Matt Kelty and the Perjury Charges

I've been on the ground and on the phone talking with various people all evening long. One consistent topic that continued to come up was the 2 perjury charges. There were a lot of questions about this - in particular, did the perjury charge come from signing documents under the penalty of perjury or was it related to grand jury testimony?

I asked Matt Kelty this specific question and he told me that he didn't know. He indicated that he would have more information tomorrow and that he'd hold a press conference to answer questions at that time. Frankly, I was a little surprised that he wouldn't know the answer to this question this late in the evening - it was about 10pm - but I'm sure it has been an incredibly rough day for him and his family so I decided not to press the issue.

After returning home I reviewed the statements by the special prosecutor and there's absolutely no doubt it came from grand jury testimony:

Both (perjury charges) relate to testimony of Kelty regarding the Zogby poll. They came from his testimony in the grand jury and the allegation is those statements he made he knew to be false or not to be true.

This could be absolutely devastating to the Kelty campaign. The facts of this case had not been in doubt for quite some time; the arguments really boiled down to interpretation of the law. However, the news that Don Willis also paid for part of the Zogby Harrison Square poll was only released today. If Matt Kelty went before the grand jury and tried to bamboozle them about the funding of that poll then I think he's in serious trouble and frankly he should be.

It's one thing to mislead the press but it's a whole different ball game to try and do the same thing to the grand jury. I think you can make an argument about the campaign finance laws being ambiguous but there is absolutely no justification for misleading the grand jury. This was the #1 concern of just about every Kelty supporter I spoke to today. I don't want to be too critical on these specific indictments yet because there's too much information I just don't know.

Hopefully once the indictments are released I'll be able to get a better handle on this specific charge but it is certainly a devastating blow to the Kelty campaign...