It was just four days ago that Virginia Republicans settled the eavesdropping lawsuit for a whopping $750,000, and already the Kilgore campaign is trying to define the case as old news, accusing Democrats of “dredging up something that happened in the past”. 
(How they’d bring up something that happened in the future, I can’t say.) Kilgore would like nothing more than for this to simply go away — a goal that just doesn’t square with the Republican talking point that Kilgore was “the hero of that whole affair,” as John Behan writes on Commonwealth Conservative .
It is with this in mind that I point to Bob Gibson’s Sunday Daily Progress column (they run on the Progress‘ website a couple of days early), “Troubling testimony still echoes.” Gibson considers the testimony and the facts as they’re known and finds that, just like the “hero” claim, reality just doesn’t square with Kilgore’s spin, and obliquely accuses Kilgore of being implicit in the obvious cover-up.
Gibson also mentions in his column that “top Republican elected officials” are being shaken down for the $750,000 that the Republicans have to pony up to make good on their settlement, since the party is about $695,000 short, to the tune of $30,000 to $150,000 apiece. Astute Virginians will find this familiar-sounding — that’s because a little less than a year ago, House Speaker Bill Howell and House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith shook-down Republican members of the House of Delegates for $1M for Howell’s PAC, demanding set fees from legislators, with the dollar value tied to their seniority. (You could call it a progressive tax, I suppose.) This time, of course, they don’t have much of a choice — the last thing that the state Republicans want is a collection agency seizing the speaker’s gavel mid-session.
I maintain that this settlement will serve only to stall the discovery of what’s really going on here. It’s going to come back to smack Kilgore in the ass. I hope he’s looking forward to it.