A FUNDING JAM

Serious questions keep arising about what looked at first like a minor dirty campaign trick in the 2002 New Hampshire election of a U.S. senator.

Recently, the Associated Press reported that a GOP telemarketing firm implicated in two criminal prosecutions involving the issue got startup money from Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former head of the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, it appears that the New Hampshire Republican Party received $5,000 checks at the time from clients of Jack Abramoff, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. A third $5,000 check came from Americans for a Republican Majority, Rep. Tom DeLay’s political action committee.

For Republicans, what could have been a blip of bad news about an old election is metastasizing into something more serious and will keep getting worse until the public learns all the facts about the funding of this operation.

It all started when phones were jammed at Democratic get-out-the-vote offices in the race between Republican John Sununu and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen. Mr. Sununu won by about 20,000 votes, helping his party gain control of the Senate and suggesting that the phone jamming was unnecessary. New Hampshire Republicans paid $15,600 to the telemarketing company, GOP Marketplace, for arranging with an Idaho company to jam the phones.

An indictment in New Jersey implicated the same Republican firm in a telephone harassment case. Democrats are looking for other incidents that could show a national pattern.

More information could emerge in testimony in a pending civil suit filed by the New Hampshire Democratic Party. Attorneys want to question under oath Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who was White House political director in 2002, and his associates who that Election Day took the White House phone calls of James Tobin, who was the New England political director for the Republican National Committee. Mr. Tobin, of Bangor, was convicted of conspiracy in the phone-jamming case in December 2005 and has appealed.

Democrats are awaiting a response to a Freedom of Information Act request for Justice Department records of its investigation into Mr. Tobin’s calls. An attorney for the Republicans in the civil suit has said that the Justice Department “investigated those calls and did not bring any charges.”

Republican officials continue to insist that the New Hampshire phone jamming was merely a local rogue operation. Democrats continue to liken it to the early months of the Watergate investigation. It should be clear by now that Democrats are not going to back away on the possible connection to top Republican leaders and that the longer unanswered questions remain for Republicans the worse things look for them.