Evolution of a RightWing Lie (0r as it is now called, a “NothingBurger”)
This could be real trouble for almost-announced Republican candidate Fred Thompson.
The former Tennessee senator, who will soon seek the Republican nomination for president as a pro-life candidate, apparently once accepted a lobbying assignment from a family-planning group to persuade the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction.
The Semi- but Not Quite Denial:
WASHINGTON - Fred Thompson says he “has no recollection” of lobbying on behalf of a family planning group.
This story is seeing bigger and bigger holes blasted through it every day by the blogosphere, and it’s getting easier and easier to believe Thompson’s claims that it is all a straight out lie as this story falls apart around the L.A.Times’ ears.
And what of the Hillary Clinton connections I mentioned a few days ago? How deep are Hillary’s hands in this incident one has to wonder?
The abortion “gag rule” was a major political flashpoint at the time. Thompson’s lobbying would clash directly with the anti-abortion movement that he is now trying to rally behind his campaign for president. Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family-planning group. “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period,” he said in an e-mail.
In a telephone interview, he added: “There’s no documents to prove it, there’s no billing records, and Thompson says he has no recollection of it, says it didn’t happen.”
Billing records show that former Sen. Fred Thompson spent nearly 20 hours working as a lobbyist on behalf of a group seeking to ease restrictive federal rules on abortion counseling in the 1990s, even though he recently said he did not recall doing any work for the organization.
According to records from Arent Fox, the Washington law firm where Thompson worked part time from 1991 to 1994, he charged the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association about $5,000 for work he did in 1991 and 1992.
The records show that Thompson, a probable Republican candidate for president in 2008, spent much of that time in telephone conferences with the president of the group, and on three occasions he reported lobbying administration officials on its behalf.
As one of the commenters on this post wrote, this story is a nothingburger.
