What voting scandal has the Republican National Committee paid $722,000 (and counting) to keep under wraps? And how are they keeping it out of the national press?
RNC bigwig James Tobin (says
his Federal indictment) arranged for thousands of hang-up calls from a phone bank in Idaho, blocking Democrats’ efforts to give people rides to the polls and swinging a hotly contested 2002 Senate race to the Republican candidate.
If such dirty tricks aren’t official RNC policy, why is the RNC paying all Tobin’s legal fees?
Within days after Tobin’s indictment, RNC cash started paying for top DC lawyers to defend him. (Story here, or if that’s under firewall here.)
How can this blatant attempt to buy Tobin’s silence be a non-story?
How can the
Boston Globe treat it as a “New Hampshire” story. But wait–that most recent Boston Globe story fails completely to mention that the RNC was discovered (just ten days earlier) to be secretly funding Tobin’s full legal defense.
It also fails to mention that the Federal prosecutor (Todd Hinnen) who got Tobin indicted has been summarily pulled off the case.
This is real news, folks–please, won’t somebody cover it?
* The blocked phones were intended to provide rides to the polls for voters with no cars. A similar, non-partisan rides-to-the-polls line run by local firefighters was also jammed by the Republican effort.
On a related note, here’s a
pdf of multiple Republican tactics to disrupt the 2004 election by preventing people from voting including:
- Failure to send out absentee ballots to Democrats
- Allocating many more voting machines per capita to Republican districts, so that voters in Democratic districts had to wait in line up to 5 hours in order to vote
- Misleading mailings to minority districts, saying for example that the date of the election had been changed to November 3