NYT: The Many Parallels Between Watergate And N.H. Phone-Jamming Scandal

The Many Parallels Between Watergate And N.H. Phone-Jamming Scandal...
The New York Times | ADAM COHEN | Posted April 17, 2006 11:30 AM

The Internet is a great breeding ground for political conspiracies, and there is a new one lighting up computer monitors across the country. Bloggers are fascinated by what they see as eerie parallels between Watergate and a phone-jamming scandal in New Hampshire. It has low-level Republican operatives involved in dirty campaign tricks. It has checks from donors with murky backgrounds. It has telephone calls to the White House. What is unclear is whether it is the work of a few rogue actors, or something larger.

In 2002, there was a hard-fought Senate race between Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, the Democrat, and John Sununu, the Republican. On Election Day, Democratic workers arrived at five get-out-the-vote offices to find their phone lines jammed. It turned out that the jamming was being done by an Idaho telemarketing firm that was being paid by a Virginia consulting group. The fee for the jamming, reportedly $15,600, was paid by New Hampshire Republicans.
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The parallels drawn with Watergate are a good place to start:

1. The return of the "second-rate burglary." The New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal is being dismissed as small-time, state-level misconduct, but it occurred at a critical moment in a tough election.

In November 2002, Republicans were intent on winning a Senate majority so they would control the White House and both houses of Congress. They saw the Sununu-Shaheen race as pivotal. On Election Day morning, the phone lines were jammed at the Democratic offices and at a get-out-the-vote operation run by a firefighters' union. The police were called, and the lines were eventually freed up. The election wasn't as close as expected. Mr. Sununu won, and Republicans retook the Senate.

more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/opinion/17mon4.html?ex=1302926400&en=95d7f18eb564ed89&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
via:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2006/04/17/the-many-parallels-betwee_n_19271.html

K&R.

I like the part where $15,000 from Tom DeLay's PAC and two of Abramoff's Indian clients totalled up to be nearly the exact suspected cost of the phone jamming. This has potential!

"2. The return of the high-priced lawyer. Aficionados of the Watergate connection like to point out that one of the first clues that the Watergate burglars were not ordinary small-time crooks was the presence of a slick lawyer in an expensive suit at their first court appearance. In the New Hampshire case, Mr. Tobin was represented by Williams & Connolly, a pre-eminent white-collar criminal law firm. The legal bills, which published estimates have put at more than $2.5 million, were paid by the Republican National Committee. Democrats are asking why the committee footed the bill, if Mr. Tobin was a rogue actor who implicated the national party in a loathsome and embarrassing crime.

3. The return of "follow the money." (As if it ever left.) New Hampshire Democrats pored over the filings of the New Hampshire Republican Party and found three contributions for $5,000 each, all shortly before the election. One was from Americans for a Republican Majority, Tom DeLay's political action committee. The other two were from the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, tribes that were clients of Jack Abramoff. Those checks add up almost exactly to the cost of the phone jamming.

Republicans say that a lot of money flows into a campaign and that there is nothing to tie these checks to the phone jamming. But New Hampshire Democrats argue that it is highly unusual for Indian tribes to contribute to a state party in a state that does not have federally recognized Indian tribes or Indian gambling.

4. Does anybody get to ask: "What did they know, and when did they know it?" Democrats would, of course, like to connect the jamming to the White House, and this month they found a possible link. The Senate Majority Project, a pro-Democratic campaign group, examined the phone records that came out in Mr. Tobin's case and found that he made dozens of calls to the White House's office of political affairs right when he was executing the phone-jamming scheme. Ken Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman who was the White House political director at the time, insists that close contact of this kind between political operatives is the norm on Election Day, and that none of the calls mentioned the jamming."

this Bushco incident is one of many that managed to fade away or get little or no attention from MSM.

I hope this one is investigated properly. Now that things aren't looking so good for Bush, who knows...

Watergate seems to be remembered for the cover up and not so much the actual duplicities and lies against the American people. America needs another Daniel Ellsberg now to leak the new Pentagon Papers.

They did this in Ohio in 04 too.

http://www.thousandreasons.org/get_article.php?article_id=13 #4

Remember that "they" gave Tobin a raise and a promotion after his arrest for
the 02 phone jamming.

Drip Drip Drip

The net had to "light up" under this story because the questioning and digging by political types on the internet seems to be the only thing that passes for investigative journalism these days.

If we waited to read about unfolding events in the newspaper or to watch such events on TV-- especially events that cast a bad light on our glorious leaders or cause questions regarding their authority to rule (e.g., election fraud)-- then we would wait in vain.

The media is generally afraid and/or complicit.

And tell them exactly that.

. . .The poll-tax lines in Ohio (time is money), the under-allocation of machines, the jamming in NH, on and on, are reminiscent of the government initiated crimes orchestrated by Donald Segretti and Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP).

Perhaps if we make a point of labeling such activities "dirty tricks," the association will expose the unsavory, immoral, and criminal nature of the activities orchestrated by the theo-cons and new American fascists.

I sensee a shift at NYT. Ever since the "dueling editorials" with WaPo, NYT seems to be staking out a position to the left. Probably due to the shifting winds of fortune, but ink is ink.

There were a bunch of leaks coming out of the Pentagon about propaganda and psyops units. The Pentagon and NSA have been spying on anti-war groups. There was a burglary at a Democratic office in Ohio right after the 2004 election. An FAA worker destroyed 9/11 tapes containing interviews with air traffic controllers. The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding hearings on NSA domestic spying. A Federal Judge demanded the release of White House documents. Cheney apparently underpaid his taxes. That is too freaky.

I'm glad to see the NYT speaking out. The possible ties to DeLay and Abramoff are interesting. Of course, the Repubs will say that the DeLay PAC contributed to all the tight Republican races, but why would two Indian tribes with nothing to gain in New Hampshire contribute to a NH Repub? Hmmm, I smell something fishy.

I was able to read the whole article, and it's just tasty. :evilgrin:
True, it was (and is) blogger-researchers who are nudging this and other stories forward, but as long as the NYT prints and pursues the leads for themselves, I am one happy gal.

Just prayin' the NYT keeps it up.

Hekate

just hyperbole and throwing in that word "conspiracy" pretty much means it's a crazy idea anyway.

If I had time, I'd write and ask him about his journalistic efforts and intent for even writing the "story" (or should I say fairytale)?

It's kind of amazing how this has bloomed over time.

Just a general rule.

While checking into the jamming of the phones in New Hampshire,
I would hope that someone will look into Ron Kaufman and his
connections with N.H. He has risen thru the ranks in the NRC
and has worked in the White House and with most of the insiders.
He is well known in MA and raised havoc here during many elections.
He is a real slimebag....and extremely capable of pulling off a
jamming like this....he may have done it here in MA too.