Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has been missing in for more than two weeks, leaving everyone wondering just where he’s been as election day closes in. Now, according to a couple of independent journalists, we have the answer.
Talarico is facing renewed scrutiny over his nearly two-week absence from the campaign trail after conservative commentators released a recording they claim connects him to a psychiatric treatment facility in Ohio.
The allegations surfaced Sunday, just weeks before the November 3 election, as Talarico prepares to face Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate contests.
Conservative commentators Nick Sortor and Rhein Amacher released an audio recording of a telephone conversation with a woman they identified as an employee of the Lindner Center of HOPE in Mason, Ohio. They claimed the recording established that Talarico had recently been a patient at the facility.
However, the recording has not been independently authenticated as proof that Talarico received treatment there, and his campaign has strongly denied the allegations. “This is a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory,” campaign spokesman JT Ennis said Sunday. “Last week James Talarico was home in Austin, Texas, recovering from the flu,” Ennis added.
The controversy intensified after Sortor and Amacher published what they described as evidence connecting Talarico to the Ohio facility. The recording features a woman purportedly answering a telephone call to the treatment center and discussing a patient’s discharge. The commentators interpreted the exchange as confirmation that Talarico had been admitted.
Amacher also published telephone records that he said documented his calls to the facility. Those records establish neither the identity of a patient nor whether Talarico received medical treatment. The Lindner Center subsequently issued a statement emphasizing its patient confidentiality policies.
“We do not confirm or deny whether any individual is or has been a patient, and we do not comment on individual cases,” the facility said. The statement did not corroborate the allegations, nor, of course, did it deny them, either.
