Politico won’t say if a rival campaign fed them the story about sexual harassment allegations made against current Republican presidential front-runner Herman Cain in the 1990s.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Monday pressed reporter Ken Vogel of Politico on whether the publication relied on opposition research from one of Cain’s rivals.
“Politics are politics as you said, and certainly there are people that are digging up opposition research,” Vogel said. “I’m just not going to do anything that would identify — that would point to the identity of our original source.”
“We don’t think that the original source is as important as the actual information,” Vogel said.
The reporter said Politico “got a tip and it was from someone outside. We managed to corroborate all the details and more. We have to be clear here that this tip was sort of a general tip.”
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During a luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on Monday, Cain said: “We have no idea the source of this witch hunt, which is what it really is.”
Cain’s campaign manager, Mark Block, told The Daily Caller that he is skeptical of the notion that another campaign participated in the story. (RELATED: Cain says he’s a victim of a ‘witch hunt’)
“I have no idea,” Block told TheDC at the Press Club. “No clue. I would find it hard to believe that anybody from another campaign would do that, but then again this is politics. Isn’t it?”
In its story, Politico doesn’t name sources or the identities of the two women who the story says “complained to colleagues and senior association officials about inappropriate behavior by Cain” while he served as head of the National Restaurant Association.
Politico also is only describing the accusations in generalities.
“We’re just not going to get into the details of exactly what happened with these women beside what’s in the story,” another reporter on the story, Jonathan Martin, said on MSNBC.
