'Nixonian': US senator attacks release of Ashley Judd tape

A SECRET tape recording of a senior Republican senator and his staff discussing ways to exploit Hollywood actress Ashley Judd's history of mental illness if she stands for election, has "stripped bare" the take-no-prisoners nature of US politics, The Times says.

Rather than apologise for the conversation – in which Judd is labelled "emotionally unbalanced" – Senator Mitch McConnell has condemned the release of the tape to Mother Jones magazine as "quite a Nixonian move" by his opponents on the left. He was referring to the Watergate scandal which linked former US president Richard Nixon to a plan to install secret listening devices in the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington.

"This is what you get from the political left in America … Much like Nixon in Watergate, that is what the political left does these days," McConnell said. The senator has referred the matter to the FBI for investigation.

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Judd, who has since decided not to challenge McConnell for his seat in 2014, said: "This is yet another example of the politics of personal destruction that embody Mitch McConnell and are pervasive in Washington, D.C. We expected nothing less from Mitch McConnell and his camp to take a personal struggle such as depression, which many Americans cope with on a daily basis, and turn it into a laughing matter."

In the tape recording, McConnell - who leads the Republicans in the senate - is allegedly heard saying, "I assume most of you have played the game Whac-A-Mole? This is the Whac-A-Mole period of the campaign…when anybody sticks their head up, do them out."

The senator's staffers then analyse Judd's battles with depression, which she discusses openly in her 2011 autobiography. "She's clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced," one aide says. "I mean it's been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalised for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s."

Mother Jones is the magazine that obtained a recording of a fund-raising speech by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney last year in which Romney said 47 per cent of Americans were dependent on government and unlikely to vote for him.