Candidate for Lt. Gov. of Idaho responds to attack mailer targeting him

Leading up to the primary election, a campaign mailer aims to smear a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Idaho by claiming he’s a foreign agent and has other agents funneling cash into his campaign.

The Idaho Press-Tribune reports the mailer went out to voters Thursday statewide. The mailer was sent out by the PAC called “Idahoans Fighting Corruption” – with Josh Packer as treasurer. According to the Idaho Press-Tribune, the PAC’s sole funding sources, from its own campaign finance report, are Idaho Falls attorney Bryan Smith, a construction company owned by Idaho Falls GOP activist Doyle Beck, and GOP activist Mike Duff.

The mailer shows Steve Yates in front of a Taiwanese flag and implies he is concealing information with ties to a foreign government. Yates confirms Duff is the person behind the website for the PAC.

“That’s a truly unfortunate part of what they did with in the mail. And the second part is a very, very personalized hit piece where an email from my wife to the late Sheila Olsen was taken basically from Sheila’s computer without her knowing it, and it ends up in a political hit piece. The fact of the matter is that I run a small business where you experience the high highs and the low lows, and in mid-2015, we, in fact, lost a client, but that’s kind of beside the point. I still run the same business and what in the world do these people have with taking the private, confidential communications of two members of a church, where my wife is seeking the counsel of someone in our faith who’d become a personal friend and mentor at a time when my wife felt some distress? And so I feel a degree of indignation on my wife’s behalf. She’s felt hurt and betrayed by this. And I think again, that’s a new low in Idaho politics. And I think it crossed a line and frankly, a lot of people in the community and across the state agree,” Yates said in an interview Friday.

Yates said he’s “committed to waging a campaign based on issues, not insult.” Yates said he has “a very high degree of faith and confidence in the Idaho primary voter, that when they see a cartoonish personalized attack on someone that they don’t buy it.”

Yates encourages voters to get out and vote Tuesday.

There are four other GOP candidates running for lieutenant governor of Idaho and two Democratic candidates.