For a five-year-old scandal, it’s amazing just how many important unanswered questions there are surrounding the Republicans’ New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal.
For those just joining us, in 2002, New Hampshire was home to a very competitive U.S. Senate race between Jeanne Shaheen (D) and John Sununu (R). The morning voters headed to the polls, Democratic workers arrived at five different get-out-the-vote offices, only to find that none of their phones worked. As it turned out, Republican officials conspired and financed a scheme to jam all the Dems’ GOTV phone lines.
It paid off; Sununu narrowly won the race. It didn’t pay off the Republican officials who hatched the scheme, all of whom faced criminal charges, and one of whom went to jail.
But as it turns out, prosecuting the Republican criminals responsible for rigging the election was itself politicized by the Bush administration.
The Justice Department delayed prosecuting a key Republican official for jamming the phones of New Hampshire Democrats until after the 2004 election, protecting top GOP officials from the scandal until the voting was over.
An official with detailed knowledge of the investigation into the 2002 Election-Day scheme said the inquiry sputtered for months after a prosecutor sought approval to indict James Tobin, the northeast regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee. […]
While there were guilty pleas in the New Hampshire investigation prior to the 2004 presidential election, involvement of the national GOP wasn’t confirmed. A Manchester, N.H., policeman quickly traced the jamming to Republican political operatives in 2003 and forwarded the evidence to the Justice Department for what ordinarily would be a straightforward case.
However, the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry.
You mean the Bush Justice Department delayed prosecuting Republican criminals because it might help Dems during a campaign? Actually, that’s exactly what happened.
The official said that Terry O’Donnell, a former Pentagon general counsel who was representing Tobin, was in contact with senior department officials before Tobin was indicted.
In October, the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation to determine whether partisan politics undermined the federal probe.
The official said that department officials rejected prosecutor Todd Hinnen’s push to bring criminal charges against the New Hampshire Republican Party.
Weeks before the 2004 election, Hinnen’s supervisors directed him to ask a judge to halt action temporarily in a Democratic Party civil suit against the GOP so that it wouldn’t hurt the investigation, although Hinnen had expressed no concerns that it would, the official said.
Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the state Democratic Party, said the delay spared Republicans embarrassment at the peak of the campaign because a pending deposition would have revealed that several state GOP officials knew about the scheme, which was hatched by their executive director, Charles McGee. The delay also stalled the case beyond its statute of limitations, depriving Democrats of full discovery, he said.
I realize the U.S. Attorney purge scandal has faded from the headlines, and has already forced the Attorney General to resign in disgrace.
But this story, like so many like it, reminds us of the breathtaking corruption that became commonplace under Bush’s leadership. The rule of law and the criminal-justice system became just another partisan tool, to be used, exploited, and manipulated for partisan ends.
Again, we’ve known all of this for quite some time, but new information that reinforces what’s painfully clear should help erase any lingering doubts anyone might still harbor.