller in the documents the borough disclosed.
The Tea Party Express leaders visited Anchorage the day after news came out that the group has been expelled from the national Tea Party Federation, an organization that seeks to represent the many Tea Party anti-big government groups around the country. The federation objected to the blog post written by Williams, a California talk radio host who was chairman of the Tea Party Express until last month and is currently described as spokesman on the group's website.
Tea Party Express chairwoman Kremer said Monday that Williams, who wrote the post on his own blog, was not speaking on behalf of the Tea Party Express.
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