Reports: Michele Bachmann Negotiating Settlement with Former Iowa Campaign Worker over Home School Emails

Former GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann is negotiating a settlement with a former campaign worker from Johnston who sued the Minnesota congresswoman over a stolen email list, according to the Star Tribune's report on Wednesday.

Barb Heki served as a coordinator of home-school supporters for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign that participated in the January 2012 Iowa caucuses. She claimed fellow staffer and Iowa State Sen. Kent Sorenson stole an email list from her computer in Bachmann’s Urbandale campaign office in 2011.

Sorenson's attorney told Patch last year he committed no crime.

According to the Star Tribune, Bachmann met with Heki's lawyers in Des Moines on Monday.

Heki said in a statement last week she was grateful former Bachmann campaign aide Chris Dorr of Van Meter had acknowledged removing an email list from Heki’s computer in Bachmann’s Urbandale campaign office. In September, Bachmann adviser Eric Woolson said in a sworn affidavit that Sorenson admitted taking the email list from Heki.

A state ethics committee is looking into the email list, as well as a claim that Sorenson was receiving $7,500 a month to work on the Bachmann campaign.

The AP reported:

Heki, who lives in Johnston, claims in the lawsuit that Sorenson took a database from her private computer in November that contained names and contact information, including email addresses, of thousands of Iowa families who were part of the Iowa home-school network on whose board she served. Heki said she had told Sorenson months earlier that she would not provide the list to the campaign.

When an email from the campaign was sent to members of the network in November, Heki was named in media reports as providing the list. She was later removed from the boards of the Iowa network and a related national network of home-school advocates on which she served.