Of COURSE they did. It doesn’t fit the narrative.
Of course, had it been a tea-partier, they’d have devoted a full 8 minutes to it, AT LEAST, with hourly breaking updates.
It doesn’t even have to be a Tea Partier. As we’ve already seen, the Media does a Google Search (that’s how they research everything these days)... if they come-up with a similar name associated with the Tea Party, they just declare it so.