NEY AND THE ELECTIONS - SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

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Tue, 10 Jan 2006 18:37:09 -0500

NEY AND THE ELECTIONS - SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS

 

 

 

 

The Soon-to-be-Indicted Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio's Connection To Electoral

Fraud

The Dots Connect Between Abramoff, Ohio 2004 Election Smokescreen and

Ney's Former Staffer Revealed to be on Diebold's Payroll While Working

for White House Law Firm

All the While as HAVA -- America's 'Election Reform' Bill -- is Used

for Political Payoff in the Bargain...

 

There's been a great deal of speculation over the last several days,

particularly in the light of Jack Abramoff's recent guilty pleas,

concerning the connection of Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH...

 

There's been a great deal of speculation over the last several days,

particularly in the light of Jack Abramoff's recent guilty pleas,

concerning the connection of Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) to Election

Fraud in Ohio, and indeed, vis a vis his stewardship and authoring of

the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) back in 2001 and 2002. The

heavy-handed tactics he has taken since then in order to keep the

flawed act from being changed in any way over the years, along with

the great lengths he's gone to in order to keep the nation's eyes off

of massive electile dysfunction in Ohio and elsewhere since 2004 may

finally soon get the attention it all properly deserves.

 

Both Abramoff and his partner Michael Scanlon have directly informed

prosecutors of Ney's alleged wrong doing in regard to money and gifts

given to Ney in apparent exchange for support on various legislation

and even personal business deals. Ney, who chairs the important U.S.

House Administration Committee, has been fingered, and now subpoenaed,

in regard to accepting illegal trips, gratuities and other apparent

quid pro quo deals with Abramoff's former firms, partners, friends and

groups who had paid both him and Scanlon as lobbyists.

 

His direct connection to the HAVA Election Reform bill passed in the

wake of the 2000 Florida Election Debacle and his various

extraordinary efforts to specifically block amendments to the bill and

to smokescreen attempted investigations into his home state's conduct

during the 2004 Election Debacle, has been less widely reported. Until

now.

 

While Common Cause quietly reported in December of 2004 that Diebold

-- the much-beleagured-of-late American Voting Machine company -- paid

as much as $275,000 to Abramoff's firm, Greenberg Traurig for lobbying

work, The BRAD BLOG has now found additional details that begin to

shed new light on Ney's personal connections to Diebold lobbyists.

 

Such personal connections include those with Ney's former chief of

staff turned lobbyist, David DiStefano who has been working on behalf

of Diebold, Inc. and at least one other Voting Machine Company, as a

registered lobbyist in the House going back to at least 2001. One of

DiStefano's online bios crows about his having " an insider's edge to

hard-to-reach political officials. " That " insider's edge " has proven

to have been a very worthwhile investment for the Voting Machine

Companies who'd purchased access into Ney's political office.

 

Congressional lobbying records reveal that Diebold, Inc. has paid at

least $180,000 to DiStefano and eventually his partner, Roy C. Coffee,

to lobby for the " Help America Vote Act " and other " Election Reform

Issues " in Congress since 2003. Another Electronic Voting Machine

Company, AccuPoll, Inc., also paid DiStefano some $70,000 to lobby for

HAVA on their behalf in 2002, though that relationship was apparently

terminated once the legislation was passed by Congress.

 

In turn, Ney's former employee DiStefano and Coffee themselves have

given nearly $20,000 to Bob Ney's campaigns dating back to 2002.

 

The connections of DiStefano and Coffee don't stop at Congress,

however. Both lobbyists now work out of the new Washington office of

the Texas-based law firm of Lock, Liddell & Sapp LLP -- the firm of

George W. Bush's White House Counsel Harriet Miers. And Coffee,

himself, had previously worked as a senior aide to the then-Governor

Bush back in Texas.

 

In addition to lobbying in favor of Electronic Voting, DiStefano and

Coffee were also paid thousands to lobby Ney on behalf of an obscure

firm by the name of FN Aviation which later became known as FAZ

Aviation. FN/FAZ Aviation, the Columbus Dispatch reported last

December, paid for Ney's 2003 trip to England. On that trip, Ney met

at a casino with FN Aviation's director, Nigel Winfield, a three-time

convicted felon, and Fouad al-Zayat, the Syrian-born head of FN

Aviation. Zayat, as reported by NBC News, is known as " one of London's

biggest gamblers. "

 

As has also been reported by NBC and others, the apparently once-very

lucky Ney reported winning some $34,000 a few months later at that

same London casino after an initial $100 bet " on two hands of a

three-card game of chance, " according to his spokesperson Brian Walsh.

Ney, who coincidentally carried at least $30,000 in credit card debt

in 2002, was fortunate to be able to report that the debt was paid off

in full by the end of 2003.

 

The dots begin converging, however, in regard to both large campaign

contributions and lobbying done by Ney's former chief of staff,

DiStefano along with Coffee on behalf of both FN/FAZ Aviation and

Diebold, Inc.

 

Ney was one of the original authors and lead co-sponsors of HAVA and a

fierce defender of both the act, and the effort to keep further

legislation from moving forward in Congress that would mandate Voter

Verified Paper Ballots for electronic voting machines made by Diebold

and other e-voting vendors.

 

In 2004, prior to the Presidential Election, Ney went so far as to

send a " Dear Colleague " letter signed along with the other HAVA

co-sponsors to members of congress, urging them not to amend the

original legislation. He argued at the time, that paper records on

such machines would somehow disenfranchise disabled voters who had

been cleverly afforded a special provision in bill which mandated at

least one disabled-accessable device in every voting precinct in the

country. That device, of course, would be a paperless touch-screen

electronic voting machine, like the ones made by Diebold, which,

legislators, vendors and lobbyists would later proffer, were required

to meet provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

 

Ney had also peronsally gone out of his way in order to keep Rep. Rush

Holt's (D-NJ) " Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act " (HR

550), which would mandate paper records for all votes cast, from ever

seeing the light of day in the House Administration Committee. That,

despite Holt's bill having now nearly 160 bi-partisan co-sponsors. Ney

has succeeded brilliantly at squashing Holt's bill, first proposed as

HR 2239 back in 2003, as it continues to both gain co-sponsors and

gather dust as the powerful Republican committee chair still refuses

to allow it even to be brought up for hearings.

 

The American Prospect's Art Levine broke a superb exposé last May

concerning Ney's alleged payoffs from a number of the Indian tribes

that now-disgraced, once-uber-lobbyist Abramoff was representing in

exchange for promises to support their hope for new gambling

legislation back in 2002.

 

" Just met with Ney!!! We're f'ing gold!!!! He's going to do Tigua, "

wrote Abramoff to Scanlon in an Email after Ney reportedly promised to

add the Tribe's hoped-for legislation to HAVA while the bill was still

pending.

 

Ney then told the tribes -- who had been instructed by Abramoff and

Scanlon to give tens of thousands of dollars to his campaign and to

pay for a $100,000 trip to play golf at St. Andrews in Scotland --

that he was working with the Democratic Senator from Connecticut,

Chris Dodd, to add gambling language in HAVA that would be favorable

to the tribes.

 

In reality, Dodd had rejected the idea early on in no uncertain terms,

as Levine reports, but that didn't keep Ney from spinning tales to the

tribal groups. He told them on several occassions, at least once

personally, that things were moving smartly forward as he kept

accepting more cash and gifts from them along the way.

 

Finally, when the HAVA legislation was passed, and the promised

language was nowhere to be found, Ney informed the tribes that Dodd

had reneged on the deal at the last minute.

 

That was, of course, not true, since Dodd had rejected the plan months

earlier.

 

But as the spotlight of corruption has finally begun to shine bright

and clear in the Mainstream Media onto Ney, renewed interest in his

support and authorship of HAVA itself -- along with the connections

between that legislation, chicanery in Ohio's Election, Abramoff and

several other GOP operative and lobbying firms' merry band of

pay-for-players -- are helping to bubble up towards the surface a few

previously overlooked, but very important, details that may finally

now receive the attention they always deserved from the Mainstream

Media...

 

The BRAD BLOG has been reporting since early 2005 about Ney's role in

authoring and co-sponsoring HAVA along with his various attempts to

keep it from being amended to require Voter Verified Paper Ballots

with every vote cast. More so, we've been reporting on his very

specific efforts to smoke-screen the mountain of evidence suggesting

massive fraud in Ohio's 2004 Presidential Election by -- amongst other

things -- holding hearings in his House Administration Committee meant

quite clearly to deflect the focus from the rampant Electoral Fraud in

the Buckeye State in 2004 towards the trumped-up imaginery epidemic of

Voter Fraud in that state and elsewhere around the country.

 

Ney's hearings, ostensibly publicized as " investigations " into the

many Election Irregularities in Ohio, even went so far as to hear

testimony from a self-described " voting rights " group calling

themselves the American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR). The

tax-exempt 501©3, self-proclaimed " non-partisan " group was the only

such " voting rights " group to give testimony to the committee.

However, as The BRAD BLOG discovered at the time, the brand-new

organization was little more than a phony GOP front group. It had been

co-founded by two top-level Bush/Cheney/RNC operatives, Mark F. " Thor "

Hearne and Jim Dyke.

 

As we reported back then, the phony ACVR had been formed just days

prior to their giving testimony to Ney's congressional committee. The

hearings -- held in Columbus, OH -- were on March 21, 2005. Yet the

first known record of ACVR's emergence in the world was on its

Internet domain registration (AC4VR.com) which was created on March

17, 2005 -- just two business days prior to the hearings!

 

Hearne -- who had been National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney '04

Inc. -- identified himself in his testimony at the hearings only as " a

longtime advocate of voting rights and an attorney experienced in

election law. " He then was allowed to go on to testify about

unsubstantiated, and later completely discredited charges of voter

fraud while others testified misleadingly about long voting lines in

all of Ohio's counties, instead of just those precincts which leaned

heavily Democratic. Many of those mainly Left-leaning precincts turned

out to have had, in several cases, fewer voting machines deployed in

the November general election than they reportedly had in the primary

races just several months earlier.

 

For his part, Hearne's partner Dyke had been the RNC's Communication up to that point. Dyke now works in the office of

Vice-President Dick Cheney and apparently continues his affiliation

with the " non-partisan " ACVR in the bargain.

 

The HAVA legislation, while it does not explicitly require states or

counties to upgrade their voting equipment to electronic touch-screen

systems made by Ohio's Diebold, Inc. and others (even while the

opportunistic Voting Machine Vendors and the lazy Mainstream Media

have otherwise perpetuated that myth for several years), it does

mandate that every precinct have at least one voting device that is

accessable to disabled voters so that they may be able to cast their

ballots secretly and without assistance.

 

Hence, Ney and the other original authors and lead co-sponsors of HAVA

-- Dodd (D-CT) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in the Senate and Steny

Hoyer (D-MD) in the House -- have been playing up the " Disabled Voters

Need Electronic Voting Machines! " card since its inception by hauling

out various spokespeople from disabilities groups such as the National

Federation for the Blind (NFB) and the American Association of People

with Disabilities (AAPD). Representatives from those groups have

testified at hearings and elsewhere to help make the case that their

members simply must have computerized voting machines -- with no paper

ballots -- or their civil rights will be denied.

 

What is rarely reported when folks such as the AAPD's Jim Dickson

invetibaly shows up at these hearings to testify is that the NFB

received a contribution of one million dollars from Diebold and

Dickson's AAPD has received at least $26,000 from them as well, as

reported by the NY Times and others.

 

(NOTE: Those spokespeople from disabilities groups not on the Diebold

payroll, who don't buy into the tortured notion that they must have

paperless touch-screen voting machines in order to protect their

civil-rights -- folks like David Dixon of Florida's Handicapped Adults

of Volusia County (HAVOC) -- are rarely called to testify at such

hearings as those trumped-up by Bob Ney and friends.)

 

In addition to the " Dear Colleague " letter that Ney wrote (signed by

him and his co-sponsors of the HAVA legislation) in 2004, asking

members of congress not to amend the act to require paper trails, Ney

has made every effort to ensure that the myriad reports of massive

voter disenfranchisment and electoral irregularities that occurred in

Ohio remain little more than " conspiracy theory " as far as both the

Mainstream Media and the majority of the American electorate perceive

the matters. He, and others who have lobbied hard on behalf of Diebold

have continued to misleadingly forward the idea that what occurred in

2004, and subsequently in 2005, where some 44 out of 88 counties in

Ohio went electronic for the first time, is nothing to be alarmed

about. It's all little more than the imaginery ruminations of

Democratic-party John Kerry supporters, according to such folks. That,

despite the fact that it has been the Green and Liberterian parties

who have, by-and-large, waged the most aggressive attempt to have

votes in Ohio counted, along with the extraordinarily well-documented

reports of chicanery exposed nationally throughout various local

media. More information in that regard will likely surface via the

still-pending lawsuit on all of this brought by the League of Women

Voters in Ohio.

 

Add that to the " staggeringly impossible " results of the 2005 Election

results there which were stunning, to say the least, and the

shamefully under-reported story of the non-partisan Governmental

Accountability Office's (GAO) damning report on HAVA and its gross

failures released last September. All told, it would seem that Ney and

the Voting Machine Companyies like Diebold have had every reason to

squash whatever reporting they could on these matters, and so far,

they've gotten the job largely done. At least in the mainstream outlets.

 

And finally then, it has recently been revealed that Diebold itself

was also paying Abramoff's firm Greenberg Traurig directly for work in

June of 2004 which has yet to be fully detailed or explained in any way.

 

A payment stub [PDF] and pre-check-register [PDF] revealing a $12,500

payment for the month, made from Diebold to Greenberg Traurig was

discovered in a dumpster at Diebold's McKinney, TX facility in July of

that year by electronic voting watchdog group BlackBoxVoting.org.

 

Perhaps that payment was part of the $275,000 we mentioned previously,

as reportedly paid to Diebold. Though we've yet to find a reference to

the work by Abramoff's old lobbying firm on behalf of Diebold listed

in the Congressional lobbying database. So exactly what those payments

were meant for, and where they ultimately ended up, remains unclear,

at least to us, at this time.

 

It seems that the Tigua Indian tribe, which paid $32,000 to Ney and

his political action committee on Abramoff and Scanlon's directive,

and the two other tribes who paid $100,000 to send them all golfing in

St. Andrews ultimately received little if anything for their investment.

 

Diebold, Inc. on the other hand, seems to have received quite a bit in

return for their investment. At least in light of the continued lack

of media scrutiny and congressional oversight their electronic

touch-screen voting machines -- now proven on several occassions to be

fully hackable and wholly unsecure -- have received from legislators

like Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio. The same Bob Ney who has worked so hard on

their behalf -- not the voters' -- to ensure that all of those poor

disabled folks would have at least one voting machine of the type

manufactured by Diebold Inc., in every single precinct, in every

single county, in every single state in the country in 2006. It's

mandated by law, after all, by Bob Ney's Help America Vote Act of

2002. In this case, it seems, they got what they paid for.

==================

 

 

" The Soon-to-be-Indicted Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio's Connection To ...

Brad Blog - USA

.... days, particularly in the light of Jack Abramoff's recent guilty

pleas, concerning the connection of Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH) to

Election Fraud in Ohio, and ...

http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00002261.htm