You probably heard yesterday that Louisiana Congressman Vance McAllister was featured in a leaked video showing him necking with an aide during the holidays last year. I was going to write a quick malaka of the week post about this minor league hypocrite getting caught and failing to use the misteloe defense. What’s funnier that a Duck Dynasty backed family values Congresscritter getting caught on camera sucking the face of an aide and family friend whose name is Mrs. Peacock? Very little. Then, I read a post by my friend and Daily Kingfish colleague Lamar White, which connected the dots in a very interesting manner. Here’s the money quote:

But while the national media gawks over the lurid details and focuses on Congressman McAllister’s rank hypocrisy, they’re missing the real scandal here: Who leaked the video, and was this leak purposely timed? After all, this video was recorded nearly four months ago, from inside the Congressman’s own district office.

To borrow a horror movie cliche, the call was coming from inside the house.

The story was first broken at 12:19PM by The Ouachita Citizen, a fledgling website that claims to have a paid readership of more than 5,200 people but, based on third-party web traffic analytical data, likely has a daily audience of between 200-300 unique visitors. An hour and a half later, the story was on the front page of Politico. An hour later, it was covered by almost every national news outlet in the United States- Fox, CBS, The Washington Post, NBC.

With all due respect to John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman, the two Politicojournalists who broke the story nationally, it defies logic that they somehow randomly stumbled on a story published on a website that even most Louisianians have never heard of and verified the authenticity and provenance of a blurry surveillance video (which, by the way, was behind a paywall) all within a span of 90 minutes. No, this leak was coordinated and planned, and more than likely, considering it was recorded nearly four months ago, it had been in the works for a long time.

Notably, The Ouachita Citizenstrongly supported State Senator Neil Riser, calling Mr. McAllister a “liberal” in a bizarre, apoplectic rant, which, ostensibly was an endorsement of Riser but reads more like a scathing attack against McAllister for supporting Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. In its report on the McAllister video, The Ouachita Citizenclaims to have received the video from an “anonymous” source, but somehow, inexplicably, they were able to verify the video’s provenance. The Ouachita Citizen, in my opinion, bordered on recklessness in their reporting, publishing Mrs. Peacock’s home address and implying, without any evidence whatsoever, that she may have never actually married her own husband.It seemed, to me, nasty and personal, motivated by more than a mere desire to inform the public.

I don’t know much about this Congresscritter but it turns out that he’s one of a handful of GOPers who supports Medicaid expansion in the Gret Stet, which means he’s got a lot of enemies on the far right. Lamar, of course, is from that neck of the piney woods and knows his stuff. It will be interesting to watch this play out and learn exactly who is behind this Nixonian dirty trick.

Stay tuned.