Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Leave Sen. Ensign alone

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. It’s time to leave Sen. John Ensign alone.

All of his supporters who say he made a mistake, it’s a personal matter and he should be left alone to do his job have a point. It would seem only the barely veiled partisans at MSNBC and the Las Vegas Sun still think this is a story. Enough is enough. Let’s move on.

But before we do, at the risk of sounding like Columbo walking out of the room with the obvious culprit seemingly off the hook and then turning around to ask one more question, there is just one more thing. Or, perhaps, a few related things that need to be cleared up. And only the heretofore mum senator can do so.

Maybe the revelations, which began weeks ago with a senatorial news conference about his affair and continued with his lawyer’s statement about a parental payoff, are over. But even without any new information, questions surround the payments Ensign claims were made by his parents to the Hampton family after husband and wife left D.C. in April 2008.

The money, which lawyer Paul Coggins claims amounted to $96,000, was supposed to answer the question of whether Ensign violated disclosure laws regarding severance pay after Ensign’s former best friend, Doug Hampton, asserted on “Face to Face” that the senator gave Cynthia Hampton, Ensign’s then-lover, more than $25,000 out of his own pocket. That could have brought criminal penalties to bear — as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington pointed out — so Ensign immediately had Coggins put out a release saying the senator violated no laws:

“In April 2008, Senator John Ensign’s parents each made gifts to Doug Hampton, Cindy Hampton, and two of their children in the form of a check totaling $96,000. Each gift was limited to $12,000. The payments were made as gifts, accepted as gifts and complied with tax rules governing gifts.

“After the Senator told his parents about the affair, his parents decided to make the gifts out of concern for the well-being of long-time family friends during a difficult time. The gifts are consistent with a pattern of generosity by the Ensign family to the Hamptons and others.”

This statement, designed to answer the severance question and head off those criminal sanctions, only raises more questions. The most obvious one: Why should we believe Ensign? He has provided no evidence to back up the assertions, so we are supposed to take it on, ahem, faith that he is telling us the truth?

Where are the canceled checks? Were the checks given directly by Mike and Sharon Ensign or passed through their son to the Hamptons? Why, pray tell, did the generous Ensign family short one of the Hampton’s three kids by only providing enough $12,000 increments for two? And if we are to take the lawyerly statement at face value, what other gifts consistent with the generous pattern has The Family Ensign bestowed on the Hamptons?

Show us the money.

The Sun’s Lisa Mascaro discovered this week that Doug Hampton did not disclose any gifts on an annual disclosure form he filed last year. So did Hampton conceal them or err on the form, or were these really not gifts? (Hampton could not be reached, and I have asked the senator for answers to these and other questions.)

On June 17, The New York Times reported on the putative severance. Using as a source a “person close to the Ensign family,” the paper of record said the senator “dismissed Mrs. Hampton from his political team with a severance that was paid from his own pocket.”

If this is so, was this the $96,000 in the statement? Or was this a different pot of money from the generous Ensigns’? And if Ensign did not pay a severance out of his own pocket, why did the senator not demand a retraction from The New York Times?

We don’t know and he won’t tell. The Family Ensign, despite having a public official at the center of a sex and money scandal, has a code of Omerta that would be the envy of the mob or the senator’s other Family, the one that lives in the shadowy C (for Christian?) Street house where men can veto or help cover up each other’s behavior.

If Ensign would just tie up those loose ends, actually answer these questions, I and many others would be willing to say, as Columbo might have, that the case is closed. Unless, of course, by answering those questions, Ensign would only raise other ones.

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