White House officials and their allies sought to pressure an Indiana Republican to drop out of a state Senate primary earlier this year, floating job opportunities and warning of the personal attacks she could face as they worked to pave the way for President Donald Trump’s preferred candidate.
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Trump is seeking to unseat seven Indiana lawmakers in the May 5 primaries who broke with him last year and opposed a redistricting plan. In one of those races, he has endorsed Brenda Wilson, a Vigo County Council member, against state Sen. Greg Goode, who voted against Trump’s wishes.
But her supporters fear a third candidate, Alexandra Wilson — a 34-year-old network engineer who isn’t related — could confuse voters since they share a last name, thus dividing the opposition to Goode.
Over several days in February before the deadline for primary candidates to withdraw, White House officials peppered Alexandra Wilson with phone calls, text messages and voicemails that she recorded and shared exclusively with NBC News. In the calls, White House aides first tried to entice her to leave the race with possible job options. On another call, they later warned her about the money and attacks that would follow if she didn’t.
Wilson, a longtime Trump supporter, said she was contacted by three White House aides — political director Matt Brasseaux, deputy chief of staff James Blair and Midwest regional political director Marshall Moreau — as well as Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith; Gov. Mike Braun’s chief of staff, Joshua Kelley; and a staffer for the conservative group Club for Growth, Evan Oudekerk.
The effort shows how deeply senior White House staff members and their allies have been involved in trying to oust the Indiana Republican state senators who delivered a rare and stunning rebuke to Trump over a congressional map that was designed to net the party two seats in this year’s midterm elections. It also offers a rare glimpse of the type of pressure campaign that can happen behind the scenes in elections.
“This is what the political team does. They talk to candidates across the country. And it’s not, you know, again, it’s not coming from a place of malice,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NBC News. “It is coming from a place of doing their jobs to report back to the president what’s going on in these races.”
Leavitt said Trump is intimately aware of “all races” up and down the ballot — not just those in which he is seeking political retribution.
“Ultimately, President Trump is the decision-maker in these races, and it’s incumbent upon his team that he’s empowered to find out the facts about all of these races across the country,” she said. “His team is again doing their jobs to ensure the best outcome and as many wins across the board as we can get.”
‘Kill two birds with one stone’
In a Feb. 11 phone call — the first she answered — Brasseaux told Wilson he could contact the White House Presidential Personnel Office to find her an administration job in Indiana. “I’m going to ask the point-blank question here: Is there a pathway to where you would put some thought into another route to making an impact in your community?” Brasseaux asked.
“I’m just trying to think outside the box to where we can kill two birds with one stone, and you have the ability to effect change and do exactly what you’re talking about doing, but also we have the ability to take out Greg Goode and move on,” he continued.
Wilson said she didn’t think Brasseaux could find her a job better than the one she has as a network engineer and asked whether he had any other suggestions. Brasseaux said it “wouldn’t have to be a job.”
“I think that we can think outside the box here,” Brasseaux said. “I am absolutely, unequivocally open to any ideas that you have to entertain to try and get us to a yes or try and get us there. I just don’t know what all that looks like, but I can 100% put my head down to the grind and figure out what that may look like.”
“This is not something that I’m just trying to blow smoke and just to try and get you out of the race,” he continued.
Toward the end of the call, Wilson said, “I’m not envisioning anything else but continuing in the race at this very moment.”
In an interview, Alexandra Wilson said her motivation for running for the state Senate was a major renovation plan for Terre Haute, Indiana, schools that she expected would raise taxes.
“I got tired of people making decisions without the reality of how hard it is to live day to day,” she said. “I have three stepchildren. We have a kid on the way. Life’s expensive. Buying dinner is astronomical.”
The call with Brasseaux was insulting, she said.
“I had a hard time not feeling insulted the entire call,” she said. “The admin position — I have a career, my job — that was a fraction of what I make a year. Let alone I had been adamant during that call of these are the local issues going on and this is what I’m passionate about.”
Minutes after their phone call, Brasseaux texted Wilson that he’d spoken with the governor’s office and that there were some boards and commissions she might be interested in. In a statement, a spokesperson for Braun said the governor’s office receives “hundreds of referrals for Hoosiers interested in serving our state and it is standard practice that we follow up on those leads. Mrs. Wilson was one of many who have been referred to our office.” The spokesperson added that Kelley, Braun’s chief of staff, “reached out and she did not respond.”
Later that night, Beckwith, the lieutenant governor, called and left a message. Beckwith said in an interview that he hadn’t talked to the White House about Wilson, though he had spoken with the conservative group Turning Point Action — which is backing Brenda Wilson — about Alexandra Wilson’s candidacy. He said he hoped to urge her to withdraw from the race and called some local Republicans to push for that.
“I just said I don’t know if you guys really thought this one through, because this probably could end poorly for this woman,” Beckwith said, noting her political inexperience.
‘This is going to be really ugly’
With just one day left for candidates to withdraw from primary races, the pressure escalated the morning of Feb. 12.
“They were very, very pushy,” Wilson recalled.
Brasseaux asked in a text message whether she could talk with him again and Blair, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Kelley, Braun’s chief of staff, texted 45 minutes later. Blair called seven minutes after that and left a message.
Wilson texted Brasseaux and said she couldn’t speak until the evening. Later that afternoon, she got a call from Steve Ellis, the Vigo County Council president, who told her Blair had called to try to get her to talk sooner. That night, she finally got on the phone with Blair, who said he was on a plane to Germany with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
In the call, which was shared with NBC News, Blair said that when he was researching her candidacy, her past charge of resisting arrest and her husband’s DUI arrest came up. He also said he expected Goode’s allies to spend millions of dollars to defend him and the other state senators facing primary challengers.
“I think that they’re going to run television ads on it. I think they’re going to run mail pieces on it,” Blair said of her past arrest. “They’re going to tell every voter in the district about this kind of stuff. Because they don’t have to tell your side of the story. They will tell the side of the story they want people to hear.”
During the call, Wilson explained the circumstances around her arrest, which was resolved with a plea deal for a misdemeanor charge. “I was a child. I made a mistake. It was right after my mother passed away suddenly, I made a poor choice,” she said. “Everybody makes mistakes. I have been a law-abiding citizen since then.”
At another point in the call, Blair said: “I just wanted to talk about that brass-tacks reality that I think is going to be really ugly. And I think we’re sort of working at cross purposes with two people with the same last name on the ballot.”
They discussed Trump’s potentially switching his endorsement to her, though Blair made it clear that was a tall order. Wilson said she was pregnant and wasn’t eager to start a new job.
By the end of the call, which Wilson characterized as “a little threatening,” she made it clear she wasn’t leaving the race, which Blair seemed to acknowledge. She didn’t return the other phone calls and texts from Moreau, Beckwith, Club for Growth and Braun’s chief of staff, Kelley.
Joe Kildea, a spokesperson for Club for Growth, confirmed its call to urge Wilson to withdraw, saying the group has urged any Indiana state Senate candidate without Trump’s backing to get out of their races. He didn’t respond to questions about whether the group was working with the White House.
That was the last time Wilson heard from the White House, she said.
The next morning — Feb. 13, the final day candidates could withdraw from the primary — conservative attorney Jim Bopp, a Braun ally, filed a petition with the state’s Election Commission to disqualify Wilson from the ballot.
Bopp said in an interview that he wasn’t aware of the broader pressure campaign and that the state Republican Party asked him to challenge Wilson’s candidacy.
Bopp, who is supporting Brenda Wilson, alleged that Alexandra Wilson’s candidacy was a “trick” designed to help Democrats. He claimed she wasn’t eligible to run for office because she’d been arrested when she was 19 on a felony charge of resisting arrest, even though it had been plead down to a misdemeanor. The Election Commission deadlocked on the issue, leaving Wilson on the ballot. Bopp then went to court to try to overrule the commission.
Wilson got her criminal record expunged March 23, and the court referred the case back to the Election Commission. On Wednesday, the commission again deadlocked with a 2-2 vote, Wilson said, leaving her on the May 5 primary ballot. Bopp told NBC News on Thursday he plans to appeal the move in court next week.
Wilson said in an interview: “I have been accused of dirty tricks, political dirty tricks. This is exactly what is a political dirty trick. I’m a legitimate candidate with concerns for my district that would like to represent my district, and I have every right to be involved as anybody else on the ballot.”
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