The Ohio Obama Plumbers; The Plot Thickens

As bad as the crime was, the coverup is invariably always worse. Ohio's Director of Job and Family Services, Helen Jones-Kelley, is making a bad situation worse. It's turning into a full blown criminal coverup of epic proportions.

Someone lied to the state employee who ran the search on Joe Wurzelbacher, and then was told to keep the matter quiet and the reasoning changed for the search after the fact.

Vanessa Niekamp said that when she was asked to run a child-support check on Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher on Oct. 16, she thought it routine. A supervisor told her the man had contacted the state agency about his case.

Niekamp didn't know she just had checked on "Joe the Plumber," who was elevated the night before to presidential politics prominence as Republican John McCain's example in a debate of an average American.

The senior manager would not learn about "Joe" for another week, when she said her boss informed her and directed her to write an e-mail stating her computer check was a legitimate inquiry.

The reason Niekamp said she was given for checking if there was a child-support case on Wurzelbacher does not match the reason given by the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Director Helen Jones-Kelley said her agency checks people who are "thrust into the public spotlight," amid suggestions they may have come into money, to see if they owe support or are receiving undeserved public assistance.

The Director is lying to cover her ass. She knows that employees are fired for illegally accessing the computer records. So does Niekamp, and Niekamp has fired employees who have engaged in illegally accessing computer records. There's absolutely no reason that anyone should have checked Joe's computerized records in this instance, and most certainly he did not inquire about his own status to generate searches of a multitude of state records.

Kelley abused her position to have her subordinates engage in a fishing expedition to dig up dirt on Joe the Plumber, whose sole transgression was having the audacity to ask Sen. Barack Obama a question about his economic policy. It was an innocuous question, but Obama's response was most illuminating as to Obama's true intent - the redistribution of wealth.

Niekamp was tricked into running the searches, and those who told her to run the searches must be held accountable. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They abused their power, and used the computerized searches to engage in a partisan attack on someone who they believed was a threat to someone who they sought to elevate to the Office of the President.

Hot Air also notices the coverup in Ohio and the partisan politicians at the state's highest level are attempting to bury the story even as the criminality of those involved becomes all too clear.

UPDATE:
The media is ignoring the story. Other than the Columbus Dispatch, the media isn't looking into the story in any way, shape or form. The NYT doesn't even have anything on it. MSNBC? Nada.

They simply aren't interested in a scandal of what's growing into epic proportions - because of the coverup no less. It's sad. You have government officials abusing their power and obstructing justice with lying about their intentions to run database searches for purely partisan reasons. Where is the accountability?

UPDATE:
Wurzelbacher says that he doesn't have a child support case. Jones-Kelley's excuses keep changing, and it doesn't make it any better. There was nothing routine about running his name through the databases, and there most certainly wasn't a "public spotlight search protocol" in place.