The New Republic’s McCain scandal piece is up. It’s much more focused on the internal process at the Times leading up to yesterday’s publication of the story of McCain’s possibly sexual relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman and the corruption and favoritism connected to their relationship than I’d expected.

One thing that’s clear in the TNR piece is how hard McCain fought against the publication of this story:

From the outset, the Times reporters encountered stiff resistance from the McCain camp. After working on the story for several weeks, Thompson learned that McCain had personally retained Bill Clinton’s former attorney Bob Bennett to defend himself against the Times’ questioning. At the same time, two McCain campaign advisers, Mark Salter and Charlie Black, vigorously pressed the Times reporters to drop the matter. And in early December, McCain himself called Keller to deny the allegations on the record.

…

Immediately, the media pounced on the budding scandal. “If John McCain has hired Bob Bennett as his lawyer,” one commentator said on Fox News, “that’s a big–you don’t hire Bob Bennett to knock down a press story. You hire Bob Bennett because you have serious legal issues somehow.” On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan speculated that the Times newsroom was the source of the leak. “They’ve been rebuffed and rebuffed on this story, and they say we’ve had it, and they go around then and Drudge pops it just like he popped the Monica Lewinsky story first.”

The TNR piece reflects poorly on the Times, but I think it leaves many questions unanswered. It doesn’t offer any insight into why the Times published their story now, nor does it do anything to disprove the claims made in the Times piece about McCain’s relationship with Iseman and the corrupt relationship he maintained with her clients.

One of the aspects that I’m most interested in finding more about is why McCain hired Bennett, one of the nation’s top criminal attorneys, to beat back a media story.

In the New York Times story, three separate McCain staffers talk about ways in which they intervened with and for their boss about his relationship with lobbbyist Vicki Iseman:

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

Separately, a top McCain aide met with Ms. Iseman at Union Station in Washington to ask her to stay away from the senator. John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her. [Emphasis added]

But earlier today, McCain himself denied ever being confronted by his staff about his relationship with Iseman, also denying that he confirmed he was behaving inappropriately with her. The AP reports on the McCain press conference (via TalkLeft):

But McCain said he was unaware of any such conversation [between Weaver and Iseman], and denied that his aides ever tried to talk to him about his interactions with Iseman.

“I never discussed it with John Weaver. As far as I know, there was no necessity for it,” McCain said. “I don’t know anything about it,” he added. “John Weaver is a friend of mine. He remains a friend of mine. But I certainly didn’t know anything of that nature.” [Emphasis added]

McCain described Iseman as only a “friend.”

Now, only one side can be right. Two McCain staff said they intervened with McCain and he concurred with their assessment of his relationship of Iseman as problematic. Weaver says he met with Iseman to intervene on her side. McCain is contradicting the accounts of three separate staffers. It’s possible that Weaver’s intervention with Iseman took place without the knowledge of McCain, but McCain goes beyond denying knowledge of the Weaver/Iseman meeting to deny any reason for such a meeting to take place. Someone is lying and the law of parsimony would suggest that it’s McCain.

Update:

Marc Ambinder notes that the Times’ use of the word “associates” suggests that, in fact, the people who confronted him were not aides or staffers. He hazards that “associates” might actually be other lobbyists.

I think Ambinder is raising a good point here, but it may just as well be connected to the Times’ agreement with the sources for attribution as it is the actual role of the sources (think Scooter Libby, former Hill staffer).

It’s also possible that McCain might be getting cute with his language. If “associates” does not mean aides or staffers, his statements denying an intervention in his press conference, which the AP described as about “aides” may be linguistically correct, but dodging the question. I’d be curious to see the how the question and answer were actually framed.

While the New York Times is taking fire from the right and the McCain campaign for running the story on McCain’s corrupt ties to lobbyist Vicki Iseman, it is critically important to remember that the Times was not alone in this story. The Washington Post, shortly after the Times story was published online, ran their own version of the piece. While the Post piece had been updated to include the timing of the Times publication and some details included therein, it was clear that the Post had been sitting on their story as well. The Post piece included original reporting – the fact that McCain’s Senate office had banned Iseman from entering – that could not have been done in the short time between the two stories’ publication. The Times piece was published around 8:30pm Wednesday night, the Post piece was online by around 10:30pm.

The New Republic will also be releasing their full story on the McCain scandal and how the Times sat on it for months. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional details in it about the corruption and sex side of the McCain/Iseman scandal.

In short, charges of the Times smearing McCain just don’t hold water. This is a big story that, by the end of the day, will have had major original reporting of the same story line by three prominent publications, including the two most important newspapers in the country.

One of the major subplots of the McCain-Iseman sex, lobbying, and favors scandal is the timing of how the New York Times broke the story. The Times had been working on the story for a while when Matt Drudge leaked that it was about to publish this past December. This prompted McCain to go all out lobbying the Times editorial staff, including executive editor Bill Keller. McCain succeeded in getting the story killed, thanks to lobbying by him and presumably his campaign staff, ahead of the early Republican primaries and caucuses.

Marc Cooper of the Huffington Post takes a look at the huge benefit McCain reaped by getting the story killed until now:

Under what is said to be intense pressure from McCain and prominent D.C. criminal attorney Robert Bennett, who was hired to help deal with the matter, the Times capitulated and held off on publishing the story – offering no explanation, then or now. And if you read through the piece just published, there doesn’t seem to be any new information that the Times couldn’t have had two months ago.

So what, you ask? Just one small detail: In the intervening weeks between the moment when the Times was first going to publish the story and finally did publish the story, the same New York Times endorsed John McCain! And while he’s described in the endorsement editorial as a “staunch advocate of campaign finance reform” he’s tagged in this Wednesday’s news piece as having accepted favors from those with matters that came before the very committee he used to push that reform. And many, many other favors.

More importantly, if the Times had published its expose when it first had it over Christmas, it would have preceded all of the Republican primaries and caucuses. To say it would have changed the dynamic of the GOP race is perhaps the understatement of the decade. You can bet Mitt Romney and even Mayor Rudy are up late tonight gnashing their teeth and pounding their heads against the wall over this one.

Cooper goes on to say that this amounts to the Times giving the GOP McCain as their nominee, which I likely agree with, and now they’ve taken him away. I hope that the level of corruption, dishonest, sex, and sleaze in this story is enough to bury McCain for the remainder of the campaign, but I hardly think it’s likely to assure any outcome. Yes, had this story broke when there was a full raft of Republican opponents McCain would have been buried. Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani would have made sure that it was a scandal voters knew about. It may have prevented McCain from winning the GOP nomination, but we’ll never know for sure.

The Times story apparently ran today because they became aware that another publication, The New Republic, was going to release a story on it shortly. According to Noam Scheiber at TNR’s The Stump the story wasn’t just about McCain, but how the Times bent their coverage to his will by burying the story:

The McCain campaign is apparently blaming TNR for forcing the Times’ hand on this story. We can’t yet confirm that. But we can say this: TNR correspondent Gabe Sherman is working on a piece about the Times’ foot-dragging on the McCain story, and the back-and-forth within the paper about whether to publish it. Gabe’s story will be online tomorrow.

The McCain campaign has confirmed that account.

This is a story of corruption, influence, sex, and hypocrisy. McCain is falsely known as a reformer and a clean politician. The Times’ story contradicts the key narratives that McCain will be running on – and has been running on for over a year. There is a legitimate public interest in knowing what major media outlets know about John McCain, much in the way if major media outlets had well-documented stories about how Obama’s “hope” message was hypocritical based on his long-standing practice of stealing candy from babies it would be relevant for voters to know.  The Times ran the story now not out of an obligation to report timely stories to their readership, but because they were about to get burned by another publication. No heroics by the Times, no motivation other than an interest to counter a story by The New Republic.

That was quick: IsemanAndMaverick.com.
D-Day saw this coming.

Digby:

I don’t know if McCain is crooked. But you have to wonder, after his close call with the Keating Five and public association with campaign finance reform, how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could get away with this stuff if he actually became the Republican nominee? After all we’ve seen of pages and blue dresses and wide stances, it’s nearly impossible to believe that candidates can think they’ll get away with hiding anything like this in this environment.

But apparently, he did. He has bought so fully into his media love that he seems to have believed that he wouldn’t be held to the same standards as other politicians. I guess he thought that nobody could ever believe he’d do anything dishonest. But now that another woman has been injected into this (by GOP operatives, I might add), his whole facade is in danger of crumbling. The press might have been willing to overlook the corruption angle, but the sex angle is just impossible for them to resist. [Emphasis added]

I think this is a spot-on analysis of McCain’s likely thought process, though I’d also add that there was a clear effort on his part to muscle this story out of printing press last year. The initial Times story included this line:

He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.

So I think Digby’s right – he thought he could get away with it, but he was working to kill this story at the highest levels of the New York Times. As Digby says, he thought no one, including Bill Keller, would believe he would do anything dishonest. I suppose the inclusion of the section on the Keating Five scandal in the Times expose puts that lie to bed, separate from anything included in the Iseman scandal.

McCain spokesmodel Jill Hazelbaker responds to reports of McCain involved in a likely sexual relationship with a telecom lobbyist that lead to favoritism and indulgences. The statement does not make any explicit reference to or denial of an affair between McCain and Vicki Iseman.

What I’m sure an intrepid journalist would want to find out is why the lobbying firm that McCain’s sweetie was a partner of scrubbed her from their website. Here’s what Vicki Iseman’s bio page used to look like on Alcade & Fay’s website. Now it’s blank. Likewise, their staff listing used to include Vicki Iseman’s name. Now Iseman’s name, which linked to her bio, is absent from their staff list.

It seems that the McCain campaign, through hatchet man Bob Bennett, is out in force to try to kill this story in the press. Shame on the press if this story doesn’t get full and detailed coverage. The Times buried it until McCain had secured the nomination – a fact reminiscent of the suppression of the Tims’ Risen and Lichtblau’s story on warrantless wiretapping of Americans in advance of the 2004 presidential election. Hopefully the press can do a better job delving into McCain’s corrupt past as we move forward this story. I predict that there is a great deal of corruption yet to come out.

Update:

Now Iseman’s bio is back on the Alcade & Fay website and staff list, with some contact information removed. Iseman’s bio is now at a different URL than before.