John McCain Breaks Ethics Law?
WASHINGTON, July 11 — About 3 p.m. Tuesday, Senator John McCain ducked off the Senate floor, entered the Republican cloakroom and took out his mobile phone. Just hours after accepting the resignation of his two top campaign aides, he was making a conference call to his top fund-raisers to urge them to keep up the fight.
The call, however, may only have exacerbated an already tough week for Mr. McCain. Senate ethics rules expressly forbid lawmakers to engage in campaign activities inside Senate facilities. If Mr. McCain solicited campaign contributions on a call from government property, that would be a violation of federal criminal law as well.
There is no evidence that Mr. McCain has made a habit of making such calls or otherwise exploiting his office for political gain, and he is hardly the first lawmaker to call a donor from under the Capitol dome. But he made the call as he was in the spotlight because of the staff shake-up, sagging poll numbers and disappointing fund-raising of his Republican presidential primary campaign.
It was the kind of technical mistake that seasoned aides — like the ones his campaign is now letting go — are supposed to prevent.
Mr. McCain was well aware of the rules. Ten years ago he led Republican calls for an independent prosecutor to investigate accusations of violations of the same rules by Vice President Al Gore. Mr. McCain went on to make the episode a cornerstone of both his 2000 Republican primary campaign and his argument for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.
Matt David, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, confirmed that Mr. McCain made the phone call from the cloakroom. Mr. David said Mr. McCain used his campaign cellphone and did not specifically ask the fund-raisers for campaign contributions, which would have been a crime. And the spokesman sought to distinguish Mr. McCain’s call, made as he was managing the Republican side of a fierce Senate debate over the Iraq war, from the accusations once made against Mr. Gore.
“This is very different than systematically abusing your office to raise money,” Mr. David said.
Whether a conference call with fund-raisers could constitute a solicitation of campaign contributions and thus violate the criminal law as well as the internal Senate ethics rules can depends on the details of the call, several legal experts said.
“If it is a solicitation, it is illegal,” said Lawrence Noble, a nonpartisan expert on political law in Washington.
Marc Elias, a Democratic campaign lawyer, said, “It is going to depend on the precise words that were used on the call,” noting that courts might consider an exhortation to pump up his fund-raisers a solicitation, depending on the context. (Mr. David insisted there was no form of solicitation on the call.)
Well why don't we just go to the NSA and have them dig up the details? Surely they have that capability.
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