During Wednesday night’s convention coverage, the Democratic National Convention decided to roll out a trio of workers allegedly kicked to the curb by Bain Capital, the private equity firm co-founded by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. One of them was Randy Johnson. According to Adam Kredo’s August 28 column in The Washington Free Beacon, Johnson “worked at American Pad & Paper (Ampad) after Bain purchased the company in the early nineties” and “maintains that the investment firm callously managed the mill with an eye only towards profits.”
But as Kredo reports, Johnson has essentially been a professional liberal flak for the past few months, traveling on the DNC dime to lambaste Romney at every possible turn. Don’t expect, of course, for Kredo’s reporting to find its way into any network “fact checking” about the Democratic Convention's speakers:
Bain’s business tactics ‘devastated my family,’ said Johnson, who earned $104,974 from United Steelworkers union in 2011. Though he billed himself as a blue-collared fighter, Johnson has been living in the lap of luxury courtesy of the DNC for months, according to reports. The DNC has paid for Johnson’s airfare to various partisan events across the country and had footed the bill for his hotel rooms, according to the New York Observer. Johnson has even forced the DNC staffer who constantly shadows him to pay for his meals and highway tolls, the Observer noted.
In addition, this isn’t the first time Johnson has slammed Romney.
In what appears to be hollow vindictiveness, he “has been excoriating Romney publicly since 2002, when he ran to become governor of Massachusetts.When Romney ran for president in 2008, "Johnson again popped up in the media landscape, feeding the Boston Globe similar talking points to those he touted in Tampa Tuesday."
It appears that the staffers within the DNC know that his credibility is shoddy. Kredo concluded his column stating “when approached by a Free Beacon reporter about his partisan affiliations, DNC staff quickly swooped in to escort Johnson away, claiming that he was incapable of answering further questions.”
Randy Johnson is a de facto Democratic operative who claims to have been “destroyed” by Bain Capital, but who now travels on the DNC dime and makes a six-figure salary with the United Steelworkers union. The network “fact checkers” should note that, but I’m not holding my breath that they will.
