Sioux Falls mayoral candidate Paul TenHaken is sticking with DSU’s story that no faculty or students participated in the Rounds for Senate campaign’s 2013 scam to trick an anonymous online critic into revealing his/her identity. Under a Facebook post by his opponent Jolene Loetscher concerning the multiple trust issues raised by TenHaken’s participation in that partisan dirty trick, TenHaken includes in his many counter-comments this explanation that “the DSU team” was overbranded wishful thinking:
Far from banging away on this topic, Loetscher said her piece when the news broke Thursday, then got back to knocking on doors and posting endorsements from cool people.
Cardboard Mike’s campaign was such a bore staffers sat around and made up potential criminal activities for the hell of it? Riiiight!
Wait just a minute. Ten Haken’s response is not an answer to the question posed to him. He doesn’t say there was no DSU Team. He only says that no students contracted with them for some freelance work. He should address whether any faculty or other state employees did any work as the “DSU Team.” Ten Haken entirely – entirely – sidestepped that question. Neither Ryan Rolfs nor Cory Heidelberger should assume there was no “DSU Team” at all simply because Ten Haken said there were no students on the “DSU Team.”
How did they enlist the help of DSU students for potential contract hire? Did they go through the DSU Career Center? If so, there should be a record of that job advertisement. Or, did they work with a faculty member to directly contact students? If so, who was the faculty member? Or just who led the DSU ‘team’?
There are probably armies of security programming people in state government who all went to DSU and would be loyal to Mr. Rounds’ cause. If they worked from free, from their own homes, there is no foul here. It would have been on their own time.
If you liked how Jason Gant scandalized the Secretary of State’s office as a roost for political hackery, think what Team Rounds’ cyber spook Paul TenHaken can do with hundreds of employees, police and fire authority, boards and commissions, contracts and millionaire developers, easy access to public (and sealed) records and his expertise to exploit the Rounds political machine, state resources and Click Rain’s facility with invading cyber privacy, a TenHaken administration would be like Team Gant on steroids. The new frontier in campaigns is weaponizing cyber communications, and that was a major point of the Argus Leader article. TenHaken was the team leader to hunt down a political critic for punishment.
If, indeed, it was a “nothing burger,” Jonathan Ellis’ article landed on Page 1 of Sunday’s paper. Here are the elements that should make Sioux Falls voters cringe and shudder, in Ellis’ words:
• They devised a scheme to bait the users into unwittingly divulging their identities. The scheme also included a team from Dakota State University, which has a top cybersecurity program that feeds graduates to national intelligence agencies.
• Ten-Haken’s company, Click Rain, had been hired by the campaign to run digital operations.
• The emails obtained by the Argus Leader show that TenHaken was working with Pat Powers, a conservative blogger prominent in political circles.
You may recall that Mr. Powers was hired by Jason Gant and that he reportedly used his authority as chief elections officer to further his political consultant business, a major conflict of interest and an apparent violation of Mr. Gant’s sworn duty as Secretary of State. Once revealed, Mr. Powers exited quietly and Jason Gant lost the faith of his party to be nominated for a second term in 2014. Other than the prosecution of Gant’s employee who stole the original state flag, Team Gant was allowed to move on to their next political crusades unfettered by the Attorney General.
In today’s Page 1 Argus story, I found this quote by TenHaken interesting. He and Powers refused to be interviewed for the story, except for this emailed statement from TenHaken:
“In 2014, Click Rain was contracted by the Rounds for Senate campaign to dig into some libel/slander against various parties,” he said in an email. “I would be breaking my former client’s trust by commenting on your story.”
That’s interesting, because TenHaken’s concern for his “former client’s trust” seemed to have disappeared with his comment on Jolene Loetscher’s campaign Facebook page three days ago:
“I was hired by a client to track down the source of an anonymous Twitter account that was libeling/slandering my client, his staff, as well their families. I’ll protect cyber-bullying victims all day long. This is not privacy invasion. My cell phone number is 605-305-2680 as I would love to talk to anyone about this. It’s a nothing burger. Let’s get back to real issues.”
I think using sledge hammers to swat flies and refusing to talk with a news reporter displays a juvenile shrewdness and a strong indifference to transparency. These are valid issues in this election, despite what Mr. TenBaken, who is clearly a very bright man, says to polish this turd into “a nothing burger.”
To be accurate, let’s keep all of this in context. The year was 2014. TenBaken was the major cyber spook for Team Rounds, which was wiggling around the Richard Benda suspicious death, the Joop Bollen revelations, the mishandling of many, many millions in EB5 investors’ money, a kids gloves investigation of Rounds, Daugaard and Bollen by the Legislature’s Operations & Audit Committee, scandals rising from the failed Aberdeen beef plant, the Annette Bosworth fiasco, the Jason Gant corruption fiasco and a hamstrung Attorney General who revealed very late in the election that he had filed felony charges against Benda and called a grand jury. The Gear Up scandal and more details of the Mike Rounds culture of corruption had not yet been revealed until after the election.
After all the scandals from Team Rounds and Team Gant, granting police powers as Mayor of South Dakota’s largest and wealthiest city to Mr. TenBaken could prove to be disastrous. He’s certainly well qualified to continue his business and political hackery on the side. But, really, Mayor of Sioux Falls?
Fortunately, there are far safer and smarter alternatives on the April ballot.
Mr. 96tears has a point…if you can vote in Sioux Falls there is a very pretty young woman and also the fellow with the zombie videos who you should put a lot of consideration towards.
96, I keenly appreciate the sledgehammer/flyswatter point. The Twitter troll didn’t matter that much. Voters didn’t pay attention when Stace nelson called Rounds a RINO on air and everywhere; why would that message get any more traction when espoused by an anonymous tweeter?
The willingness of Team Rounds to go on such crazy and needless crusades could get me to rethink my rejection of the suggestions that Annette Bosworth was a Rounds plant.
Ror, like Mulder, I want to believe, but I can’t go as far as you in rejecting TenHaken’s rebuttal as incomplete or shift. Rolfs asked what role the DSU team had. TenHaken says Team Rounds was hoping to freelance-contract a student or two but got no takers. On face, I could read that as a complete response: You’re asking about “the DSU team”? That was supposed to be just a student or two, and it never came together.
Absent other information, I take that answer to mean a blanket denial aligning with DSU’s blanket denial. If evidence surfaces that there was a DSU team made up of professors, I would deem the statement TenHaken made in response to Rolfs’s question a lie.