Those familiar with Missouri politics have become more familiar with Jeff Roe than many want to. Roe has gained a reputation for running extremely dirty campaigns that will do anything in order to get his candidate elected. Even if anything means bringing about the suicide of another candidate.

Ben Carson’s camp is fuming over a false statement on the eve of the Iowa Caucuses saying that Carson was dropping out of the Republican Race. Carson ended the night with just under 10% of the GOP vote. Cruz, who won the GOP Caucus last night, today apologized for a “mistake” that some within his own campaign made false statements to Iowa caucusgoers that Carson planned to quit the race. Jeff Roe and Axiom Strategies is running the Cruz campaign. This is a tactic they have used many times in the past. The common bond to this story and the Cruz story is like Cruz, Roe was a paid operative for the Billy Long campaign.

Billy Long

This is not the first time that a Jeff Roe run campaign has been accused of leaking to the press that a candidate running against them was quitting the race. In 2010, a press release was sent to KSPR that appeared to be from the Scott Eckersley campaign that noted he was dropping out. KSPR ran the story in the morning news and Eckersley was put in damage control in the final days of the campaign.

Eckersley filed a complaint with the FEC, which concluded that a man who went to school with Long’s daughters and was an acquaintance of Long’s. They found that Patrick Binning, who at the time was a political consultant with LakeFront Strategies,”solely responsible for sending the fake press release, and that he was not an agent or employee of any federal candidate.”

Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich

Within the span of four days back in February 2015, a politician and his spokesman both committed “suicide”. Vice reported:

On February 26, Missouri State Auditor Tom Schweich had something he wanted to get off his chest. Two days prior, he’d try to call a press conference about the fact that his political opponents were spreading rumors that he was Jewish, but his advisers had convinced him to back off. So taking matters into his own hands, the 54-year-old called both the Associated Press and the St. Louis Dispatch himself to request a set of interviews. “This is more of a religious story than a politics story,” he told the local paper in a voicemail.

But Schweich never met with any reporters. Seven minutes after asking to be heard out, the Republican candidate for governor shut himself up with a bullet to the head.

The suicide—already one of the more bizarre political news stories in recent memory—took a turn for the even-weirder on Sunday evening, when Schweich’s spokesman, Robert “Spence” Jackson, was also found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gun wound. Now, people in Missouri really want to know what Schweich was trying to get off his chest last month—and whether it was even related to anti-Semitism after all.

The suicides were thought to be related to an radio ad by Citizens for Fairness. PoliticMo had this to say about the ad:

On Friday, Citizens for Fairness — a political action committee that, until recently, was registered to James Thomas, a Kansas City lawyer with close ties to Jeff Roe, the Republican strategist leading Catherine Hanaway’s gubernatorial campaign – launched statewide ad accusing Schweich of being corrupt.

“Elections have consequences. Tom Schweich, like him? No. Is he a weak candidate for governor? Absolutely, just look at him. He could be easily confused for the deputy sheriff of Mayberry. But, more importantly, he can be manipulated. That’s why Sen. Claire McCaskill and Pres. Obama enlisted my help to meddle in another Republican primary with Schweich as our pawn. Schweich and McCaskill are tied at the hip. Schweich even gave money to McCaskill’s campaign. Schweich is an obviously weaker opponent against Democrat Chris Koster. Once Schweich obtains the Republican nomination, we will quickly squash him like a bug that he is and put our candidate, Chris Koster in the governor’s mansion.”

Vice also tells us about the reaction of Schweich’s friend former US Senator John Danforth.

In the wake of Schweich’s death, former US Senator John Danforth blamed political bullying and Missouri’s dirty politics for his friend’s suicide. In a scathing eulogy, Danforth noted that Schweich had believed that other Republicans, including state party chairman John Hancock, were behind the rumors that he was Jewish, and claimed that a hurtful House of Cards–themed attack ad mocking the auditor’s appearance may have pushed Schweich over the edge (it compared him to Don Knotts).

“Politics has gone so hideously wrong, and the death of Tom Schweich is the natural consequence of what politics has become,” Danforth told the stunned audience. “I believe deep in my heart that it’s now our duty, yours and mine, to turn politics into something much better than its now so miserable state.”

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It’s true that Missourians play dirty politics, perhaps none more so than Jeff Roe, the guy behind the House of Cards ad. Known as the “Karl Rove of Missouri,” he got his start in politics in 1994, according to Mother Jones, and helmed successful campaigns for Missouri Republican Congressman Sam Graves. Opponents have described Graves’s campaign staff as “evil”; other phrases used to describe Roes’s campaigns include “intimidating” and “very, very bad.” It’s also worth noting that while Missourians are trying to figure out what to do about Roe, he’s taking his hardball talents to the big leagues. Late last year, Ted Cruz, the Republican senator who no one really likes, announced Roe would be heading up his presidential campaign.

Roe and the National Stage

Ted Cruz had a serious problem. He was known as a Conservative, but not as a Christian. The NY Time Magazine explained how that Roe got Cruz and Evangelicals to be mentioned in the same breath.

One morning early in January, in the lobby of a public library in Onawa, Iowa, I listened to Cruz’s campaign manager, Jeff Roe, as he explained a central challenge of his previous few months. ‘‘Prior to March 23,’’ Roe said, ‘‘if you were to word-cloud ‘Ted Cruz,’ which we do every day — take all the Google mentions and Internet searches, dump them into a file and form a cloud — you can’t find ‘evangelical.’ ’’ In other words, voters were largely unaware of the Tea Party firebrand’s religious faith. To convince evangelicals that Ted Cruz was the ‘‘righteous’’ candidate, Roe told me, his team needed to sell him as such, from the very beginning: ‘‘Regardless of what you’ve got in the bank, you’d better determine the narrative of the campaign, and show that’s who we are, every day.’’

After Cruz’s surpizing win over Billionaire Donald Trump, the River Front Times wrote about the man behind Cruz’s victory.

Political consultant Jeff Roe, who is based in Kansas City, is Ted Cruz’s campaign manager — and the architect of the Texas senator’s surprising first-place finish.

Roe is hardly a household name even amongst the political chattering class. (He has less than 6,000 Twitter followers.) Locally, he’s most famous for commissioning the mean-spirited ad that upset State Auditor Tom Schweich and may have factored into his suicide, at least according to former U.S. Senator John Danforth, who blasted “politics that has gone so hideously wrong” in his funeral oration. Roe has been labeled “the Karl Rove of Missouri” — and the people calling him that don’t consider it a compliment.

The Goon Squad

Back in 2004, David Martin wrote in an article for The Pitch about how Jeff Roe was already being called dirty and how his team acted like a goon squad.

Bob Fairchild, a retired assistant high school principal and head football coach, stood with his mouth open on the day an aide to U.S. Rep. Sam Graves came to his house and tried to intimidate him.

[..]

One day two years ago, a Chillicothe newspaper publisher and a St. Louis mortician, Democrats both, visited Fairchild’s home in an effort to persuade him to run for an open seat in the Missouri House of Representatives. They were discussing the idea — Fairchild is convinced he would have won — when Jewell Patek knocked.

Patek graduated from Chillicothe High School in 1989. Though a much younger man than Fairchild, he had once held the very seat the decorated coach was thinking of running for. Patek was elected to the Missouri House in 1996, when he was just 25 and fresh out of law school. He resigned from the Legislature in 2001 to work for Graves in Washington, D.C. For a time, Patek and Graves shared an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia.

“He came to the door but would not come in,” Fairchild tells the Pitch, describing Patek’s visit. “In a threatening way — now, I can’t tell you his exact words — but it was kind of put to me that, ‘You don’t have a chance, and you’ll be sorry if you decide to do this.'”

[..]

That day, Fairchild joined a not very exclusive club of Missouri politicians who have felt bullied, harassed, jostled, taunted and defamed by someone connected to Graves, a conservative serving his second two-year term in the U.S. House. Politicians from both major parties claim disgust with his political operation, a squad led by Jeff Roe, his longtime campaign manager and (until recently) chief of staff.

“Their tactics are the worst I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in politics fifty years,” says former Kansas City Councilwoman Teresa Loar, who opposed Graves in a Republican primary in 2000. “It’s truly incredible what they get away with.”

The young Roe latched onto a young Missouri State Congressman and rode him all the way to Washington. This where Roe honed his viscous style of political campaigning. The New Republic says this of Roe’s beginning:

On a college trip to Jefferson City, the state capital, Roe met an up-and-coming state representative and conservative culture-warrior named Sam Graves from the state’s northwestern-most corner. The two country boys hit it off. Graves was running for state senate in a district he didn’t know well. The district included Roe’s hometown of Brookfield, and the lawmaker asked if Roe would work for him. When the time came to decide between reenlisting in the Army National Guard or plunging headlong into politics, Roe chose politics. On June 6, 1994, he finished his stint in the Guard; the next day, he began his first paid political gig working on Graves’s winning campaign.

Roe established himself as Graves’s right-hand man, running his state senate office and getting him reelected four years later. In 2000, Graves made a late entrance into the race for an open U.S. House seat previously held by a conservative Democrat. Republican officials had initially blessed another candidate, a city council member named Teresa Loar, but they quickly changed course and threw everything behind the better-connected Graves. The campaign—along with the one Roe ran two years later against Democratic challenger Cathy Rinehart—offered an early glimpse of the soon-to-be notorious tactics used by Roe and his underlings. According to Loar and Rinehart, camera-wielding Graves staffers repeatedly ambushed their campaign offices and tracked them at nearly every parade, fair, and public event they attended. Roe’s young team dug through their opponents’ trash; Rinehart told me she resorted to dumping dirty kitty litter in her garbage to ward off Roe’s Dumpster divers. Loar recalls young men she knew to be Graves staffers posing as journalists or volunteers in order to get inside her campaign and catch her saying something incriminating. “‘The little brown shirts,’ I called them,” Loar said. (Roe confirmed some of this, but couldn’t recall all the details.)

Roe has a reputation as a person that will do whatever it takes to win. When he was asked about this no holes barred approach to running a campaign on Fox News Sunday, Roe responded, “I think the rigors of democracy require us to have a real full-throated conversation about our beliefs, defend our beliefs, and point out the differences in our opponent’s beliefs. Your entire life is going to go under a microscope. And I think people want someone with them that will ruthlessly defend them.”

Ted Cruz knew what type of campaign Roe would run, and had a three and a half hour meeting with Roe in Washington. Cruz was going all in and was willing to do whatever it took in order to win. Like Lee Atwater did for George H. W. Bush to destroy their 1988 Presidential opponent Michael Dukakis and Karl Rove did for George W. Bush in 2000, Roe was prepared to do whatever it would take to put Cruz in the White House.

From The New Republic:

Roe also pitched himself as singularly qualified to run Cruz’s presidential bid, touting a pedigree few, if any other, operatives had—how he’d built his own full-scale political operation from scratch, with multimillion-dollar budgets, dozens of employees, running everything from TV to direct mail, fund-raising, polling, research, strategy. And he was ready to put the whole thing on pause and move to Houston for Cruz—to go all in.

Cruz already knew what else he’d be getting: A master of hardball politics whose attacks could get under even the toughest politician’s skin—his own included. Maybe that’s why Roe’s mailer never came up in the conversation. Even so, Roe left the interview uncertain: “I walked out and I had no idea.” Three days later, he got the call. He was hired for the Cruz team, and would later be named campaign manager.

Roe’s company, Axiom, is tied in to the GOP political establishment that Cruz has railed against. Bringing on Roe, Cruz knew that he would be bringing in the GOP establishment. The National Republican Congressional Committee has paid Roe and Axiom over $90,000 in-between 2009 and 2014. He did strategy and consulting work for them.

Again from The New Republic:

Roe helped mainstream Republican Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas—a RINO in the eyes of many conservatives—defeat a Tea Party challenger and win re-election in 2014. Perhaps most damaging in the eyes of movement conservatives, that same year Roe’s mail firm was behind a $234,000 negative ad blitz in Kansas’ 1st congressional district funded by a super PAC called Now or Never. The target was one of the most conservative members of Congress, Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who was being challenged in the Republican primary.

New York/San Francisco Values

When in a Republican debate Cruz hammered Donald Trump on his “New York Values”, it was straight out of the Roe playbook. When Roe was working for Rep. Graves, he used an attack ad against former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes. The ad, seen below, called out her “San Francisco values”.

Roe has shown that he will do whatever it takes to win. If that pushes people to commit suicide, then he is fine with that. He will take Establishment Republican and Democrat Money and destroy any candidate that his bosses deem as a threat. Much like the Clinton’s strategists over the years, nothing is out of bounds for the man who is dressing up his candidate, Ted Cruz, as the American Messiah to evangelicals that are willing to sell their core beliefs in order to put their kind of candidate in office. Cruz appears more than willing to go as low as it takes in order to win. Cruz is playing the Bush family’s style of politics, and hoping that it takes him where it took them.