Who is behind the Tea Party organization pushing for a GOP upset in Delaware?

Yet local leaders such as Murphy, a Vietnam veteran, were unaware of accusations from others in the Tea Party movement that TPE is taking financial advantage of grassroots energy.

“I don’t know whether that’s a fact or not,” Murphy said. “My concern is for what the 9/12 Delaware Patriots are standing for.”

But Mark Meckler, a national spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots, which does not endorse candidates, said TPE is run by “old-school, top-down, political operatives who are using the Tea Party movement for their own purposes.”

“Every grassroots Tea Partier has an obligation to defend the movement. When people do things that are racist, sleazy, immoral and offensive in the name of the movement, Tea Party Patriots will always stand against those things,” Meckler wrote in an e-mail. “Tea Party Express has done those things, and we have called them out for that.”

Eustis, a 22-year political wunderkind who left TPE in October 2009, said that during his time at the organization, employees would regularly run up bar tabs of more than $1,000 a week and charge it to Russo, Marsh or King Media, which would then bill TPE for the expense under a concocted fee.

Russo said this was a trumped up charge.

“Do the young guys go out and have meetings sometimes at night and have a cocktail? Yes, that’s true. But they don’t spend thousands of dollars,” Russo said. “When people are working at night and staying up all night, you’ve got to feed them and you got to treat people decently.”