A member of Scott Milne’s remaining staff who is doing research and writing for the candidate has, in the past, lost his job for stating as fact what may have been fiction.
Milne’s run for governor suffered a setback earlier this week when his campaign manager, Brent Burns left the campaign.
The Republican candidate said Wednesday that his campaign would go on without a manager, and that he and a group of staffers would make the push through November 4th.
One of those staffers is Scott Fletcher, a former managing editor for the Times Argus. Fletcher was fired in 2002 for a front-page story that didn’t seem to be based in reality.
The story outlined a 16-year-old Montpelier girl selling herself as a prostitute and using heroin. Residents and Times Argus staff questioned the story, and an internal investigation at the paper couldn’t verify it.
After he was dismissed for that story, other stories came into question.
Another story featured a woman who, Fletcher wrote, left society behind to live in a rural hunting cabin after her nephew died on Sept. 11, 2001. The woman couldn’t be found, and property records showed no evidence that her cabin existed.
There was another story, based on the diary of a Charlotte woman who, as Fletcher wrote it, died in the famous Triangle Shirt factory fire. But her name wasn’t among the list of those killed in the fire, and Fletcher said the diary was lost in a flood.
Twelve years later, Fletcher stands by his stories.
“Nothing’s changed, I mean nothing has changed since that day,” he said, referring to the November 2002 day he was fired from the Times Argus. Back then, he denied that the stories were made up, a stance he maintains.
Now, Fletcher works for Scott Milne, who says he is aware of the allegations about Fletcher’s integrity but remains confident in Fletcher’s work.
“I’ve gotten to know him reasonably well over the last couple months,” Milne said. “He’s got a defined role and I think he’s going to be very good for our campaign in his role.”
That role, Milne said, is “research and background stuff that he’s doing directly for me.” The candidate said he has no concerns that Fletcher is bringing forth anything but the truth.
Fletcher elaborated on that, saying that he writes most of the press releases for Milne’s campaign and spends the bulk of his time in policy research and policy development.
“I sat down and actually wrote out most of the policies as they stand today,” he said, adding that it is a collaborative process involving the rest of the campaign staff.
“It’s not me working on my own, it’s a collaborative effort with Scott Milne and the rest of the team, so it’s really more of a collective effort,” he said.
Fletcher said that materials out of the Milne campaign aren’t reliant on his integrity, but that of Milne and the entire staff.
“I’m simply the guy at the keyboard documenting it all and, you know, coming up with a lot of the research that we based our direction on,” he said.
