Tampa Reporter Upset Gyrocopter Pilot Hasn’t Elicited More Talk on Campaign Finance

‘I thought he was very sane’

MONTOGOMERY: “He called me up in my office. Didn’t identify himself and he said, 'I’m going to commit an act of civil disobedience. Nobody is going to get hurt. I might get hurt. In that event, I need somebody to be able to tell the back-story.'” 
STEPHANOPOULOS: “So what did you start to do?”
MONTOGOMERY: “At that first meeting, he explained he had this plan. It sounded to me like a bunch of craziness. But, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to pay attention to this guy. If he has the wherewithal to try to pull this off then it could be an interesting story.'”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “You wrote he was a mix of Paul Revere and P.T. Barnum. We also showed him telling you that no sane person would do what he was doing. Did you think he was sane?”
MONTOGOMERY: “I thought he was very sane. Just sane enough to — or just insane enough maybe to commit a federal crime like this.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “You get word he’s finally going to pull this off. You go up to Washington, as well. Listen, if he had flown a foot or two higher, he would have gotten killed. Did you feel any responsibility to tell the authorities this was coming?”
MONTOGOMERY: “Look, he said he was going to do this whether we were there or not. Um — uh — the authorities knew. He was interviewed by the Secret Service about a year before, before he took flight. He announced his flight well in advance. He left from Gettysburg which is about and hour and half of flight time.”
STEPHANOPOULOS: “So what do you think should happen to Doug now?”
MONTOGOMERY: “He would want people not to not view the story as, ‘Oh, this is lack of security on the part of the Capitol police or the Secret Service, but instead what he was really aiming for, which was, we need to talk in a big way, as a nation, about whether we want unlimited corporate spending in elections. He — you know, I think — his message is kind of — got lost in the past 24 hours. The idea that like there’s big money in politics, and he felt like this was the crumbling of the democracy. And we need to have a conversation about campaign finance reform.”

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