Super pacs, billionaires and more – Congressman Tim Huelskamp speaks out on the smear campaign and big money investors that contributed to his defeat in in the August 2nd primary election.
Huelskamp attended a telephonic media press conference where no subject was off limits and his frustration was evident.
“Roger Marshall attacked me for not getting anything done, and that’s a lie and a smear if I guess you don’t count the Veterans and count the military,” said Huelskamp.
Huelskamp says that his work for Veterans and the military will continue until he leaves office.
Many times Huelskamp noted that he was a “5th generation farmer” and stated that Marshall – “an OBGYN” doesn’t care about farmers, as he has famously campaigned for.
“3 million dollars spent against me, much of it from outside the state of Kansas – super pacs and billionaires from Chicago, and Florida and Washington, D.C. insiders put in an incredible amount of money….I’m very confident that if the super pacs that wanted to control my vote and tell us how to vote hadn’t put in money then we would have won this race,” said Huelskamp.
Huelskamp added that his votes for or against various things always were made while keeping Kansans in mind, and that these controlling money pots, or so to speak, became upset with him for not going along with their agendas.
“It’s a sad indictment of Washington [D.C.] where you have a Speaker [of the House], now a former Speaker who decides he’s going to tell members how to vote; and I didn’t vote the way John Boehner told me how to vote and he punished me and three other members,” said Huelskamp referencing why he was kicked of the House Agriculture Committee.
Huelskamp said that he couldn’t hurt Kansans in order to support “big money guys”.
“These guys don’t care about the AG Committee, you know the U.S. Chamber of Commerce never did score the vote on the AG Committee and if that was such an important vote – why did they support Pat Roberts? And if the Kansas Farm Bureau thinks the Farm Bill vote is so important why have they endorsed Pat Roberts…why did they endorse Kevin Yoder, Lynn Jenkins, Mike Pompeo and say it was all about the Farm Bill…that was just an excuse to use against me,” said Huelskamp who doesn’t know why such intense efforts were made by outside investors to get him out of office.
Huelskamp adds, “At the end of the day, they don’t want a principled conservative, they don’t want a principled anything actually – they want someone who will do exactly what they say, and I’m pretty confident they’ll get that in Roger Marshall because they bought his seat for him.”
Huelskamp alleges that this is one of the top, if not the most money spent on a primary election in Kansas history.
“Call Marlene Ricketts and say ‘What’s your interest in Kansas?’; call this Christopher Saddler whoever he is, you can go to the FEC and look up his contributions….his corporate office is in London, England. All I know is, they weren’t from Kansas, their interests were not agriculture – my guess is that the Wall Street folks want to continue to get bail outs…I’m not up there to look out for the Wall Street guys, the big money guys – at the end of the day I’m worried about ‘main street’, that’s where we have problems here in America.”
In addition to the Ricketts family, Huelskamp name dropped “uber billionaires” like Paul Singer, the U.S. Chamber and “corporate cronyism types” backing Roger Marshall with some sort of underlying special interest in Kansas.
Huelskamp added that there are no sour grapes, saying that he received more votes this election that the ones previously won; but he is frustrated that the people of the 1st Congressional District in Kansas fed in to the “smear campaign” and “flat-out lies”.
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