In the latest issue of New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer delivers a fascinating portrait of The Fellowship, the secretive religious group behind the C Street house. Among the interesting nuggets in Boyer's piece are some new details about Tom Coburn's role in ending John Ensign's affair with the wife of Ensign's former top aide.
As you may recall, both Coburn and Ensign were residents of the C Street house during the affair. Ensign publicly admitted to the affair in June, 2009 after the husband of Ensign's former mistress told Fox News about the senator's indiscretions. (Ensign's office said he had learned that Hampton had contacted FNC before Ensign's public admission. Nonetheless, despite learning about the affair before any other cable news channel, Fox waited until Ensign's public confession to report the story. In fact, Fox was the last cable news channel to report on it.)
When the husband of Ensign's former mistress contacted Fox about the affair, he told them that Tom Coburn had been aware of it since at least February, 2008. That brought Coburn into the story, albeit unwillingly. Of particular interest was the husband's claim that Coburn had urged Ensign to offer the mistress money as compensation for the hardship the affair had caused, a claim Coburn vehemently
denied.
Boyer's new article doesn't deal with the financial question, but the story he tells does challenge several of Coburn's claims about his knowledge and role (claims that never added up in the first place). Here's a summary of the instances in which Boyer's narrative contradicts or questions Coburn's public claims:
- This is an example of parsing more than prevarication: Coburn flatly denied being present when Ensign wrote the letter ending the affair to his mistress. "I was never present when a letter was written, never made any assessment of paying anybody anything. Those are untruths. Those are absolute untruths." According to Boyer's account, Ensign wrote the letter after an intervention at the C Street house -- an intervention that included Coburn, who had to leave the intervention to attend to Senate business before Ensign actually put pen to paper. So technically, Boyer is confirming what Coburn claimed -- he wasn't actually in the room when the letter was written -- but he was in the room for much of the intervention in which the letter was written, and was fully aware that the letter had been written. Claiming otherwise without offering a complete account of what had happened was misleading.
- Coburn claimed that he would never real the nature of his discussions with Ensign to anybody. His discussions with Ensign, he said, constituted "privileged communication that I will never reveal to anybody. Not to the Ethics Committee, not to a court of law, not to anybody." According to Boyer's account, however, Coburn told several members of the C Street House exactly what he had discussed with Ensign when he broke the news of the affair to them and asked for their help in handling it.
- Notwithstanding his claim of privileged communication, Coburn, through his spokesman, said that Coburn had urged Ensign to go public with the affair. "Had Senator Ensign followed Dr. Coburn’s advice, this episode would have ended, and been made public, long ago," said the spokesman. According to Boyer, however, Coburn never wanted the news of the affair to go public. "Looking back, Coburn believed that the Ensign case was a C Street success story. A year after that midnight confrontation, word of Ensign’s affair had not leaked, and Ensign and his wife, Darlene, had reconciled."
Ultimately, what's important here probably isn't so much that Coburn hasn't come clean about all the embarrassing details of Ensign's flawed personal life -- it's that we still don't have a full and accurate account of what Coburn knew about Ensign's attempts to use his power as a public official to secure hush money for the family of his former mistress. Sex might provide the sizzle, but at it's heart, what matters most here is the real possibility that Ensign engaged in an act of public corruption to cover up his private failure. That's why the FBI is investigating Ensign and that's why he could be indicted. And that's the real reason why Coburn's misleading and false statements are so troubling.