How quickly Kathie Summers seems to forget…
For the sentencing phase of James Tobin’s trialin April, 2006, she wrote a five(!)-page letter full of warm memories of her eight years as his friend and business associate, including…
- Living in the Tobin house for months
- The Tobins’ frequent offers of personal, professional, and financial help
- Being an intimate part of the Tobins’ family life, to the point of going along on their son’s looking-at-college tour this spring
And yet, only 4 months later, when the Washington Post‘s David Farenthold starts asking questions about why Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee recently sent $386,000 to the home address of convicted phone-jammer James Tobin, Kathie Summers steps up to say that money is hers. Oh, ok, maybe she worked just a little bit with Ellen, but Ellen is just “a friend whom she recruited..during a ski trip.”
So does she know the Tobins a little bit, or a lot? Or does how well she knows them depend on who asks her that question?
On December 8, 2005, Kathleen Summers appeared as a defense witness at James Tobin’s trial, swearing under oath that she knew exactly why James Tobin had phoned Allen Raymond on October 18, 2002. Her testimony was probably vital in making the jury decide to find Tobin not guilty on the most serious charge against him.
Update: I now have that day’s official transcript. Summers testified that she was close to the Tobins, both politically and personally. Her testimony about the phone call in 2002 came as a surprise to prosecution attorneys, who complained repeatedly that the defense kept blindsiding them with new “evidence”–in this case, an email from October, 2002, which mentions neither James Tobin nor Allen Raymond, but which allegedly inspired Summers to ask Tobin to phone the RLC, where Raymond served as executive director.
Meanwhile, Chafee’s campaign is also having some memory problems, telling the Providence Journal on Monday that they knew nothing about Summers or Tobin, and were happily paying $386k to “Ellen Hall”, which I assume is the maiden name of Jim Tobin’s wife Ellen.
The Chafee team needs to get their story straight, because the Washington Post story, just one day earlier, quotes their campaign manager saying the money went to buy expertise from Summers.
Republican memory loss–is it contagious?
I uploaded page 1 of Kathie’s five-page letter to my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=210205681&size=o
This letter appears as pp 126-130 of Docket item 186 (part 4, if you download it from Pacer), in the federal criminal trial US vs. James Tobin, Case 1:04-cr-00216-SM.