The 2002 midterms were thunderous wins for the Republican Party — not so much for their scope as their context, and for the fact that they snuffed out the Democrats’ last remaining hold on power in George W. Bush’s Washington. But those victories continue to cast long legal shadows.

This month we’ve been focusing on the consequences of former Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s 2002-2003 Texas redistricting coup, which may bring the Hammer’s career to an ignominious end. But other investigations are moving forward that had their start in that campaign cycle and even on Election Day.

Keep in mind that the U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s Valerie Plame investigation actually tracks back to events that transpired just before the 2002 elections. Smearing Joe Wilson happened in the summer of 2003, but it was part of the effort to cover up the knowingly false claims the White House made about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program back in September and October 2002.

Nor should we forget the 2002 New Hampshire election-tampering scandal, which has been dragging on in the federal courts for almost three years.

Just to review, this is the case in which the New Hampshire Republican Party — with help from as-yet-unnamed parties — hired a phone-bank operator in Idaho to take down Democratic and union phone banks on election day 2002 by flooding them with thousands of automated hang-up calls. The former executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party, Chuck McGee, and Republican political consultant Allen Raymond have already taken plea agreements for their roles in the crime and gone to prison. Republican political operative James Tobin, the accused mastermind of the operation, is awaiting trial.

Before Tobin’s involvement in the New Hampshire case was finally revealed late last year, he was the head of the Bush-Cheney reelection in New England. In 2002, Tobin worked for Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), then the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as the committee’s northeast political director. (Frist has yet to answer questions about his knowledge of or potential role in the case.) Tobin also worked at the same time for the Republican National Committee, which is now footing the hefty legal bills for his defense.

Through the life of the case, Department of Justice (DoJ) prosecutors seldom appeared to be in any particular rush to move the case along or push the investigation higher up the food chain. The revelation of Tobin’s involvement was kept under wraps for more than a year, for instance. And his trial was left till long after the 2004 election cycle.

But recently something seems to have changed.

For the duration of the case, the prosecution had been in the hands of Todd Hinnen, a Justice Department prosecutor from the criminal division’s computer-crimes section. At the end of July, however, Hinnen was pulled from the case and reassigned. He’s now reportedly working on cyberterrorism issues at the White House.

When Hinnen was withdrawn from the case, many observers in New Hampshire saw his removal as yet another example of possible DoJ foot-dragging and lack of commitment to the case. After all, two and half years into it, and just before the big trial, the department was pulling the lead attorney from the case and starting over with someone new.

But the opposite now seems to have been the case.

Hinnen was replaced by another attorney from the computer-crimes division and, significantly, an attorney from DoJ’s public-integrity section. (Why a public-integrity lawyer wasn’t involved from the first has always been a mystery, given that the case is a textbook instance of political corruption.) And the tempo and zeal of the investigation appears to have picked up significantly since the reassignment.

The most tantalizing new bit of information is word from sources close to the case that the assignment of a lawyer from the public-integrity section may be tied the expanding Jack Abramoff investigation and possible connections between the cases.

Just what those connections might be remains unclear. But the new prosecutors on the case do seem to be looking much more seriously into who else in Washington and among national Republicans might have known about the scam in advance or participated in it.

There’s also the lingering question of who footed the bill for the phone-jamming scam. And attention has now focused on two $5,000 checks that came in Oct. 28, 2002, just days before the plan was hatched, from two of Jack Abramoff’s prized clients — the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians and the Mississippi Choctaws.

Folks in Washington have never been particularly interested in the New Hampshire case. But even with indictments coming down fast and furious in Republican circles, this scandal may yet get its day in the sun.

Stay tuned.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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