The RNC's least favorite reporter Keach Hagey

August 6, 2010 09:23 AM EDT

The Republican National Committee, embroiled in an internal squabble over the leadership of Chairman Michael Steele, is leaking like a sieve.

In an indication of just how bad it’s gotten, CNN reported — via a leak, naturally — that one of the first orders of business at the RNC summer meeting in Kansas City on Wednesday was a resolution by the Republican state party chairs urging the RNC executive committee to launch an investigation into the leaks.

“It is a unanimous move to strike against the repeated consistent leaking in regards to committee finances,” said a committee source, speaking anonymously to CNN’s Mark Preston and Peter Hamby.

While there have been a series of leaks to several different outlets, including POLITICO, anyone following the RNC’s internal knife fight knew these words were aimed at the reporting of one man: The Washington Times’ veteran political writer, Ralph Z. Hallow, who has broken a steadier stream of stories about the RNC than anyone else.

Hallow, who has covered the RNC for The Washington Times for decades, has forged an entire beat out of the infighting of the RNC, which is divided between the supporters of Steele and critics of his spending and leadership style. That latter, which includes many major GOP donors, has been feeding Hallow internal documents damaging to Steele almost since the moment Steele was elected in the spring of last year.

Those leaks culminated in a particularly damaging story by Hallow on July 20th, based on a leaked memo by RNC Treasurer Randy Pullen accusing Steele of trying to hide $7 million in debt from the Federal Election Commission in an attempt to make the RNC books look healthier than they actually were.

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported in a segment about The Washington Times’ reporting on Steele shortly afterward – which didn’t mention Hallow by name – “If you want to know how badly the Republican establishment wants Michael Steele to go away, take a look at The Washington Times, where you will find that reporting dirt on Michael Steele has become a beat all its own.”

Steele supporters believe that Hallow is too close to his sources to be objective, and charge that he overlooked stories about Pullen’s own debt-hiding controversies — published in the Huffington Post and the local press in Arizona, where Pullen is state party chairman.

But Hallow’s editor, Sam Dealey, said the paper had another investigative reporter look into those charges against Pullen and found them to be without merit.

Other reporters on the RNC beat say Hallow cuts a familiar, if someone mysterious, figure at RNC events, where the he is as likely to be hobnobbing with RNC members as in the press pen with his fellow scribes. 

But there is no question that Hallow’s relationship with members of the RNC goes beyond the professional. Hallow and his wife, Millie, were listed as guests of outgoing RNC member David Norcross at a farewell party in Norcross’s honor Thursday night, according to an e-mail obtained by POLITICO.

Millie Hallow said her family and Norcross’s family became friends when their children were RNC interns together during Haley Barbour’s tenure as RNC chairman in the mid-1990s.

“Ralph and Millie are attending as friends,” Norcross said. “They are old friends.”

Norcross said there was also an NRA connection. “Millie works for the NRA, and I’m a member of the NRA. I don’t remember if we met at a convention.”

Hallow declined to comment on his relationship with Norcross, saying only that he had been a newspaper reporter since 1965 and didn’t get into it to be in the spotlight himself.

“Came into the craft believing it was a secular priesthood whose members sought the truth without fear or favor,” he said. “Journalism’s practitioners were not newsmakers and news breakers. I still believe that.”

Dealey said Hallow is simply a well-sourced reporter who is doing nothing inappropriate by attending the dinner. “Ralph’s stories are based on committee documents and on-the-record quotes,” he said. “I do not believe that The Washington Times should regulate the private lives of its reporters and editors. They are free to marry, vote and socialize as they like.”

Norcross has been critical of the RNC’s fundraising under Steele’s leadership, telling The Washington Independent earlier this week that he was “disappointed” by the results to date. The $12.5 million the RNC had in May was less than a third of what it had raised by the same time in either the 2002 ($47 million) or the 2006 ($44.6 million) midterm election cycle.

But he believes Pullen’s disclosure will likely help the RNC turn a corner.

“Given the opportunities that we’ve got, I think fundraising has got to pick up, because I think Republicans are really, really excited,” he told POLITICO. “And the whole stuff about the treasurer coming out, that ought to make people feel more comfortable, because things are being fixed.”

He also thinks the RNC is spending too much of its energy obsessing about the leaks.

“Today, I said to the membership in the members-only meeting that spending a lot of time worrying about leaks is a waste of time,” he said.

Hallow’s reporting has been one of the few bright spots of a bumpy year so far for The Washington Times, which went through significant layoffs in January, the freezing of 401K contributions and the loss of its publisher and president, Jonathan Slevin, in April.

The paper has also had to kill its sports section and focus on international, national and cultural issues. In a symbolic move, the White House Correspondents Association voted Sunday to move the paper’s White House correspondent back a row in the White House briefing room.