From today's press gaggle:

Q This Reverend Haggard out in Colorado, is he someone who is close to the White House? There had been reports that he was on the weekly call with evangelicals. Is that true?

MR. FRATTO: I'm actually told that that's not true, that he has -- in terms of a weekly call that he has? He had been on a couple of calls, but was not a weekly participant in those calls. I believe he's been to the White House one or two times. I don't want to confine it to a specific number because it would take a while to figure out how many times. But there have been a lot of people who come to the White House, and --

Q -- when was he at the White House?

MR. FRATTO: I couldn't tell you specifically. I know that there was a picture of him with the President in one of the TV reports, so obviously he met with the President at some point in time.

Look, this is a personal issue for someone. It's something that Reverend Haggard needs to deal with, with his family and his church. And I'm not sure that there's any comment beyond that that's necessary.

Q Would that make evangelicals dispirited and maybe sit out the election Tuesday?

MR. FRATTO: I doubt it. I doubt it.

Q Why?

MR. FRATTO: Well, because I think the community you're referring to understands where the Republican Party is on issues that are important to them, and someone's -- something that an individual did that affects them personally shouldn't affect their interest in advancing issues that they care about.

Over at Election Central, Greg has just posted the latest opus from the Free Enterprise Fund, a conservative attack group that's been running ads against Democrats in four of the closest Senate races, "Brokebank Democrats."

The Free Enterprise Fund is just one of the three groups that have been started up with cash from Bob Perry, the man who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perry provided the bulk of the FEF's money with a $1 million contribution.

He's also almost exclusively responsible for the funding of two other groups that have been very active this campaign. The Economic Freedom Fund, whose activities we've catalogued here, received $5 million from Perry. The group has targeted six House races. Another group, Americans for Honesty on Issues, has attacked nine House Dem candidates and Senate candidate Jon Tester in Montana. The entirety of their funding comes from two contributions of Perry's totalling $3 million.

All together, that's $9 million of attack ads, courtesy of Bob Perry.

Update: Today CREW filed a complaint with the IRS against Americans for Honesty of Issues, alleging that the group had failed to file disclosure reports with the IRS, as required by federal law. Such a failure could result in as much as a $1 million fine. Lawyer Glenn Willard who represents the group told me that AHI had in fact filed with the IRS, but that the filings had not shown up on the IRS website "due to the IRS failing to provide an electronic filing password."

When Rep. John Sweeney (R-NY) announced there there'd be a press conference today, expectations were high that he was going to finally release that promised "authentic" police report. You know, the one that would disprove all those news accounts which said an officer was called to his house because he was knocking his wife around.

Alas, he's not giving up the document. Instead, he's starting his own investigation into who "leaked" the "false" records. From The Albany Times-Union:

E. Stewart Jones apologized to TU reporter Brendan J. Lyons, who is over at Jones’ office in Troy, saying he has no documents to release today.

The news, Jones said, is that he has been hired by the Sweeney campaign to investigate who leaked police records related to the Dec. 2, 2005 911 call by GOP U.S. Rep. John Sweeney’s wife, Gaia/Gayle, that summoned State Police to a domestic incident at the couple’s Clifton Park home.

It's not entirely clear, but it sounds as though Sweeney's no longer contesting the integrity of the police reports cited in news accounts.

The shadowy RNC-connected front group the "Progressive Policy Council" is still at it, trying to discourage liberal voters from going to the polls on Tuesday. And thanks to TPM reader JA, you can see their two recent mailings here and here.

The first PPC mailer, if you remember, went out this past weekend in Pennsylvania, attacking both Senate candidates for being too conservative on key progressive issues. We had an awful time finding any information about the group, but eventually discovered that they are represented by the former Deputy General Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04.

The group's lawyer has not returned our telephone calls, and our emails to the address provided on the group's Web site have garnered no response.

But mistake about it -- this fake group has real resources. It's impossible to tell how widely their mailers have been distributed, but we heard from a number of TPM readers who'd received the mailing.

The two new mailings are very similar to the initial one, which concentrated on gay marriage, comparing Dem Bob Casey's and Sen. Rick Santorum's (R-PA) views on gun control and stem cell research, and stating "there's no difference." Like the other mailings, the PPC identifies itself as "a not-for-profit organization seeking to educate the public and to advocate for progressive public policy solutions for contemporary social issues."

We should note that the group has finally constructed an almost-completely-professional-looking, one-page Web site, although it provides no information about the group, such as an office address, staff list, leadership bios, board of directors, a telephone number, or any programming details. "Full site coming soon!" it says. We're not holding our breath.

CQ reporting:

Rep. Bob Ney, facing certain expulsion from the House after being convicted of two felonies in relation to the Jack Abramoff scandal, said on Friday he will resign by the end of the day.

Ney, who pleaded guilty Oct. 13 to making false statements and conspiracy to commit fraud, is the first member of Congress to be convicted as part of the wide-ranging Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

Ney, in a call to Congressional Quarterly, said “I’ll be resigning today, approximately 4 or 4:30 p.m. I’ll be submitting my letter to the Speaker of the House.” . . .

“I have completed the loose ends — the audit came back, the boxes are shipped out,” Ney said. “I’m done with everything I wanted to complete.”

As we noted back in mid-October after Ney pled guilty, he just needed to hang around Congress until November 1st to get his last paycheck of $13,000.

Reader GB has some good questions about that hours-long surveillance tape from the parking garage purported to be recorded on the night Gibbons allegedly assaulted a young woman, which shows neither the Republican gubernatorial hopeful nor his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo -- only an occasional security guard, and a white cat:

It's odd that no one, not just Mazzeo and Gibbons but no one at all, appears in the tapes -- why would no one be going to or from their cars on a busy Friday night; the garage is between the restaurant where the event happened, a popular bar (Gordon Biersch) and two other restaurant/bars, plus the office complex where lots of law firms (and [Gibbons adviser Sig] Rogich) have offices.

Moreover, a charity auction was taking place in a large tent in the outdoor portion of the parking lot that night (which is why Mazzeo was at M&C ) -- which meant more than the usual # of people would have been parked in the garage.

And once the rain let up, there should have been a lot of people going to their cars.

But no one is in the tapes at all. Other than a security guard occasionally, who is conspicuously not carrying an umbrella or rain gear.

Sweeney has said that recent reports of police documents showing he abused his wife were forgeries, and that he'd consent to releasing the originals so they could see they'd been duped. But for over a day and a half, he's declined to sign the official order to allow those docs to be made public.

As TPM readers no doubt know, The New York Daily News and Albany Times-Union both published accounts earlier this week of a police blotter report that showed that an officer had been called to the Sweeneys home in December of last year on a domestic abuse call. Sweeney's wife allegedly told a 9-1-1 dispatcher that he was "knocking her around the house," and when an officer arrived, he was told that Sweeney had "grabbed [his wife] by the neck and pushed [her] around the house," but that everything was fine now.

Sweeney responded to the report by claiming that the blotter report was forged. But oddly, the Sweeneys did confirm that there had been a 9-1-1 call -- but that nothing like what's alleged in the blotter report happened.

There's a very clear way to get to the truth, of course: the police could release the official report. To do that, all they need is a signed and notarized letter from the Sweeneys. Now, Sweeney has said that he would authorize the police to release the report. But somehow, despite the fact that numerous news organizations have offered to facilitate the process, Sweeney just hasn't gotten around to sending the police that letter.

And more than 24 hours after his promise to release the report, we're all still waiting.

What do you do when confronted with incriminating evidence by an investigative reporter?

If you're Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA), facing documents showing you've misused taxpayer funds to support your ailing campaign -- you snatch it away.

Murphy: "This was taken from me without my knowledge, okay? So I'm keeping my materials here."

"A partial review Thursday of surveillance video from a parking garage where a woman said the Republican candidate for governor assaulted her did not reveal the presence of either person, nor of an attack," the AP reports.

"The cameras filming an area in front of the first floor elevators showed neither [accuser Chrissy] Mazzeo nor [Rep. Jim] Gibbons [(R-NV)]," the news organization said, "only black-and-white images of elevator doors and the occasional appearance of a security guard and a white cat."

These tapes, of course, are the same ones that first did not exist, then did exist, and whose fluctuating realities have been blamed entirely on a security guard named "Aaron."

Gibbons' lawyer, Don Campbell, turned over a copy of the surveillance recordings to the AP yesterday morning, and said he expected the organization to dupe the tapes and distribute them to other outlets. Chaos ensued, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal:

"I thought about this and couldn't think of any better plan than that," Campbell said.

More after the jump.

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Congress Fires Iraq Auditor Who Uncovered Waste, Fraud, Abuse
"Investigations led by a Republican lawyer named Stuart W. Bowen Jr. in Iraq have sent American occupation officials to jail on bribery and conspiracy charges, exposed disastrously poor construction work by well-connected companies like Halliburton and Parsons, and discovered that the military did not properly track hundreds of thousands of weapons it shipped to Iraqi security forces.

"And tucked away in a huge military authorization bill that President Bush signed two weeks ago is what some of Mr. Bowen’s supporters believe is his reward for repeatedly embarrassing the administration: a pink slip." (NYTimes)

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From the AP:

A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after Election Day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press.

Rep. Don Sherwood is locked in a tight re-election race against a Democratic opponent who has seized on the four-term congressman's relationship with the woman. While Sherwood acknowledged the woman was his mistress, he denied abusing her and said that he had settled her $5.5 million lawsuit on confidential terms.

The settlement, reached in November 2005, called for Cynthia Ore to be paid in installments, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal is confidential. She has received less than half the money so far, and will not get the rest until after the Nov. 7 election, the person said Thursday.

In the days before ABC News first reported Mark Foley's "over friendly" emails toward a congressional page, top Republican political staffers huddled with Foley in conference calls, helping him handle political fallout from story, The New York Daily News reports.

In other words, when top Republicans learned of Foley's inappropriate emails, they appear to have circled the wagons and helped Foley himself spin the story, rather than alert the House Page Board or any other responsible authority to look into the matter.

Rep. Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee, Carl Forti, was on the calls, along with Reynold's chief of staff Kirk Fordham and Foley's top staffers. A source told the Daily News the calls were focused on "damage control"; Forti confirmed that the calls took place.

The Republican leadership, of course, has been under fire for not dealing more aggressively with Foley after the emails came to light months earlier (there's been no evidence that top Republicans knew about the sexually explicit IMs turned up after ABC News' initial story). This is actually an example of top Republicans helping Foley deal with fallout from the emails.

An open question from the story is whether Reynolds, who's locked in a tight reelection battle due in part to his role in Foleygate, was involved in the damage control effort -- which involved two of his top staffers. He refused to answer questions for the piece, citing his testimony before the House ethics committee.

We've spent some time here cataloguing the myriad signs that point to a cover-up of Rep. Jim Gibbons' (R-NV) alleged assault of a cocktail waitress in a Las Vegas parking garage. But the mystery of the disappearing videotapes from surveillance cameras in the garage just has to take the cake.

Today, The Las Vegas Sun provided the fullest accounting yet of the tapes' journey. And it just gets worse.

Chrissy Mazzeo, the cocktail waitress who says she was assaulted, has said from the beginning that the tapes would show just what happened that night. "[A]ll that stuff will be on tape if there is a camera there," she told a 911 dispatcher the night of the incident.

When police first contacted the parking garage that night, they were told by a security officer "identified in police reports only as Aaron,'" that the cameras in the garage weren't recording. Sorry. "The next day," the Sun reports, "after officers told Mazzeo there was no video after all, she decided to drop the case."

But two weeks later, Mazzeo called a press conference to say that she would press charges if the police reopened the case. So the police decided to "tie up some loose ends," as a police Deputy Chief put it to the Sun. They went over to check up on the tapes and maybe interview that Aaron fella.

To their surprise, "Robert Clavier, director of security for Hughes Center [the garage], showed up to say that videotapes indeed existed from Oct. 13." They were told that Hughes had had the tapes the whole time, but "didn't know what to do because it was a closed case."

There's been no explanation as to why Aaron (whose last name remains undisclosed) gave police such bad information early on. For some reason, though, police don't suspect Aaron of knowingly misleading them. Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy would only tell the Sun that "He may have been given wrong information." It's not clear from whom.

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Over at Radar, they've got your mid-morning muck diversion, a clip from the 2003's action thriller Strike Force -- starring Mark Foley.

In it, Foley gives a straight-to-video performance as Congressman Fairchild, a lawmaker who pays a sack of money to a group of vigilantes (called "The Librarians") to rescue his kidnapped daughter.

The only other scandal figure we can think of who's matched Foley's contribution to cinema is Jack Abramoff, who infected the world with the action flick Red Scorpion, only to redouble the accomplishment with Red Scorpion 2.

Update: From TPMm Reader GN: "You're forgetting Gary Condit's cameo in the film Return of the Killer Tomatoes."

Warning: the American people are a threat to the American people. At least, according to the vice president.

As you may recall, the Washington Post has been suing the Bush administration for access to vice president Cheney's visitor logs. A couple weeks ago, a judge ordered the Secret Service (which keeps the logs) to release them -- or explain why, under current law, certain portions could be withheld.

But the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein tells us this morning that the vice president ain't gonna show his dance card that easily. His legal team -- better known as the Justice Department -- has asked to block the judge's decision, and they cite a pretty unusual argument for doing so. It's called "mosaic theory."

Mosaic theory has been around for a while, and it's enjoyed a post-9/11 renaissance. It's an increasingly common government argument for withholding sensitive national security-related information, because of "the potential for an adversary to deduce from independently innocuous facts a strategic vulnerability, exploitable for malevolent ends," as a 2005 article in the Yale Law Review described it.

In other words, even if one piece of information appears harmless, if you put it together with other pieces of harmless information, the sum becomes dangerous in enemy hands.

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As Josh mentioned yesterday on TPM, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) -- under federal investigation for the ties between him and his daughter's lobby shop -- has been running an ad in his district asking his constituents for the "benefit of the doubt." You know, just like you would "a friend." The ad ends with: "He's been there for us. Now it's our turn to be there for him."

Showing remarkable restraint, in the ad Weldon refrains from repeating his allegation that the probe is the result of a left-wing conspiracy, although the spot notes that Weldon's "made a few enemies."

Enjoy:

Update: Another recent ad from Weldon has his wife telling voters, "Curt deserves the benefit of the doubt."

The St. Petersburg Times reports:

Federal investigators have interviewed at least two more former chiefs of staff to U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris as part of a federal inquiry into her relationship with a convicted defense contractor.

Dan Berger and Ben McKay, who both worked for Harris in her first term and are now lobbyists in Washington, confirmed the interviews this week and said it was their understanding all congressional staff would likely be questioned. The two spoke separately to three investigators from the FBI and the Defense Department in Washington several weeks ago.

Two more former staffers interviewed, plus four that were earlier reported -- that makes at least six former Harris staffers questioned by the FBI.

Scandals Alone Could Cost Republicans Their House Majority
"Indictments, investigations and allegations of wrongdoing have helped put at least 15 Republican House seats in jeopardy, enough to swing control to the Democrats on Tuesday even before the larger issues of war, economic unease and President Bush are invoked.

"With just five days left before Election Day, allegations are springing up like brushfires. Four GOP House seats have been tarred by lobbyist Jack Abramoff's influence-peddling scandal. Five have been adversely affected by then-Rep. Mark Foley's unseemly contacts with teenage male House pages. The remaining half a dozen or so could turn on controversies including offshore tax dodging, sexual misconduct and shady land deals.

"Not since the House bank check-kiting scandal of the early 1990s have so many seats been affected by scandals, and not since the Abscam bribery cases of the 1970s have the charges been so serious. But this year's combination of breadth and severity may be unprecedented, suggested Julian E. Zelizer, a congressional historian at Boston University." (WaPo)

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Mark Foley may have resigned from Congress, but he's still a Republican. And he's not going to exit rehab right on the eve of the election. Foley's extending his 30-day stay (which started October 1st), his lawyer announced today.

Ah, a whole new scandal involving Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV).

Yes, he's accused of sexual assault. And yes, he had an illegal domestic worker he hid in his basement. But now, we learn that Gibbons granted exceptional favors to a campaign backer and "friend" from whom he received gifts and campaign donations, according to a lengthy and circuitous investigative piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Step 1: From Nevada software entrepreneur Warren Trepp, Gibbons received generous gifts, including a week-long family cruise valued at $10,000 (which he failed to report) and $100,000 in campaign contributions. Trepp also gave Gibbons gambling chips worth money, as well as plain ol' cash, according to Trepp's old business partner.

Step 2: Gibbons gave Trepp at least one multi-million dollar earmark, and a "plus-up" -- adding more money onto an existing contract than was originally agreed to. He also set up numerous meetings between Trepp and defense officials, worked to get Trepp paid when the government checks weren't coming on time, and personally flacked for Trepp's products.

(There's no connection, the two men say, and of course Gibbons and Trepp deny any wrongdoing. Gibbons' wife even says she paid back $1,654 of the cruise's cost to Trepp's wife. It's not clear why she paid that amount, or why she paid Trepp's wife.)

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The front-running GOP candidate for Tom DeLay's old House seat is accusing Democrats of dirty tricks -- but a look at a similar tactic in Pennsylvania, apparently by her own party, shows how a dirty trick is really done.

The candidate, Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, is upset about a mailer the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently spent $50,000 to send to voters in her district, TX-22 -- but not because the mailer attacks her. The DCCC targets another Don Richardson, another GOP candidate who's trailing badly in polls. In its mailer, the DCCC attacks him for being "too conservative" for the district.

The DCCC won't discuss its strategy here, but it's pretty transparent: They're hoping to boost Richardson's name recognition and help him peel votes away from Sekula-Gibbs, who is the GOP-endorsed nominee. (DeLay's botched late resignation, you might remember, has left Republicans without a candidate on the ballot -- so Sekula-Gibbs, the GOP's endorsed write-in nominee, has been forced to compete with Richardson and Libertarian Bob Smithers for every conservative voter she can get.) Here's the mailer (click to enlarge):

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The sexual-assault scandal surrounding the GOP's Nevada gubernatorial candidate is gaining a level of complexity seen only in tawdry television drama series and particularly sinister small-town conspiracies.

A judge yesterday ordered mysteriously disappearing and reappearing surveillance tapes released, that could prove who's lying about the late-night encounter between Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV) and his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo.

Big news, right? Those tapes could be the key piece of evidence that breaks the case. Well, hardly. Here's what else has been revealed in the last twenty-four hours:

- Just about every player in the drama (aside from Mazzeo) is connected to Gibbons. Through himself, his counsel and advisers, the accused is closely tied to the local sheriff whose force is investigating the assault charges against him; at least one of the two local newspapers covering the scandal; a key judge; the owners of the surveillance tape; and nearly everyone else in his drinking party that fateful night (i.e., witnesses). For starters.

- While the tapes could have been the most important piece of evidence to determine Gibbons' guilt or innocence, they may be useless if they can't be authenticated and their whereabouts established for the past two weeks they've been missing.

- Police finally admitted that there was a fourth 9-1-1 call from that night, from the accuser's sister. Since the incident over two weeks ago, the police have denied they had any record of that call.

From the Associated Press:

In at least 53 competitive House races, the National Republican Campaign Committee has launched hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls, known as "robo calls."....

Bruce Jacobson, a software engineer from Ardmore, Pa., received three prerecorded messages in four hours. Each began, "Hello, I'm calling with information about Lois Murphy," the Democrat running against two-term incumbent Rep. Jim Gerlach in the Philadelphia-area district.

"Basically, they go on to slam Lois," said Jacobson, who has filed a complaint with the FCC because the source of the call isn't immediately known.

FCC rules say all prerecorded messages must "at the beginning of the message, state clearly the identity of the business, individual, or other entity that is responsible for initiating the call." During or after the message, they must give the telephone number of the caller.

"The way they're sent is deceptive. The number of calls is harassing. The way her stances are presented in these stories is deliberately misleading and deceptive," said Karlyn Messinger, another Murphy supporter from Penn Valley, Pa., who filed a complaint with the FCC.

NRCC spokesman Ed Patru denied any illegal intent.

"All of our political calls are in compliance with the law," Patru said.

Not so, said the Democrats.

"They are violating the regulations that were set up," said Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who said the DCCC employed one robocall this cycle and paid $500 for it.

Keep in mind that these robo calls sound far less nasty than the push polls going out from the independent conservative attack groups.

The videotapes from surveillance cameras in a Las Vegas parking garage which mysteriously disappeared for two weeks are to be made public, a judge ruled yesterday. The tapes are said to have been recorded during the period of time a woman alleges Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV) assaulted her in that garage.

Police investigating the Oct. 13 incident were told by the garage's management company that no tapes existed. Two weeks later, the company told Rep. Gibbons' camp that the tapes had been located. A short while later, the company notified police of the tapes. Gibbons has pushed for the release of the tapes, claiming they show the story of his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo, is false.

Questions have arisen about the tapes, their disappearance, and their sudden resurfacing. In particular, concerns run high over ties between Gibbons and the property company: One of Gibbons' most powerful campaign advisers, Sig Rogich, is a longtime Las Vegas power broker who once lobbied on behalf of the property company. Rogich's offices are also in the same complex as the parking garage, and are managed by the firm, Crescent Real Estate Equities.

Attorney: No Backstory in CIA Leak Case
"Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby agree on something: keeping Libby's perjury trial in the CIA leak case focused solely on his actions. The two are separately asking a federal judge not to allow three years of politically charged backstory in the case to seep into Libby's trial starting in January.

"In new court documents, Fitzgerald argued that he shouldn't have to explain why Libby was charged while others, including the source of the leak, escaped prosecution. Libby said jurors shouldn't hear about New York Times reporter Judith Miller's 85-day jail term for refusing to discuss her conversations with him." (AP)

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Yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized. Not for rudely telling Americans to "back off" in their criticism of his lousy performance; not for going to war in Iraq without adequately planning for stabilizing the country; not for running the U.S. armed forces into the ground; not even for infecting Bartlett's with inanities about "unknown unknowns."

Donald Rumsfeld didn't even apologize to America. He apologized to Turkey.

Last month at a NATO training seminar in Rome, a U.S. lieutenant colonel showed his audience a map displaying a "Free Kurdistan" where parts of Turkey are today. That's kind of a painful idea for Turks, who like their country the way it is. Several Turkish officers stalked out of the event. Back home in Turkey, the incident re-ignited fear that the United States secretly harbored plans to carve up the country -- an abiding worry due to the U.S.'s close diplomatic relationship with the Iraqi Kurds.

You see, Turks were already on edge about this "secret plan." In June, the Armed Forces Journal -- a non-government publication -- published an article by retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters that featured a very similar map. Titled, "Blood Borders," the piece imagined the geography of the Middle East if colonial powers hadn't created artificial boundaries in the earlier part of the century.

I spoke with Peters today by phone. He was, perhaps ironically, unapologetic. "The fact these societies have descended into self-destructed paranoia isn't my problem," he told me. "I have no regrets about writing it, and I would do it again."

Besides, Peters grumbled, "anything that makes Donald Rumsfeld's day more unpleasant is a good thing."

In increasingly tight races around the country, voters are receiving telephone "push poll" calls, a classic dirty trick designed to suppress turnout on election day. One calling firm in particular, with White House ties and an impressive ability to fire off millions of automated calls per day, is benefiting from the strategy.

Gabriel Joseph III, president of the robo calling company FreeEats.com, may be the king of the push poll, in which real-sounding questions with ludicrous premises are asked to plant negative ideas in voters' minds. His company, which is better known under its business alias ccAdvertising, has impressive Republican ties: According to a recent piece in Mother Jones, the group has, on at least one occasion, drawn on its White House ties to get business. And its founder, Donald Hodel, is a veteran of the Reagan administration and a former president of Focus on the Family.

As might be expected of an outfit that profits off of convincing people not to vote, ccAdvertising plays rough. Mother Jones reveals that Joseph once boasted of his firm's ability to "deliver a voter suppression message" to unfriendly voters. And as much as Joseph enjoys talking about the reach of his company's technology, he's not above threatening reporters: "If someone writes something that I don't like, I can make their life—I can make them understand a few things if I choose."

How would you know if you received one of the millions of calls ccAdvertising has made on behalf of clients, all Republican, in the past few months? A robo voice might have asked you, "Do you believe that foreign terrorists should have the same legal rights as American citizens?" or told you that your local Democrat "voted to allow the sale of a broad range of violent and sexually explicit materials to minors."

Not only has the Virginia-based company been making millions of calls on behalf of the Economic Freedom Fund, the GOP attack group funded by the money man behind the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, but the firm has also worked for Common Sense Ohio, a conservative nonprofit group active in the closest Senate races.

These groups go to ccAdvertising for one reason: the company is effective. It provides tremendous but targeted reach, largely under the radar -- and arguably without scruple. You can hear recordings of ccAdvertising's work this election here (from Indiana's 9th, funded by the EFF - a call a polling expert called "egregious") and here (from Tennessee, funded by Common Sense Ohio).

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Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV) stands accused of sexually assaulting a woman in a parking lot in the later hours of Friday, Oct. 13.

Immediately following the incident, his campaign manager -- a big player in the GOP, Nevada politics and business named Sig Rogich -- hustled to squelch the story. But Rogich is increasingly in danger of becoming the story.

New questions are being raised about Rogich and a key piece of evidence in the case: the videotapes from the surveillance cameras in the parking lot which surfaced just a few days ago. For two weeks, the police and the public believed they didn't exist. The property management company responsible for the complex told police the cameras were "operable, but not working."

Gibbons' accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo, told police the night of the 13th to get those tapes, because they would prove she was telling the truth. The media first wondered why it took the police several hours to discover there were no tapes -- at the time, the Las Vegas Sun looked askance at Rogich, noting that the power broker's offices were in the same complex which housed the parking garage.

Now that the tapes have turned up, the paper's giving Rogich a second, harder look. Why? It turns out that Rogich once lobbied for the property company which managed the complex, Crescent Real Estate Equities.

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Oh, Katie. We're going to miss you.

Our "Pink Sugar" stormed through the Washington Post Style section this morning, throwing crazy comments every which way like so many uprooted palm trees in a hurricane, insisting she will beat Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) in next Tuesday's election, despite trailing by a jillion points in every poll ever taken.

But how crazy is she? We sense a subtext to her madness.

Harris is a "wannabe" Jew, did you know that? Israelis mistake her for being Jewish, and sometimes talk to her in Hebrew, she says. "I can remember riding my bike to piano lessons and thinking about Israel," she says of her youth. "I thought I was adopted for a while." (Subtext: do you forgive me yet, Palm Beach County?)

Perhaps worried that she was being out-crazied by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), who's blamed his recent troubles with the FBI on a complicated left-wing conspiracy, Harris alleges she's beseiged by an even more complicated meta-conspiracy, "encompassing both the 'liberal media' and the Republican 'elite,'" as the Post describes it. (Subtext: I'm a uniter, not a divider.)

Do you remember her promises to spend her $10 million inheritance getting elected? Then she said, no, she's going to sell all of her assets and spend that on her campaign as well. Then she said she wasn't spending her inheritance, just her assets, which totaled $10 million so what's the difference? Now, she tells the Post that the $3 million she's put in is all she's going to spend. "[That's] everything that I have liquid," she told the paper. (Subtext: I'm frugal -- maybe give me a seat on Appropriations?)

But the greatest news of all is, Pink Sugar's writing a book! It will detail the multitudinous indignities visited upon her during her Senate run -- by fellow GOPers, the press, and possibly the Starbucks barista who didn't make her coffee hot enough. "It's going to be great," she promises. (Subtext: Give me C-SPAN, or I'm taking Oprah hostage.)

Oh, dear. Rep. Christopher "Abu Ghraib was a sex ring" Shays (R-CT) took a luxurious 10-day trip to Qatar in 2003, organized by Grover Norquist's Islamo-Republican outfit, the Islamic Institute. And, it appears, it was likely paid for by the government of Qatar, according to Garance Franke-Ruta in the New Republic (sub. req.)

Somehow the trip was never publicly disclosed, as required by House rules. But he was more than happy to share with CNN and others the intimate details of his one-day jaunt into newly-liberated Iraq, which he tacked on to the end, reports Franke-Ruta:

. . . Shays's privately sponsored trip to Qatar was notably absent from his own annual federal financial disclosure form, filed in May 2004, in violation of House rules. Nor did he submit an amendment disclosing the sponsor of his Qatar trip until confronted in mid-October 2006 by The New Republic with internal Islamic Institute receipts for his plane tickets, which were provided by an Arab American source upset with Shays's foreign policy positions.

Franke-Ruta notes that Shays has boasted, "every expense of my office is a matter of public record." No doubt.

Qatar doled out over $140,000 to Norquist's group to fund the trip for Shays and about a dozen other lawmakers; by comparison, it paid $150 million to found Al Jazeera television (which had a very different take on the Abu Ghraib debacle than Shays did). Like K Street, I guess it likes to hedge its bets.

The scandal involving Nevada congressman Jim Gibbons (R) and the 32-year-old cocktail waitress who says he assaulted her continues its reckless, convoluted unraveling.

The Las Vegas police announced they are re-opening their investigation into the claims. When the waitress, Chrissy Mazzeo, told police Oct. 14 that she did not wish to press charges, they dropped the probe. Even as evidence of further wrongdoing mounted in the case, Sheriff Bill Young maintained that they could investigate nothing without Mazzeo's consent.

Meanwhile, Mazzeo's lawyer said his client would cooperate with an investigation -- run not by the police, but by the county district attorney's office. The lawyer, Richard Wright, met with the D.A. yesterday, then signed forms with Mazzeo that would allow that investigation to proceed.

This morning, there's an emergency court hearing to decide whether or not the police can release to the public surveillance tapes from the parking garage in which Mazzeo says Gibbons assaulted her. The tapes, purported to have been recorded during the time Mazzeo says she and Gibbons were in the parking garage, were missing for two weeks before surfacing a few days ago. Gibbons' lawyer has sued to force the police to release the tapes.

Gibbons himself spoke with the press again, to repeat what he's said already -- he's innocent, he always acts like a gentleman, Mazzeo is a liar. He (and his wife) called for the release of the parking garage's surveillance tapes, saying they prove his innocence.

On top of all the other mysteries surrounding this scandal, Gibbons' comments remind me of a new one: I'm pretty sure Gibbons didn't mount a public campaign to focus attention on these tapes until folks in his campaign allegedly learned they exonerated the gubernatorial hopeful. What's up with that? Mazzeo has been asking police to obtain and review the tapes since her first 911 calls following her run-in with Gibbons Oct. 13. We still don't know what kept the tapes from surfacing for two weeks. Stay tuned.

Bad News for Burns: Montana Paper Set to Publish Letter from Abramoff Pal
"A Republican media consultant and friend of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff recently wrote a letter to a Montana newspaper saying Burns' staff ate so many free meals at Abramoff's restaurant, people joked they would have 'starved to death' without the lobbyist.

"'Frankly, it was widely viewed in D.C. that Mr. Abramoff effectively exerted implicit control over Mr. Burns whenever he and his team needed to get something accomplished,' reads the letter, which was sent to the Whitefish Pilot last week.

"The letter is expected to run in the Pilot's Thursday edition.

"The author, Monty Warner, a GOP media consultant, told the Gazette State Bureau last week that he came across an article in the Pilot recently in which Burns is quoted as saying he only got $5,000 from Abramoff. That, combined with Burns' other statements in which he says he hardly knew Abramoff and, at one point, he wished Abramoff had never been born, compelled him to write the letter, Warner said." (Billings (MT) Gazzette)

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Yesterday at TPM we brought you news of a "push poll" operation in Maryland in which voters were reportedly asked whether they supported medical research experiments on unborn babies. This afternoon, Paul spoke with the man responsible for those calls and similar ones against at least four other Senate Democratic candidates.

Zeke Smith, the executive director of the non-profit "Common Sense Ohio," said his group was behind thousands of calls to voters in Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, South Dakota and elsewhere -- oh, right, Ohio. He defended his group's questions ("Do you want your taxes raised?"). "Push polls" are used to spread negative information about a candidate, and are rarely used to collect respondent's answers.

The questions used "accurate characterizations," Smith said, and insisted his group was legitimately engaged in "data collection."

"There are a fair number of things that are unpleasant to talk about," Smith said. "But that doesn't make [our questions] any less accurate." His group is organized as a 501(c)(4)-type nonprofit, which requires the bulk of its advocacy to be on behalf of particular issues, not for particular candidates.

Common Sense Ohio was behind similar push-poll calls against Democrats in Senate races in Montana, Tennessee, Maryland and Ohio, Smith said. The group also called voters regarding the Ohio governor's race, and a South Dakota anti-abortion initiative.

Smith said he created the group to be active in Ohio -- hence the name -- but was approached by activists in other states to "help," presumably by orchestrating thousands of his unique brand of negative phone "survey" calls. "We have been approached by others in other states for help in their campaigns," Smith said.

Smith confirmed that his group uses a firm called ccAdvertising to make his calls. The "Economic Freedom Foundation," the GOP-backed campaign group Paul has covered extensively, also uses ccAdvertising. The group specializes in "robo calling," in which machines make thousands of unsolicited phone calls.

Well, I think we have our answer as to who is behind the Progressive Policy Council, the phony group behind a mailer that's gone out to an untold number of Pennsylvania voters in an apparent attempt to sour liberal voters on Democrat Bob Casey.

Records with the Virginia State Corporation Commission show that the group's charter was filed by a man named Jason Torchinsky of Holtzman Vogel. And who is he?

His bio at his law firm gives a good idea:

Jason Torchinsky recently joined Holtzman Vogel PLLC with a primary focus on campaign finance and election law. During the 2004 election cycle, Jason served as Deputy General Counsel to Bush-Cheney '04 and Deputy General Counsel to the 2005 Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Immediately before joining the firm, Jason was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice. Jason has also served in other positions at the White House and at the United States Department of Justice. At the White House, he worked for now-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the Counsel's Office. At the Department of Justice, Jason served as a Special Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division and in the Eastern District of Wisconsin as a Special Assistant United States Attorney....

Jason's prior political experience includes the Republican National Committee Counsel's Office, the Dole-Kemp campaign, the 1996 Republican National Convention, and Congressman Herb Bateman's re-election campaign.

Actually, it turns out that diminishing voter turnout is somewhat of a hobby for Torchinsky. Torchinsky is also affiliated with the American Center for Voting Rights, a conservative organization working to pass Voter ID laws in several states.

TPM readers might recall that this is not the first time that Republicans have mustered their resources to attack Bob Casey from the left. They even went so far as to fund Green candidate Carl Romanelli's Senate bid. That effort was derailed, however, when a judge ruled that Romanelli did not have enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.

My call to Torchinsky wasn't immediately returned.

Here's another thing to watch for this campaign season: front groups that attack Democrats from the left.

The Pennsylvania Senate race has provided a case in point. TPM Reader TC, who lives there, sent us a scan of a mailer he received Saturday. You can see it here. The mailing purports to be from a group called The Progressive Policy Council, which, according to the mailer, "is a not-for-profit organization seeking to educate the public and to advocate for progressive public policy solutions for contemporary social issues," and provides bullet points to show that Democrat Bob Casey and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) are both against gay marriage, stem cell research, and "common sense gun controls."

But as TC wrote us, there's something fishy about the group:

I live in PA and received this mailing Saturday. I can't quite make sense of who it is from. The organization listed has no info online about it. The website returns an access forbidden error and google and whois searches turn up nothing.

It smells to me like a Republican suppress the vote effort, as I cannot see a progressive organization mailing something like this out this close to the election. The underlying message seems to be: why bother voting for Casey.

Maybe you can make more sense of this or find out where it is from. Sorry for the quality of the scan - my wife ripped the mailing in half before I could get to it. I understand the impulse.

Indeed, the url on the mailer, www.progressivepolicycouncil.org, leads nowhere. And the group, despite its stated purpose to get the message out, definitely does not want to be contacted.

Whoever is behind the group, which was formed in mid-June, has taken care not to leave any public traces.

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Last week, Roll Call reported that there were 17 known federal investigations into members of the 109th Congress. We noted an 18th they missed -- Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL).

Since then, a new investigation has come to our attention: The FBI is investigating Colorado's Rep. Bob Beauprez (R), following allegations he used restricted voter information as part of his gubernatorial bid.

That makes 19 known federal investigations into members of the 109th Congress. For those keeping score, the Republican members can claim 15 of the investigations; the Democrats, four.

Ethics Report on Foley Not Expected Before Elections
"The House ethics committee has all but wrapped up the investigative phase of its probe into the actions of former representative Mark Foley, informing key witnesses that they will not be summoned back for more questioning, lawyers in the case said yesterday.

"But those lawyers indicated that the committee is unlikely to release its report on the Florida Republican -- or even an interim memo -- before the Nov. 7 elections." (WaPo)

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Surveillance tapes have surfaced, two weeks after police were told no such recordings existed from the security cameras in the parking garage where the Nevada GOP's gubernatorial hopeful allegedly assaulted a cocktail waitress.

Curiously, the candidate, Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-NV) -- whose camp has worked furiously to bury the story -- is loudly and publicly pushing for the tapes to be released.

Why? Gibbon's spokesman said that the tapes show that neither Gibbons nor his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo, was even in the parking garage. "We've been told. . . [that the tapes] prove that Jim Gibbons was never in that garage, and interestingly, neither was she," Robert Uithoven said.

That's curious, since Gibbons has already admitted to being in the parking garage with Mazzeo, according to the Las Vegas Sun. No one appears to have pushed the campaign on the apparent contradiction.

Regardless, the Gibbons camp is clearly excited about these tapes. "On Monday morning, I intend to file an emergency motion to compel the Metropolitan Police Department to produce 18 hours of videotape in their possession,"his lawyer, Donald Campbell, told the Associated Press.

"It is imperative that these tapes get released soon," [Nevada GOP chief Paul] Adams said in a statement quoted by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "Jim Gibbons' name has been dragged through the mud in the past two weeks. . . . [The police department] has an obligation to give Gibbons the opportunity to clear his name."

Despite numerous articles on the topic, no one has attempted to provide any explanation as to why it took two weeks for the tapes to surface. Mazzeo's lawyer, Richard Wright, is guarded about the existence of authentic surveillance tapes. He says his client will ask to have the matter investigated by the county district attorney.

Update: At least one version of a story why the tapes went missing for two weeks has surfaced. In yesterday's Las Vegas Review-Journal, columnist John L. Smith divulged that he had "learned" from an anonymous source or sources that "The tapes never left the possession of the Hughes Center security office and had remained locked in a safe on the premises since shortly after police began their abbreviated investigation of the alleged incident. . . . An unidentified employee removed the tape, placed it in the safe and remained silent about its existence until it became evident that failing to produce it could be considered concealing evidence and obstructing a police investigation."