chuckago

CONCORD, N.H. -- A fourth man has been charged with taking part in a Republican scheme to jam Democrats' get-out-the-vote phone lines on Election Day 2002.

Shaun Hansen, of Spokane, Wash., headed a former telemarketing company that placed hundreds of hang-up calls to five phone lines run by Democrats and one run by the Manchester firefighters union.(...)

The former executive director of the Republican state committee, Chuck McGee, has pleaded guilty in the scheme and been sentenced to seven months in federal prison. Allen Raymond, a GOP consultant from Virginia, also has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to five months in prison.

James Tobin, of Bangor, Maine, who was regional director of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee at the time, has pleaded innocent to similar charges. He is scheduled to stand trial in June.

Tobin resigned as New England director of President Bush's reelection campaign last fall before he was indicted, but after Democrats named him as a possible target of the federal investigation into the phone-jamming conspiracy.(...)

McGee has said former state Republican chairman John Dowd authorized the phone-jamming operation. Dowd has said McGee told him about it, but he did not authorize it and, after consulting with a lawyer, ordered it stopped. Dowd has not been charged.

The Democrats also want to know what, if anything, U.S. Sen. Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who was Tobin's boss at the time, knew about the phone-jamming plan. Frist, now the Senate Majority leader and a possible presidential candidate in 2008, has denied any knowledge of it.