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, one of whom went to jail.
One of the key lingering questions has always been whether the White House was involved in the phone-jamming scandal. Based on what we know, the Bush gang’s ties to this mess are a little ambiguous. For example, on Election Day 2002, while James Tobin, the regional chairman of Bush’s presidential campaign, was criminally interfering with the election process, he called the White House 22 times. What’d they talk about? What’s more, when the Republican National Committee intervened to pay the legal fees for Tobin, then-RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie conceded that he kept the White House informed about the payments. Why?
Congressional Dems tried to generate interest in all of this, but congressional Republicans refused to ask any questions (natch). It’s five years later, but some of these questions are being raised anew. The House Judiciary Committee is planning to investigate, with an emphasis on two key questions.
First, whether top officials [in Bush’s Justice Department] blocked a New Hampshire prosecutor from pursuing leads involving the White House and both the Republican National and Senatorial Committees.
Second, whether the Department purposely delayed prosecution of the one defendant with ties to the RNC and NRSC until after the 2004 election. The Department did attempt on October 15, 2004, just over two weeks before the election, to block depositions of key witnesses in a civil suit brought by the New Hampshire Democratic Party.
The answers could prove to be kind of interesting, even if it is too late.
For what it’s worth, last year, the NYT’s Adam Cohen noted the similarities between this story and a certain other second-rate burglary.
1. The return of the “second-rate burglary.” The New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal is being dismissed as small-time, state-level misconduct, but it occurred at a critical moment in a tough election.
In November 2002, Republicans were intent on winning a Senate majority so they would control the White House and both houses of Congress. They saw the Sununu-Shaheen race as pivotal. On Election Day morning, the phone lines were jammed at the Democratic offices and at a get-out-the-vote operation run by a firefighters’ union. The police were called, and the lines were eventually freed up. The election wasn’t as close as expected. Mr. Sununu won, and Republicans retook the Senate.
2. The return of the high-priced lawyer. Aficionados of the Watergate connection like to point out that one of the first clues that the Watergate burglars were not ordinary small-time crooks was the presence of a slick lawyer in an expensive suit at their first court appearance. In the New Hampshire case, Mr. Tobin was represented by Williams & Connolly, a pre-eminent white-collar criminal law firm. The legal bills, which published estimates have put at more than $2.5 million, were paid by the Republican National Committee. Democrats are asking why the committee footed the bill, if Mr. Tobin was a rogue actor who implicated the national party in a loathsome and embarrassing crime.
3. The return of “follow the money.” (As if it ever left.) New Hampshire Democrats pored over the filings of the New Hampshire Republican Party and found three contributions for $5,000 each, all shortly before the election. One was from Americans for a Republican Majority, Tom DeLay’s political action committee. The other two were from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, tribes that were clients of Jack Abramoff. Those checks add up almost exactly to the cost of the phone jamming.
Republicans say that a lot of money flows into a campaign and that there is nothing to tie these checks to the phone jamming. But New Hampshire Democrats argue that it is highly unusual for Indian tribes to contribute to a state party in a state that does not have federally recognized Indian tribes or Indian gambling.
4. Does anybody get to ask: “What did they know, and when did they know it?” Democrats would, of course, like to connect the jamming to the White House, and this month they found a possible link. The Senate Majority Project, a pro-Democratic campaign group, examined the phone records that came out in Mr. Tobin’s case and found that he made dozens of calls to the White House’s office of political affairs right when he was executing the phone-jamming scheme. Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman who was the White House political director at the time, insists that close contact of this kind between political operatives is the norm on Election Day, and that none of the calls mentioned the jamming.
Would anyone seriously be surprised if the White House was involved in this criminal enterprise? One wonders what could have come of this, had there been a Democratic Congress at the time.