WASHINGTON (Aug. 11) - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Talk about hypocrisy here. Torbin creates this scheme to overwhelm the Democratic phone bank system so that those phone bank systems cannot be used to solicit votes. He gets caught, indicted, and now the Republican Party is paying for Torbin's defense even though the Republican Party stresses a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters. Here is what RNC chairman Ken Mehlman had to say about the story:
"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position," Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.
If this scheme is true, then you've got to wonder what other Republican Party schemes took place in the 2004 elections--especially the rumors of voter suppression in Florida. It is also interesting to note that Torbin "stepped down from his Bush-Cheney post a couple of weeks before the November 2004 election after Democrats suggested he was involved in the phone bank scheme. He was charged a month after the election." He left the position before the election, before the scheme surfaced, and before the Republican Party would have endured the embarrassment of firing him. The story goes on to say that federal prosecutors have secured testimony from convicted conspirators in the scheme directly implicating Torbin.
Charles McGee, the New Hampshire GOP official who pleaded guilty, told prosecutors he informed Tobin of the plan and asked for Tobin's help in finding a vendor who could make the calls that would flood the phone banks.
Allen Raymond, a former colleague of Tobin who operated a Virginia-based telephone services firm, told prosecutors Tobin called him in October 2002, explained the telephone plan and asked Raymond's company to help McGee implement it.
Raymond's lawyer told the court that Tobin made the request for help in his official capacity as the top RNC official for New England and his client believed the RNC had sanctioned the activity.
McGee and Raymond had probably plea-bargained their testimony and cooperation with the feds in exchange for a lesser charges and sentencing. If what they say is credible, then Torbin knew of this scheme and participated in setting it up. And if Raymond is correct in that Torbin made his request as an RNC official, then who else in the Republican Party--besides Torbin--knew or sanctioned this activity? The feds are certainly putting the heat on to Torbin. The next question is, who did Torbin talk to about this scheme? Someone in the Republican Party has to be worried if Torbin talks, otherwise why spend $722,000 of RNC money to defend him?
How high will this scandal go?
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