Paul Kiel January 9, 2008, 6:39 PM

Yesterday, the D.C. watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a criminal complaint against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), calling for an investigation of whether she’d been bribed to deliver a $2 million earmark. The basic facts, as laid out in a December 20th Washington Post piece, I said, “weren’t pretty.”

Well, late yesterday, Landrieu’s office finally, after having remained silent for nearly three weeks, responded, providing a number of facts that substantially changed the story.

The story had been that Randy Best, the longtime Bush supporter who founded Voyager, had struggled to find a senator willing to give his company, the Voyager literacy program, funding for the Washington, D.C schools. In the fall of 2001, he finally landed an interview with Landrieu. Shortly after that, someone from Landrieu’s office contacted him to see if he might host a fundraiser. He said yes, ultimately delivering $30,000 to Landrieu’s campaign (despite his Republican ties) through Voyager executives; four days after that, he landed his earmark, which provided $2 million to the D.C. schools for use on Voyager… even though the schools hadn’t asked for it. As far as things on the Hill go, it seemed like a pretty tidy quid pro quo.

But yesterday Landrieu’s office provided a letter showing that, in April of 2001, Paul Vance, the superintendent of the D.C. public schools, had written Landrieu, then the ranking member on the D.C appropriations subcommittee, and Sen. Mike DeWine (R-OH), then the chair, to ask for funds for Voyager. And they produced another showing that three weeks later, on May 15, 2001, Landrieu wrote to DeWine to request $3.5 million for the program’s use in D.C.

Landrieu suddenly became chairwoman of the subcommittee when Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT) left the Republican Party that same month in 2001, throwing control of the Senate to the Democrats. That put her in a position to add the language to the appropriations bill herself — which she did, Landrieu spokesman Adam Sharp told me. The subcommittee prepared the final version of that year’s appropriations bill on October 15th, and it included $2 milllion for the Voyager program. Four days after that, Best hosted his fundraiser for Landrieu, during which the company’s executives were so generous to their patron (they’ve continued to be generous ever since, delivering almost $80,000). In contrast to the Post’s reporting, Sharp claimed that Best had first approached Landrieu about hosting a fundraiser for her — not the other way around. My efforts to reach Best were unsuccessful.

Best’s story seems to have changed since he first talked to the Post about this. The Post quoted him as saying that he’d been unable to obtain funding on the Senate side as of September, 2001. Now his story is jibing with Landrieu’s, that the request for support came “many months before a fundraiser.”

It’s certainly not a flattering story for Landrieu, but now it looks a lot different.

Mary Landrieu