One More Appeal

Details of the plot are well known by now. On Election Day, 2002, two out-of-state companies — one run by a then-high-level national GOP official — were directed by the head of the New Hampshire Republican Party to jam Democratic Party phone lines, as well as the lines at the Manchester firefighters’ union. The Democrats and the firefighters had planned to conduct get-out-the-vote drives for Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, who was running for the U.S. Senate. But the phones wouldn’t work that morning, and Republican John Sununu won the election. There is some dispute over whether there was any connection between the two events.

Sununu and Shaheen will face each other again this coming November. One side-effect of the past five years of legal wrangling over the 2002 incident is that Shaheen’s telephones are likely to work this time.

Following that Election Day attack, several GOP officials — including the then-executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party — pleaded guilty to various charges, and two served time in jail. One of them has even written a book about his adventure.

But Tobin, the biggest fish caught in the conspiracy net, has not served a day behind bars.

At the time of the crime, Tobin was regional political director for the Republican National Committee, and he worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Despite the phone-jamming incident, he was then appointed as chairman of President Bush’s 2004 New England election campaign.

In 2005, a federal jury convicted Tobin on two counts of telephone harassment, and he was sentenced to 10 months in prison. But a federal appeals court overturned the conviction. The court admitted: “That Tobin assisted in the substantive crime is patent ... .” But it concluded that U.S. District court Judge Stephen McAuliffe’s jury instructions were flawed, and that the specific crime of “harassment” hadn’t been proven.

Maybe Tobin didn’t want to harass anybody; maybe he just wanted Sununu to win the election.

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