Jon Huntsman this week denounced a video posted to a YouTube account that seemed to belong to a Ron Paul supporter, and which depicted him as a possible Chinese agent.
But Paul's supporters hit back last night with the suggestion that the video had actually been pointed by Huntsman to gain sympathy for a campaign that has struggled for traction.
The suspicious evidence:
The concluding caption is “American Values And Liberty… Vote Ron Paul”. Starting to smell the stink yet?
The video was uploaded by a user called “NHLiberty4Paul” on Wednesday, January 4. A quick look at the user’s channel page (archived here as a backup) shows that the account was created the exactly same day that the video was uploaded. This brand new, anonymous user has, of course, zero other uploads.
Furthermore, according to the publicly-viewable stats provided by YouTube, the very first place this video was posted was Jon Huntsman’s campaign website, Jon2012.com. This was done on November 4, the very day the video was uploaded to YouTube, and before the video had received any traffic from other sites.
It's not, sadly, quite that easy to point fingers though. Huntsman spokesman Tim Miller emails:
We have a page that feeds in all the tweets that tag Jon Huntsman. So it is not weird at all that someone would go to the video from our site, given the Paulbots tweeted it at Jon Huntsman.
No love lost, in any event.