You probably remember hearing something about Cindy McCain's past addiction to painkillers, a habit which eventually resulted in her forging prescriptions and stealing medications from a charity she worked for. It was a story for about a day way back in the beginning of this eternal campaign, and not much has been said about it since.
However, the story might be bubbling up once again. It seems Tom Gosinski has decided to speak up.
Gosinski was an employee of the same charitable organization, he was one of the people whose name Cindy McCain forged, and he eventually became the whistleblower on the whole mess. He was fired from the organization, and intimidated and blackballed at the direction of John McCain. There were also some hints that McCain may have engineered a cover-up of the ensuing investigation and used his clout to keep Cindy out of jail. (It helps to recall that this was all happening around the time that McCain was dealing with the Keating Five scandal -- he really didn't need another mess.)
Gosinski hasn't said anything about the matter in a long while. Amy Silverman, one of the reporters who interviewed him in 1994 when he blew the whistle, had this to say, today, on her blog:
Tom insisted the Cindy story was a thing of the past and that he was done talking. He'd moved on with his life. I emailed him just to be sure he hadn't changed his mind, for a story I did this summer. He didn't respond.
(You may recall that I noted that summer story last month.)
But minds change, don't they? Today (or yesterday -- a little hard to tell) Gosinski sat down with, among others, Nick Juliano of Raw Story and Matt Stoller of Open Left.
Here are two more links, for a little background:
- Opiate for the Mrs. -- the original Phoenix New Times story by Amy Silverman and Jeremy Voas, published in 1994.
- How Cindy McCain was outed for drug addiction -- a 1999 piece that Silverman did for Salon, after Cindy McCain did a quick tour of the talk shows in an attempt to put out the fires from this story the last time John McCain ran for president.
There's also some weirdness going on in connection with this. Editor & Publisher describes the case of the vanishing Washington Post story. John Aravosis of AmericaBlog adds some screen shots. Sabra of Democratic Underground has a screen shot of Yahoo "buzzing" the WaPo story before it got taken down. (The Yahoo Buzz page for this article is still live, at this moment, although that link could be stale by the time you read this.) [See update to this part here. --ed.]
To coin a phrase that Drudge better not steal: Developing …
Thanks to TRex for the starting tip.
[Added] You know you can worship trust Amy Silverman, because she's "a working mom with a child with Down syndrome."
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