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.
Because I have been a lifelong rep., and right now his position has been a lifelong anti-abortion guy, so if he made some money working as a attorney/lobby man for a pro group, big deal, let get this together, right now no one pleases any of you, because you stake you whole vote on this issue, we need to look at other things right now.
As had Fred in the Senate. He also helped Roberts get confirmed. So again, you prove no point whatsoever.
Brody is about as conservative as they come.
That’s not the point.
Also, be very afraid of Larry Flynt, he says he has someing on some of the candidates for president, he means reps, of course, then what do you do???????
All it took for me was to see a graphic description of the partial birth procedure. Now I am far stronger on pro-life issues than I ever was on pro-choice.
Life-long? Read his statements in the 1990s, when Fred Thompson opposed every effort to ban abortion. Time and time again, he states that he's personally opposed to abortion, but he thinks the decision should be left up to the woman.
In what way is that position different from Rudy Giuliani's? Heck, that's Hillary "Safe Legal and Rare" Clinton's position on the issue.
But back to the point: Should Thompson have represented them to get an entre' to the White House? Not if he was being rock solid on the principles he's SHOWN, not spoken about (Mitt fans), since then. He vaciliated and rep'd a client he didn't agree with, as lawyers will do.
Folks, let's use our heads for a moment. Where do you suppose the NYT got these "billing records"? From Thompson? His lawfirm? don't think so. How about from the client? Hmmmm... let's see: Now why would an abortion rights groups dig up old invoices from storage to help the Left try to torpedo Thompson's candidacy? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that Fred has a 100% approval rating from National Right to Life and a ZERO rating from groups like NARAL? Does it say something about how this client perceives Fred's position on abortion? ya' think?
The story has no legs, because people see it for what it is. But Brody is right: If Thompson's memory is now refreshed, he needs to talk plainly about this, and not spin like a Senator. We don't want another Beltway candidate.
He probably shared a meal or two with old Dhamer. Thought it was chicken. LOL
guess what. i used to be a democrat and was a pro-abort, there are a lot of people like me. now abortion is my hot button issue. even if Fred Thompson’s position on abortion changed over time to become more prolife, it didn’t change in order to run for president [romney] and it didn’t remain pro-abort[giuliani] so out of the ELECTABLE candidates, i’d say he’s the one i will vote for.
I’m not surprised that he didn’t remember the work. This was before he ran for office, it was probably sold as “Family Planning” and free speech, so most people would have had to be educated on the double speak. 19 hours (or parts thereof) of conversations sounds about right.
Nevertheless, the law went too far in my opinion, since it specifically restricted *counseling* between a doctor and patient. See my post #28, here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1868199/posts
What were we supposed to do when a woman asked us about abortion, leave her vulnerable to whomever she called after looking up numbers in the phone book? The same people who called themselves “Family Planning”?
Those of us who are prolife were restricted, also.
*snicker*
That’s bad.
The point is Fred and his campaign have been tapdancing this thing since it first broke. Gotta expose the tapdancing.
No, I don't think so at all. I'm looking at Thompson the man, not Thompson the uber-conservative myth, and I think I have the facts on my side.
*************
Agreed.
Imagine if Romney had done this!!! The double standard is sickening.
Part of Fred's piece, titled "A lawyer who is a prospective candidate" from Power Line.
The easiest and most generally used tactic when running against a lawyer is to trade off a general perception that most people dislike lawyers. Goodness knows that a lot of lawyers have earned disfavor but, as it turns out, folks understand our system better than a lot of politicians think they do. In my first run for the Senate, my opponent tried the old demagoguery route – “He has even represented criminals!” – to no avail.
A first cousin of this ploy is to associate the lawyer with the views of his client. Now-United States Chief Justice John Roberts addressed this notion during his confirmation hearings. “… [I]t’s a tradition of the American Bar that goes back before the founding of the country that lawyers are not identified with the positions of their clients. The most famous example probably was John Adams, who represented the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre.”
Roberts pointed out that Adams was actually vindicating the rule of law. Every person, unpopular or not, is entitled to representation. He further said, “That principle that you don’t identify the lawyer with the particular views of the client or the views that the lawyer advances on behalf of the client, is critical to the fair administration of justice.”
Like Adams, the views of attorney Abe Lincoln would have been a little hard to discern from looking at the positions he took as a lawyer. He represented the big railroad companies and on other occasions represented farmers and small land owners against the railroads.
Likewise during the Roberts confirmation, the New York Times reported on August 5, 2005 that as an appellate lawyer in the mid-1990s, Roberts gave advice to a gay-rights group that helped them win a 1996 anti-discrimination suit. Chief Justice Roberts had no direct hand in the suit. Rather, colleagues at his firm were handling the case and sought advice from a number of partners, him included. The group said that Chief Justice Roberts provided “invaluable strategic guidance” formulating legal theories.
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, it would not be appropriate for a lawyer to make such comments.
This situation does however bring to mind my many years in the law, and the nature of law practice in a country such as ours that prizes independence and individual rights. Of course, these values could not be protected without lawyer-client confidentiality or if lawyers were identified with the positions of their clients.
Fred Ping.
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