by Frank James
Imagine you’re the district attorney character on, say, television’s long-running “Law and Order.” You have five witnesses who say they either saw the accused, or learned contemporaneously, that the accused did the alleged bad thing.
Then imagine the accused’s defense is essentially a variant of “I don’t recall. There’s no paper trail. Nope, I didn’t do it.” And the accused has a friendly witness who at first doesn’t recollect if the accused did the bad thing, then ratchets up to “It didn’t happen.”
If you’re the DA, you probably still think you’ve got a case, right? Maybe you’ll just let the jury decide.
That appears to be where we’re at in case of The People v. Fred Thompson, the people being family-planning types who say they hired Thompson to lobby the first Bush White House to overturn an anti-abortion executive order. The story was broken by Michael Finnegan of the Los Angeles Times.
Thompson, the former Tennessee Republican senator who appears to be running for president even though he hasn’t yet officially announced, says, through a spokesperson, he didn’t do the lobbying at all back in 1991. That’s a surprise to the family-planning folks who say that’s exactly what they hired him to do back during his Washington lobbyist days, to specifically lobby then-White House chief of staff John Sununu.
This matters, of course, because Thompson has been wooing the anti-abortion activists and social conservatives so important to winning the Republican nomination. They’re on the jury.
If this story gains legs, that increases Thompson’s challenge in winning over that group. If the people who recall signing on Thompson to lobby the first Bush White House are seen as more credible, Thompson will not only suffer with those opposed to abortion but also more generallly because his truthfulness will become an issue.
Cue the “Law and Order” theme.