Speaking of White House involvement in the NH phone-jamming scandal, guess which White House official has promised to headline a fundraiser to help the NH GOP cover the legal bills they’ve been running up since this felony?
Karl Rove, the architect (in 2001) of the 72-hour task force–an all-out pre-election push to victory that got its national rollout in 2002, perhaps coincidentally the year that the then-Executive Director of the NH GOP Chuck McGee decided to try jamming NH Democrats’ phones.
The NH Republicans were keeping the name of their June 12 headliner quiet. After Democrats outed them, GOP leaders told John DiStaso of the Union Leader that the $70,000 they hope to raise from Rove’s visit has “absolutely nothing to do” with their roughly $80,000 legal fees for defending themselves against the Democrats’ civil suit.
And those legal bills just keep getting bigger. Several defendants’ lawyers were in the audience during James Tobin’s three-hour long sentencing hearing, and presumably billing those hours, on May 17.
Does Karl Rove’s assistance to the NH GOP also have “absolutely nothing to do” with James Tobin’s phone calls to the White House? Does Karl Rove also have “absolutely nothing to do” with RNC chair Ed Gillespie’s unnamed White House contact, the person who gave him the nod to pay Tobin’s lawyers?
In related news, there’s a good editorial today in the Portsmouth Seacoast News:
No time in jail is good time, but we believe 10 months in a federal prison is too light a sentence for James Tobin…We also believe there is more to this story and that Tobin did not act in a vacuum. Phone records show multiple calls between New Hampshire Republicans and the White House in the days surrounding the phone-jamming incidents, but the details of those calls remain a mystery.
Now we find out that former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove, who remains embroiled in his own controversy regarding the outing of a CIA agent, will be coming to New Hampshire shortly to fund-raise for the state Republican Party, whose coffers have been decimated by the costs of legal efforts to have Tobin, McGee and Raymond exonerated.
The fact that the man who virtually created the George W. Bush persona is working so hard to undo the financial harm done by the phone-jamming scandal raises even more questions about White House involvement…
There is a strategy that has been used by those in power in Washington for years that involves the sacrifice of subordinates in order to halt investigations. They claim the culprits have been punished so there is no need to look into the matter any further.
There is enough information out there to believe that is what is going on in the phone-jamming scandal. We believe the future of the Republican Party and this country hinge on getting a definitive answer on possible White House involvement in this operation, and we will pursue every means at our disposal to make sure that happens.
We hope others with more political clout join us in that effort.
* Yes, that Karl Rove:
Inside [his office], Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. “We will f— him. Do you hear me? We will f— him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever f—ed him!”
Ron Suskind, Esquire, January 2003, “Why Are These Men Laughing?”