National Tea Party Organization Endorses Meehan as He Continues to Deny Tight Links to Movement

Springfield, PA – FreedomWorks, the leading national organization in the Tea Party movement, announced on Thursday that it had endorsed Pat Meehan’s campaign, in the latest sign that the Republican candidate is working behind the scenes to align himself with the Tea Party’s far-right agenda, even as he continues to deny those links in public. FreedomWorks’s endorsement comes on the heels of endorsements and letters of support from local Tea Party groups, including the Independence Hall Tea Party and the Valley Forge Patriots.

FreedomWorks has been one of the leading national groups behind the Tea Party movement, organizing the infamous :”nationwide Tea Party tour” in March of 2009 that helped kick off the movement. The group has been actively endorsing well known Tea Party candidates around the nation, including Alaska Senate Candidate Joe Miller and Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck.

For months, Meehan has publicly denied his tight bonds to the extreme far-right agenda of the Tea Party , including their calls to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Privately, however, he has been speaking at closed-door, off-the-record Tea Party rallies and actively reaching out to Tea Party groups for their support, as Monday’s endorsement continued to demonstrate.

“How much longer will Pat Meehan continue to deny that he supports the far right agenda of the Tea Party, when local and national Tea Party groups are lining up behind his campaign,” said Kevin McTigue, campaign manager for Bryan Lentz, the Democratic nominee for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District. “A group like FreedomWorks wouldn’t be throwing their support behind his campaign if they didn’t believe he supported their extreme proposals.”

Lentz has made saving and creating jobs the cornerstone of his campaign for Congress. He is the only candidate with a published plan to get our economy moving again and the only candidate who supports Wall Street reform and the creation of a consumer financial protection agency to ensure another collapse does not happen. Lentz has also pledged to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas while his opponent Pat Meehan has signed a pledge that has bound him to oppose legislation that has been introduced to end those tax breaks.