Defendants added to phone-jam suit

MANCHESTER, N.H. – The New Hampshire Democratic Party added more defendants Wednesday to a lawsuit over the jamming of its phone lines on Election Day 2002.

Repeated hang-up calls overwhelmed the party’s get-out-the-vote phone banks and a ride-to-the-polls line for more than an hour that day. Former state GOP director Chuck McGee and Republican consultant Allen Raymond pleaded guilty to taking part in the scheme, and James Tobin, a former regional director for the Republican National Committee from Bangor, Maine, is scheduled for trial in December.

As those criminal cases proceeded in federal court, Democrats sued the state Republican Party, McGee and Raymond in Hillsborough County Superior Court seeking more information about the plan and reimbursement for its costs of setting up the phone banks.

On Wednesday, they expanded the civil lawsuit to include Tobin, former state GOP chairman John Dowd, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“The phone jamming was a crime, plain and simple. Two men are in jail, and a third has delayed his trial only because the RNC has spent almost a million dollars stonewalling this case,” said Democratic Party Chairwoman Kathy Sullivan. “Let’s get to the bottom of this, and get it behind us.”

The Republican National Committee has spent more than $722,000 to provide Tobin, who has pleaded innocent, a team of lawyers from a high-powered Washington law firm. Officials said last month they had agreed to underwrite Tobin’s defense because he was a longtime supporter and that he assured them he had committed no crimes.

“It is disappointing to see Granite State Democrats leveling these outrageous allegations,” RNC spokesman Aaron McLear said Wednesday. “Unfortunately this is just politics as usual for the Democrats.”

Democrats accuse Dowd of knowing about the scheme before the election, then covering it up later. He called those allegations “shameless lies” Wednesday and said he has cooperated with the investigation from the start.

“The government was able to swiftly determine that I had no responsibility for the criminal conduct,” he said. “My only involvement in the phone jamming was to stop it before it was to have started, shortly after I first learned of the plan on Election Day eve. I was surprised as anyone when I learned … in February of 2003 that any phone jamming had occurred.”