A former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire is having his legal bills paid — with a little help from his Republican party friends:
Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.
James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.
A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire’s newest senator.
At the time, Tobin was the RNC’s New England regional director, before moving to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
Oh.
So he got promoted for his good work…?
A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin’s indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.
“The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters … of their federally secured right to vote,” states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.
Wait! Didn’t this “bipartisan” group that turned out to be a GOP front issue a report? How could it leave this case out? Does that mean we can’t trust the contents of that report?
Since charges were first filed in December, the RNC has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm’s other clients include Bill and Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.
Uh, oh.
That means Rush, Sean and B.O. (Bill O’Reilly) can’t talk about the Clintons having sleazy lawyers. CORRECTION: It won’t faze them one bit. MORE:
The GOP’s filings with the FEC list the payments to Williams & Connolly without specifying they were for Tobin’s defense. Political parties have wide latitude on how they spend their money, including on lawyers.
Well, then, it MUST have been an oversight.
Surely the GOP wouldn’t be trying to hide payments to someone who is accused of suppressing the vote? Again, we’re sure if it happened it would be in this “bipartisan group’s” report.
Republican Party officials said they don’t ordinarily discuss specifics of their legal work, but confirmed to The Associated Press they had agreed to underwrite Tobin’s defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.
“Jim is a longtime friend who has served as both an employee and an independent contractor for the RNC,” a spokeswoman for the RNC, Tracey Schmitt, said Wednesday. “This support is based on his assurance and our belief that Jim has not engaged in any wrongdoing.”
Aha! If he’s on your side, it can’t be true. The hanky panky only occurs if someone has a D in front of their name. And then there’s this:
The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.
Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a “zero-tolerance policy” for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.
Well, it certainly seems like he’s off to a great start in New Hampshire….
SOME OTHER VOICES ON THIS STORY:
An example of Great Minds Think Alike via John Cole:”Oddly enough, the ‘non-partisan’ American Center for Voting Rights had no mention of this in their latest report.”
—Liquidlist:”This is par for the course and should be a gigantic scandal. I’ll put it on my list of typical behaviors that should be gigantic scandals. But I’m going to need more paper.”
—Scott Shields points to this and several other miniscandals and writes:”I have a strong feeling that what we’re seeing here is the tip of a massive iceburg of corruption that’s been growing in the Republican Party for years. If reform is not one of the main rallying cries for the Democratic Party in next year’s midterms, I’ll be very disappointed.”
—Obsidian Wings also points to this and a few other not-so-good tidbits of news for the GOP and says:”I hope any of these people who are guilty spend a nice long time in jail reflecting on the system they helped to corrupt. I normally try to be a nice person, but I have my limits.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.