Republicans steal elections - more indicators

James Tobin was the New England director for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004 when he directed a telephone firm to repeatedly call the Democratic headquarters line in New Hampshire. The election was a very close one, and the Republican candidate John E. Sununu was barely elected Senator in that election. James Tobin and two other Republican operatives have pleaded guilty to felonies for their actions to disrupt the Democratic phone lines and prevent the Democrats from getting their voters to the polls.

Since then, the Republican National Committee led by Ken Mehlman has paid over $2.5 million of Tobin's legal bills, and will pay more since the Democrats have filed a civil suit against him. There is no contractual requirement that the Republicans pay those bills. My bet is that this is the price Tobin is demanding so that he doesn't roll over and tell that the White House was behind the phone jamming.

Why the White House? Well, consider this:

A Democratic activist group, combing through evidence from a trial last year in which the former New England regional director of the Republican National Committee was convicted, uncovered 22 calls from New Hampshire officials to the White House political office on Nov. 5-6, 2002. During the same time, according to prosecutors, state GOP officials started -- and then frantically sought to stop -- a plan to have a telemarketer bombard the phone banks of Democrats and a local firefighters association that was offering voters rides to the polls.[Snip]

The court documents describing the calls were only discovered recently by researchers at the Senate Majority Project, a Democratic group based in Washington.[Snip]

There are no public documents or public sworn testimony concerning the matters that were discussed in the phone calls. "They started calling the White House about 11 a.m., and didn't stop until 2 a.m.," said Christy Setzer, a Senate Majority Project spokeswoman.

Paul Twomey, of Epsom, N.H., an attorney for the Democratic Party in its civil lawsuit, said that he wants to question Mehlman and Davis to determine if the calls dealt with the phone-jamming scheme.

"You have somebody who's committing a felony, and he's calling [the White House] during the planning, the execution and when it's falling apart," Twomey said, adding that he will request records listing what outgoing calls were made from the White House during the same time.

[From the Washington Post.]

Then there are the experiences in the 2004 election - see More evidence that the 2004 election was hacked for Bush.

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Addendum April 15, 2006

Want more evidence that the White House knew about the phone jamming? See here. Ken Mehlman, head of the RNC hired Tobin as chairman of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and kept him on even after the other two Republicans working with Tobin had pleaded guilty. Tobin was not required to resign until he was himself indicted.

It should be remembered that RNC Director Ken Mehlman was apointed to the RNC after the 2002 election from his White House job where he worked for Karl Rove.