A clue surfaced Saturday to the identity of the person who leaked audio to news outlets last week from a closed meeting at the Republican Retreat in Philadelphia.
According to an email sent to members by Mark Strand of the Congressional Institute, the organization hosting the retreat, a woman falsely claiming to be the spouse of a member of Congress managed to sneak into the retreat on Thursday for 11 hours until Capitol Hill Police escorted her out. The email was first obtained by Axios.
The letter reads in part:
Dear Member of Congress:
As you are aware, digital recordings from the national security, health care, and Vice President Pence meetings were anonymously leaked to several media outlets, including The Washington Post. We believe these recordings were audio only, rather than video. The Congressional Institute is continuing to investigate this breach in order to fully understand how it happened and to ensure it does not happen again. While a number of unanswered questions remain, here is what we currently know:
- An unauthorized person infiltrated the congressional retreat on Thursday, between the hours of 7:30 am and 6:30 pm
- She misrepresented herself on multiple occasions to retreat organizers as the spouse of an elected official;
- She was able to gain access using counterfeit credentials;
- She entered the event through the same security checkpoints as every other attendee (i.e. magnetometers, police checkpoints, etc.);
- She was escorted from the event at about 6:30 pm. We are working closely with Capitol Police to ascertain the identity of the woman in question.
In the leaked audio sent to the news outlets, Republican members aired concerns about how to handle any backlash that could come of the repeal and the replacement of the Affordable Care Act.
“We’d better be sure that we’re prepared to live with the market we’ve created” with repeal, California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock can be heard saying. “That’s going to be called Trumpcare. Republicans will own that lock, stock and barrel, and we’ll be judged in the election less than two years away.”
“Our goal, in my opinion, should be not a quick fix. We can do it rapidly — but not a quick fix,” said Republican Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander. “We want a long-term solution that lowers costs.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan disregarded the remarks made by members in the meeting when asked about the story during an interview at a Politico event last Friday.
“We have a responsibility to work for the people that put us in office,” Ryan said. “That’s the oath we take: to defend the Constitution, to fight for the people we represent, and this is a fiasco that needs to be fixed.”
