Isolation grows for John Ensign
Sen. John Ensign and Doug Hampton were once so close that they affectionately referred to each other as “babe” when walking around the senator’s office on Capitol Hill.
But no more.
Since Hampton — then a top aide to the Ensign — discovered that the Nevada Republican was having an affair with his wife, the relationship has soured to the point that it threatens to sink Ensign’s political career.
Until news of the affair forced him to relinquish the post in June, Ensign was the No. 4 Republican in the Senate. Now he finds himself isolated, both personally and professionally.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) passed on a chance to offer a vote of confidence for Ensign on Friday, and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) took a pass on defending him during a CNN appearance Sunday. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), one of Ensign’s Capitol Hill roommates, called him “arrogant.” A number of Ensign’s top aides have deserted him over the scandal, and his poll numbers back home in Nevada have tanked.
Senate GOP insiders said there are no calls for Ensign to resign, or even any discussion of it, but a Senate Republican aide said Ensign “doesn’t have a lot of friends up here right now.”
The latest blows came last week, when The New York Times published a long, detailed report on the attempts Ensign made to funnel money to the Hamptons after they left the senator’s employ in April 2008 following several angry confrontations between Doug Hampton and Ensign over the affair with Cindy Hampton.
POLITICO and others have previously reported that Ensign’s family paid the Hamptons $96,000 and that Ensign helped Doug Hampton get a lobbying job in Nevada in 2008.
The Times reported last week that Ensign leaned on his network of financial backers in Nevada to provide Hampton with lobbying contracts. The Times also reported that Ensign intervened with the government on behalf of some of Hampton’s clients, a potential violation of the one-year lobbying ban covering Doug Hampton, who had failed to register as a lobbyist for these firms, a potential violation of federal lobbying disclosure laws.
When asked Friday about the latest allegations against Ensign, McConnell pointedly declined to support his colleague.
“Sen. Ensign continues to serve,” McConnell told reporters. “He’s a member of the Finance Committee [and has] been active in the [health care reform] discussions.”
“I really don’t have any observations to make about the Ensign matter,” McConnell added.
“The silence is deafening,” a former Senate GOP leadership aide noted when asked about the lack of backing for Ensign. “I can’t imagine that he’s gonna get a lot of support. This is bad, bad, bad stuff.”
A government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, filed a complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee this summer. The ethics panel has begun a “preliminary review” of the Ensign case, but CREW plans to file additional complaints with both the committee and the Justice Department. Ethics experts said the panel is now likely to conduct a full-blown investigation of Ensign.
Sources close to Ensign also said the senator has told his staff that he has no intentions of stepping down. Yet the latest revelations have further undermined Ensign’s shaky support on Capitol Hill.
The critical question for McConnell and other GOP leaders, said the former Senate aide, is whether Republicans would be able to hold on to Ensign’s seat if he were to leave office. Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, has been seriously damaged by his own ethics problems, and state Republicans have had a hard time recruiting a top-tier candidate to run against Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2010, despite Reid’s bad poll numbers.
“First and foremost, they’re going to think about preservation of the seat before they decide on anything or say anything publicly,” said this source. “My guess: At the end of the day, considerations of keeping the seat probably dominate. I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of Republicans in the leadership calling on him to resign, at least right now.”
One of Ensign’s friends told POLITICO that Doug Hampton appears to be on the “warpath,” and it’s making Ensign’s ability to resurrect himself extraordinarily difficult.
“I think it’s worse than I originally thought it would be,” the Ensign friend said. “I hear more and more talk about whether John can survive. ... I think it’s 50/50.”
But this source added that there is no “real push” among Ensign’s supporters for him to resign and noted that Nevadans are “giving him a chance to salvage his situation,” which Ensign could do by asserting himself in the health care debate.
Indeed, after bailing from a Thursday evening Finance Committee session on health care soon after the Times story broke, Ensign returned later that night to pepper staff with questions and debate amendments to the plan.
Throughout August, Ensign went into overdrive to re-establish his standing back home — and at one meeting, Ensign told his supporters and party activists that he had had no other affairs, denying rumors of his involvement with other female ex-staffers, according to two people familiar with the account.
However, since Ensign admitted the affair with Cindy Hampton on June 16, several members of his inner circle, including top Senate and political advisers Mike Slanker, John Lopez and Tory Mazzola, have left the Nevada Republican’s office or cut off their ties with him.
Beyond Slanker, Coburn, the Hamptons and the Ensigns, no one else on Ensign’s staff knew of the affair with Cindy Hampton until the senator called an emergency staff meeting at midnight at his C Street home on the day he would announce his affair, according to a person familiar with the account. About 10 people gathered there.
And within the past few weeks, two other Ensign aides — Brooke Allmon and Jason Mulvihill — also announced they were jumping ship. Allmon was deputy chief of staff, while Mulvihill was legislative director.
While Ensign has brought in a number of old staff members to fill those jobs, his core group of political and legal advisers remains very small. He has hired a crisis communications team, led by former Bush White House aide Ed Gillepsie, as well as lawyers, to help with the situation.
However, Ensign is not consulting with his Senate colleagues on how to handle the fallout from the affair, and they don’t seem in a hurry to reach out to him, either.
“I don’t have any idea who he is talking to anymore,” said a top Republican aide. “I don’t think anyone wants a piece of this.”
Neither Ensign’s office nor Gillespie returned calls seeking comment for this article.
South Carolina GOP calls for Sanford's resignation
Just hours after Gov. Mark Sanford held a news conference Thursday to fight back against Republican legislators seeking his ouster, the South Carolina Republican Party dealt him another blow by formally calling for his resignation.
Two-thirds of the GOP's executive committee voted to call for the governor's resignation at the end of an hour-long conference call organized by state Republican Party Chairwoman Karen Floyd.
Floyd sent a letter to Sanford after the result was announced informing him of the vote.
It is a stinging rebuke for Sanford from the grassroots wing of the party that has long been his base of support. Members of the party's executive committee are volunteers elected by their fellow political activists — the kind of Republicans who make phone calls, stuff envelopes and knock on doors during election years.
While Sanford has sparred publicly over his two terms with state GOP lawmakers, who have also called for his resignation, the state's grassroots activists have been dependably in his corner.
The vote was also a formal change of course for the state party: Floyd convened a similar conference call in July after Sanford revealed his extramarital affair, which resulted in a vote to censure Sanford for "repeated failures to act in accordance" with the party's core principles and beliefs. But at the time, the party did not ask for the governor to step down.
Sanford's spokesman Ben Fox immediately released a statement following the vote insisting "that working South Carolinians are ready to move beyond this political circus and media-driven distraction." He thanked the committee members who voted against the measure.
"We'd also thank those on the committee and others across the state who've cautioned against a rush to political judgment that would ultimately overturn an election before all the facts and indeed the 'rest of the story' is laid out," Fox said.
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Sources: Politico, CNN, Google Maps
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