Michele Bachmann Hasn't Paid Former Staffers Because Michele Bachmann

Five of Michele Bachmann’s former staffers say she still hasn’t paid them for their work, and not because she can’t spare the relatively paltry $5,000 each — because they refuse to sign a shady nondisclosure agreement.

Salon has the backstory: According to Peter Waldron, her former national field coordinator (and accused terrorist/”Kill The Gays” advocate, so must be a lovely guy himself), it all started when the staffers didn’t want to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would prohibit them from discussing any “unethical, immoral, or criminal activity” that went down during the campaign with police or reporters.

Conveniently, there’s an alleged specific “activity” in mind: a home-schooling group says Bachmann’s campaign stole an email list from a volunteer and used it for fundraising purposes; the group has sued and, according to Waldron, there’s also a criminal investigation pending. He said Bachmann’s camp wants to make sure her former staffers won’t rat her out, which is why she’s withholding the money. So he’s decided to go public and play the Christian card. From a press release on Christian Newswire:

“I feel a moral obligation to see that my Christian brothers and sisters are paid for worked performed in good faith. I’ve continually communicated by telephone and email with Mr. Pollack for 1 year but he broke every promise made to me to pay the staff. I appealed to Dr. [Marcus] Bachmann for help. I appealed to Representative Bachmann’s Chief of Staff Robert Boland to intercede with Mrs. Bachmann on behalf of her loyal Iowa staff – all of whom are married, all have children,”

Oh, he’s playing that Christian card super hard:

“It is sobering to think that a Christian member of Congress would betray her testimony to the Lord and the public by withholding earned wages from deserving staff.”

Of course, Waldron’s motivations probably aren’t so pure, and Bachmann (whose campaign was no stranger to controversy; remember when her entire New Hampshire staff quit, in part because she wasn’t paying them?) told Salon that his charges were “false and inaccurate.” He called the five irked former staffers “soldiers,” but it seems like this is more a question of “which shitty and increasingly irrelevant asshole is lying a little less than the other?”