A pol with a different type of conviction
Coal baron sees his time behind bars as an asset
WASHINGTON – In West Virginia’s GOP Senate primary, candidate Don Blankenship runs on a different kind of record.
The former CEO of Massey Energy served a one-year sentence, ending in May 2017, for conspiring to violate mine health and safety standards in connection with the nation’s deadliest coal mining explosion in decades. Blankenship’s period of supervised release doesn’t end until May 9, the day after the primary, according to court records.
Blankenship said he was “falsely imprisoned” by the Obama administration, and he doesn’t see that as a political liability — not to West Virginians who blame the former president for waging a war on coal and their livelihoods. To Blankenship, such an “improper” conviction could be a political asset.
It was, he noted, for former South African president Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for fighting an apartheid government. “There are situ- ations in history where being in prison was an advantage,” he said. “I think that’s the case in West Virginia.”
He is not the only 2018 candidate who is viable despite legal baggage.
Michael Grimm, a GOP candidate for his former New York House seat, pleaded guilty in 2014 to tax fraud, and former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, an Arizona Senate candidate, was pardoned by President Trump last year for a contempt of court conviction in a racial profiling case.
Polls commissioned by Blankenship’s primary opponents — Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General
Patrick Morrisey — show Blankenship,
68, is within striking distance. He is a self-funded candidate who can laugh when he says “I don’t need any money” and blankets the airwaves.
His spin on his conviction could help him with hard-core Republicans looking for the most anti-establishment candidate in the race, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“It’s a good strategy,” Sabato said. “Take a negative and make it a positive. That’s one of the cardinal rules of politics.”
Mark Dorsey, a retired coal miner from Rivesville, said the coal miners he knows are “flabbergasted” by Blankenship’s re-emergence. They say he got off easy with a misdemeanor.
“The audacity for him to run for a public office, I think, is terrible,” said Dorsey, a representative of the United Mine Workers of America’s political action committee. “But if you’ve got enough money, you can do anything. He ought to be in jail.”
While at Taft Correctional Institution in California, Blankenship described himself as a “political prisoner,” and he faults the government for the explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine that killed 29 men in 2010.
The Mine Safety and Health Administration blamed the company for safety violations and assessed
$10.8 million in penalties. Blankenship said a change in airflow, required by MSHA, caused the explosion.
He said the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is reviewing his prosecution. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.
Blankenship’s candidacy is bolstered by an “anti-establishment vibe,” particularly from those in the southern part of the state, who don’t trust that the government was fair to him, said Patrick Hickey, an assistant professor at West Virginia University.
If Blankenship wins the primary, he’ll probably face Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in the general election.
Trump hasn’t weighed in on the primary race, but he sat between Jenkins and Morrisey at a tax policy roundtable with elected officials in West Virginia. Blankenship was not invited to the event, which was held on the eighth anniversary of the mine explosion.
“It’s delusional to think that spending a year in a California prison is an asset,” said Nachama Soloveichik, a Morrisey spokeswoman. “I’m not sure what planet Don is running on, but it’s not Earth, and it’s sure as heck not West Virginia. Joe Manchin would crush Don Blankenship in the fall.”