Posted on 07/19/2007 7:33:24 AM PDT by pissant
This may be the political version of Evolution. The New York Times is out this morning with a story about billing records that show Fred Thompson did indeed charge for his time while helping a pro-choice group. Details from the article below:
Billing records show that former Senator Fred Thompson spent nearly 20 hours working as a lobbyist on behalf of a group seeking to ease restrictive federal rules on abortion counseling in the 1990s, even though he recently said he did not recall doing any work for the organization.
According to records from Arent Fox, the law firm based in Washington where Mr. Thompson worked part-time from 1991 to 1994, he charged the organization, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, about $5,000 for work he did in 1991 and 1992. The records show that Mr. Thompson, a probable Republican candidate for president in 2008, spent much of that time in telephone conferences with the president of the group, and on three occasions he reported lobbying administration officials on its behalf.
Mr. Thompson's work for the family planning agency has become an issue because he is positioning himself as a faithful conservative who is opposed to abortion.
Read the whole article here. The Brody File has a call in to Thompson's people. Check back later for an update. Already, email is coming into The Brody File about the story. Here's one:
"The significance of this is not what Fred did 16 years ago. Had he been candid and honest, and explained himself, all would be well. The issue is that Fred lied for political expediency, and allowed others on his staff to do so on his behalf."
Lied may too strong a word. It seems like Thompson did what most politicians do. They beat around the bush and try to avoid an outright apology. Let's review shall we?
When this story first broke, Thompson's spokesman Mark Corallo said the following:
"Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period."
Then it became Thompson had "no recollection of doing any work on behalf of this group. He may have been consulted by one of the firm's partners who represented this group in 1991".
Days after the story broke, Thompson told radio talk show Sean Hannity:
"You need to separate a lawyer advocating a position from the position itself. They will probably come at me, in 35 years of law practice, with some people, I represented criminal defendants. I was a prosecutor. I had a general law practice. So that in and of itself doesn't mean anything anyway. … I'm not going to get down in the weeds with everything they dredge up over the next six months."
Thompson also sent in a column to the Powerline blog where he seemed to suggest he did some work:
"A lawyer who is a candidate or a prospective candidate for office finds himself in an interesting position because of the nature of the legal profession and the practice of law. … I've experienced another gambit of those schooled in the creative uses of law and politics: dredging up clients - or another lawyer's clients -that I may have represented or consulted with and then using the media to get me into a public debate as to what I may have done for them or said to them 15 or 20 years ago. Even if my memory serves me correctly, Even it would not be appropriate for a lawyer to make such comments."
Any way you slice it, what we have here is an "evolving story". This isn't really about the abortion issue. Because of Thompson's consistent pro-life record in the Senate, pro-family groups will probably give him a pass on that aspect. But Thompson needs to be careful. He wants people to see him as a plain spoken, tell it like it is southerner. But evolving stories like this are normally left to "inside the beltway" Washington insiders. For his campaign to be successful, he needs to be seen as a Washington outsider not just another politician who is spinning his way out of a mess.
I agree about Mitt. Some may not believe his story about how he became pro-life, but he was frank in admitting his past position was a mistake.
Hunter will catch fire, I assure you.
You’re not doing Hunter any favours by mischaracterizing Thompson.
Once again I am met with personal attacks with all my critics ignoring the legitimacy of my conclusions. Nevermind that Fred’s wife is younger than one of hiss daughters. Everyone in the nation will be capable of looking past her seductive appearence, and come to the realization that Jeri is an accomplished lawyer and devoted wife and mother. The American voting poopulace is so enlightened that will casually gloss over image and the stereotypes which are associated with them. Look at the tv programming in our country. Its predicated upon superficiality.
Why should he have to explain his wife to amyone? Mrs. Thompson is a very successful woman in her own right, so where's the beef?
“How do you expect Fred explain his wife to Joe public?”
I don’t. And if some jackass just CANNOT bring himself to vote for Fred Thompson because he wife is too pretty, THAT JACKASS is too friggin’ stupid to be allowed to vote in the first place, SOMEONE get him a helmet!
There's nothing to say that he won't. The video that was posted earlier in the thread (YouTube from FoxNews, start at 6:22) where he talks about seeing his daughter's sonogram strongly suggests that he eventually will.
We'll get some more specific statements when Fred announces. For that, we must be patient.
Hunter/Romney a cool west coast - east cost ticket.
Not sure it would carry either homestate but it could clean sweep the midwest.
Oddly enough, the criticism seems to be coming in part from Romney's opposition research staff, even though their candidate was seemingly OK with abortion in the current decade.
There are many here who post ugliness about their candidate’s opposition, but that deleted post was the ugliest, vilest speculation I’ve seen. It was filth.
Sorry, could not resist after all this “When is Fred going to announce stuff...”
I am hopeful, it would be good to see them both at the top so we can get the rest out of the way. I can live with Hunter as well as FDT. Indeed it is long past time for Duncan to get in the national spotlight. that’s his biggest problem.
Is this the kind of crap that Savage spews?
Is it my imagination, or are some folks so scared of "amnesty" that they've started attacking legitimate candidates that they perceive to be 'too weak'?
Roberts and Alito won’t vote to completely overturn the privacy right which was first established in Griswold and later expanded in Roe. So, they are going to have to find a countervailing right which is greater than the Women’s right to privacy. One of the key points of the Roe decision was Justice Blackman’s conclusion that “fetus’s” were not persons entitled to 14th Amendment protection. His reasoning was very flawed since he relied on the fact that citizenship is not gained untill birth when everyone agrees that the term person’s in the 14th Amendment applies to people who are not citizens. So, given that Roberts and Alito are not likely to completely overturn the right to privacy the best chance for overturning Roe is to simply reverse the portion of Roe which held that unborn children were not persons entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment.
I missed it fortunatly.
Romney’s cross to bear is his Mormonism. Fred has his wife and his curious globalist philosophies as obstacles. Rudy cannot stray very far from 9/11. The big three carry exploitable weaknesses into the primary.
>You’re not doing Hunter any favours by mischaracterizing (sic) Thompson.<
LOL! Mischaracterizing?
You mean I can’t believe my lying eyes?
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