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as much as i love a complicated story of alt right and republican entanglement, my honest impression after speaking with harding is that his involvement with jason kessler was brief.
around christmas 2016 there were more than a few people calling for wes bellamy’s resignation from charlottesville city council over some resurfaced problematic social media posts. kessler was not the only one talking about a petition to recall him.
harding claims he refused to be the attorney on the matter but eventually agreed to help jason make sure his petition passed legal muster. he did not want to be the attorney of record in the event that the petition found its way into court.
harding says that by late january 2017 (i assume around the time kessler assaulted a man who wouldn’t sign the petition?), he realized kessler was not the kind of person he wanted to associate with in any way.
harding worked on nick freitas’ primary campaign against corey stewart (whose campaign kessler was associated with). after freitas’ loss, kessler contacted harding with taunting, vulgar messages. this aligns with publicly available messages kessler left freitas himself.
there’s a lot harding and i will never see eye to eye on, but i believe him when he says he doesn’t want to let kessler work his way back into the conversation in charlottesville. he’s done enough to this community and this is just another desperate stab at being relevant.
if he’s lying to me, he’s got an amazing career ahead of him as a politician. he struck me as genuinely shaken by the whole matter, and not in the “shit, i got caught” kind of way. as a 26 year old republican lawyer, he reviewed a petition another young republican wrote.
the broader story remains unclear (who the hell is paying kessler’s legal bills? why wasn’t he indicted for perjury 6 months earlier?), but as far as the young attorney who reviewed the petition, i think jason’s just striking out at whatever he thinks he can hit.
sometimes the truth is boring. and that’s ok.
