JUST IN: Herschel Walker Fires Political Director Over Suspected Leaks to Media

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Herschel Walker has fired the political director for his campaign, according to a report by CNN.

The Republican candidate and Word Salad Champion has been mired in scandal throughout his campaign challenging incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), but the situation went thermonuclear after a Daily Beast report that Walker had paid for an ex-girlfriend to have an abortion.

Walker vehemently denied the report, but then came his own son Christian Walker’s social media posts, the candidate’s flailing attempts at explanation, and a follow up report from the Beast revealing the woman to also be the mother of one of Walker’s children. This week has been one unrelenting headache for the former football star’s campaign.

CNN anchor John King reported on Friday that Walker had just fired Taylor Crowe, his campaign political director.

“Getting a pink slip, sources tell us, over suspected leaks to the media,” said King.

The report on CNN’s website listed “[t]wo people familiar with the matter” as the anonymous sources.

When Mediaite checked Crowe’s Twitter account, it was set to private protected tweets, but it is not known if that was a new development. Walker’s campaign manager Scott Paradise and Crowe both declined CNN’s requests for comment.

In a later segment with the Inside Politics panel, King discussed the news about Crowe’s firing, noting that it was “risky to shake up your top campaign staff” when you’re in the middle of the “urgent business” of the final few weeks of an election.

Chief Congressional correspondent Manu Raju agreed, adding that the Walker campaign had been “uneven,” to put it lightly, in how they had attempted to respond to the accusations.

“Shaking up a campaign is never a good sign at this key moment,” said Raju. He was in Georgia earlier this week and interviewed a lot of voters, and described many of them as having “very entrenched” views right now. With so many voters already decided, the “challenge for both camps” was “finding the small pocket of voters who could tilt the race one way or the other,” he concluded.

The most recent polling in the Georgia Senate race has Warnock up by several points, but the full fallout from the scandal has not yet been calculated. One poll that was 95% complete when the first Beast story broke had Warnock up by 12; some political observers had assessed it as an outlier. Another poll taken just on Tuesday evening (after the first story but before the second story) had Warnock up by 3. The current RealClearPolitics polling average has Warnock up by 3.8.

This is a breaking news story and has been updated.