GOP operative Caroline Hunter could face disbarment, according to first in series of investigative reports at RAW STORY

Related: Disgraced vote cager, Rove protégé Tim Griffin now running for Congress...

Brad Friedman Byon 3/31/2010, 8:05am PT

[Updated below with details on the second part of Jacobson's series, just posted at RAW STORY, in which he ties together Hunter's EAC appointment and dubious tenure, representing the RNC's nefarious "voter fraud" fraudster wing (which is to say, pretty much the entire RNC these days!) The second in the series offers important info and a good reminder of the names you'll be seeing again soon, singing the same old phony, discredited "voter fraud" songs once again as November nears, as sure as the sun rises in the East.]

Brad Jacobson has filed the first in a series of exclusives at RAW STORY concerning GOP operative and Bush-appointed FEC commissioner Caroline Hunter. [Disclosure: Jacobson has blogged at The BRAD BLOG in the past.] Here's the lede for his first excellent investigative report yesterday:

Caroline Hunter, a Bush-appointed Federal Election Commissioner who remains in office, provided misleading statements under oath in an effort to conceal Republican National Committee involvement in vote suppression activities during the 2004 presidential election, a Raw Story investigation has found. Legal experts say Hunter's submission of such statements under oath is a serious ethical and professional breach which could warrant a bar review and potential disbarment. At the time, Hunter was serving as deputy counsel to the Republican National Committee.

The report goes on to detail how Hunter --- who, as The BRAD BLOG has highlighted over the years, had previously been allowed to serve as a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) --- deceptively misrepresented the facts, on behalf of the RNC, in a 2004 voter caging hearing in federal court.

Jacobson quotes election law experts, including two long-time former DoJ Voting Section attorneys, who argue that while the way she couched her sworn testimony may "shield her from perjury charges," the statements she gave may "still pose ethical problems that potentially could result in her disbarment."...

Garry Hebert, who spent more than twenty years prosecuting voting rights cases at the DoJ told Jacobson after reviewing the Hunter matter: "If a lawyer makes a misleading statement in sworn testimony to the court, and then the court not only finds that the statement was misleading but it turns out to be 'belied' by the actual facts in the case, I think a state bar would be interested in that."

Both Deborah Rhode, a Stanford University legal ethics professor, and Joe Rich, a long-serving former DoJ Voting Section chief, offered similar assessments.

While it wasn't mentioned in Jacobson's first article in the series, Hunter was appointed to her position at the FEC after serving as a commissioner on the EAC, the dreadfully-failed body responsible for overseeing federal certification for the nation's electronic voting systems.

As The BRAD BLOG detailed in 2007, after being nominated for the EAC post by George W. Bush that year, Hunter, despite her known record of involvement in voter caging chicanery in Ohio in 2004 and her lack of election administration experience (as required by law for commissioners) was approved for the commission without either a public hearing in the Senate Rules Committee, as chaired by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), or even a recorded vote in the U.S. Senate. She was allowed to take her position on the EAC by simple unanimous consent on the floor.

Be sure to check out Jacobson's superb reporting for the details on exactly what Hunter is accused of having done, and the slippery way in which she did it.

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A related connecting-the-dots post-script: The BRAD BLOG has filed dozens of reports on RNC vote caging over the years, including details on one of the lead GOP operative/cagers from 2004, former Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin.

Griffin was the one who had authored a number of the voter caging-related e-mails that Hunter misleadingly testified in regard to, as Jacobson details in his story. (Our articles concerning Griffin are indexed here).

In the wake of Bush's U.S. Attorney Purge scandal in 2007, Griffin, who had replaced one of the purged U.S. Attorneys in Arkansas' Eastern District, was forced to tearily resign his new post as his role in the caging schemes during the 2004 Presidential Election came to came to light during Congressional hearings.

Nonetheless, as most shamed GOPers do, Griffin is now attempting his return from ignominy and is now running for the U.S. Congress in Arkansas' 2nd District.

Old vote suppressors never die. They just count on the media forgetting about --- or never having covered in the first place --- their nefarious, anti-democracy schemes.

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UPDATE 3/31/10 1:23pm PT: Part II of Jacobson's series has now been posted at RAW. This chapter picks up on Hunter's EAC ascendancy, as we briefly noted above, and offers a detailed, connect-the-dots report on the various nefarious RNC players who gamed the EAC --- as assisted by Hunter --- to bury reports on the GOP's "voter fraud" fraud and more. Long time readers of The BRAD BLOG may be familiar with much of what Jacobson reports in Part II, but he's done a tremendous job in tying together many of the various odds and ends that we've covered in separate articles over the year.

His second report (assisted by Muriel Kane this time out) is very well worth the read even if you think you're familiar with all of these data points, as even I picked up a few items that I hadn't been previously familiar with!

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