OK, now the Ensign story is really getting good.
Yesterday we wrote about how Team Ensign is now saying that they went public about the affair because Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s girlfriend, was threatening to go to a TV news station about it. We asked whether Ensign was now walking back an earlier claim — which seemed to come from his camp — that Hampton had tried to extort him.
And now the Las Vegas Sun has obtained a letter that Hampton wrote to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, dated five days before Ensign went public about the affair earlier this week. Hampton asks Kelly for her assistance in exposing his former good friend’s “heinous conduct and pursuit” of Hampton’s wife, and pleading “Please help me.”
Hampton writes that he and others confronted Ensign about the affair several times:
In fact, one of the confrontations took place in February 2008 at his (Ensign’s) home in Washington D.C. with a group of his peers. One of the attendees was Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma, as well as several other men who are close to the senator.
Hampton adds that he chose Kelly because of her “legal back ground (sic) ” and adds:
I could have sought the most liberal, Republican hating media to expose this story, but there are people’s lives at stake and justice is about proper process as well as outcome. Senator Ensign has no business serving in the US (sic) Senate anymore!
You can read the full letter in all its glory here.
As we reported yesterday, Ensign and Hampton became friends through their mutual involvement in the conservative evangelical Christian group, the Promise Keepers. One of the seven promises that a participant must make is to pursue “vital relationships with a few other men, understanding that he needs brothers to help him keep his promises.”
Vital is one way of putting it.