Brookings County State’s Attorney surrogate attacks campaign opponent with fake claims.

The Brookings County State’s Attorney race heated up in the local paper this week when a letter from former Brookings County Deputy State’s Attorney Mark Kratochvil appeared in the local paper attacking Republican candidate Dan Nelson, who is running for the office:

…it is informative to review what Mr. Nelson has not revealed concerning his Beadle County work. In my review of the Beadle County Clerk of Courts records, I do not find 21 jury trials by Nelson, I only find 15, which can be summarized as follows:

1. 2013-no jury trials;
2. 2014-no jury trials;
3. 2015-seven jury trials and lost five of them; *
4. 2016-three jury trials;
5. 2017-five jury trial and lost three of them; *
6.  2018-he has not handled any jury trials.

Losing eight of 15 trials puts Mr. Nelson at a 47 percent winning record. A 47 percent winning record is nothing to be proud of; in educational terms that is an F.

and…

I have always believed that the office of state’s attorney should be non-political. The state’s attorney should be totally unbiased as far as politics, and Teree Nesvold will maintain that independence since she is running as an Independent. It is my understanding that Mr. Nelson was a registered Democrat in Beadle County and in fact worked for President Obama’s campaign.  Perhaps Nelson should explain why he decided to run as Republican in Brookings County for state’s attorney?

Read that here.

Writing in favor of the recently appointed State’s Attorney Teree Nesvold, among other things, Mark Kratochvil is claiming that Dan Nelson’s record isn’t as advertised, the office of State’s Attorney should be non-political, and alleging that Nelson worked for the Obama campaign.

Interestingly, if you click on the link, you’ll notice that it’s the copy of the letter cached by Google. In fact, it doesn’t exist on the Brookings Register website anymore. Why is that?  For starters, it may be because just about all of the claims made against Nelson are false.

As you’ll see, the attack itself provided the candidate being attacked the opportunity to point a few things out, as appeared in the Brookings Register yesterday:

Read the entire response here.

If you review the response, Nelson does a pretty effective job of shredding Mark Kratochvil’s false claims regarding his experience.  (And he provides the documentation via his facebook page.)  I would note that the Obama campaign claim is also bullshit too.

So, why would Mark say all these things? Well, there’s one item that could explain things.

Interestingly, the false claims seem to have a close association with the campaign of Nelson’s opponent.  In the same breath that Kratochvil proclaimed that “the office of state’s attorney should be non-political.'” and “The state’s attorney should be totally unbiased as far as politics,”  there’s a little item he failed to disclose regarding his attack:

The fact that he’s representing the opponent’s campaign as it’s treasurer, doesn’t seem to be disclosed in his screed against Dan Nelson.

If the Nesvold campaign is going to send it’s surrogates to attack the Nelson campaign in this manner, she’s not exactly emphasizing her credibility with false attacks in an attempt to obfuscate her own record.

And the campaigns roll on…