Guest blogged by Jon Ponder, Pensito Review.
The John McCain campaign scrubbed its website today to remove all references to its Alabama campaign chairman, Attorney General Troy King.
King, who is known for extremist views on religion and who has frequently made homophobic statements, including calling gays the "downfall of society," is the subject of rumors that his wife recently discovered him having sex with another man.
The story about King had been published at Wonkette and on numerous gay news websites, but none of them had reported King's connection with the McCain campaign before we published the story, "McCain’s Alabama Chairman Reportedly Outed - Attorney General Troy King Has a Record of Homophobic Rhetoric," at Pensito Review on Friday.
We happened upon the scrubbing of the campaign website as we did fact-checking for the article. At about 2:30 p.m PDT, when we checked the McCain campaign website, we found a news release from January on this now-blank page announcing the Alabama politicians who had joined McCain's "leadership team." The list included King, who was indeed named state campaign chairman.
A few minutes after we published the article, a reader left a comment alerting us that the link to the McCain website led to the blank page that is there now.
A search on the campaign site for "Troy King" returned no results, however a Google search for "Troy King" and "John McCain" still produced a link to the now-blank McCain campaign webpage near the top of the results as of 4 p.m. Friday.
We happened to have the webpage open and so made the screen capture of it and grabbed the text: