In my post
below, I mentioned that if a "smoking gun" document appears linking
Fred Thompson to lobbying work for the abortion rights group (such
as billing records), it could raise honesty questions about
Thompson given that his campaign has steadfastly denied it. The
flip side, of course, is that the story could be proven completely
bogus, in which case it would be a huge coup for Thompson by
rallying conservatives on his behalf against the mainstream media.
Captain's Quarters has
led the charge in trying to debunk the story. Ed points out
that Thompson wasn't registered as a foreign lobbyist with his firm
until October 1991, which was a month after the meeting minutes in
the LA Times story, which as I noted represented a bit of
documentary evidence that contradicts Thompson's account. Is this
significant, or is it possible that there was a lag time between
when he began to do domestic lobbying and when he was registered as
a foreign lobbyist?
Jim Geraghty, meanwhile, points out that the LA
Times story has been altered without any explanation to remove
a reference to a 1991 meeting in which Judith DeSarno, the head of
the abortion rights group in question and Thompson's primary
accuser, recalled that "Thompson re-enacted a cowboy death scene
from one of his movies." He hadn't been in a cowboy movie by 1991.
That is pretty damaging to the credibility of the Times
story.
It's pretty clear that somebody is not telling the truth here,
and now the onus is on the Times to provide harder
evidence.
UPDATE: It appears that Fred Thompson
actually joined Arent Fox as of April 1991. An April 17, 1991
Washington Post story, accessed via Nexis, begins:
Fred Thompson, the former minority counsel
to the Senate Watergate Committee, who in recent years has become a
familiar face on the big screen in some blockbuster movies, is
making a more permanent connection here. The Tennessee lawyer, who
headed his own firm in Nashville and came here on an infrequent
basis, has joined Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn, the
Washington firm with which his close friend John Culver, the former
senator, is also affiliated.
So, this means that Thompson was at the
firm in Sept. 1991 and could have theoretically lobbyied for the
abortion rights group during the time period mentioned in the
LA Times story. This still doesn't explain why the LA
Times removed the cowboy movie reference.
topics:
Mainstream Media, Abortion, Movies, Law, NATO
