Thursday, August 11, 2005

 

Is This Where GOP Contributors Want Their Money To Go?

The Republican Party brags about all the "small money" donors it has, attempting to convince us that it's not the party of Big Money And Big Corporations, really. Let's ask the people who contribute that "small money" if this is what they expected to support. GOP Paying Legal Bills of Bush Official

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. Since charges were first filed in December, the RNC 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 GOP's filings with the FEC list the payments to Williams & Connolly without specifying they were for Tobin's defense.
As Mark Crispin Miller has pointed out, the RNC has a penchant for trying to hide where the money goes. I'm inclined to agree with Paul Twomey as to the reason:
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. "It originally appeared to us that there were just certain rogue elements of the Republican Party who were willing to do anything to win control of the U.S. Senate, including depriving Americans of their ability to vote," Twomey said. "But now that the RNC actually is bankrolling Mr. Tobin's defense, coupled with the fact that it has refused some discovery in the civil case, really raises the questions of who are they protecting, how high does this go and who was in on this," Twomey said.
Lest anyone think this is just a "partisan witchhunt", prosecutors are going after Tobin because he was implicated by fellow Republicans.
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.
I do like the way the headline lays the whole slimy mess at Karl Rove's George W. Bush's feet.
Comments:
Forty percent of the American people approve of bankrupting the Treasury, paying off contributors with taxpayer payola, breaking international law with what the Nuremburg Tribunal labeled "the supreme crime" of aggressive war, alienating the rest of the world, and so on.

Why wouldn't they approve of their contributions being used to protect a criminal from the consequences of presidential orders?
 
51 NOT 40 AND THEN THERES THE PEOPLE THAT VOTED FOR WAR CRIMINAL JOHN KERRY
 
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