Conspiracy Charges in GOP Voter Fraud Case

WASHINGTON —  The Republican Party says it still has a zero-tolerance policy for tampering with voters even as it pays the legal bills for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to thwart Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002.

The Republican National Committee already has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded not guilty, a team of lawyers from the Washington law firm Williams & Connolly.

The firm’s other clients have included former President Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros.

Republican Party officials said they did not ordinarily discuss specifics of their legal work, but confirmed to Associated Press that they had agreed to underwrite Tobin’s defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.

“Jim is a longtime friend who has served as both an employee and an independent contractor for the RNC,” a spokeswoman for the RNC, Tracey Schmitt, said Wednesday. “This support is based on his assurance and our belief that Jim has not engaged in any wrongdoing.”

A telephone firm was paid to make repeated hang-up phone calls to overwhelm the phone banks in New Hampshire and prevent them from getting Democratic voters to the polls on election day 2002, prosecutors alleged. Republican John E. Sununu won a close race that day to be New Hampshire’s newest senator.

At the time, Tobin was the RNC’s New England regional director, before moving to President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign.

A top New Hampshire party official and a GOP consultant have pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Tobin’s indictment accuses him of specifically calling the GOP consultant to get a telephone firm to help in the scheme.

“The object of the conspiracy was to deprive inhabitants of New Hampshire and more particularly qualified voters ... of their federally secured right to vote,” said the indictment issued by a federal grand jury May 18.

The Republican Party has repeatedly and pointedly disavowed any tactics aimed at keeping citizens from voting since allegations of voter suppression surfaced during the Florida recount in 2000 that tipped the presidential race to Bush.

This week, RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, the former White House political director, reiterated a zero-tolerance policy for any GOP official caught trying to block legitimate votes.

“The position of the Republican National Committee is simple: We will not tolerate fraud; we will not tolerate intimidation; we will not tolerate suppression. No employee, associate or any person representing the Republican Party who engages in these kinds of acts will remain in that position,” Mehlman wrote Monday to a group that studied voter suppression tactics.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean questioned Mehlman’s commitment to the policy.

“This is just another example of his say one thing, do another strategy,” Dean said Thursday. “Ken Mehlman tells crowds his party is against voter fraud and intimidation, while in the backrooms he supports Republican officials who engage in these dirty tricks.”