The Thompson Candidacy Hits A Bump In The Road…
…and perhaps more than that. If this article in the L.A. Times is to be believed, and it appears pretty authoritative, Fred Thompson not only lobbied against the abortion ‘gag rule’ at clinics that receive federal funding, he is lying about it now:
Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.
A spokesman for the former Tennessee senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But the minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. say that the group hired Thompson that year.
His task was to urge the administration of President George H. W. Bush to withdraw or relax a rule that barred abortion counseling at clinics that received federal money, according to the records and to people who worked on the matter.
The abortion “gag rule” was then a major political flashpoint. Lobbying against the rule would have placed Thompson at odds with the antiabortion movement that he is now trying to rally behind his expected declaration of a presidential bid.
Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family planning group. “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period,” he said in an e-mail.
In a telephone interview, he added: “There’s no documents to prove it, there’s no billing records, and Thompson says he has no recollection of it, says it didn’t happen.” In a separate interview, John H. Sununu, the White House official whom the family planning group wanted to contact, said he had no memory of the lobbying and doubted it took place.
But Judith DeSarno, who was president of the family planning association in 1991, said Thompson lobbied for the group for several months.
Minutes from the board’s meeting of Sept. 14, 1991 — a copy of which DeSarno gave to The Times — say: “Judy [DeSarno] reported that the association had hired Fred Thompson Esq. as counsel to aid us in discussions with the administration” on the abortion counseling rule.
Former Rep. Michael D. Barnes (D-Md.), a colleague at the lobbying and law firm where Thompson worked, said that DeSarno had asked him to recommend someone for the lobbying work and that he had suggested Thompson. He said it was “absolutely bizarre” for Thompson to deny that he lobbied against the abortion counseling rule.
“I talked to him while he was doing it, and I talked to [DeSarno] about the fact that she was very pleased with the work that he was doing for her organization,” said Barnes. “I have strong, total recollection of that. This is not something I dreamed up or she dreamed up. This is fact.”
DeSarno said that Thompson, after being hired, reported to her that he had held multiple conversations about the abortion rule with Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff and the president’s point man on the rule.
Thompson kept her updated on his progress in telephone conversations and over meals at Washington restaurants, including dinner at Galileo and lunch at the Monocle, she said. At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson told her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for a Thompson son and his wife.
“It would be an odd thing for me to construct that thing out of whole cloth,” DeSarno said. “It happened, and I think it’s quite astonishing they’re denying it.”
I could care less if Thompson lobbied for or against anything at all – that’s what lobbyists get paid to do: they lobby (although, as a person who is quite fond of Rudy Giuliani, I can’t resist an ironic smile at Thompson’s troubles, and the contrast between Rudy’s principled refusal to change his mind and Romney and Thompson’s sudden changes of heart)…but his denial is simply not credible based on the facts available. After all, the other side has documentation, and pretty detailed recollection from more than one individual.
Now, it may be that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and perhaps Thompson can account for his side of the story with his own documentation or something more convincing than the denials quoted in this article…but I challenge any of my readers, Thompson supporters or not, to read the article in its entirety (there’s more than what I excerpted here) and draw their own conclusions.
I have withheld judgment on the Thompson candidacy, and I still do – but I am very, very troubled by what certainly appears to be a dishonest attempt to cover up a part of his past that he now finds inconvenient. I invite both friend and foe, and Thompson supporters and opponents, to provide links or commentary on either side of this story. I think this episode, small though it may seem at the moment, may grow quite large in time…and I certainly am keeping an open mind to persuasion by convincing facts from either side…
UPDATE 11:16 p.m.: I have done some further looking at other reactions around the web and I have seen nothing to put this story in doubt – in fact, there are additional details that lend it credence. The NY Times has a piece revealing that Sununu is suddenly unavailable for comment, and that Thompson’s spokesman, so unequivocal in his earlier denials, is starting to parse words:
A spokesman for Mr. Thompson said yesterday that Mr. Thompson had “no recollection of doing any work on behalf of this group.”
“He may have been consulted by one of the firm’s partners who represented this group in 1991,” the spokesman, Mark Corallo, said in a statement. “As any lawyer would know, such consultations take place within law firms every day.”
…Former Representative Michael Barnes, Democrat of Maryland, said he recommended Mr. Thompson to Ms. DeSarno, who worked for Mr. Barnes when he was in Congress.
At the time, Mr. Thompson and Mr. Barnes worked together at Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn. Ms. DeSarno said Mr. Thompson gave her regular updates by phone and that she met him on at least two occasions in person. Over dinner at the Washington restaurant Galileo one night, she said Mr. Thompson told her he had spoken with John Sununu, then the White House chief of staff, about the matter.
“Fred had a big smile and he said, how about if only the doctors can talk but not all these other nurses and volunteers,” Ms. DeSarno recalled, referring to a potential compromise on the ban. “It wasn’t formal. It was, ‘How about this?’ ”
Ellen Battistelli, who worked with Ms. DeSarno on getting the ban lifted, said: “He was certainly willing to contact the administration about this.” Mr. Sununu did not respond to messages left for him on Friday.
UPDATE 11:28 p.m.: To be fair, as Marc Ambinder notes here, the story has obviously been peddled by opponents of Thompson, and Newsbusters notes that the people most involved in the accusations are Clinton supporters – but nevertheless, and, I stress, based on the facts before us at this time, it would appear that Thompson did some sort of lobbying on the issue, no matter how official, and that he initially put out a vehement denial that appears to have been less than forthright.
That’s about the fairest take I can give…
Mark,
All the folks have to do is show copies of the billing records. I will not believe a word of those folks unless/until they can show a contratc, billing records, or whatever.
This is simply in line with the other leftist groups that have their shorts in a twist aboud Fred. seriously, these folks must really be running scared, judging from all the gutterball articles being served up ecently.
Good heavens, look at the NYT doing a hit piece of him and labeling his wife a “trophy wife”. The woman is an articulate and capable attorney in her own right, yet the left has to dig into the gutter in their groveling, sniveling fear of a Thompson candidacy.
I will flat-out call DeSarno a liar unless she can back up her comments with a paper trail. It should be a REAL paper trail, not one of those usual dan-rather paper trails the left generates when it needs “inconvenient truths”.
Respects,
Gwedd, they provided minutes of a meeting in 1991 – and a number of people corroborated the story. To quote James Joyner of Outside The Beltway:
Mark. Dude. Honestly.
http://www.redstate.com/blogs/blogsforfredthompson_com/2007/jul/06/some_questions_about_the_new_la_times_hitpiece_against_fred_thompson
See Point #4, at least.
I apologize for being too stupid to work HTML, can you fix it for me, if it doesn’t work?
In the absence of billing records or some other tangible evidence, this seems to be a case of “he said, she said”. One memo documenting a meeting isn’t going to cut it.
It shouldn’t be hard to come up with the records for how Thompson actually spent his time when this was supposed to have happened.
GCB, it worked…look, you guys are all welcome to disagree with me, as always…and I respect your disagreement. The story rings true to me, particularly in light of the backtracking already in progress by Thompson’s spokesman.
Obviously, I wasn’t there – but I think Thompson is going to have to put up a better defense than he has so far to make this go away…
A lot of backpedaling by the LAT now as well:
http://hotair.com/archives/2007/07/09/facts-disappearing-without-a-trace-from-lat-bombshell-on-freds-abortion-lobbying/
Sununu seems to ever meeting with Fred, as well.
Mark, you may be right on this issue. The whole thing smells. But, right now my “believability meter” is tipping to Dan Rather.
Mark, I got caught in the spam filter last night, but I was attempting to post a link from RedState similar to what Chris just posted from Hot Air.
http://www.redstate.com/stories/elections/2008/rs_radio_part_2_of_our_fred_cast
Chris, GCB, I saw that…certainly, it is a curious detail. I still say the LA Times story rings truer than the denial – but as I said, I’m open to persuasion…and that certainly is a mitigating detail in Thompson’s favor…
And that’s certainly your right… I just don’t believe anything I read in the paper anymore, which is a shame really.
GCB,
It is a shame, and mirrors a thought I had just this morning, that the MSM (and I include FNC in this for you FNC-haters out there) may be the only organization as a whole that I trust less often than the government (including both Democrats and Republicans).
And that is very saddening. And troubling, frankly.
Would anyone like to argue that in Thompson’s case, we need to seperate his actions as a lobbyist from the core beliefs that he would bring to the presidency? …….oh, looks like Thompson himself has already done that. Perhaps someone more internet savvy than me can post Thompson’s statement from the Sean Hannity show.
It’s not a matter of his right to lobby, nor to separate that from his beliefs. The question is one of integrity – if (and I stress if) he in fact did this, and lied about it, that’s what would be a problem. The fact that he did or didn’t do it is immaterial to me…
Mark,
I agree with you on that.
Actually, the whole lobby aspect of his past concerns me far more than whatever he may or may not have lobbied for or against. It’s hard to believe that a former lobbyist will believe in anything other than “politics as usual” in Washington. He has an uphill climb to convince me on that score. Not an impossible climb. I keep an open mind. I even tried to keep an open mind about McCain (as much as I dislike certain things about him, there are plenty of things to like and admire), but he was far too heavily involved in that despicable “immigration reform” bill for me to truly accept him.
Scott,
Brought to you by the wonderful folks at Huff ‘n Puff:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/07/11/thompson-waffles-on-proc_n_55834.html
If you can get past the hyperbole, the facts are there, and the article is correct that a) it doesn’t make Thompson look good, and b) Hannity was amateurish in not following up.
In Hannity’s defense (a rare thing for me these days), I listened to the interview. If I recall correctly (and if I’m wrong, please correct me) that was the last question that Hannity posed before a “hard break” (basically the commercial breaks at the hour and half hour), and Thompson was gone after the break, I’m pretty sure. Now, a good interviewer would’ve posed that question much sooner in the interview, and not lobbed such a softball in there, but it’s disingenuous to accuse him of not following up when he should’ve. I don’t believe he had the opportunity to do so (which I freely admit is his fault in the first place).
This is from my memory, and I was out exercising and a phone call even came in at about this time, so it is possible that I’m misremembering. If someone has better information, I willingly cede the floor to them.