/ STAFF WRITER
With a week to go before the June 7 primary, two Republicans in the 31st Congressional District race are going after each other.
In a mailer sent out last week, candidate Sean Flynn called opponent Paul Chabot “No Show Chabot” for “refusing to vote” while serving on the California Parole board.
“Paul Chabot took over $100,000 of your taxpayer money and was supposed to make tough decisions to keep us safe,” the flier reads in part, “but he didn’t show up to vote.”
Chabot served on the board from 2006 through 2015. He posted on his Facebook page on Monday that he missed votes during his deployment to Iraq, and hit back against Flynn, an economics professor, during a campaign event in downtown San Bernardino on Tuesday.
A naval reservist, Chabot returned from Iraq in 2008, but the flier specifically cites votes he abstained from in August 2009. According to parole board records, Chabot abstained on six of the eight votes held by the board on Aug. 18, 2009. (He did vote on the other two.)
“Abstaining is a vote,” Chabot said after a campaign event in downtown San Bernardino on Tuesday. “I had no knowledge of those particular cases.”
Chabot had just returned to the country the year before and wasn’t up to speed on those six cases, he said after his campaign event.
“The right and ethical thing for me to do was for me to abstain,” Chabot said.
But he defends his record overall: “I have one of the toughest recods on the California state parole board.”
Chabot lost to Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-San Bernardino, in his first run for the seat in 2014.
“We’re up against a campaign that’s equally as dishonest as we faced in 2014,” Paul Chabot told a group of supporters during Tuesday’s rally.
Officially, this is Chabot’s second attempt for the seat, although, by Chabot’s own admission, he’s never really stopped running against Aguilar after losing to him two years ago.
In addition to Aguilar, Chabot and Flynn, former Rep. Joe Baca is running as a Republican, along with retired school teacher Kaiser Ahmed, who’s running as a Democrat.
Contact the writer: beau.yarbrough@langnews.com; @LBY3
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