The Wayne Dumond controversy has clearly thrown Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign for a loop — given the seriousness of Huckabee’s role in Dumond’s release, the story has the potential to permanently undermine his campaign.
In response, the former Arkansas governor has come up with a two-prong defense: 1) Huckabee claims not to have been involved; and 2) this is Bill Clinton’s fault anyway.
On the latter point, Huckabee was emphasizing this nonsense on national television this morning.
In an appearance on CBS this morning, Huckabee noted that the parole board members were “appointed by Bill Clinton, by Jim Guy Tucker,” that “Jim Guy Tucker, in concert with Bill Clinton … reduced [DuMond’s] sentence,” and that “it was Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker who actually commuted Mr. DuMond’s sentence, making him parole-eligible.”
Huckabee made sure to mention Wednesday that Tucker was “convicted of Whitewater-related felonies.” And just in case that wasn’t enough, he noted in an interview on MSNBC this morning that some of the new attention to the DuMond case is being driven by Waas’ reporting in the Huffington Post, “one of the most left-wing blogs in the blogosphere.”
First, Clinton didn’t reduce the sentence, Tucker commuted Dumond’s life sentence to 39 years. That made him parole-eligible, but it was Huckabee who actively sought Dumond’s release, in large part because this convicted rapist had become a right-wing cause celebre.
Second, for Huckabee to argue that he wasn’t involved in the parole process is flatly contradicted by a lot of evidence.
Controversies like these come up from time to time. Governors commute sentences or grant parole for a convict, the convict then commits a heinous act, and the governor gets the blame. The tragedies are hard to spin, but governors are usually wise to accept responsibility and promise to do better in the future.
But lying about it only makes matters worse. Regrettably, that’s the path Huckabee has chosen.
Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee made a rare personal appeal to release a convicted rapist from prison, a former top aide to the GOP presidential hopeful confirmed to ABC News.
Butch Reeves, formerly the criminal justice counsel to the Arkansas governor’s office, handled all requests for clemencies and communications with prisoners.
His account of a key 1996 meeting between then-Gov. Huckabee and the state parole board largely supports an earlier version of the meeting by former board member Charles Chastain. It contrasts with Huckabee’s position that he did not pressure the board.
“At their invitation, I went to their meeting. Someone brought up his case,” Huckabee said Tuesday, describing his meeting with the board. “Frankly it was simply part of a broader discussion. I did not ask them to do anything.”
In a phone interview, Reeves said Huckabee told the board members he thought there was “something nefarious” about the criminal justice system in Dumond’s case, and that the rapist got a “raw deal.” Huckabee said he believed Dumond’s sentence, originally a life sentence plus 20 years, was “way out of bounds” for his crime, raping a 17-year-old high school student.
Reeves said he could recall only a few such appeals being made by a governor.
And it’s not just Reeves who’s coming forward to contradict Huckabee’s version of events.
The [parole] board’s decision came after a closed-door, off-the-record meeting with Huckabee and one of his aides in October 1996. During that meeting, former board member Charles Chastain said in 2001, Huckabee “made it obvious that he thought DuMond had gotten a raw deal and wanted us to take another look at it. Another former board member, Deborah Springer Suttlar, told journalist Murray Waas in 2002: “For Gov. Huckabee to say that he had no influence with the board is something that he knows to be untrue. He came before the board and made his views known that [DuMond] should have been paroled . . . .” A third board member, Ermer Pondexter, told Waas in 2002 that she voted for DuMond’s parole because the chairman of the parole board asked her to do so — and that she believed he was “acting on behalf of the governor.”
The smart way out of this was to acknowledge the truth, express regret, and promise voters to learn from the mistake. Instead, Huckabee not only pushed to let a violent criminal out of jail for political reasons, he’s lying about it now.
There are some controversies that are almost impossible to recover from. This is just such a controversy.