| July 20, Manchester, NH: A nasty start to the latest phone-jamming hearing…with funny lawyering both peculiar and ha-ha. That’s the short version of what I saw in Judge Philip Mangones’s Courtroom #2 of NH’s Hillsborough County Courthouse.
At stake: will years of stone-walling the Democrats’ civil suit now pay off for the phone-jammers with complete amnesty? Republicans say it should, based on NH’s three-year statute of limitation. |
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Josh Roger covered the hearing for NPR, Anne Saunders was there for AP, Hilary Sargent was there for Senate Majority, and somebody from WGIR had a microphone. The RNC and NRSC had fresh lawyers flown in from DC, with reservations home again last night. (I wonder if they’ll show up for Friday’s hearing.)
James Tobin‘s NH lawyer was there, but his DC ones were absent and so was he. Chuck McGee showed up “pro se,” listening stony-faced to the story of how his phone-jamming played out in the lives of real people.
Ovide P Lamontagne, whose ties to US Attorney Tom Colantuono may have helped the NH Republican State Committee throw delays into the path of the civil suit, represented the NHRSC by (among other things) determinedly mispronouncing the name of Allen Raymond’s company GOPMarketplace “gopp marketplace.” (I’m told he also likes to refer to the Democratic party as “the Democrat party,” on the grounds that they’re not democratic; I look forward to hearing him do this but he didn’t yesterday.)
Lamontagne also may or may not have been the author of a clever trick that forced the hearing to spill over into an extra day of testimony. As the hearing began, NH Democratic Party attorney Finis Williams told the court that Lamontagne had assured him only the federal defendants–Tobin, the RNC, and the NSRC–were claiming the statute of limitations applied to them. Lamontagne leaped out of his seat to say that Williams was mistaken. The NHRSC, and in fact all the other defendants, had “decided” they should be included in statutory relief, based on a wide variety of different reasons and different cut-off dates.
Williams was visibly surprised and upset, saying that he had brought evidence to argue the federal cases only. Spirited argle-bargle then ensued* — both Williams and Lamontagne seemed to believe that Williams would now have to argue against all the different defendants that day, using only evidence that he’d already brought with him. It would have been a very cute trick, if it was a trick,* * and if it worked. Judge Mangones intervened between the combatants, assuring Williams that he would have time, on a future court date if necessary, to present all his material.
That’s enough for one blogpost–more after this afternoon’s hearing!
* After the judge departed at five o’clock, Lamontagne was still defending himself, possibly to his own group of co-lawyers now stuck with an extra court date they hadn’t expected, “I never told him that! I didn’t say that! That’s not what I said!”
* * The opening minutes of James Tobin’s trial were marked by two similar situations. First, an (alleged) verbal promise by Tobin’s attorneys to deliver a key piece of evidence fell through. (Dane Butswinkas told the court that the RNC had Tobin’s calendar “somewhere,” but he couldn’t get it.) Next, just before prosecutor Nicholas Levchuk was about to begin his opening statement, Butswinkas objected to a small piece of text on a large poster Levchuk had planned to use as a visual aid. Surprised, Levchuk asked if he could meet the objection by covering or blotting out that piece of text. Butswinkas instead demanded that Levchuk should make his opening statement without the visual aid he had built it around. And Levchuk did so–he had no other choice.