Amy McGrath’s campaign is calling out the Mitch McConnell campaign for continuing to use what McGrath is calling “doctored audio” in its campaign ads.
McGrath is running in the Democratic primary to take on McConnell for his U.S. Senate seat in the fall. The other two main candidates in the primary are Mike Broihier and Charles Booker. However, McConnell has almost exclusively targeted McGrath in his ads.
The snippet of audio is from a fund-raiser in the 2018 cycle, where McGrath can be heard saying she is “more progressive than anyone else in Kentucky.” That one clip was used by Andy Barr in his race against McGrath, and is being used repeatedly by McConnell in the current election cycle.
The clip has been used, for example, in one ad where McConnell’s campaign calls McGrath “too extreme” for Kentucky, including the charge that “she supports abortion through the ninth month.”
According to McGrath and her campaign, though, the use of the audio is unethical, because it has been “doctored” to remove the context – the larger conversation around the one phrase.
In her response, McGrath says “He cut out half the sentence. You should release the whole recording, Senator. I was running for Congress and talking about not taking money from gun lobbyists, and I compared myself to anyone in Kentucky who had served in that office.”
The McGrath campaign does not have its own copy of the original audio, so they are calling on the McConnell campaign to release the entire audio.
In a response ad, McGrath addresses the use of the audio, and the abortion charge.
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