What did the White House know and when did they know it? Several million Republican dollars and lots of Department of Justice slow-walking went into an effort to wall off investigation of any higher-ups in the NH phone-jamming scandal.
What's new is that Representative Paul Hodes (D-NH)--a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee--is asking his own committee to investigate.
And with an overwhelming Democratic majority in the House (233 of 435 members), this request from Hodes is likely to get more traction than a request to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which never went forward.
From Hode's letter of request, online thanks to TPM:
- Twenty-two phone calls were exchanged between New Hampshire Republican officials and the White House Office of Political Affairs from 11:20 a.m. on Election Day 2002 to 2:17 a.m. the next morning, the period during which the phone jamming occurred.
- The Republican National Committee paid over $2.5 million in legal fees resulting from criminal charges filed against the defendants.
- John Durkin (counsel for the Republican criminal defendants) was told by a DOJ prosecutor that all decisions in this case had to be approved by the Attorney General himself, a highly unusual requirement which blocked all progress on the case and delayed the conviction of James Tobin, Regional Political Director for the National Republican Party, until after the 2004 Presidential election.
Ignoring these obvious points, you can see in the text and comments of John DiStaso's article Republicans' predictable spin of their own talking points--that this is too late, a dead story, everybody involved has now been indicted. And--worst NH political insult!--a waste of money.
Hodes's committee would have more leverage than NH Democrats, whose civil suit was stymied as soon as they got past the small fry with rock-solid DC-lawyer-enhanced stone-walling--for example Darrell Henry's non-response to questions including questions about his education since high school.
Another failed earlier effort to move this investigation up the food chain was a May 12, 2006 request to Gonzales (pdf) for a special prosecutor to look into White House involvement in the phone-jamming. (Gonzales never replied.)
In other news, no news link yet, but September is the month when James Tobin's lawyers are supposed to file papers about the new federal trial on his overturned conviction.
(Thanks to Dean Barker, whose post at Blue Hampshire inspired me to write this.)