{"id":1075,"date":"2004-01-12T14:33:13","date_gmt":"2004-01-12T19:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1075.html"},"modified":"2004-01-12T14:33:13","modified_gmt":"2004-01-12T19:33:13","slug":"nick-smith-changes-his-story-about-bribe-offer-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/nick-smith-changes-his-story-about-bribe-offer-again\/","title":{"rendered":"Nick Smith changes his story about bribe offer — again"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you’ve been wondering what the latest is on the Nick Smith bribery story, Slate’s Tim Noah discovered<\/a> late last week that Smith has changed his story — again — about the promise of financial support for his son in exchange for his vote on Bush’s Medicare bill. (If you’re new to this controversy and want background, I’ve written about it a<\/a> few<\/a> times<\/a> before<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

When we first heard from Smith, he said he was offered $100,000 for his vote<\/a>. Smith used the same dollar figure in a radio interview in Michigan<\/a>. He said something similar, but with less specificity, in a Michigan newspaper<\/a> column the day after the Nov. 22 House Medicare vote in which he said, “Bribes and special deals were offered to convince members to vote yes.”<\/p>\n

Realizing that he was accusing his House GOP colleagues of a serious federal crime, Smith backpedaled. After this story started gaining some traction, Smith changed his story<\/a> and said, “[N]o member of Congress made an offer of financial assistance for my son’s campaign in exchange for my vote on the Medicare bill.” Although “[t]he lobbying from members was intense,” Smith insisted that “[n]o specific reference was made to money.”<\/p>\n

No one believed this recantation. Not only had Smith already explained exactly how much he’d been offered as a bribe, there were witnesses<\/a> — including several other Republican lawmakers — who backed up Smith’s original claim.<\/p>\n

In light of this, Smith’s attempt to deny the bribe became, as Tim Noah put it, “impossible to sustain.” So, naturally, Smith is changing his story once again.<\/p>\n

Apparently, the assertion that there was “no specific reference” to money wasn’t quite right. To hear Smith tell it now, someone referenced “money,” but it was kind of by accident.
\n
\n“I was told there would be aggressive, substantial support for my son, Brad [in his race for Congress] if I could vote yes on the bill,” Smith said<\/a> on Jan. 6. “There were offers of endorsements and so maybe a member [of Congress] sitting close by said, ‘Boy that really could be big money.’ Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. But never was I offered any exact amount of money in exchange for my vote.”<\/p>\n

Adding some zeroes to this, the next day, Jan. 7, Smith said a Republican House member told him his support for the Medicare bill “could mean tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but not in the context of a bribe, but because of the strength of the endorsement’s Smith’s son would receive.<\/p>\n

It gets better, or at a minimum funnier. Smith also can explain why he told a Michigan radio station that he was offered $100,000 in exchange for his vote.<\/p>\n

“I read [the $100,000 figure] for the first time in Bob Novak’s column,” Smith said. “I was driving back from the President’s visit to Detroit and talking on my cell phone, driving in Detroit traffic and I repeated that hundred thousand dollar figure. But an exact figure was never offered to me.”<\/p>\n

This is, for lack of a better word, insane. He said he was offered $100,000, but didn’t mean it because he was on his cell phone in Detroit traffic? <\/p>\n

I can’t say that I’ve ever, personally, had to drive in Detroit traffic, but I’ve had to deal with pretty bad traffic in plenty of big cities — Miami, Chicago, DC, New York — and I’ve never once felt compelled to make up dollar amounts regarding bribes I’ve been offered.<\/p>\n

Sorry, Rep. Smith. I still believe the first thing you said, not the bizarre denials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you’ve been wondering what the latest is on the Nick Smith bribery story, Slate’s Tim Noah discovered late last week that Smith has changed his story — again — about the promise of financial support for his son in exchange for his vote on Bush’s Medicare bill. (If you’re new to this controversy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1075\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}