On Saturday, the Hall County Republican Party hosted an event that invitations said was "open to everyone," but for one longtime Georgia radio reporter––this was not the case.
"I love talking to voters; I love going to campaign events," 90.1 WABE Politics Reporter Rahul Bali told WDUN's Martha Zoller Show.
Bali, a veteran political journalist in the Peach State, had come to the event on Saturday morning after seeing a post about the event on Facebook. The Hall County Republican Party hosted several speakers at the Dogwood Pavilion in Longwood Park in Gainesville, most notably U.S. Senate Candidate Herschel Walker and Congressman Andrew Clyde, R-Ga.
Bali said that when he arrived, he encountered no issues; he said he was at the pavilion for "40 minutes" before someone with the local party walked up to him.
"[He] asked me to leave saying it was a private event and that the speakers were told there'd be no press," Bali explained. "I made my case for a moment...and he just again asked me to leave, so I left."
Bali then took to Twitter about the incident. As of Monday night, it had been retweeted more than 240 times and had 447 likes.
In response to the tweet, the Hall County GOP twitter @HallCountyGOP wrote that "'Open to everyone' typically means citizens. You know as well as I that as soon as you step into a role representing an entity (you a reporter and I as a grassroots Chair) you cease to become just a citizen and have different access and different rules applied."
AccessWDUN does not know who operates the Twitter account with the local party. However, in a Monday afternoon interview James Gisonna, the current chairman of the local party, said Bali was asked to leave the pavilion due to a capacity limit.
An official with the Gainesville Parks and Recreation Department confirmed that the event was only registered to have up to 100 people inside the open-air pavilion. The site's capacity is larger, but any crowds above 100 would've required additional permits.
"I have a feeling that there might have been a little bit of a misunderstanding between the reporter that was there and the person that went over and spoke to him," Gisonna explained. "And that might have been on our part."
Gisonna emphatically denied that Bali had been asked to leave as part of the Walker campaign's aversion to exposing the candidate to the press. He insisted that the Walker campaign and Rep. Clyde's staff were leaving it entirely up to the organizers to decide about the press.
However, the person running the Twitter account on Saturday night wrote, "Herschels team made this request to ask the reporter to leave the pavilion."
Gisonna told AccessWDUN that the person making statements on Twitter is no longer working with the party. They do not plan to delete the tweets, but he said he felt "horrible" about them.
As noted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Walker has "largely stuck to a 'velvet rope' regimen of private events, tightly controlled appearances and limited-access speeches."
The incident was the second in the same week where media was barred, according to the newspaper. The first was at an event in Buckhead where someone told an AJC reporter the same thing.
