‘KGB, CIA Operation’: Osborn Gives Autopsy of Election Loss and Infiltration of his Campaign

by John Gage

(Picture credit Matt Johnson)

Dan Osborn, a week after an election loss in a bitter race against incumbent Senator Pete Ricketts, has remained fairly mum about his Election Day performance. On Monday, he appeared for the first time since his loss in an interview with The Young Turks, an anti-Israel and left-wing commentary program, to give a reflection on what went wrong on his campaign as well as to discuss the audio leaks that damaged his competitiveness.

“Hindsight is always 20/20. We should have run a tighter ship,” Osborn said in the interview regarding the numerous campaign leaks. “But at the end of the day, I am who I am. I am a sailor, I’m a mechanic, I didn’t come from your standard politician factory that got stamped out on an assembly line. So I say what I want to say a lot of the time.”

Osborn said he still is trying to figure out who leaked the audio from his campaign.

“They ran like a KGB, CIA-style operation and infiltrated our camp and here we are. It’s dirty politics; it shouldn’t exist,” he said. “We are trying to put the pieces together still. We are still trying to identify who these people are who came in as staffers or volunteers, where they got paid from, what events they recorded what in. I don’t really know.”

“It runs pretty deep, and maybe something comes out of it, maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “It skirts the line of illegality, especially if money came from a campaign.”

On election night, Ricketts thanked his political director, who he said should be hired by the CIA. “He was also the person who recruited a lot of the people to do the tracking to be able to expose by opponent for the fraud that he is,” Ricketts said. “While we are not going to go into the names that were there tracking him. They played a pivotal role in this.”

Some of the leaks from the Osborn campaign came from outside “trackers” who attended his events and recorded his remarks while others came from inside the campaign. Osborn’s campaign had a notable amount of turnover and it is unclear how many individuals were involved in costly campaign leaks to the press.

Political insiders have noted that a lot of Osborn’s “leaks” were self-inflicted as the candidate did not always present a consistent campaign message. Osborn, they note, had a tendency to “pander” to whatever audience he was speaking to that day, which led to contradictions when recordings of his town halls were publicized.

The leaks from Osborn became a defining part of his campaign with comments disparaging rural Nebraskans, multiple remarks where he appeared to tell people he supported liberal policies he publicly opposed, and recordings where he used vulgar language. Later when he apologized for his much publicized “Billy Bob” remarks at a Red Cloud town hall, he told attendees that Omahans were not as neighborly as rural Nebraskans.

Osborn’s campaign hit back at some of the recordings saying some were “taken out of context” or “jokes” while saying his vulgar language was a result of him being “a sailor.”

Osborn Blames Money

Outside of the leaks, Osborn put the bulk of the blame for his loss on the amount of money spent against his campaign, citing “$50 million” spent by Ricketts and outside PACs.

“I wasn’t a Democrat in a close race. I fundraised strongly, but I did not fundraise the way a Jon Ossoff or a Sherod Brown or Turek or El-Sayed did in any of these races,” Osborn said. “The money won out in Nebraska.”

A review of FEC filings, however, reveals that collective spending from campaigns and outside PACs in the race was nearly identical from both sides, with each spending just under $50 million. Outside spending for Osborn’s campaign was higher than outside spending for the Ricketts campaign while Ricketts campaign spent more than the Osborn campaign directly.

“If I would have been a Democrat in like Kansas, Mississippi, or Iowa, and running a close race, I would have raised the amount of money I would have needed to to win this,” Osborn added.

No ‘Independent’ Regrets

Osborn was asked if he regretted running as an Independent candidate and whether he believed that ended up hurting his chances of winning.

“If I was a Democrat, I would have run as a Democrat, but I’m a lifelong registered Independent,” Osborn said. “I’ve never bought into the two-party system. The fact that I’ve got to accept the policies, principles, and values and reject the other side to be part of a party. So I just ran true to who I am, and at the end of the day the money was able to define me than I was able to define myself.”

Osborn did not indicate whether he planned to run for another office after two failed attempts at the Senate. “Are you hiring? Because I need a job,” he joked. “I don’t think I’m going to go back to being a mechanic. I’m 51-years-old, I’ve been there done that.”

In Montana, Idaho, South Dakota, and Nebraska, all four Independent candidates who ran against Republicans with Democratic support lost. Jane Kleeb, the chairwoman of the Nebraska Democratic Party, told a Semafor reporter on Friday that the Democrats would likely not support an Independent candidate instead of running a Democrat going forward.

"I don't think I would do it again in the future."

— John Gage is the executive editor of The Plains Sentinel.