Gore's Night of Drugs and Cheating
Commentary by Phil Valentine / November 3, 2000

The morning after the George W. Bush/DUI story broke, I received an e-mail from someone with a story to tell about Al Gore. I must tell you that hardly a day goes by that I don't receive some tip on the VP's murky past. I have been very careful to pick and choose which leads to follow and which ones to leave alone. When John Warnecke, Al Gore's best friend at The Tennessean newspaper, called me with two sources who said they supplied Gore with drugs while in Congress and the U.S. Senate, I determined that to be newsworthy. Countless other stories of past indiscretions I have left alone. To me, if these accusations either don't reflect on his character, don't contradict something he's said or don't follow a pattern, I don't deem them newsworthy. The story you're about to read met all three criteria.

Ray Hudson was once a member of a notorious motorcycle gang called the Death Angels. One of their more famous members was David Allan Coe, who went on to stardom as a singer. Hudson recounted for me a story of Al Gore, then a reporter for The Tennessean, approaching the gang about doing a feature story for the paper. They invited him over to hang out with them at their clubhouse. He told me that Gore smoked marijuana with the gang, drank a lot of alcohol, even fired a pistol inside the house. Since so many people in the national press have discounted John Warnecke's story of Gore's drug use for lack of another witness, I was eager to substantiate his claim. What he told me next opened up a whole new dimension to Al Gore's past, something I had heard before but didn't believe for lack of a pattern. Hudson told me that Gore was given one of the biker girls and shown to a private room in the house. He didn't come out for hours. Now, no one else was in the room with the two of them but I can say with a comfortable degree of certainty that Al wasn't giving her a dissertation on global warming. This took place 18 months AFTER Al and Tipper Gore were married. If, in fact, Gore does suffer from a distilled strain of Clintonitis, I believe it is cause for alarm.

I chose to go public with this interview because, unlike Frank Sutherland, editor of the Tennessean, who recently told a gathering that the public doesn't have a right to know, I believe you do. Barring some breach of national security, I believe you have a right to know what kind of people you're electing to office. This story may never make it past this page you're reading but I would be derelict in my duties if I did not let you know.

(Read the transcript of Phil's interview with Ray Hudson)
(Second witness confirms Biker story - Read the transcript)