Democrat Heidi Heitkamp, the director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, alleged that Congressman Matt Rosendale (R., Montana) “impregnated a 20-year-old staff person.” Now, he is planning legal action.
According to Rosendale communications director Ron Kovach, Heitkamp’s accusation “is 100% false and defamatory and [she] will be hearing from our lawyers soon.”
This is not Heitkamp’s first time being threatened with lawsuits for a sex-related statement. When she was running for reelection to the U.S. Senate from North Dakota back in 2018, her campaign published an open letter from sexual assault survivors as an ad in several North Dakota newspapers.
Many of the women who Heitkamp’s campaign listed as “undersigned” on the letter had never agreed to sign it, and some of them were not sexual assault victims at all. This snafu prompted lawsuit threats and an apology from Heitkamp herself.
A third sex-related allegation may have sunk Heitkamp’s reelection campaign in 2018. Heitkamp voted against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court and also supported unsubstantiated sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, which came at the height of the #MeToo movement.
Heitkamp’s vote did not play well in North Dakota, where polls swung toward now-U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer. Cramer, a Republican, called Heitkamp’s vote “the greatest political gift I’ve been given in a very long time.”
The IOP played up Heitkamp’s bipartisan credentials when she was selected as director, but it is unclear where they got that impression from.
Heitkamp’s One Country Project is supposedly focused on helping “reopen the dialogue” between rural America and the Democratic Party. OCP’s “rural playbook,” however, is completely focused on helping Democrats better advertise the Biden administration’s “legislative wins,” such as the Inflation Reduction Act, aid to Ukraine, and efforts to preserve abortion access after Dobbs.
Why Heitkamp thinks rural voters will get excited about any of those things is unclear.
Heitkamp is part of a broader trend of unsuccessful Democratic politicians becoming university sinecurists. Other notables in this category include one-term Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, zero-term Texas senator Beto O’Rourke, and 0.6-term San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin.
For his part, Rosendale was formerly a 2024 candidate for the Montana U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Joe Tester. He ended his campaign before Heitkamp’s remarks, very soon after his primary opponent—Tim Sheehy—won former President Donald Trump’s endorsement. In a statement then, Rosendale said he ended his campaign because Trump’s endorsement of his opponent made the “hill . . . just too steep.”
Following Heitkamp’s remarks, Rosendale announced that he would not pursue reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives.
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Author: Ben Ogilvie
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