united states flew to california to give a speech. it was a speech that he knew he would be giving to some of his most die hard fans. people who would follow him until the end of the earth. and that was crucial at that moment in his political life, because just a few weeks earlier, the wall street journal was first to report that that same vice president, spiro agnew, he was under federal criminal investigation for potential felony corruption charges, bribery, extortion, tax evasion, a bunch of stuff. this was very shocking front page news at the time. it was very damaging news, for obvious reasons, to the vice president, and he was just completely enraged about it. so he flew out to california september 29th, 1973, to give a talk to his most rabid supporters. it was the national conference of republican women. and, um, these women were hard core activists. as a group, generally speaking, they were quite right wing and quite devoted to spiro agnew. agnew was seen as being
constituents in that district were able to show up and say, you have to side with us. and we were able to help limit the harm from this member of congress. we re going to try and do that in every single one of the districts. sometimes we ll get them to go on the record, sometimes they ll vote against us. so it s up to the constituents to hold them accountable and make sure there s a price to pay for their extremism. over the past six years you ve been involved in this organizing effort that started small and turned into this big thing, dowless feel like there are big lessons learned in terms of what works, what s effective, and things you thought might work but didn t and things that have been more effective than you thought. we always say pictures or it didn t happen. you can call your representative, 1 of the 18, and they ll have a staffer taking down your message saying we re really concerned
operative who appeared to run the whole illegal absentee ballot scheme and was paid by his campaign. then that contention was shot down yesterday by none other than mark harris s own son. assistant u.s. attorney john harris shows up at the hearing and testifies he e-mailed his own father in writing back in 2017 about worries that dowless was breaking the law. and you wanted to be clear that this could all blow up, be referred to the d.a. yes. there s a legal dimension which i thought they were illegally collecting ballots. all of which led to the republican congressional candidate mark harris, the father of the man seen there testifying kind of against him, a man who had sued previously to be seated in congress because it was not fair. that led him to his emotional reversal before the state board of elections today. here with me now, wsoc tv reporter joe bruno whose stellar reporting on this story just won a poke award this week and has
absentee ballot operation. dan mcgreedy, his attorneys are going to try to connect him to do you r dowless saying how did you not know this man was undergoing this operation with these really wild results that definitely benefited you. it s going to be a really big day at the hearing, steph. my goodness. i want to get my panel to weigh in on this. basel and noel still here. is the right move for the republican party at this point to say let s have a new election, let s have a new candidate? yes, yes, this is the right move. i think considering all the black cloud that surrounded this election, i think it s fair to say that probably even the voters would appreciate just a whole new from scratch vote because if you voted for whichever candidate you liked in the first place, you re just going to re-establish your vote. it weeds all these fraudulent voting ballots. i think that s unlikely.
dowless, a convicted felon, who was working for a firm hired by the republican candidate. allegedly this operative had something to doing with highly questionable absentee ballot activity. dowless personally turned in 592 of the 1,341 total absentee ballot requests in bladen county. and a set of 161 ballots obtained by cnn showed that nine people individually signed as witnesses on at least ten absentee ballots. many of those nine are loosely connected to dowless. usually the witness for an absentee ballot is the voter s family or friends and this cnn learned that more than 1,000 ballots in the race might have been destroyed. there are also allegations that republican operatives took