Arizona Rep. Ben Quayle’s campaign is accusing its GOP primary rival of sending a young woman to spy on its campaign headquarters Thursday.
Quayle spokeswoman Anna Haberlein told The Daily Caller that the campaign believes Rep. David Schweikert’s campaign sent a woman posing as a potential volunteer to its offices, presumably to obtain information about Quayle’s campaign operation.
The campaign, Haberlein said, received a call Thursday from a woman asking for directions to the headquarters. After arriving, she told them she wanted to volunteer and asked for an office tour.
“It was a little bit strange,” Haberlein said of the young woman’s behavior.
After the woman left, the Quayle campaign decided to verify her contact information.
“The field director was like, ‘let me check her address to see if this is a legitimate person,’” she said. “And we found that her address was the Islamic Community Center in Tempe, Arizona.”
The Quayle campaign, following a hunch, sent a staffer to Schweikert’s headquarters, where they found the same woman sitting at the front desk, she said.
Haberlein said the woman, who she didn’t name, had a “sheepish look and walked in the back” after being confronted.
“She knew she had been caught,” she said.
The spokeswoman also said the Quayle staffer found 18 Quayle yard signs at Schweikert’s headquarters.
Haberlein said they have filed a formal complaint with law enforcement over the signs.
Reached by phone, Schweikert campaign spokesman Chris Baker let out a laugh of disbelief when asked to respond to the accusations that the campaign sent a spy to Quayle’s headquarters. He denied that the campaign sent anyone.
“I can tell you unequivocally that we have no plan to send — or have sent — any spy to the Ben Quayle headquarters because lets face it, there’s not a whole lot we can learn from them,” he said.
Asked about the signs, Baker said: “I don’t know anything about that. We don’t engage in the sign-stealing business.”
He then appeared to level a charge against Quayle’s campaign: “I will say this. Our campaign put signs out in the public right of way in front of Quayle’s headquarters and they disappeared within about 24 hours.”
Both Quayle — the son of former Vice President Dan Quayle — and Schweikert are freshman Republican members of Congress now running against each other for the same seat because of redistricting.
The election is August 28.
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