Rapid City Journal does wide ranging story on Paul Erickson from Putin to John Wayne Bobbit.

Pat Powers

The Rapid city journal has an interesting story this AM about Paul Erickson, who has been involved in the Pat Buchanan for President campaign, as well as with John Wayne Bobbit:

Getting entangled in the Trump-Russia investigations would be a strange twist of fate for most South Dakotans, but not Paul Erickson.

For him, it might have been predictable.

In a Dec. 3 news story, The New York Times identified Erickson as a potential connection between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. On Jan. 25, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee addressed a letter to Erickson asking him to submit documents and schedule an interview as part of the committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But before any of that happened, Erickson, 56, of Sioux Falls, had already spent much of his adult life in the orbit of the famous and infamous.

and…

Erickson told the Journal he took no money from Bobbitt and viewed the work as a cause, both to protect a man he thought was wrongfully accused of rape and to stop national interest groups, such as the National Organization for Women, from using the rape allegation against Bobbitt to advance a political agenda.

“The case was a pretty deep dive into the sexual politics of America at the time,” Erickson said.

After Erickson and Bobbitt parted ways, Bobbitt went to Las Vegas, where he hired new representation and veered into a stint in pornographic films.

Read it here.

Ooookay…

The story has quotes from South Dakota politicos Lee Schoenbeck and Casey Phillips, and provides an entertaining read this am.

9 thoughts on “Rapid City Journal does wide ranging story on Paul Erickson from Putin to John Wayne Bobbit.”

  3. “He is the single biggest phony I’ve ever met in South Dakota politics,” Schoenbeck said.

    Usually I agree with Lee, but in a state that also spawned Annette Bosworth and her attorney Joel Arends it’s tough to pick the biggest phony.

  4. On the subject of small potatoes con men, who and where exactly were these giant corporations and powerful boardrooms you negotiated “huge deals “ with, Senator Tapio?

  5. Seth did a nice job, but I think he had to edit because he had too much. In 1980 Erickson helped the McGovern campaign in his own egocentric way. He convinced Abdnor to hire him to be thecampus coordinator so he could get the check and the title, which he used to put on his resume, and then never showed up for work and didn’t tell anybody he was going to submarine our campus efforts.
    Good news for Abdnor that troy jones and bill Protexter and others picked up the Work and did a great job.
    And his claim about the USD event when he stole the phone list, that anybody forgave him for what he did to innocent people is equally false
    He’s a bad news dude

    1. Lee is right about this guy. Wish I could find it online, but it wasn’t too many years ago (8 or 10 maybe) that the Argus Leader ran a story about this guy as well. They went to ask Buchanan and others if they knew him because Paul likes to drop names about all the famous people he knows. But when asked, all of these guys said they had no idea who he was. It was a big expose’ on this guy that Tupper and others haven’t referenced and evidently haven’t found.

      Anyone have that story?

    2. But he didn’t steal the phone list. He had a right to it as the Vice President of the Student Association at the time. He was suppose to just use the list to verify student voters for a Student Association Student Senate election in September of 1980 – as the head of the election committee that was overseeing the election – but then he allegedly copied the list, which had privacy info on it that the 1974 Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act did not allow to be made public without the students’ approval, and then the copy was then given to the Abdnor campaign as a phone list by Erickson, Abdnor operative.

      When the USD Administration got a hold of this fact – and after some pressure from the media and USD Democrats – the Administration gave Erickson an ultimatum to either cease partisan activities during the remainder of his term as Vice President of the SA or resign as the Vice President of the SA. Erickson then chose to pick Party over the student body by resigning as Vice President of the SA in late September of 1980.

      I might also add, that the USD Young Republicans at the time knew damn right where that list came from and had no trouble using it until it came to light that the list’s info was not to be released to the public or any partisan party. And with or without knowledge of the FERPA, the USD Republicans and the Abdnor camp had no problem using SA resources for their own political benefit as well.

      How do I know all of this? I was a Young Democrat at USD at the time and on the Student Senate.

      I find Lee’s comment about Erickson not showing up for work ironic and believable, however. Because the real reason Erickson got into trouble with that list is because he forgot to order the proper list for that student election, a list which should only have had the students’ names on it and would have not have violated the 1974 FERPA had it got into the wrong hands, but because he was allowed to copy a master list with a lot of private info on it, his tardiness then helped lead to his eventual campus political demise.

      It seems just like yesterday, however, but soon it will be 40 years ago…..

  6. Good details. The not showing up for work was at the Abdnor campaign. I feel bad for you folks that had him show up with you at USD

Comments are closed.