"Rand Paul courts controversy with rehire of staffer Jesse Benton"

With Rand Paul dancing around so many issues, it is difficult to understand why he has come out so forcefully in support of Jesse Benton. Such support could easily become a presidential campaign issue, especially in Iowa.

If Rand really felt an obligation to bring on board his niece's husband, he could have done it in a much more low key fashion. Very odd.

Lee Stranahan weighs in :

As the wide-open 2016 presidential race is getting ready to kick off, expected Republican contender Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky has already made a controversial staffing decision by bringing in longtime Paul family political aide Jesse Benton, who was thought to be in disgrace after being forced to resign from the Mitch McConnell campaign earlier this year. The 37-year old Benton has previously worked as communications manager for the presidential campaign of Paul’s father Ron Paul, and is married to Rand Paul’s niece..

It’s an interesting time and place for Rand Paul to expend political capitol and potentially put his political future on the line.

The Iowa State Senator involved in the bribery scandal is Kent Sorenson, as we reported here at Capitol City Project earlier this year. The investigation is still going on and Sorenson recently failed a drug test while awaiting sentencing.

While Sorenson took a plea deal, so far there have been no charges for the people who negotiated the bribe that had Sorenson stab Bachmann in the back, not have any charges been made against Dimitri Kesari, the former Ron Paul deputy national campaign manager who made the the payoffthat is sending Kent Sorenson to prison.

Although he hasn’t been convicted or even charged yet, it’s hard to understand how it makes political sense for Rand Paul to assert “I don’t think he’s done anything wrong” about Jesse Benton, who all evidence points to as one of the people who negotiated the bribe.

At the very least, it would have appeared more judicious to let the investigation on Benton take its course before bringing him back into fold publicly. By endorsing Benton on the record, his story becomes a question that Paul may be forced to answer over and over, which would turn Benton into exactly the sort of distraction that he supposedly wanted to avoid being for McConnell. It’s hard to find an upside.

Nor is it especially clear that Benton is “good at politics.” Benton did manage Paul’s winning bid for Senator in 2010 but Benton has a reputation for being very unpopular with the core Ron Paul / liberty movement constituency. Many diehard Ron Paul fans felt that the 2012 presidential bid was money about fundraising than any real possibility of victory and the Sorenson bribery scandal shows that there was big money being tossed around. Benton himself made over half a million dollars on the Paul ’12 campaign.

It didn’t help matters that Benton went to work for the much-maligned Mitch McConnnell, something that even Benton seems to have had difficulty stomaching based on his much-publicized comment that he was “holding his nose” working for establishment warhorse in an audio published by theEconomic Policy Journal.

-RW