Reply #2: He was also an Advisor to Jean Schmidt:

[mod mom]

July 31, 2005

Schmidt Advisor Connected to Noe: It's Even More Money Than Reported

By DHinMI

Atrios is linking to a report about a Toledo Blade editor connected to Ohio Coingate figure Tom Noe who Ohio Republican Congressional candidate Jeannette Schmidt is reported to have paid $60,000 in consulting fees the week he retired from The Blade. But that's not all of the money this guy's received from Schmidt. And there are some questions that should be asked.

First, what we're talking about, the original report from Editor and Publisher:

The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, is on top of the news- paper world, thanks to its "Coingate" reports (see p. 34). But while the paper is rightly thumping its chest with each new revelation, it's also coming under some scrutiny — not for what it has printed, but for what it may not have. Rumors swirl around a veteran Blade scribe, former political reporter Fritz Wenzel. Nothing at all is proven, but it's worth recalling the dangers — even if it's just in public perception — of jumping from political campaigning to political reporting and back again.

Wenzel, a longtime GOP campaign worker in Oregon, spent 10 years on the Blade politics beat before returning to the world of political consulting in May, virtually the day after he left the paper. One of the key contacts he made along the way was the man now at the center of the Coingate accusations, Tom Noe, a major Republican fund-raiser who attended the wedding of Wenzel's son, P.J., a state GOP employee. Noe's wife, Bernadette, even praised Wenzel during a GOP Lincoln Day Dinner this spring. "It was obvious that was a Republican, he never hid the fact," Dennis Lang, interim chair of the Lucas County Republican Central Committee, told me last month. "But his work stayed in neutral ground."

<snip>

So, there's lots to suggest that Wenzel was in a business and political client/consultant relationship with Schmidt well before he wrote his last column for the Toledo Blade. That's a serious problem for the credibility of the Blade. But it's also something The Blade, if it has contractual restrictions on the outside work that can be done by its reporters and editors, should look in to regarding Fritz Wenzel, because it's hard to believe he wasn't working for Schmidt until after he left his job with the newspaper.

http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com/the_next_hurrah/2005/07/schmidt_advisor.html

He is a Republican Operative, what is he doing as a spokeman for Zogby?