Election Rigging Goes High into GOP, Cheney's office catches fire

Greg Gordon reports on the McClatchy Newspapers:

WASHINGTON — A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day
scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state's
tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he
believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.

Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will
publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the
blame for a scandal on him as part of an "old-school cover-up."

Raymond's book, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican
Operative," offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled
and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all
costs....

...The 2002 New Hampshire Senate race, in which GOP Rep. John Sununu edged
Democratic Gov. Jeanne Shaheen by 19,000 votes, was among several targeted by
Republicans seeking to win control of the U.S. Senate.

Raymond said those who've tried to make him the fall guy for the New
Hampshire scheme failed to recognize that e-mails, phone records and other
evidence documented the complicity of a top state GOP official and the
Republican National Committee's northeast regional director.

Both men were later convicted of charges related to the phone harassment,
along with Raymond and an Idaho phone bank operator. Defense lawyers have since
won a retrial for James Tobin, the former regional director for both the RNC and
the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

A lawyer for Tobin didn't respond to phone messages.

GOP committees have paid Washington law firms more than $6 million to defend
Tobin and to fight a Democratic civil suit against the party. Raymond, himself a
former RNC official, said in the book and an interview that he believes that the
scandal reaches higher.

"Any tactic that didn't pass the smell test would never see the light of day
without, — at the very least, the approval of an RNC attorney," he wrote.

Paul Twomey, a lawyer for the New Hampshire Democratic party, said that phone
records obtained in the civil suit showed that Tobin made 22 calls to
the White House political office in the 24 hours before and after the
jamming....

Today, James Gerstenzang at the Los Angeles Times reports:

A fire erupted this morning in the vicinity of Vice President Dick Cheney's ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. The vice president was not in the office at the time, a White House spokesman said.

Thick, black smoke billowed out of the windows and balcony doorway of an adjacent office. The century-old stone building on Pennsylvania Avenue was evacuated. Deputy White House Press Secretary Scott Stanzel said many of the 1,700 employees of the Executive Office of the President work in the building.

There were no injuries reported. The cause of the fire was not immediately disclosed....

Oh, how convenient can a fire be! Let's all figure out what records were burned this morning.

Could the destroyed records have anything to do with the White House's participation in the discussions with CIA about the possible destruction of the CIA torture videos?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - The White House on Wednesday made a rare public demand for a formal correction from the New York Times for implying that it had misled the US public over the destruction of CIA interrogation videos....

...Late Tuesday, the Times reported that four top White House lawyers were more involved than previously acknowledged in the decision.

Citing current and former administration and intelligence officials, which it did not name, the Times said that the four took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2005 on the question of whether to keep recordings of the sessions with two Al-Qaeda operatives.

"The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged," it said.

The Times cited "conflicting accounts" as to whether any of the lawyers supported destroying the tapes, but cited one former top intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter as saying that "there had been 'vigorous sentiment' among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes."

Other officials told the Times that no-one at the White House called for destroying the tapes -- but that no White House lawyer ordered that they be preserved or warned that destroying them might be illegal.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino angrily denounced the Times's sub-headline -- "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said" -- in a highly unusual written statement that demanded a formal correction.

"The New York Times' inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story," she said....