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nates_daisy

Aug 12 2005, 10:15 AM

By JOHN SOLOMON
The Associated Press
Friday, August 12, 2005; 12:33 AM

WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president's 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

James Tobin of Bangor, Maine, is seen is a Dec. 13, 2004 photo as he arrives at U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H.. Tobin, former Bush-Cheney '04 New England regional campaign director, has pleaded innocent and is scheduled to stand trial in September on federal charges related to a conspiracy of illegal phone jamming in a get-out-the-vote operation for Election 2002. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File) (Jim Cole - AP)

The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from the high-powered Washington law firm of Williams & Connolly. The firm's other clients have included former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Republican Party officials said they don't ordinarily discuss specifics of their legal work, but confirmed to The Associated Press they had agreed to underwrite Tobin's defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.

"Jim is a longtime friend who has served as both an employee and an independent contractor for the RNC," a spokeswoman for the RNC, Tracey Schmitt, said Wednesday. "This support is based on his assurance and our belief that Jim has not engaged in any wrongdoing."

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on Election Day 2002, prosecutors allege. Republican John Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire's newest senator.

At the time, Tobin was the RNC's New England regional director, before moving to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

A top New Hampshire Party official and a GOP consultant already have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin's indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.

"The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters ... of their federally secured right to vote," states the latest indictment issued by a federal grand jury on May 18.

The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.

Earlier this week, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a "zero-tolerance policy" for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.

"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position," Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean on Thursday questioned Mehlman's commitment to the policy. "This is just another example of his say one thing, do another strategy. Ken Mehlman tells crowds his party is against voter fraud and intimidation, while in the backrooms he supports Republican officials who engage in these dirty tricks," Dean said.

Dennis Black and Dane Butswinkas, two Williams & Connolly lawyers for Tobin, did not return calls seeking comment. Brian Tucker, a New Hampshire lawyer on the team, declined comment.

James Tobin of Bangor, Maine, is seen is a Dec. 13, 2004 photo as he arrives at U.S. District Court in Concord, N.H.. Tobin, former Bush-Cheney '04 New England regional campaign director, has pleaded innocent and is scheduled to stand trial in September on federal charges related to a conspiracy of illegal phone jamming in a get-out-the-vote operation for Election 2002. (AP Photo/Jim Cole, File) (Jim Cole - AP)

Tobin's lawyers have attacked the prosecution, suggesting evidence was improperly introduced to the grand jury, that their client originally had been promised he wouldn't be indicted and that he was improperly charged under one of the statutes.

Tobin stepped down from his Bush-Cheney post a couple of weeks before the November 2004 election after Democrats suggested he was involved in the phone bank scheme. He was charged a month after the election.

Paul Twomey, a volunteer lawyer for New Hampshire Democrats who are pursuing a separate lawsuit involving the phone scheme, said he was surprised the RNC was willing to pay Tobin's legal bills and that it suggested more people may be involved.

The new development "really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this," Twomey said.

Federal prosecutors have secured testimony from the two convicted conspirators in the scheme directly implicating Tobin.

Charles McGee, the New Hampshire GOP official who pleaded guilty, told prosecutors he informed Tobin of the plan and asked for Tobin's help in finding a vendor who could make the calls that would flood the phone banks.

Allen Raymond, a former colleague of Tobin who operated a Virginia-based telephone services firm, told prosecutors Tobin called him in October 2002, explained the telephone plan and asked Raymond's company to help McGee implement it.

Raymond's lawyer told the court that Tobin made the request for help in his official capacity as the top RNC official for New England and his client believed the RNC had sanctioned the activity.

Found at Washington Post

rox63

Aug 15 2005, 09:55 AM

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on the subject of RNC-approved vote-suppression policies.

http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion...kman/index.html

QUOTE

If words, deeds collide, deeds are better compass

Published on: 08/14/05

The Republican Party would never, ever try to win elections by keeping American citizens from entering the voting booth. It's hateful nonsense to even suggest such a thing.

For example, the suggestion that Georgia Republicans might be trying to suppress Democratic turnout by requiring voters to have state-issued ID to vote is absurd. Party officials are just trying to prevent fraud, and who could argue with that?

The fact that state GOP officials can't cite a single instance of people trying to vote by misrepresenting their identity — that doesn't matter. As Donald Rumsfeld suggested in a different context, the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

And the fact that in that same bill, Georgia Republicans made it much easier to vote by absentee ballots — a method for which there is substantial evidence of large-scale voting fraud in Georgia — that doesn't matter either. The fact that absentee-ballot voters tend to be Republican also played no role in that decision.

"The position of the Republican National Committee is simple," RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman wrote recently. "We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression."

But then there's this troubling case in New Hampshire.

In the 2002 election, with a hard-fought U.S. Senate race at stake, the New Hampshire Democratic Party and the Manchester, N.H., firefighters union set up voter hot lines. If you were elderly, handicapped or just needed a ride to the polls, it didn't matter if you were a Republican or Democrat — all you had to do was call one of those six numbers and a volunteer would pick you up and drive you to the voting booth.

But something went wrong. All day long, someone placed hundreds and hundreds of calls to those hot line numbers, tying up the lines and making it impossible to get through. As soon as a hot line volunteer answered the ring, the callers would hang up. As a result, a lot of voters never got rides to the polls that day.

Now, who would devise a plan so clearly intended to keep people from exercising their democratic right to vote? Certainly not the Republican Party.

Except, there's Charles McGee. He has pleaded guilty for his role in proposing the plan and arranging to have a Utah telemarketing firm make all those jamming phone calls. At the time, he happened to be executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee, and he used party funds to pay the Utah firm.

There's also Allen Raymond. The one-time executive director of the Republican Leadership Council and president of GOP Marketplace, a Republican consulting company in Virginia, is today serving five months for his role in the conspiracy to keep Americans from having the chance to vote.

Of course, these were just two rogue operatives. One did happen to head the state party, but that doesn't mean it was an official GOP operation, right?

Well . . .

Meet James Tobin. He has been charged by a federal grand jury with four felonies for conspiring with Raymond and McGee to keep American citizens from voting, and Raymond and McGee will both testify against him. As the federal indictment alleges, "The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters . . . of their federally secured right to vote."

In 2002, Tobin was New England regional director for the Republican National Committee; in 2004, even after news of this scandal broke, he was named New England chairman for President Bush's campaign.

Raymond and McGee will apparently tell a jury that Tobin approved the plan and helped carry it out, even suggesting the Utah firm that would be able to handle the job. They will also testify that Tobin told them the plan had official RNC approval.

Of course, even that doesn't prove that the RNC sanctioned what happened in New Hampshire. Anybody can say anything about anybody, right?

And Mehlman, the RNC chairman, has certainly made it clear that his party will not tolerate any such effort.

"The right to vote belongs to all of us, and no one has the right to take it away or dilute it by intimidation, fraud or suppression," he wrote last week. "The Republican Party will not rest until this principle is upheld."

Clearly, whatever Tobin was up to in New Hampshire, the RNC had nothing to do with it.

Except that, according to the Associated Press, the Republican National Committee has quietly contributed $722,000 to Tobin's defense.

What's up with that?

—Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column usually appears Mondays and Thursdays.

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