2) From the same UL column:
He served with Ayotte in the Benson administration; she was legal counsel and he was an adviser and speech writer. Varsalone is a former state legislator from Pembroke who also worked on Benson's 2002 campaign and directed the state's Republican National Committee-funded Victory Committee in 2004.
According to the Ayotte campaign, "For the past five years, Rob has worked to promote democracy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq."
3) For whom did Mr. Varsalone promote democracy? For the State Department? For the U.N.? No, it was for the International Republican Institute, chaired by John McCain. There, he "serve(d) as IRI's country director in Afghanistan. Varsalone is a former state legislator and a veteran of numerous campaigns. He ran Governor Craig Benson's first gubernatorial campaign and later served as senior advisor in the Governor's office. Varsalone has also worked for the New Hampshire Republican Party and New Hampshire Citizens for a Sound Economy. Most recently, Varsalone served as executive director of the Republican National Committee's coordinated campaign in New Hampshire." IRI has a Wiki page, btw.
4) Remember how Rove was "Bush's Brain?" Well, considering their "By the Switch" email correspondence of 2006 and their April 2009 correspondence (3 months before Ayotte's resignation as A.G.) about how to foreclose a GOP primary for the U.S. Senate seat, I dare say that Varsalone is Kelly's Machiavelli.
5) Pindell would agree, virtually attributing Ayotte's razor-thin primary win to Varsalone himself:
UP
Rob Varsalone: If someone were to make an EKG-like chart of Kelly Ayotte's Senate campaign it would have a lot of peaks and valleys. But the ship was truly on course when Varsalone showed up this summer. Ayotte campaign manager Brooks Kochvar FINALLY started getting consistent, but Varsalone came through big.
6.) BREAKING - DiStaso uncovers another bombshell:
Two weeks after Republican Ayotte used her work e-mail account at the Attorney General's Office to tell future political adviser Rob Varsalone she had sought the death penalty in the Briggs case, the two had another exchange in which she talks about plotting strategy for a political run.
She asks Varsalone for a meeting to talk to "sit down with a state map" and discuss "info on population profiles, approx # of registered voters in areas (r, d, I). I have some ideas and need to talk with you using some data.
The facts here are simple - in the early stages of a capital murder trial, in fact almost from Day One, Attorney General Ayotte was emailing someone - whether she wants to call him a friend, former colleague or her current campaign guru - outside the Department of Justice about how to maximize her personal political opportunities.
The bottom-line is that although Kelly Ayotte should fire Rob Varsalone for joking about an ongoing capital punishment case with the sitting N.H. Attorney General, she won't. For 3 years Rob Varsalone and Kelly Ayotte openly speculated about her future political opportunities. When her Senate primary campaign floundered this summer, Capital Punishment Joke Meister Varsalone stepped into the fray. And now that her general election campaign is sinking over these revelations, Kelly Ayotte is going to need Rob Varsalone more than ever.
After all, he's Kelly's Machiavelli.
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