Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

The slow-walk of justice for Republican wrongdoers has been setting some kind of a record in NH. Tiny blurb in Thursday’s Union Leader: A new trial for accused 2002 GOP phone jamming conspirator James Tobin is expected in either December or January. Tobin’s conviction on phone harassment and conspiracy charges was reversed by a federal appeals court in March and remanded to the trial court… Briefs will begin to be filed in September.

So–federal crime in November, 2002 as paid professional staffers for the NH Republican State Committee and the RNC conspire to jam Democrats’ phones on Election Day. Eventually, one FBI agent in Boston is told to look into this on a part-time basis, but instructed not to follow up on leads to Washington, DC because “other agents” will cover such leads. Such leads, if followed by anyone, yield no indictments, testimony, or the slightest evidence that other FBI agents worked on the case.

Wait two years

In 2004, James Tobin was serving as New England chair for the Bush/Cheney campaign when hints of his phone-jamming role leaked into the press. Conveniently, he was not indicted until December, 2004, more than two years after the phone-jamming. It took only a few days from Tobin’s indictment until millions of dollars from the RNC started flowing that month into payments for his defense lawyers. But…

Wait a year

… it took another year for the case to come to trial. Tobin was found guilty in December, 2005 by 12 NH jurors. And Tobin’s lawyers, within a few days, had transformed their hundreds of pages of objections into multiple appeals of Tobin’s conviction.

Wait a year

In January, 2007, a bizarre spectacle played out in Federal Appeals Court in Boston–watching it unfold, I predicted that Tobin’s conviction would be overturned–as it was, on very narrow procedural grounds, in March, 2007. The judgment clearly stated that Tobin could be re-tried.

Moving comparatively quickly, when events in March get some follow-up in July!

So now, it seems, in December 2007 or January 2008, NH will re-try Mr. Tobin. Will he finally take the stand and respond to some questions about the crime that took place more than five years in the past? Will the many links from Mr. Tobin to his bosses in Washington, DC get any exploration? Will the lonnnggg slow-walk of the phone-jamming case finally speed up now that a pardon from Bush would need to come before January of 2008?

Wait a few more months…

…and these questions will be answered.

1950s kitchen with wringer-washer in background

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.

The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.

What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH): “Our society treats both perjury and obstruction of justice as extraordinarily serious crimes, ones for which people are put in prison,” Gregg told the AP.

Senator John E Sununu (R-NH) strongly agrees: “These acts are not merely technical violations of federal law; they demonstrate a broad and consistent pattern of behavior designed to corrupt our system of due process.”

Is impeachment called for? Sununu says it is:

“The President has undermined the judicial process, shown contempt for judges and officers of the court, and failed egregiously to uphold his oath of office. The President should be impeached. Those who will vote to exonerate a President who has shown such contempt for our judicial system either discard the evidentiary record, or willingly betray their own oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States.”

Gregg says so too:

“In a country based on the system of laws, which is really the great gift given to us under the terms of our Constitution, there needs to be a consistency of application. The idea that all people are equal under the law is not a relative term.”

Bzzt–thank you for playing! These quotes all come from 1999, when perjury and obstruction of justice were dead serious matters to Republicans Gregg and Sununu–and their target was President William Jefferson Clinton. But perjury and obstruction of justice are much more forgivable now–and how sincerely President Bush agrees with them!

Thanks to Dean Barker at Blue Hampshire for getting me started on this!

Energy in New Hampshire

Originally uploaded by John Edwards 2008.

Because my little sister gave me one. But that’s not the only reason…

I’ve been trying to hold back on supporting a candidate for President this time–because I remember way back to the 2000 primary in NH, when Bradley vs. Gore got so hot that many Bradley-ites (OK, my family) ended up disillusioned and sore at heart.

Yes, in November of 2000, my mom drove to the polls and cast a vote for Al Gore–while holding her nose. But she didn’t give money to Gore. She didn’t campaign for him. If election day had been rainy, she might have stayed home. Configure my mom as a lot more unhappy Bradley-ites– you do know that Bush won NH in 2000?

In 2004, Kerry beat Howard Dean in NH–but Kerry didn’t break the hearts of us Dean-supporters. And NH Democrats later went all out to help Kerry beat Bush in the *real* election in 2004.

I like John Edwards. I like Barack Obama. I like Hillary Clinton. (Not necessarily in that exact order.) It saddens me that Obama and Clinton staffers are taking nasty punches at each other’s candidates. I like it that Edwards’s staffers seem to be pro-John, not anti-Barack or anti-Hillary.

Lake Massabesic, springtime 2007

Originally uploaded by Broompl.

Scrawny NH pine trees and pale springtime sky–Lake Massabesic reflects them.

Tonight I’m missing my beautiful NH, even though I now enjoy similar cold, wet springtime in Massachusetts. (My daffodils are coming up, but no buds yet!)

Lake Massabesic provides drinking water to my hometown of Manchester, NH. My raffish and beloved great-uncle Joseph P Devine and his wife, the former Mae Kelly, lived right on that lakefront, when I was a little girl. Of course, it is forbidden to swim in that water–but not to sail boats on it.

Let me digress to say more about my Uncle Joe, aka within the family as “Darlin’ Joe.” Much more than my grandfather Maurice Francis Devine (his baby brother) Uncle Joe carried on the traditions of his Irish parents–and he was their favorite. He and Aunt Mae took over both the family businesses that had grown out of the very successful carpentry trade built up by Patrick Devine–the Devine Funeral Home (because carpenters build lots of coffins) and the Devine Travel Bureau (because recent immigrants want to take those coffins home to be buried in Ireland.)

But whenever the humor was upon Uncle Joe, he and Aunt Mae would shutter both those businesses (which shared one building) and gather up some of the many children who loved them both for some new adventure. Often they’d take a whole bunch of us to Hampton Beach, bringing us home bright-red with sunburn, full of lobster dinners and saltwater taffy.

Once they completely terrified my poor parents by keeping us out until something like 2 a.m. at a drive-in movie where we saw a wonderful double-feature of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald. My mother assumed that “dinner and a movie” was an event that would get her four children home by maybe, at the latest, 9 p.m.

Now, with that preparation, I hope my dear readers will not be shocked to learn that on one very hot day in one long-ago summer, my Uncle Joe took us four Devine kids on a boatride onto Lake Massabesic, in which, I repeat, you are not allowed to swim. We were all wearing life jackets because you must, on a boatride.

In the middle of Lake Massabesic, Uncle Joe stopped. “Now,” he reminded us, “swimming is forbidden here. But sometimes it just happens … that you fall off a boat!” He then picked me up and threw me far into the water! Yes, remarkably, all four Devine children “fell” into Lake Massabesic on that hot day and had to swim back to the boat.

Not that I’m recommending to anyone else to be as naughty as my Uncle Joe. But now, looking back, I realize just how lucky I was to have known him.

I’ve been DailyKossing my phone-jamming investigation posts recently–the latest one (even I admit) is incredibly geekish–my 2-page deconstruction of the 20-page appeals court decision.

I don’t expect “real reporters” who arrive at the NH phone-jamming from “USAgate” to know where all the bodies are buried, either from Tobin’s original trial in December 2005, or from his Tobin’s January 2007 appeal, when I was the only “reporter” present. So my new Daily Kos post is a “reporter service” piece, I admit that.

But such are the pangs of vanity that it hurts anyway that only five people have “recommended” that diary post in the hour since I first put it up on Kos.

Looking on the bright side, if the US Appeals Court was going to set just one defendant free, James Tobin seems like a really decent guy–aside from his unwillingness to help implicate co-conspirators higher up in the RNC.

Two pieces of blockbuster news today in the ongoing NH phone-jamming scandal.

1) NH Democrats detail, in 10 damning pages, the evidence the NH’s US Attorney Thomas Colantuono stone-walled and “slow-walked” the investigation of the 2002 Election Day crime where the NH Republican State Committee paid a Virginia telemarketing firm $15,600 (having just received $15,000 from Abramoff clients), some of which went to pay an Idaho telemarketing firm to make repeated hang-up phone calls to Democrats’ ride to the polls lines. (Josh Marshall posted that 10page document as 10 html pages; it’s here as one 10-page pdf file.)

2) James Tobin’s conviction has been overturned by the US Appeals Court, on the grounds the NH’s US Attorney Thomas Colantuono chose the wrong statute to use in prosecuting him. I did predict this result in January, after the appeals court hearing at which I was the only “reporter.”

Update:Here’s a text file of the court’s opinion. They don’t acquit Tobin, but remand his case back to the courts of NH to be re-tried. Poor Mr. Tobin.

Update: Yet more documents :

• 20030207Union Leader Article first public report of phone-jamming on Election Day 2002 (pdf)
• 20030210 Democrats ask US Attorney to investigate phone jamming (pdf)
• 20031216 McGees statement to FBI (pdf)
• 20041015Motion to Intervene & Stay Discovery.pdf
• 20050512RqSpecPros.pdf
• 20051205Tobin Trial Re Darrell Henry.pdf
• 20061004Tobin Legal Bills in relation to payments to NE Strategies.pdf
• 20061013Darrell HenryDepositionTranscript.pdf
• Lobbying contract of NH Senator John E Sununu’s father John E Sununu (2002)
• Darrell Henry American Gas Assoc.doc
• 20070321 Democrats ask Senator Leahy to investigate DOJ handling of phone jamming (pdf)

How do our new Democratic Senate and Congress look to the many who have so much to hide?

Scarily revealing is the oh-so-subtle promo for DC white-shoe lawfirm Covington and Burling co-authored by one of the many high-priced DC lawyers who worked for the RNC on the NH phone-jamming, one Robert Kelner.

Phone-jamming fans may recall that Kelner let slip some embarassing info to a TV station in NH–making it clear that the RNC’s defense lawyers were fully informed about DOJ investigations into the phone-jamming’s White House connection, although said investigations were kept a deep secret from Democrats.

Kelner’s remark inspired a Freedom of Information Request to the DOJ (pdf here), filed on April 18, 2006 but not yet answered by the DOJ….

(Quotes, etc. below the fold at my DailyKos page.)

Hey–what about the US Attorneys who didn’t get fired? Paul Krugman is asking (free link here)–and it’s a good question. Check out the US Attorney in charge of the NH phone-jamming, Thomas J Colantuono. Does Gonzales give prizes for slow response to Republican dirty tricks? It took Colantuono’s people more than a year before the FBI questioned their top/only suspect in the NH phone-jamming, a crime by Republicans.

But in other matters, Colantuono could move fast. Just before the 2004 elections, he moved fast to block Democrats from questioning phone-jamming suspects–and fast again to file corruption charges against a NH Democrat.

In 2006, right after the Democrats’ landmark electoral victory, Colantuono also moved fast to shut down his phone-jamming enquiries, making a guilty plea deal with the last defendant that gave the Feds nothing and the Republicans everything.

More detail on this sordid story on DailyKos.

Mysterious burglars just hit NH Democratic HQ. “Some items” were taken, but nobody’s saying what. The burglars didn’t take donors’ credit card info. They didn’t hit other offices in the same building. Asked if the break-in seemed politically motivated, police refused comment.

Hmmm. Back in December, TPMMuckraker declared the phone-jamming mystery had ended, after a statement that the $15,000 of Abramoff money that “helped” to pay the $15,600 phone jamming tab were just passed along by staffers for Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH)–but Gregg himself had no knowledge about the phone jamming.

Well, who ever cared if Judd Gregg knew about the phone jamming? What we cared about was if Abramoff knew about it…and why the Republican National Committee chose to spend millions of their donors’ dollars buying high-priced attorneys for James Tobin.

It will be interesting to find out what motivated this very recent “second-rate burglary.”