Despite Setbacks, NH Dems' Phone Jamming Suit Proceeds

By Paul Kiel - June 16, 2006, 8:07 AM

Yesterday, a judge in New Hampshire decided not to end the Democrats suit against Republicans for the jamming of Democratic phone banks on Election Day, 2002.

The judge did knock off the majority of the suit's claims, including one that the GOP had interfered with voters' right to a free and fair election, but most important for Democrats, 3 of the 8 claims remained.

That means they'll have the opportunity to question higher ranking Republicans, like former RNC Chair Ed Gillespie and former White House staffer Alicia Davis and others on their wish list,  whether they knew anything about the scheme.

Phone-jamming case kept alive

By JOHN DISTASO
Senior Political Reporter
9 hours, 36 minutes ago

Manchester – A judge yesterday refused to end the state Democratic Party’s two-year-old lawsuit against state and national Republicans over an illegal GOP phone-jamming operation conducted on election day 2002.

Hillsborough County Superior Court Judge Philip Mangones quashed five of eight Democratic allegations, however, including claims that the GOP harassed Granite Staters and interfered with their constitutional right to vote when its operatives flooded Democratic and union get-out-the-vote phone lines with hundreds of hang-up calls.

Mangones preserved a Democratic claim 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.”

He also refused to dismiss a Democratic claim that there was a conspiracy to interfere with the telephones, and he agreed with the Democrats’ argument that the interference may be viewed at trial as malicious, possibly making the Democrats eligible for enhanced compensatory damages.

But Mangones refused a Democratic request to dismiss a Republican counterclaim that the Democrats had filed the suit with no legitimate basis. The GOP claims the Democrats abused the legal process by using the lawsuit as a “ploy” to generate bad publicity and “to harm the Republican Party and/or Republican candidates during the November 2004 general election.”

The judge gave the Republicans 30 days to detail exactly how the Democrats abused the system, reserving final judgment.

Paul Twomey, an attorney working with the Democrats, called the 31-page ruling a victory because the suit was kept alive. He said a goal of the suit is to find out more about who may have been behind the phone-jam besides three operatives who have either pled guilty or been found guilty.

The Democrats want to depose high-ranking Republicans, including Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie.

“We’re going forward, and there are still several horses to ride," Twomey said. “We can conduct the same discovery no matter how many counts there are."

The case is scheduled for trial in November.

State Republican legal counsel Ovide Lamontagne said a full dismissal “would have certainly been ideal,” but he said the Democrats’ lawsuit has been gutted.

"The only count left is a (property) trespass claim, which is ancient theory,” he said. “And with what they’ve provided to date, we estimate that if they prove their case, the damages at most for interference with the use of telephones is about $1,000.”

"This case belong in small claims court,” Lamontagne said.

Lamontagne said the dismissals of the constitutional claims shows the lawsuit “is absolutely void of any factual allegation that anyone was denied the right to vote. If they could show by name, by telephone number or some objective reality that one person was denied the right to vote, this would be a different case.’’

But, Lamontagne said, “after four years of intensive federal investigation, they have yet to do that.’’

Lamontagne said that although it is fighting the suit, the state GOP has never condoned the phone-jamming, which the party says was carried out solely by rogue GOP operatives, including former state party executive director Charles McGee.

State Democratic chair Kathy Sullivan countered, “The bottom line is that this is a defeat for the Republican Party. They wanted this case to end and it continues.”