Senator Allen's Staff Tackles Blogger

A physical confrontation caught on tape broke out Tuesday morning in the lobby of the Omni Hotel in downtown Charlottesville between aides to Republican Senator George Allen and a person identified as Mike Stark, a man who has spent the past several months following Allen around the campaign trail and peppering him with some hard-hitting questions.

Stark, an ex-marine who is currently a law student at the University of Virginia, showed up at a campaign rally for Allen and was tackled and put into a choke hold by aides to the Republican senator for allegedly asking Allen what his staff claims were multiple inappropriate questions about Allen's wife.

In an interview Tuesday afternoon with a reporter for the website TalkingPoints Memo, Stark said he was "within four feet" of Allen when he started firing off questions.

"My question was, 'Senator Allen, Democrats are making this election about accountability. You can shut them up by telling us what was in your police records from the seventies,'" Stark told TalkingPoints Memo. "He kind of muttered to himself, kind of, 'I'm not gonna go there.' Immediately his campaign staff started pushing me around, shoving me around, trying to form a human wall between me and him. I continued to pace him out into the lobby. My next question was, 'Is it true that you spit on your wife?'"

"Then somebody said, 'Now you're getting personal,' and wrestled me to the ground,'" Stark said, adding that he intends to press charges against Allen's staff.