The first advance reviews of the juicy tell-all book on the NH phone-jamming scandal hit newspapers this morning.
Former GOP rising star Allen Raymond doesn't hold back on the inner details of Republican telephone trickery--for example, "angering union households with calls in which people with Latin-sounding voices talked favorably about a rival candidate's support for the North American Free Trade Agreement" or using "the voice of an angry black man, posing as a Democrat, to stir up 'fear, racism, bigotry' in white neighborhoods."
A second story, also new, may embarrass Republicans even more: McClatchy Newspapers say an unnamed Administration source told them that the slow-walk of prosecuting top phone-jammers was orchestrated within the Department of Justice. More links and quotes below the fold.
McClatchy Newspapers keep doing some actual investigative reporting instead of boring readers with supersized servings of inside-the-Beltway "wisdom."
One of their reporters even tracked down a real source who had inside knowledge of Justice Department involvement in slowing down the prosecution of top Republican official James Tobin for his role in jamming the phones of NH Democrats.
An official with detailed knowledge of the investigation into the 2002 Election Day scheme said the inquiry sputtered for months after a prosecutor sought approval to indict James Tobin, the Northeast regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee...A Manchester, N.H., policeman had 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, senior Justice Department officials slowed the inquiry, the official told McClatchy Newspapers. ... 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, the official said.
Good work, McClatchy. Now, just a few of my favorite bits from two advance book reviews of How To Rig an Election...
From McClatchey again: "
Inside a GOP effort to rig the 2002 New Hampshire elections":
Shortly before the November election, New Hampshire Republicans hired his Alexandria, Va.-based consulting firm, GOP Marketplace, for $15,600 to barrage Democrats' phone lines on Election Day with 800 hang-up calls per hour amid the tight Senate race between Sununu and Shaheen.
The tactic was aimed at disrupting efforts by five Democratic offices and a firefighters' union in Manchester, N.H., to shuttle voters to the polls. The state Republican Party chairman, John Dowd, halted the calls after the first hour, saying he feared that the operation was illegal.
Raymond said it was Tobin who first phoned him 2 1/2 weeks before the election and asked if he could jam Democrats' phone lines, connecting him with Charles McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP.
However, he said, when he phoned Tobin after Sununu's 19,000-vote election victory to tell him that a Manchester, N.H., police officer was looking into the scheme, Tobin responded, "I don't know what you're talking about."
Raymond said he was seething with anger in the ensuing weeks as he read news reports of McGee denying knowledge of the scheme.
In early 2003, Raymond recalled, the state GOP wrote to demand its money back.
"They were going to throw me under the bus," Raymond wrote, "but first they wanted to check my pockets to see if there was any cash there."
And one from NH's own Concord Monitor: "Book links jamming to GOP 'high ups'":
"The Bush White House had complete control of the RNC, and there was no way someone like Tobin was going to try what he was proposing without first getting it vetted by his high-ups," Raymond wrote in How To Rig an Election, a book set for publication next month. "That's if Tobin, rather than one of his bosses, had even thought of the ploy himself - which seemed unlikely."
Raymond, who once had the same RNC job as Tobin for the mid-Atlantic region, said that before Tobin's call, his telemarketing outfit, GOP Marketplace, had been shut out of RNC jobs. Allen figured he'd lost favor because he publicly aired his disdain for Bush and feuded with a Bush vendor. "I figured this was the Dare - the Bushies' way of making me prove my stripes to get back into the club," he wrote.
Yes, because it was a club that you needed skunk stripes to get into.
The Monitor also details how a wealthy "player" gets ready to showcase himself as a regular guy:
Raymond ... owned three watches worth a total of $6,000 - so he went to CVS and bought a Timex. He also pulled out the first suit he'd owned, "a power tie from 1990" and loafers with a hole.
"When I put the whole ensemble together, (my wife) Elizabeth just clucked her tongue and gave me the thumbs-up," he wrote. "And then I jumped into my Audi and went to my meeting."
I can't wait to get my own copy of this book!