I’ve been blogging the NH phone-jamming scandal since February of 2003.
On Election Day, 2002, Republicans in NH paid telemarketers in Idaho to make hang-up calls to Democrats in NH, jamming their telephones and blocking rides to the polls. In fact, Republicans felt so strongly about winning that election that they also jammed the non-partisan get-out-the-vote phones of the Manchester, NH, firefighters’ union–but that’s not the scandal here.
Nearly all the $15,600 to pay for those phone calls arrived in NH just before Election Day, from two of the dirtiest names in GOP politics–$10,000 from clients of convicted-felon Jack Abramoff and $5,000 from criminally-indicted Tom DeLay–but that’s not the scandal here.
The Republican National Committee spent more than $2 million on partner-level Washington, DC lawyers for their former employee James Tobin–now also a convicted felon, despite all those lawyers, paralegals, and jury consultants.
NH and national Republicans continue to stonewall and to blame NH Democrats for persisting in asking still-unanswered questions about who did this, who paid for it, who knew about it–but that’s not the scandal here.
The scandal is that this has never received the national news coverage it deserves. No Woodward, no Bernstein, has tried to dig into this story. James Tobin made 75 calls to the White House while this was in progress–the RNC decision to pay for Tobin’s lawyers was cleared through the White House–the US Attorney for the State of NH helped NH Republicans block the inquiries of NH Democrats–and each new revelation gets hidden away as a regional NH story, or shoe-horned into four paragraphs from the AP.
That, to my mind, is the real phone-jamming scandal.
For Dan Gillmor’s unconference on citizen media (at Harvard Law School tomorrow, H20Town’s Lisa Williams will call for a few words about how this citizen-reporter has followed the NH phone-jamming scandal for 3+ years.
Update, many many thanks to Lisa and Dan for letting me share this story with such a wonderful audience. Doc Searls live-blogged it .