Breaking--In a damning 10-page letter to Senator Patrick Leahy, Chair of the Senate Juciciary Committee, NH Democrats spell out step by step the evidence against what Paul Krugman called the "slow-walk investigations" of the NH phone-jamming. Thanks to Josh Marshall breaking this story and for posting the 10-page letter (pdf).
Well, I had my own small breakthrough on this written up--so, after pointing you toward Marshall's big news, let me just also post my latest piece of the puzzle.
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As 2003 rolled slowly onward, the GOPMarketplace website vanished and memories had lots of time to get cloudy. By the time the FBI got a statement in Dec. 2003 from their chief suspect Chuck McGee, more than a year had gone by since the crime itself.
Today, I stumbled on an new piece of that puzzle, evidence that NH'sUS Attorney Thomas Colantuono didn't swing into gear until a green light came from Washington.
US Attorney General John Ashcroft came to NH in September 2003, as part of a national tour to promote the Patriot Act, piggybacking on the 9/11 anniversary. John DiStaso, senior political columnist for the Union Leader, gave this report of a contact with one of Ashcroft's staffers:
COINCIDENCE? Remember the GOP "phone-jamming" controversy? We reported in February that a GOP consultant paid by the New Hampshire Republican State Committee for "telemarketing" had a subcontractor jam the phones at Democratic and firefighters union get-out-the-vote sites on Election Day 2002. Chuck McGee resigned as state party executive director the following day but maintained he had nothing to do with the operation. He now heads the local chapter of Citizens for a Sound Economy.
Investigative information on the case was provided to the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Fraud Unit about a week after our report. Although we’ve sought updates from the Justice Department, our calls were never returned.
When Attorney General John Ashcroft came to the state this week, we asked chief spokesman Mark Corallo if anything was up. He promised to get back to us.
Sullivan reports that just last week, the state Democratic Party’s legal counsel, Finas Williams, was asked by the Justice Department to provide the names of people working at the state party offices when the phones were blocked.
Then a follow-up story, the next week DiStaso, Union Leader, September 18, 2003:
PHONE-JAM UPDATE UPDATE. Last week, we reported that the U.S. Justice Department wants the names of the staffers who were at Democratic Party offices when phones were jammed last Election Day on the orders of a GOP consultant. It appears that 11 months later, a state review is under way.
State Democratic Chair Kathy Sullivan received a letter a few days ago from [NH's] Attorney General Peter Heed. "I want to assure you my office is treating this matter very seriously," Republican Heed wrote, promising "a thorough investigation."
He wrote that "in order to give this matter the full priority of my office," he assigned a second attorney to the case.
Attorney General Peter Heed, I should emphasize, is a state official, not a federal one. So to sum up, in September of 2003, Colantuono was hit by two powerful motivators:
- The US DOJ at the level of the US Attorney General's office was put on notice that the press would follow up on the phone-jamming.
- The state-level Attorney General's office was planning to start its own investigation of the phone-jamming.
No more was ever heard of Peter Heed's investigation, as far as I know. Could it be that somebody from the US DOJ explained that the feds were now "really" looking into the matter?
Looking into the matter, but still not quickly -- just one more quote from John DiStaso, Union Leader, this time on February 12, 2004):
It's been about a year since we reported on a federal investigation into allegations that a Republican consultant had Democratic get-out-the-vote telephone lines intentionally jammed on Election Day 2002. There's been precious little to report since, but we can say today that, according to U.S. Attorney Thomas Colantuono, the matter is "still under active investigation by the Justice Department in Washington."
This brings us to the end of the first slow-moving year of the US Attorney of NH's phone-jamming "investigation."
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Update:Even newer March 21 news, that I first heard from the comments--the US Court of Appeals overturned Tobin's conviction --