Tom Coburn confirms he was go-between
BY CHRIS CASTEEL
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28
Published: October 3, 2009
WASHINGTON — Sen. Tom Coburn said Friday that he acted as a go-between earlier this year for discussions about whether Sen. John Ensign would pay millions of dollars to his former mistress and her husband.
Coburn, R-Muskogee, said he relayed a proposal for a financial settlement to Ensign from an attorney and that Ensign rejected it. The contacts all occurred in one afternoon, Coburn said. Confirming an account in Friday’s editions of The New York Times, Coburn said he had been contacted by an attorney for Doug Hampton, whose wife had an affair with Ensign. Coburn then had conversations with the attorney and Ensign about a possible financial agreement. Coburn, R-Muskogee, told The Oklahoman and other media outlets in July that he had not been involved in any negotiations between Hampton and Ensign regarding restitution payments. Coburn reiterated that point Friday, saying he had not been negotiating but had only been communicating to Ensign what the attorney said. "I never negotiated anything,” Coburn said in an interview Friday. "I didn’t play even a mediator. All I played was communicator.”
Coburn, Ensign roommates
Coburn became involved in the situation because he and other lawmakers share a townhouse with Ensign, a Nevada Republican, on Capitol Hill when Congress is in session. The townhouse is owned by a religious organization affiliated with the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
Ensign admitted in June that he had an affair with Cynthia Hampton that lasted about nine months and ended in August 2008.
In July, Doug Hampton, who had been Ensign’s top aide, told a Las Vegas newspaper that Coburn and members of the Christian group had tried to negotiate restitution payments for him. Cynthia Hampton had also worked for Ensign in his campaign office, but both Hamptons lost their jobs as a result of the affair.
Coburn said he tried to get Ensign to stop seeing Cynthia Hampton and urged him to make the affair public and work on healing the two families.
Coburn said he received a call at his home in Muskogee from Doug Hampton in late spring or early summer of this year, who asked if he would talk to Hampton’s lawyer about paying for the Hamptons’ house and moving expenses so they could leave Las Vegas, where the Ensigns live.
Coburn called Ensign, who said he was willing to listen and that he wanted "to help Doug.”
The attorney for Hampton first proposed an amount that, according to The New York Times, was just less than $8.5 million and would cover the cost of the house, lost wages and pain and suffering.
Coburn said Friday that he didn’t remember the exact number of the first proposal but that it was so excessive he was "astounded.”
"I said, ‘I’m not in this game.’”
He refused even to pass along the number to Ensign, he said.
The lawyer called back later that day with an offer around $2 million, according to The New York Times, which Coburn relayed to Ensign.
Coburn said Ensign rejected it and that ended his involvement in the discussions.
Ensign’s lawyer revealed in July that Ensign’s parents had made a "gift” of nearly $100,000 to the Hamptons.
Coburn said he had been opposed to the idea of Ensign paying money to the Hamptons.
"I didn’t like that at all,” he said. "I didn’t think there should be any money. I didn’t think it ought to be the basis for the reconciliation.”
The New York Times report states Ensign helped get Doug Hampton a lobbying job and then tried to influence federal agencies on behalf of Doug Hampton’s clients.
Coburn said Friday he hadn’t known about any of Ensign’s actions regarding Doug Hampton’s lobbying and clients.
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It's taken me awhile to read it because the writing style is complex, and I've read many passages several times to really understand the connections among these 'leaders.'
I'm fascinated (and frightened) by the depth & breadth of this organization & it's modern secrecy. Just so you know, the book ties several Oklahoma politicians to membership in the 'Family', including Sen. Coburn, Sen. Inhofe, former Rep. Steve Largent, former Sen. Don Nickles, and former Sen. Robert Kerr.
And RL, I hate to break it to you, but John Edwards isn't in DC and hasn't been for almost a decade. Try to keep up.
The sexual infidelity of Edwards, Clinton, et. al. are private concerns. Ensigns would have been too, but that he was involved with a staffer, then aggravated the mess by getting the husband a lobbying job -- against Senate ethics rules -- and then, just for good measure, let the guy lobby/influence his vote. This is not rocket science. He's corrupt, pure and simple. And Coburn should not get off scott free either, since he clearly WAS involved in the negotiations for a payoff. Oh, yeah and there was a payoff, hush money, by the Senator's PARENTS. So he's corrupt, and infantile.
That whole crop of pseudo-religious nuts, who think neither the laws of God or man apply to them, needs to be kicked out of Washington, not to mention decent society.
This is Sen. Ensign's PAC that his mistress worked for. The featured politician on the front page is none other than....ta da...Sen. Tom Coburn. These housemates at C Street know everything about each other. That is their whole premise...they can go to each other with all their secrets for advice, for any kind of help. Coburn was the clean-up guy. They just didn't think Hampton would turn on them.
Passage from “The Family” by Jeff Sharlett, © 2008, Pg 263
“ In 1999, [Sam] Brownback teamed up with two other Family associates – former senator Don Nickles and the late senator Strom Thurmond – to demand a criminal investigation of the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. In 2005, Senator Coburn joined Brownback in stumping for the Houses of Worship Act, to allow tax exempt churches to endorse politicians. Brownback’s most influential effort is as chair of the Senate Value Action Team, a caucus that gathers on Tuesday, before his Family cell meeting. Everything that is said is strictly off the record, and even the groups themselves are forbidden from discussing the proceedings. It’s a little “cloak-and-dagger,” says Brownback’s press secretary. The VAT, as it’s called, is a war council, and the enemy, says one participant, is “secularism.” ”
They believe as followers of Jesus (not the same as 'Christians') they are God's chosen to weild His divine power and rule the world. Religion is for the masses and removing Jesus's feminine characteristics (charity & compassion) means they are justified in their governance. God saw fit to place them in these positions of power, connected them with other followers of Jesus & power. They justify all they do as the masculine version of WWJD. This is the version of Christ they invite the leaders of other countries to know.
“ Abram’s mystical experience [during an emergency appendectomy] marked a transformation in his mission. Gone were any vestiges of the Social Gospel, any old-fashioned Chrisitan notions of feeding the poor-food, that is, not scripture-as a matter of first concern. The Cold War and the spiritual war would be one in his eyes, but the battle would be ideological,fought for hearts and minds, those of the leaders who could set the terms for the unknowing masses. Therafter Abram;s religion, the faith of the fundamentalist elite, would be global in scope, with Washington D.C., “the world’s Christian capital.” Fundamentalism could no longer simply defend it’s own ground; it must, as Finney had done, conquer new territory.”
“ In 1947, an evangelical theologian named Carl F.H. Henry would publish a startling book titled “The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism”, since interpreted as a reconciliation of fundamentalism with the postwar world, a eulogy for William Jennings Bryan and Billy Sunday and the Bible thumpers of old that allowed fundamentalism to bury its dead and move on to an easier relationship with society at large. And yet “The Uneasy Conscience” still “breathes with fire,” an editor of “Christianity Today” (the flagship evangelical magazine Henry started) wrote just a few years ago, “rejecting the failed theology of liberalism, directed by the devastation of two wars.” ”
” That one could view the ruins of Europe and the dead of Auschwitz, Bergen-Bergen, Dachau – or for that matter, Dresden or Hamburg or Hiroshima – and conclude in 1947 that liberalism was the problem, that Locke’s tradition of tolerance had led to the slaughter, that the world needed more of the gospel of no compromise, was, whatever we might make of it morally or historically, a bold assertion. It was American fundamentalism coming into its own, fulfilling the evangelical promise it claimed to uphold, no longer defending itself against modernity’s encroachments so much as expanding into modernity’s sphere. Henry’s call for “positive engagement” with politics laid the foundations for a popular front, to borrow a term from the American Left of the previous decade: an ideological army of common cause, with “Christianity” the battle cry rallying troops well beyond the confines of fundamentalism.”
[note: Frank Buchman was a contemporary of Abram Vereide, a Seattle minister working for Goodwill Industries. Vereide founded the International Christian Leadership, the sponsors of the first Presidential Prayer Breakfast in 1953. The organization’s membership submerged in 1966 to become “The Family” or “The Fellowship Foundation.” Vereide’s handpicked successor, Doug Coe, assumed the leadership role in 1969 following Vereide’s death. Buchman’s ideology greatly influenced Vereide, who co-opted ‘Buchmanism’, as it was a similar ideology to his own. Vereide’s “Family” was born from these ideologies & the network of members still work toward Vereide’s vision for a “New World Order”.]
“ In 1936, fresh with the excitement of Hitler’s Olympics, Buchman gathered some American Oxford Group men at a house party at a Lenox, Massachusetts estate. The Oxfordites sat in the floor in their tweeds as Buchman described the vision he brought back with him. ”
“ “Suppose we were all God-controlled and we became the Cabinet,” he said. Then he designated the “World-Telegram” reporter secretary of agriculture and pointed to a recent Princeton graduate (they [Princeton grads] came to him, since he could not go to them) to replace Cordell Hull, Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Around the room he went, referring not to the talents of his followers but to their willingness to govern by Guidance.”
“ “Then ,” he continued, “in a God-controlled nation, capital and labor would discuss their problems peacefully and reach God-controlled situations.” The distribution of wealth would remain as it was, bit the workers would be content to be led by employers who were not greedy but God-controlled. Echoing the words of US Steel’s James A. Farrell that had so inspired Abram in 1932, words which the Fellowship repeats to this day, Buchman declared “Human problems aren’t economic. They’re moral, and they can’t be solved by immoral measures.” ”
“ In 1936, when men such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindberg openly admired Hitler, it was still safe to name the style of government to which these word pointed. Human problems, Buchman told his little group in Lenox, require “a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy.” Just as good, said Buchman, would be a “God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.” ”
” The family is in its own words an “invisible” association, thought it has always been organized around public men. Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), chair of the weekly off-the-record meeting of religious right groups called the Values Action Team (VAT), is an active member, as is Representative Joe Pitts (R., Pennsylvania), an avuncular would-be theocrat who chairs the house version of the VAT. Others referred to as members include senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee (the powerful conservative caucus cofounded back in 1974 by another Family associate, the late senator Carl Curtis of Nebraska); Pete Domenici of New Mexico (a Catholic and relatively moderate Republican; it’s Domenici’s status as one of the Senate’s old lions that the Family covets, not his doctrinal purity); Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa); James Inhofe (R., Oklahoma); Tom Coburn (R,. Oklahoma); John Thune (R., South Dakota); Mike Enzi (R., Wyoming); and John Ensign, the conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name.”
It's clear that, somewhere in there, Senator Coburn has lied about his involvement in this whole affair (you can kind of tease that out from even THIS reporting).
It isn't just about the sex (which most of us do not even care about) but it is about the extent these men, who present themselves as the religious, most moral and trustworthy holders of office and in fact make that their entire campaign platform, do wallor gustily in the gutter and believe and expect their public image to be their shield. Coburn played a part in the cover-up. He lied about it. He smugly believes that now he can continue to tell another lie, that he didn't have any idea who Doug Hampton was lobbying for. Right.
Blaming Coburn for what Ensign chose to do with his particular body parts is rather silly.