On the last day of testimony in James Tobin’s trial, his defense lawyers surprised the US Attorney with a brand-new witness, GOP activist Kathleen Summers, who testified that Tobin’s October 18 phone call to Allen Raymond was made at her request–and she had a piece of October 18 email supporting her statement.
The US Attorney was completely blind-sided by this testimony. They had leaned on that two-minute phone call again and again as their one piece of corroborating evidence for Allen Raymond’s claim that James Tobin had specifically asked him to help Chuck McGee to jam Democrats’ phones.*
Ironically, October 18 was never a very good guess for the timing of Tobin’s phone call to Allen Raymond. McGee testified he got the idea from a Democratic get-out-the-vote pamphlet. NH Democrats don’t have the money to mail out such pamphlets to voters in mid-October. McGee testified that he had tried to remember when, exactly, he talked with Tobin. All he could remember was that it happened on a weekend when Rudolph Giuliani, President Bush, and Laura Bush were all visiting NH. Minimal googling reveals that Giuliani visited NH in 2002 on the weekend before Election Day–and only on that weekend:
- Nov 1 (Fr) GW Bush at Pease for one hour
- Nov 2 (Sa) Laura Bush in Nashua with Sununu
- Nov 4 (Mo) Giuliani in Nashua for Sununu
- Nov 5 (Tu) Election Day, phone-jamming
The Senate Majority Project’s Exhibit A shows James Tobin was in NH every day from Nov. 1 through Nov. 4. If Chuck McGee first told Tobin his plan at this time, all of a sudden lots of things start to make more sense:
- Why McGee didn’t tell his boss John Dowd of the plan until November 4
- Why Allen Raymond consented to run the operation based on email sent to him, and a check FedExed to him, on November 4. If the plot was hatched in October, wouldn’t Raymond have demanded to be paid up front?
- Why James Tobin’s call to Raymond would have been made in early November rather than mid-October.
This blogpost is long enough, but it all makes sense this way. Chuck McGee has lunch with James Tobin and hard-nosed lobbyist Darrell Henry on October 23. (I Flickred scans of both sides of that envelope.) Their conversation suggests to him that James Tobin is the kind of person who might be sympathetic to his phone-jamming idea. This meeting also creates some honest confusion in Chuck McGee’s mind that he might have talked with Tobin in mid-October.
Roll on to the weekend before election. McGee runs into Tobin and floats his new idea–Tobin quickly passes it off to Allen Raymond, a former colleague who’s just (narrowly) escaped as an unindicted co-conspirator in a different telemarketing scam.
On Election Day, when the phone-jamming plot gets stymied, McGee complains to Darrell Henry because they already know each other from that Oct. 23 lunch. As to how Darrell Henry knew about the phone plot–it’s just one more thing that the US Attorney’s office ought to have figured out, but didn’t.
* Tobin’s lawyers strongly implied that Raymond was lying–and they kept James Tobin carefully off the stand so that nobody could ask whether he had or hadn’t. But here’s what Raymond said, way back when Tobin’s name was still a secret closely held by the Republicans and the US Attorney: (Manchester Union Leader, July 13, 2004):
At Raymond’s plea hearing on June 30, Hinnen told U.S. District Court Judge Joseph DiClerico Jr., that in late October 2002, Raymond “received a call from a former colleague who was then an official in a national political organization. The official indicated that he had been approached . . . by an employee of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee with an idea that might give New Hampshire Republican candidates an edge over New Hampshire Democratic candidates in the upcoming election” — jamming their phone banks.