The Justice Department and Senate investigators are broadening their inquiries into John Ensign’s sex scandal. Ensign inquiries broaden

The Justice Department and Senate investigators are broadening their inquiries into Sen. John Ensign’s sex scandal, sources told POLITICO, amid a new report appearing to show additional, previously undisclosed, efforts by the Nevada Republican to land a job for the aggrieved husband of his former mistress.

The FBI began initial interviews with key players in the Ensign scandal in January, weeks after the Senate Ethics Committee began issuing subpoenas in the case. Sources say the Justice Department investigation remains in an information-gathering phase, but it is moving swiftly and could soon turn into a full-fledged inquiry that would put further strain on the embattled senator’s political career. To date, no information has been presented to a federal grand jury, but that could soon change, according to sources familiar with the case.


The heightened pace of the inquiries comes amid a New York Times report Wednesday night disclosing new e-mails from 2008 showing that Ensign urged a Las Vegas firm to hire his former top Senate aide Doug Hampton as its lobbyist – in what could have been an effort to contain the fallout of the senator’s affair with Hampton’s wife, Cindy. The e-mails could be damaging if investigators determine that Ensign conspired to help Hampton violate federal ethics laws that prohibit former aides from lobbying their one-time bosses within a mandated cooling off period.

While Ensign’s efforts to help Hampton after he left his staff has previously been detailed by POLITICO and other news outlets, the Times disclosed for the first time that the senator urged another firm, P2SA, to hire Hampton after it had sought his help on several energy projects in 2008. The newspaper said only that it received the e-mails from a person “involved in the case.”

Hampton has sat down for a lengthy interview with the Times for an Ensign story in October, and many political analysts in Nevada and Washington believe that Hampton is out to destroy Ensign’s career by periodically leaking damaging news on the senator to the media in order to keep the sex scandal story alive.

Hampton did not respond to inquiries seeking comment.

Since he disclosed the affair last summer, Ensign has denied any violations of federal law or Senate ethics rules.

“Any allegation or inference that Senator Ensign’s motivation for doing his job as a Senator was anything but for the good of his state is completely false and misleading,” Rebecca Fisher, Ensign’s spokeswoman said in a statement Wednesday night. “He did everything necessary to ensure there was no impropriety whatsoever in this matter.”

And Fisher said that public records show that Ensign “did not take any legislative action at the behest of this company” and that he previously returned campaign donations he received from a P2SA executive.

“No one is more anxious for this investigation to be completed and for the facts to come out than Senator Ensign,” Fisher said. “He is hopeful that politics will stay out of the investigation so that he can continue to focus on his job as Nevada’s Senator.”

But the questions in the intervening weeks since disclosing his affair have only grown more intense, in light of Hampton’s crusade to bring down the senator and Ensign’s disclosure that his parents gave the Hamptons $96,000 as they left his staff on April 30, 2008. Investigators are trying to determine whether Ensign violated federal disclosure laws by failing to report the payments as severance package to Doug Hampton and his wife, who was working for the senator as a campaign aide. Ensign said the money was a gift to the Hamptons, and therefore wouldn’t need to be disclosed under federal law.

Asked by POLITICO this week about the broadening investigation, Ensign shrugged, threw up his hands and made a motion indicating that his lips were zipped.

According to the e-mails disclosed by the Times, P2SA officials urged Ensign in May 2008 to help with several energy projects – at the same time Ensign was trying to line up work for Hampton, who had learned of the affair just weeks before. At a meeting, Ensign urged the company to consider hiring Hampton, and an executive there said they took it as a “helpful hint,” the Times reported.

In one of the e-mails, a company executive, Bob Andrews, told Ensign that they were “excited about the assistance you and your staff” could give to their projects, and asked for “information regarding next week’s fund-raising and we will certainly attend.”

“Being able to lobby our Congressional and senatorial lawmakers was certainly something we were exploring,” Andrews told the Times.

The Times said Hampton followed up and met with Andrews, but later said that the company did not need his services. In August 2008, Ensign returned a campaign donation from a co-owner of the company after he was alerted to a potential ethics problem, Ensign’s office said.

“He not only returned the donation, but also informed the company that his office could not be of assistance in any capacity due to the connection of a fundraiser and legislative requests made by any employee of the company,” said Fisher, the Ensign spokeswoman.

John Bresnahan contributed to this story