Thursday, March 22, 2007

Yesterday, an appeals court tossed out the conviction of James Tobin, the RNC operative convicted in the New Hampshire phone-jamming scandal of 2002, sending it back for retrial.

Today, New Hampshire Democrats decided to throw the scandal into the volatile cauldron of Washington politics.

Outgoing state party chair Kathy Sullivan and attorney Paul Twomey have sent a letter to congressman Paul Hodes and Senator Patrick Leahy, requesting that they investigate alleged political interference in the investigation and prosecution of the case. Hodes is on the Congressional Oversight Committee; Leahy is on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Sullivan points out that one of the defendant's own lawyers has said that prosecutors in the case had to run every decision past the US Attorney General -- whose office, of course, is now embroiled in allegations of political interference with prosecutors.

As I've mentioned before, the next obvious question about this whole US Attorney firing scandal is: what did the other US Attorneys do to make them acceptable, and not be fired? This could be example #1 in that regard.

Stay tuned.

3/22/2007 12:00:52 PM by David S. Bernstein | Comments [1] |