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As Mike Caufield has diaried elsewhere, phone jammer Jim Tobin has been indicted for two felony counts of making false statements to the FBI in connection with the 2002 effort to suppress the vote in order to help John E. Sununu's senate race.
I've been living with this phone jamming matter for nearly six years now. There are still a number of questions that remain to be answered, and a lot of them have to do with John E. Sununu's ethical tin ear:
1. Why didn't Sununu tell the Republican state committee to cooperate fully with the Department of Justice investigation? We know that prosecutor Todd Hinnen wanted to bring charges against the NHGOP because of the way it stonewalled, but was overruled by superiors:
In early 2005, Hinnen submitted a lengthy memo arguing for a criminal indictment treating the New Hampshire Republican State Committee as a corporate entity. Hinnen noted that the party lacked an ethics policy at the time of the phone jamming and that its officials had refused to share with prosecutors the results of an internal investigation of the scheme.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/hom...
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2. When did Sununu, and members of his congressional and campaign staffs, first learn about phone jamming? Did any of them know about it before it happened? According to Chuck McGee's FBI interviews, and according to a letter sent by the Concord Republican chair to the federal court, the phone jamming plan was known by severak people before election day. And, once Sununu knew about it, what did he do? Who did he call? And did he make any effort to provide any information to the Department of Justice?
3. Once the phone jamming story broke, why did John E. Sununu pose, smiling away, with Chuck McGee, holding up a t shirt with Chuck to publicize Chuck's new job, Citizens for a Sound Economy? Did Sununu think that phone jamming was okay, and that McGee had not done anything wrong?
4. And how did Chuck get that job, anyway? Who recommended him to Dick Armey, the fellow who was the Republican majority leader during the years that Sununu was in congress? Did Dick Armey ask John E. Sununu about McGee's qualifications before McGee was hired?
Sununu's behavior with McGee and his failure to resoundingly condemn phone jamming are two more examples of Sununu's ethical tin ear. It is the same tin ear that permitted him to send Julie Teer, Tobin's former colleague at the Bush/Cheny '04 campaign, out to lie to the press about the source of funding for his junket to the Kenai fishing derby. It is the same tin ear that justified his charging taxpayers to pay for his airfare to the derby, on the theory that he was attending an Appropriations committee hearing on erosion control in native Alaskan villages, when he was not on the Appropriations Committee. It is the same tin ear that permitted him to attend the derby to begin with. It is the same tin ear that permitted him to sit quietly by while his friend and mentor, Ted Stevens, plundered the federal treasury for millions and millions in earmarks to benefit Stevens' friends and contributors. It is the same ethical tin ear that allowed him to accept donations from two rail companies on June 25 of this year, and then turn around and on the same day give 75% of the money to Stevens - after Stevens' transgressions had been made public. it is the same ethical tin ear that permits Sununu to ignore New Hampshire's legal registration requirements for Daniel Webster PAC.
Wrong on the issues, wrong on ethics. It is time for Sununu to retire to his second home in Waterville Valley.
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