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We can't trust Alison Lundergan Grimes with our election. She must resign or be impeached

Scott Jennings
Opinion contributor

As of last Thursday, the father and political consultant of Kentucky’s Democratic secretary of state are headed to federal prison to join the chief deputy of Kentucky’s Democratic attorney general and nominee for governor.

Alison Grimes and Andy Beshear, the top two Democrats in Frankfort, may be divided by a decadeslong intraparty feud between their fathers, but they are united by the misdeeds and malfeasance of their family legacy as voters prepare to render judgment on state government once more in November.

The convictions of Jerry Lundergan, Grimes’ father and a former Democratic Party chairman, and Dale Emmons, a longtime cog in the Democratic Party’s state wheel, of breaking laws related to Grimes’ unsuccessful campaign against U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell in 2014, breathed fresh life into an argument Gov. Matt Bevin has made many times: that voters should reject, once and for all, the culture of corruption and self-dealing that defined Kentucky’s Democratic Party for decades.

Not only were Lundergan and Emmons found guilty of breaking laws in the 2014 election, but federal prosecutors introduced evidence of similar corruption in the 2011 and 2015 elections, in which Grimes won and then successfully defended her current office.

Grimes claims she wasn’t aware of what was happening in the large campaign that was built for her in 2014, but that defense won’t fly in the cases of her much smaller races for state office. While approximately $18 million was spent by Grimes’ Senate campaign in 2014, less than $1 million was spent in each of her state races.

Background:What to know about the Jerry Lundergan and Dale Emmons convictions

It is hard to believe that over three campaigns, Grimes could claim no awareness whatsoever of how and why money was being spent on her behalf, out of committees bearing her name. Every Democrat who appeared on the ballot with Grimes in 2015 —Beshear especially — must now answer questions about whether they knew of campaign finance misdeeds that may have changed the outcome of the election. Grimes won by just 22,000 votes. Beshear, just 2,201.

We must consider that illegal money injected by Democrats in the 2015 election unjustly carried not one, but two offices.

For Grimes, the end of the road has come. As we face what figures to be an incredibly close election, it has become clear that Grimes, who serves as Kentucky’s chief election administration official, is woefully compromised and must resign. If she refuses, Bevin should strongly consider calling the General Assembly into session for the purpose of impeachment.

Beyond the campaign finance shenanigans, Grimes has earned impeachment via her conduct in office. An investigation by journalists working for ProPublica and the Lexington Herald Leader discovered that Grimes used the state’s voter registration file “to look up political rivals, state investigators and a range of political operatives.”

This “led critics to conclude her office abused its access to the system to gain information about her political opponents and those involved in multiple investigations of her conduct while in office,” according to the reporting.

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Even as Grimes accessed the voter file for improper reasons, she was ignoring a federal court order to clean up the file. Hundreds of thousands of improperly registered voters appeared on Kentucky’s list, leading to the possibility of fraud and draining resources from the judicial system that relies on the voter list to notify people of jury duty.

But Grimes refused to abide by a federal consent decree to clean up the voter list, again showing her willingness to flout the law if it does not align with her hyperpartisan worldview.

There are addresses across the state with numerous registered voters attached to them because of Grimes’ failure to comply. I checked my own address before filing this piece and found the people we bought our house from more than two years ago — who moved out of state — are still registered here. One state representative told me people he bought his home from more than six years ago remain registered at his address.

Grimes is now under two investigations by special state prosecutors and three state agencies — turmoil that swirls as she prepares to oversee a gubernatorial election featuring two candidates with whom she has well-known differences. Given her history of flouting the law and her own campaigns’ evident engagement in election fraud, no Kentuckian can trust Grimes to impartially oversee this election. If something goes wrong, we cannot have a compromised secretary of state in the middle of it.

Her resignation is imperative, and her impeachment is warranted. Hopefully, Bevin and the leadership of the General Assembly are already discussing next steps.

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Scott Jennings is a CNN contributor, a former adviser to Republican candidates and causes and a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations. He can be reached at scott@runswitchpr.com or @ScottJenningsKY on Twitter.