Prompted by Dem Dirty Trick, Gore Witness Blows Lid Off Wild Night

Source: NewsMax.com

Date: November 5, 2000

Prompted by Dem Dirty Trick, Gore Witness Blows Lid Off Wild Night Sunday November 5, 2000; 1:00 PM ET A Tennessee minister, outraged by the 11th-hour release by Democrats of Texas Gov. George Bush's 1976 DUI arrest record, has come forward with his firsthand account of a wild night in 1971 that featured sex, booze, guns, drugs and presidential candidate Al Gore. In an e-mail to Nashville talk radio host Phil Valentine Thursday night, Pastor Ray Hudson cited an episode where Gore, while a reporter for the city's Tennessean newspaper, was assigned to do a story on the Death Angels, a notorious local motorcyle gang. Pastor Hudson, who now ministers to the homeless, was a Death Angels member in good standing at the time - and tipped Valentine that Gore's research for the story included spending a night with the gang. During the hours between dusk and dawn, the vice president got drunk, smoked pot, shot a club member's gun and had sex with one of the club's girls, the biker-turned-minister contended. Hudson said that what he saw flies in the face of Gore's family man image (Gore had married Tipper 18 months earlier), making his campaign's attempt to smear Bush over a DUI ticket even more outrageous. On Friday, Pastor Hudson went public with his story on Valentine's WLAC talk radio show. VALENTINE: Now, tell me what happened when he came to do the interview with you guys. HUDSON: Well, he hung around a couple of days and we wanted some good press so we treated him well. He spent one night with us, or a big part of the night, partying with us. And during that party he smoked dope with us, he drank a lot. We had a door there that had some weird trim up over the door and we took a couple of pot shots at it and... VALENTINE: With a gun. HUDSON: With a pistol. VALENTINE: Al Gore was shooting a gun inside of a home? HUDSON: Yes. It was an illegal firearm, even back then. VALENTINE: OK. HUDSON: And he missed. He's not a straight shooter. (VALENTINE CHUCKLES) HUDSON: The reason that I had, you know, contacted you to begin with was that, you know, he portrayed himself, as I seen it on the national convention, back about that time they showed pictures of him and his family, he's been this great family guy, great husband and all of that. That night, other than the things I already mentioned, he was given one of the club girls there and took her into another room. VALENTINE: Now, this was in November of 1971. It needs to be noted that Al Gore and Tipper Gore got married May 19th of 1970. HUDSON: Yeah. VALENTINE: So, he'd been married about a year and a half. HUDSON: Yeah. VALENTINE: He gets one of the biker girls and goes to the back room and has his way with her. HUDSON: Yeah. VALENTINE: So, this is the Al Gore that is now, his campaign is throwing this mud at George W. Bush for getting a DUI in 1976? This guy's smokin' dope with a motorcycle gang and going back in the back with a biker chick in one of the back rooms? HUDSON: Yes, well, you know, everybody deserves a blast from the past sometimes and this is his. I didn't want to, 'til this DUI came out I had thought about it but I said 'naw, I'm just not gonna say anything.' Then when this came out about a DUI and making such a big deal out of it on the news, I said 'well, I'm gonna, you know, let somebody know about it, anyway.' VALENTINE: By the way, I read the piece he wrote on the Death Angels. It is a puff piece. HUDSON: Oh, yeah. It was great. We loved it. We bought a good article there. VALENTINE: No kidding! All you had to do was supply him with a girl and some dope and let him shoot your gun a couple of times and the guy writes a puff piece for you in the Tennessean. HUDSON: You know, I'm sure we all have some things we have we wish we hadn't done. I don't know how he is now. I don't know him now other than what I see on TV and some of the stories he tells. But I do know this is one incident I know about firsthand. VALENTINE: And this goes hand-in-hand with what John Warnecke, who was a friend at the Tennessean, a fellow reporter, has told us on several occasions that has not been reported by the national press. HUDSON: Well, you know, I think that it's a shame that people try to make a big deal out of something that isn't but then ignore some more serious things in the news and it just seems, well, one-sided to me. I think both sides need to be heard. VALENTINE: Well, I would say that smoking dope, shooting an illegal firearm in a house and bedding down with a biker chick when you're married trumps a DUI any day. Valentine told NewsMax.com Saturday that Gore's Tennessean report on the Death Angels includes quotes from two of the motorcycle gang's women. "As evening passed into morning, Cortez was saying...," Gore wrote, revealing that he'd spent at least several of the overnight hours in her company. A recent revelation by Gore himself suggests that he indeed did have a taste for the motorcycle gang lifestyle. Just last week he told talk show host Queen Latifah that in his younger days he enjoyed playing drinking games, riding his own motorcycle and outrunning police. Since Hudson's revelation on Friday, the mainstream press has ignored the story and the Gore campaign has had no comment. But on the campaign trail, Gore allies continue to pound away on the Bush DUI story. Gore backer former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey engaged in some particularly ugly rhetoric Saturday, telling party faithful at a campaign stop: "[Bush] didn't want to tell us the truth. He said, 'I didn't want to tell you the truth because I was concerned about my daughters.' Governor, you remind me of that old song of Willie Nelson's - 'Who you gonna believe, you gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?' Governor, we're gonna believe our eyes." "You're covering your rear end. You're protecting yourself, "Kerrey shouted to the crowd.