Now that the AP has followed up on and confirmed the story Eli and I broke a few weeks back on the hundreds of campaign documents gathered from Rob McKenna's King County Council office, and stored in the county archives, the rest of the media is following suit. Thanks, AP!

Of course McKenna's people have denied that this is evidence of anything improper, and maybe that's true (maybe) in a purely legalistic sense, given that the chain of custody cannot be verified. We only know that these campaign documents were found in McKenna's office (where they shouldn't have been). We can't be certain how they got there.

But, you know, come on... hundreds of pages of campaign documents scattered among McKenna's official council records? Are we really supposed to believe nothing improper was going on?

What was different about McKenna's office than that of other council members of the day is that McKenna used his taxpayer salaried council staffers to simultaneously run his election campaigns. That's legal, as long as these staffers perform none of their campaign activities on council time, on council premises, and using council resources. But what these documents suggest is that this is a helluva lot more difficult to accomplish in practice than in theory, and that McKenna was at very least negligent in enforcing the ethics rules.