Spokane man faces charges
CONCORD, N.H. – A Spokane man has been charged with taking part in a Republican scheme to jam Democrats’ get-out-the-vote phone lines on Election Day 2002.
Shaun Hansen, of Spokane, headed a former telemarketing company that placed hundreds of hang-up calls to five phone lines run by Democrats and one run by the Manchester firefighters union. He is the fourth person to be charged in the case.
Word of the charges against Hansen surfaced over the weekend in the New Hampshire Daily News.
Prosecutors said Hansen’s now-defunct Mylo Enterprises of Sandpoint was hired by Republican operatives to place the calls.
Hansen is accused of violating a federal law that forbids placing anonymous telephone calls to annoy or harass someone. He has not entered a plea, but is scheduled to appear in U.S. District Court in Concord on May 9.
Attempts to reach Hansen, whose last known residence was Deer Park, were unsuccessful. His most recently published phone number has been disconnected.
Last July, Hansen told an Idaho reporter he made the calls, but did so innocently. Prosecutors say the Mylo Enterprises’ calls were multiple, computer generated and intended to clog the phone lines of Democrats attempting to offer voters rides to the polls.
Many state and federal races were decided that day, including the U.S. Senate race between outgoing New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Rep. John Sununu, who won.
“We knew that we were calling and hanging up on numbers. We didn’t know what it was for,” Hansen said.
Mylo Enterprises was dissolved in 2003 because the company wasn’t profitable, Hansen told reporters last July. The company was started as a for-profit calling center that specialized in fund raising for various nonprofit groups.
Other key defendants in the case have already pleaded guilty. The former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican state committee, Chuck McGee, has been sentenced to serve seven months in federal prison. Allen Raymond, a GOP consultant from Virginia, has been sentenced to five months in prison.
James Tobin, of Bangor, Maine, who was regional director of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee at the time, has pleaded innocent to similar charges. He is scheduled to stand trial in June.
Tobin resigned as New England director of President Bush’s re-election campaign last fall before he was indicted, but after Democrats named him as a possible target of the federal investigation into the phone-jamming conspiracy.
Federal prosecutors said McGee thought up the plan and asked Tobin for help executing it. At Tobin’s suggestion, McGee contacted Raymond and asked him to find a telemarketer to make the calls. Raymond then hired Mylo Enterprises.
Hansen has said his firm received $2,500 from Raymond’s former company, GOP Marketplace LLC of Alexandria, Va., to place the calls. He has also said a lawyer for the political consulting firm told him the job was legal.
The state Democratic Party is trying to find out whether anyone else had advance knowledge of the scheme. They have filed a civil suit against the state Republican Party seeking compensatory damages.
Friday, the two sides argued in Hillsborough County Superior Court over what information the Republicans must produce before trial. Federal prosecutors last fall got a stay on the Democrats’ pretrial discovery in the civil case, saying it could hurt their prosecution of Tobin. They have asked that the stay be renewed until Tobin’s trial is complete.
Democratic Party chairwoman Kathy Sullivan said Democrats want a chance to find out if anyone else was involved before their case is heard.
“Our concern is that time will pass and there will not be enough time for discovery to ascertain whether any others were involved,” she said.
McGee has said former state Republican Chairman John Dowd authorized the phone-jamming operation. Dowd has said McGee told him about it, but he did not authorize it and, after consulting with a lawyer, ordered it stopped. Dowd has not been charged.
The Democrats also want to know what, if anything, U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who was Tobin’s boss at the time, knew about the phone-jamming plan. Frist, now the Senate Majority leader and a possible presidential candidate in 2008, has denied any knowledge of it.
Ovide Lamontagne, lawyer for the state Republicans, says that kind of public speculation is baseless and politically motivated.
“There is no evidence to suggest that the party authorized this and supported this. Chuck McGee took steps to hide this from the party and acted on his own,” Lamontagne said. “I think the Democrats know the Republican Party is not responsible. But they are using the courts to harass and annoy the Republican Party, which is why we filed an abuse of process claim.”