More on White House Ties (Lots of Calls) to New Hampshire Election Dirty Tricks by GOP

Also from WaPo:

WASHINGTON -- New Hampshire Democrats are seeking to depose senior White House officials to learn what they knew about a 2002 episode in which a national Republican operative helped organize the jamming of Democrats' phone lines on Election Day, a scheme for which two GOP officials have already been convicted.

This week, as a Manchester judge considers a request to compel testimony and records from the White House and the Republican National Committee in a civil suit brought by the Democrats, the nearly four-year-old local political scandal spilled onto the national scene, with the chairmen of the parties trading barbs and accusations.

Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sent a letter on Tuesday to his RNC counterpart, Ken Mehlman, citing the fact that the man convicted of organizing the phone-jamming called the White House political office repeatedly in the days before the election. Dean demanded that Mehlman say whether anyone at the White House or the RNC knew about the plot.

Mehlman, who in 2002 headed the White House political office, responded by saying he and his staff knew nothing of the plans. But Democrats fired back yesterday, accusing Mehlman of refusing to reveal the extent of the contact between the White House or RNC and the New Hampshire operatives.

''They're stonewalling because they can't face the truth," said Damien LaVera, a DNC spokesman. ''The law was broken here. We need to know where this goes -- who was involved in this, who authorized it."

The episode began with a political dirty trick engineered by New Hampshire Republicans on Nov. 5, 2002. Republican John E. Sununu, then a House member, was locked in a tight Senate race against Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, then the governor, in a contest some observers thought could determine control of the Senate.

In an effort to disrupt Democrats' get-out-the-vote efforts, officials with the state Republican Party hired a telemarketing company to tie up the hot lines that had been set up by Democrats and a firefighters' union to help get voters to the polls.

For about 90 minutes, computer-dialed calls tied up the hotlines, until the scheme was halted by state Republican officials who grew concerned about its legality. Sununu won the race by about 20,000 votes on a day in which Republicans swept the major races in New Hampshire and much of the nation.

The case has yielded three convictions so far, including those of the RNC's New England regional political director for the 2002 elections, James Tobin, and the then-executive director of the state Republican Party, Charles McGee. The third person convicted was Allen Raymond, a former Virginia telemarketing executive who was hired by the New Hampshire Republicans.

New Hampshire Democrats are now trying to prove that national political figures were involved in orchestrating or condoning the plan. On Tuesday, they asked a state judge to allow them to widen their inquiry in a civil lawsuit so that they can question former White House aides -- possibly including Mehlman -- and other national political figures about their conversations with state Republican officials.

There has to be a reason why so many calls that day came from or were made to the illegal jammers to the White House. I don't believe Mehlman's - or the White House's - explanation for a moment.