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

Item: Sunday’s Washington Post breaks the story that Sen. Lincoln D. Chafee (R-R.I.) sent $386,000 in payments for “consulting services” to convicted felon James Tobin’s address in Maine. So is Chafee hiring James Tobin? Of course not–all services were provided by James Tobin’s wife Ellen (whose career has involved paper mills rather than politics) and to a political consultant named Kathleen Summers–no connection to James Tobin at all. (The story is archived here, if that other link breaks.)

Item: Kathleen Summers–that name rings a bell, because she showed up at the trial of James Tobin as a surprise witness for the defense, testifying that she (and not phone-jamming) was the reason for a phone call logged between Tobin and already-convicted phone jammer Allen Raymond on October 18, 2002.

In December, 2005, she was able to give testimony under oath about exactly what she and James Tobin discussed in October, 2002. What a memory she must have! No wonder she’s worth so much to Lincoln Chafee! Summers also wrote feelingly in praise of Jim Tobin’s character for his sentencing hearing.

Item: In related news, the NH GOP, which swore it would no longer do business with Chuck McGee’s company Spectrum Printing, just got outed Thursday by John DiStaso for doing business with GOP Print and Mail, a new company just created in the same building as Spectrum Printing (where convicted phone-jammer Chuck McGee is vice president of political and corporate communications) and doing exactly the same kind of work–but of course no affiliation with Mr. McGee.

Same building, same work, but no connection of course to the actual convicted felons who in the same building who specialize in the exact same kind of work.

You have to wonder if these guys could find their ethics using both hands, GPS, and several bloodhounds.

Update: Checking out quarterly FEC filings for NH GOP officials. “Bass for Victory” paid $2160.75 to Spectrum Monthly as recently as 3/28/2006.

So, you didn’t go to journalism school–and nobody but WordPress is going to publish your findings?

If you find a story you care about, stick with it–you’ll be doing what “real reporters” too often can’t do.

Here are some of the things that I did with the NH phone-jamming scandal:

1. Create a timeline with lots of hyperlinks, to help new readers figure out what happened when.
2. Create a reference page with a who’s-who list.
3. Go to public court hearings and
   report on what you find out.
4. Blog quotes from local papers or citizen opinions. That way, even if they disappear into some newspaper’s invisible archives, people can still read the copy that you’ve preserved.
5. When you see something that’s wrong, blog it loud and clear.
6. When you see something that’s fishy, dig into it and blog your discoveries.

Lisa Williams wants me to make the point that “blog journalism” doesn’t just mean copying stuff real journalists dig up. Here are some phone-jamming discoveries I dug up for myself with the help of Google:

• Convicted felon Chuck McGee still depends on NH Republicans for his livelihood.
• James Tobin made major donations to Republican “fixer” Tom Delay and others in the anxious run-up to his indictment.
• Was there a smoking gun in 2004 that would explain the RNC’s eagerness to keep Tobin happy by paying his legal bills?
• Should US Attorney (and Bush appointee) Thomas Colantuono have recused himself from the Tobin investigation?

Soon after my Colantuono blogpost, the senior Democrat in the House Judiciary Committee raised some of the same questions I did, and asked Gonzales to appoint a special prosecutor.

So you never know just who, out there, might be reading your blog!

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 .

“When the phone-jamming happened in 2002, you should have known right away that Republicans did it!” I’m paraphrasing here, not someone from the tinfoil-hat crowd, but Republican lawyers, one expensive gray suit after another, demanding that the Democrats’ phone-jamming civil suit be thrown out of court. Er–maybe–but back in 2002, most election dirty tricks were the work of enthusiasts whose official connection was tenuous or non-existent.*

In two days of hearings on the statute of limitations, Republicans, not Democrats, wanted to find out “what did the other guys know and when did they know it?”

Republicans say the Democrats’ long-postponed suit has run past the statute of limitations because…

• Democrats were remiss by not suspecting {every defendant} when phone lines were jammed on Nov. 5, 2002.
• Democrats were remiss by not suspecting Republican National Committee involvement when they first saw the the GOPMarketplace website in mid-January, 2003, because that website mentions that Allen Raymond had worked for the RNC in the 1990s.
• Democrats were remiss in not doing their own diligent investigation of who was behind the phone-jamming. Communicating with the phone company and the police is not enough. Asking Jayne Millerick (who denied involvement) is not enough. Researching a rumor that turned out to have no foundation is not enough. Multiple letters to the US Attorney and NH Attorney General asking them to investigate…not enough. The burden of proof is on the Democrats to prove that they themselves “diligently” investigated.
• False statements denying knowledge of the phone-jamming may have been made to reporters and the FEC by various NH Republicans–but that doesn’t constitute “fraudulent concealment.”*

I’d still like to transcribe my notes on Kathy Sullivan’s long testimony, which filled in a lot of gaps in the phone-jamming story. Today’s proceedings were also enlivened by another exchange between NH RSC lawyer Ovide Montagne and NH Democrats’ lawyer, which the judge brought to a surprising but very civilly-worded and soft-spoken finish. From my notes:

Judge Mangones: Mr. Lamontagne, I will choose my words carefully. This is not the first time you have engaged in a course of action that has bollixed up the proceedings. [three asterisks] Chuck McGee came here in response to a request from Mr. Williams. You essentially gave him permission to go home. And you did this withough consulting Mr. Williams. In the future, you might want to re-think such behavior.
Attorney Lamontagne: Your honor, if I may…
Judge Mangones: You may not, sir. Sit down, sir.

To clarify, we got a second surprise today. After Finis Williams spent several minutes on the theme that “Chuck McGee told me he would come here today so that he could serve as a witness, but he doesn’t seem to be here…” Ovide Lamontagne finally got up and said that McGee had been there. “But I told him in the hallway that if he hadn’t been subpoenaed, then he didn’t have to stay.” So McGee had simply gone home again.

Readers, bear in mind that I’m transcribing impromptu notes I took on people in fast conversation. I probably don’t have every word exact–but I hope the gist of it survives my transcription. It’s a lot more informative than newspapers will be. For better or worse, today I was the only “reporter.”

* The Democrats allege “fraudulent concealment” against the NH Republican State Committee, but not against John Dowd, its former chair.

* * Obligatory reference to the whispering campaign against John McCain in the presidential primaries of 2000–it wasn’t suspected until long after 2002 that non-fruitcakes would have done something so over-the-top…

[three asterisks] Judge Mangones may have been referring, not to yesterday’s kerfluffle, but to some other episode(s), for example the Republicans’ last-minute failure to produce an expected witness in October, 2004.

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.

Investigators are (finally) heading for Washington, to get White House phone records and sworn statements from top officials, after NH Judge Phillip Mangones today gave a death blow to the long cover-up of NH’s 2002 phone-jamming scandal. NH Republicans–with enthusiastic help from the US Justice Department–have managed to postpone now for many years the Democrats’ efforts to take sworn statements from any of the phone-jamming co-conspirators. Republicans got court orders to postpone the Democrats’ civil suit on the basis that the (very few) criminal defendants pursued by the US DOJ should not have to answer questions under oath for a civil suit.

This morning, this long charade finally came to an end, as Judge Philip Mangones ruled that NH Democrats could now finally pursue their civil suit.

He also granted the Democrats’ itemized request to demand sworn statements from White House record keepers, past and present chairs for the Republican National Committee, and others whose role never drew US DOJ attention despite the evidence and sworn testimony suggesting their involvement.

You’d like to think our government would take more of an interest in election sabotage, but at least Judge Mangones is finally letting the Democrats pursue their own investigation…

Update as of *very* early July 14:

• John DiStaso in the July 14 Union Leader
• Senate Majority July 13 press release on the decision
• Short AP story issued July 13
• Slightly longer and later Reuters story
• Washington Post has the AP and Reuters versions–not sure what it would take to wake up any of their “investigative reporters.”

When does a convicted phone-jammer go out of the business of selling teleservices?

In the case of Allen Raymond’s GOPMarketplace, the shades were pulled down in February 2003, after federal prosecutors declared their intent to start looking into the phone-jamming scandal.

Talk about funny ha-ha, though, John Ashcroft’s Justice Department took its own sweet time about asking actual questions, so all the culprits had a plenty of time to clean up their mess and acquire foggy memories. According to Chuck McGee’s sworn testimony, the FBI finally got around to interviewing him more than a year after the phone-jamming took place.

Now Hilary Sargent and the sleuths at Senate Majority have discovered something the prosecutors never seemed to notice. Allen Raymond shut down GOPMarketplace in February, 2003…but he opened its virtual twin in March, 2003. “Telus, LLC” has the same mailing address, same personnel, same text on the website…

I’d be curious to see its client list, wouldn’t you?

Today’s DOJ press release contains what they may not realize is a NH-Abramoff bombshell:

White House Office of Political Affairs (OPA) staff member Leonard Rodriguez … told the OIG that he kept Abramoff aware of information relevant. to Guam, including potential nominees for the U.S. Attorney position. Rodriguez said he did so at the behest of Ken Mehlman, the White House Political Director, who “recommended or suggested that I reach out to “make Jack aware” of issues related to Guam…

On October 23, 2002, Rodriguez sent an e-mail to Abramoff, with a copy to Ken Mehlman, in which Rodriguez stated that he had tried to reach Abramoff by telephone to introduce himself. Rodriguez also stated that he oversaw the U.S. territories for OPA and invited Abramoff to “feel free to contact me directly for any requests from Guam.”

So on

Ken Mehlman lets Abramoff know that the White House Office of Public Affairs is handing his Guam sweatshop clients control of the island. A mere five days later, on

Abramoff clients started pouring thousands of dollars into the hands of NH Republicans, money that ultimately helped pay for the phone-jamming.

I think this may be what Allen Raymond meant when he told the Boston Globe that the federal government was being “monetized.”

Thanks to Josh Marshall for flagging the DOJ’s report.

Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Phillip Mangones handed down a 31-page ruling on the civil suit growing out of the phone-jamming scandal. NH Republicans had asked Mangones to dismiss the suit.

Mangones dismissed 5 of 8 Democrats’ claims but said the case could go forward on these three claims:

1. That the Republicans “intentionally and repeatedly interfered with the use of their telephone systems, rendering them essentially useless, apparently over a not-insubstantial period of time on election day 2002.”
2. That there was a conspiracy to interfere with the telephones.
3. That the interference may be viewed at trial as malicious, possibly making the Democrats eligible for enhanced compensatory damages.

Mangones neither accepted nor dismissed a Republican counterclaim: that Democrats had filed the suit with no legitimate basis, intending primarily “to harm the Republican Party and/or Republican candidates during the November 2004 general election.” Instead, the judge gave Republicans 30 days to make a case that Democrats abused the system.

Republicans (and the AP) spin this as a Republican victory: “most” counts were dismissed.

Democrats have a different point of view: that Republicans have spent thousands of dollars on lawyers to shut down the Democrats’ investigation, but despite those efforts the case keeps rolling forward. NH attorney Paul Twomey told John DiStaso that the Democrats filed their suit to uncover the truth about those responsible for the phone-jamming. Said Twomey, “We can conduct the same discovery no matter how many counts there are.”

Allen Raymond, paid $15,600 to jam NH phones on Election Day 2002 and now fresh out of prison, gave a frank interview to Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe, saying that he felt he had to participate or risk losing business with the increasingly-aggressive Karl-Rove era RNC.

Raymond says that when James Tobin asked him to help Chuck McGee jam some phones, he assumed that Tobin had already consulted his lawyers about such a plan. (RNC lawyers, like his RNC supervisors, claim Tobin never consulted them about the phone-jamming.)

Allen Raymond, who is still a defendant in the NH Democrats’ civil suit, is understandably careful about what he says. This quote, however, deserves wider circulation:

“Republicans have treated campaigns and politics as a business, and now are treating public policy as a business, looking for the types of returns that you get in business, passing legislation that has huge ramifications for business,” he said. “It is very much being monetized, and the federal government is being monetized under Republican majorities.”

Wouldn’t you have to call that a “money quote”?