Judiciary Committee Members Write to Acting AG on “Phone Jamming,” Voter Suppression Cases

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Judiciary Committee Members Write to Acting AG on “Phone Jamming,” Voter Suppression Cases

Today Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, and Subcommittee Chairpersons Robert C. Scott, Jerrold Nadler, and Linda Sánchez sent a letter to Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler seeking answers about allegations of voter suppression in battleground states across the country, using a technique called “phone jamming,” as well as failing to register Democratic voters and destroying Democratic voter registration cards.

An excerpt of the letter:

The most important open issue is whether the possible role of White House officials and Republican Party political leaders has been sufficiently investigated. Twenty-two phone calls were exchanged between New Hampshire Republican officials and the White House Office of Political Affairs starting at 11:20 am on election day 2002 and running past 2:00 am on election night, and one hundred and ten calls were placed between James Tobin and the White House in the two months surrounding the election.3 Also, the Republican National Committee has paid millions in legal fees to defend Mr. Tobin, a decision that was apparently made in consultation with the White House and that is hard to square with any view of Mr. Tobin as a rogue operative.4 Other troubling reports indicate that the funds used to pay for the phone jamming may have been funneled from Native American tribal donors to the New Hampshire Republican Party by disgraced GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and/or the fundraising machinery of former Representative Tom Delay.5

Despite this compelling evidence of Washington involvement in the election day jamming of Democratic phone lines, however, the FBI Special Agent working this matter allegedly was instructed not to follow investigative leads back to Washington.6 In addition, the attorney for one of the phone jamming defendants has stated that he was told by a federal prosecutor that “all decisions in this case had to be made subject to the approval of the Attorney General himself, who had to sign off on all actions in this case,” an unusual state of affairs for a criminal prosecution, particularly since neither Attorney General Ashcroft nor Attorney General Gonzales recused themselves from these matters, despite their connections to political and administration officials implicated by the matter.7 It has also been reported that Department officials affirmatively blocked the taking of discovery in related civil litigation that may have shed light on these key issues.8

Finally, it has been asserted that Mr. Tobin’s name was kept out of court filings made prior to the 2004 election, and that he was not actually indicted until several weeks after the election, even though the facts of his involvement in this election-related misconduct were well known to the Department throughout this period.9 That decision allowed Mr. Tobin to work on the Bush Cheney campaign through virtually all of the 2004 election cycle, and would even have allowed him to serve the campaign on Election Day 2004 if he had not been identified as a participant in the phone jamming by a journalist, despite the apparently well-documented evidence possessed by the Department at that time that Mr. Tobin had previously participated in serious election-related misconduct.

Read full letter at link~

http://www.speaker.gov/blog/?p=820