We Be Jammin'

A new book out by Allen Raymond, one of the ringleaders of the 2002 New Hampshire phone-jamming case, has led to new scrutiny, and it's about time. This case really does encapsulate the whole Bush Administration: vote fraud, lawbreaking, ruthless partisanship, perversion of justice for political ends, and the arrogant belief that Republicans are above the law.

A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond really sounds like a guy who's been reformed by having the Republicans dump the whole scandal on him. He's an insider who is blowing the whistle on the illegal tactics they use to get their people elected.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the Republican National Committee's northeast regional director [...]

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day without, — at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic party, said that phone records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the jamming.

John Sununu ended up winning this race by only 19,000 votes (ironically, we could see a rematch between him and Jeanne Shaheen next November). Obviously the phone-jamming had an impact. And today McClatchy writes that the Justice Department interfered to slow down the case so it wouldn't coincide with the 2004 elections.

While there were guilty pleas in the New Hampshire investigation prior to the 2004 presidential election, involvement of the national GOP wasn't confirmed. A Manchester, N.H., policeman quickly traced the jamming to Republican political operatives in 2003 and forwarded the evidence to the Justice Department for what ordinarily would be a straightforward case.

However, the official, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, told McClatchy that senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry. The official didn't know whether top department officials ordered the delays or what motivated those decisions.

The official said that Terry O'Donnell, a former Pentagon general counsel who was representing Tobin, was in contact with senior department officials before Tobin was indicted.

In October, the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation to determine whether partisan politics undermined the federal probe.

The official said that department officials rejected prosecutor Todd Hinnen's push to bring criminal charges against the New Hampshire Republican Party.

Weeks before the 2004 election, Hinnen's supervisors directed him to ask a judge to halt action temporarily in a Democratic Party civil suit against the GOP so that it wouldn't hurt the investigation, although Hinnen had expressed no concerns that it would, the official said.

Read that whole thing, it's a window into how the Bush Justice Department has always operated.

Republicans have won elections in the past in part because they are more willing to push the boundaries of the law and stop and nothing to get their people elected. We need eternal vigilance and continued investigations to bring them to heel.