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ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE
Sen. John Ensign talks with reporters last month on his way to a vote. Recently, the Nevada Republican has been working on popular legislation to bolster his standing in the wake of the revelation that he had an affair with a then-campaign staffer.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Sun Coverage
Sun Archives
- Ensign: 'Sorry this issue has caused embarrassment' (7-24-2009)
- Ensign loses another senior aide (7-23-2009)
- Ensign's chief of staff leaving (7-22-2009)
- Christian group paid for Ensign’s foreign travel (7-20-2009)
- Justice Department: Ensign complaint should go to FBI (7-20-2009)
- Behind the closed doors on C Street (7-19-2009)
- Ethics group amends Ensign complaint over $96,000 payment (7-17-2009)
- Ethics group amends Ensign complaint over $96,000 payment (7-17-2009)
- Ensign’s $96,000 question: Severance pay or gift to Hamptons? (7-16-2009)
- In D.C., some worry Ensign saga is not over (7-15-2009)
- Ensign gives first Senate speech since acknowledging affair (7-15-2009)
Sun Blogs
First to go were the interns.
Days after Republican Sen. John Ensign admitted an affair, e-mail from his office intercepted by The Washington Post asked if any others on the Hill had room for “some really great interns that want to relocate to another office.”
Last week Ensign announced a wholesale shake-up of his top staff.
Ensign’s chief of staff, John Lopez, is stepping down after spending much of his professional career with the senator, as is his communications director, Tory Mazzola.
Lopez has no job lined up, but has been in talks with the Washington, D.C., office of R&R Partners, the venerable lobbying and advertising shop headquartered in Nevada, a source confirmed Monday.
Mazzola and his wife, who expect their first child in December, are relocating to New Hampshire, where they have family. Mazzola will work for the National Republican Congressional Committee as its Northeast regional spokesman.
The changes come as Ensign, his career shaken, is trying to get back to legislative normalcy — authoring crowd-pleasing legislation to help military families, and supporting a bill to make service dogs more widely available for injured vets.
Questions remain unanswered about the senator’s relationship with Cynthia Hampton, a campaign staffer when the affair started in late 2007. Her husband, Doug Hampton, was a top Ensign aide at the time. The affair ended in August 2008.
And new questions are emerging.
The latest is why Mazzola received a 50 percent salary increase during the six months from April 2008 to September 2008, about the time the Hamptons stopped working for the senator.
In April the senator’s parents paid $96,000 to the Hampton family — a payment Ensign’s attorney said is a gift but an ethics group wants investigated.
Senate records show Mazzola was paid nearly $35,000 for the half-year from spring to fall in 2007, and again for the six months from fall 2007 to spring 2008, according to legistorm.com.
But for April to September 2008, the spokesman’s pay shot up to nearly $53,000 without an overt change in job title.
Those familiar with Senate office pay structure said the sudden increase could have been for various reasons: New duties, accumulated vacation pay or a bonus. One-time bonuses, especially at the holidays or end of the fiscal year as this was, are common.
Salaries are set at the discretion of the office, so long as they do not exceed the senator’s pay.
During the next reporting period, from October 2008 to April 2009, Mazzola’s salary dropped to $45,000, or about 15 percent.
Ensign’s office on Monday declined to respond to questions about the salary boost.
Mazzola is being replaced by Rebecca Fisher, who had a brief stint as Ensign’s spokeswoman at the Senate Republican Policy Committee when the senator became chairman this year. Ensign resigned the No. 4 party leadership post after going public with the affair.
Before that, Fisher headed up communications for the senator when he was chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm, during the 2006-2008 election cycle.
Fisher earned mixed reviews on the Hill for her work during a tough election year. Republicans lost eight Senate seats and, after Sen. Arlen Specter’s switch from Republican to Democrat, handed Democrats the coveted 60-seat filibuster-proof majority.
The campaign office had been run by Ensign’s Nevada political crew, and Fisher sometimes appeared to be an outsider.
Fisher is reportedly married to Ensign ally Robert Fisher, a Verizon lobbyist.
Records show both she and her husband are former staffers of the Senate Commerce Committee, where Ensign played an active role until Republicans lost the majority in 2007.
Reports show Rebecca and Robert Fisher worked for Republican Sen. John McCain, and Rebecca Fisher worked on McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Perhaps more significant is the departure of Lopez, the longtime aide who has been with Ensign since he first came to Congress in 1995.
Friendly and knowledgeable, Lopez is known in both Washington and Nevada as a loyal staffer. A Nevadan, Lopez rose through the ranks and was in line to be chief of staff in fall 2006, but ended up sharing duties with Doug Hampton, the senator’s friend — a newcomer to Washington who was hired by Ensign that fall.
Lopez is being replaced by lobbyist Aaron Cohen, a lesser-known former Ensign staffer who also worked for former Democratic Sen. Richard Bryan. Cohen works in government relations at the firm Kimbell & Associates in Washington.
Ensign was again on the Senate floor last week, his second floor speech in as many weeks, as he tried to resume normal duties even as questions continue.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is seeking an FBI investigation into the $96,000 payment Ensign’s parents made to the Hampton family, as well as reviews before the Federal Election Commission and Senate Ethics Committee.
Ensign’s attorney has said the payment was a gift to the Hampton family during a difficult time. But Doug Hampton said the senator paid his wife severance upon her departure and did not list the money as gifts on a Senate disclosure form.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics maintains that if the $96,000 was severance, rather than a gift, Ensign could face felony violation of campaign finance law for not reporting the in-kind donation to the campaign committee where she worked.
"... and supporting a bill to make service dogs more widely available for injured vets."
--
A puppy for everyone! A best of all, he'll pay for them with taxcuts!
The Master of Lies:
Nobody can prove with absolute certainty whether or not there is an evil being called (The Devil -- Nevada Senator John Ensign -- Both) but if there were and if we got him to describe himself, here's what he'd probably tell you:
Let me assure you that any preconceived notions you may have about who or what I am -- about how I might look or act are totally false. I am the greatest master of disguises, lies, illusions, cons, and manipulations your world has ever seen. I am an actor extraordinaire. I could win Academy Awards Oscars for best actor, best actress, best supporting actor, and best supporting actress all at the same time, and never break a sweat.
Nobody, and I mean nobody, expects me to be who I am. Nobody expects me to look as I look. Nobody expects me to act as I do. Humans are incredibly easy to scam because they rarely ever think for themselves and because they have a ridiculous, cartoon-character image of me as an idiot with horns and a pitchfork. So long as I don't look like that cartoon character, or look otherwise grotesque, most humans never see me coming, and here's why.
Lies, deception, and cons are my games. Depravity, Sleaze, and Corruption, are my middle names. Trickery, fraud, and hoaxes are my calls to fame. I could sell snake oil to a snake oil salesmen, so don't try to second-guess me or put any expectations between us. I guarantee that, if you do, you'll not only be wrong, you'll also miss the essence of what I have to offer you.
If you'll think for just one moment, it will become obvious to you that no devil worth his salt would ever come out as an evil one. All I have to do to create havoc and destruction here on Earth is to disguise myself as a promoter of what seems like a good cause.
I simply gather together a flock of mindless Would-Be Do-Gooders, and then, from a sacred place of trust and power and in the name of righteousness or some other illusion, I shower evil upon all mankind.
I've pulled this trick off thousands of times in the past, and at this very moment, I'm doing it right now, in dozens of different ways, right under your noses, and the vast majority of humans simply don't see it.
I'll give you a hint. Look into the concentrations of power. Look into your governments, your multi-national corporations, and your religious institutions. Look at what they are attempting to sell you. Look at what they are attempting to get you to believe, and follow this maxim: "By their fruits shall you know them."
A) Satan
B) Nevada Senator John Ensign
C) Both of the above
poor poor johnnie boy ensign...
granted every single advantage in life...
rode mommy and daddy's coat tails all the way to the us senate...
but that wasn't enough...
he wanted another man's wife...
and when he got caught...
what does he do...
he runs to mommy and daddy to write checks to make his boo boo go away...
what a joke...
what a fraud...
what a child...
what a complete embarrassment!!!
The Classic Las Vegas Implosion...
The Ensign thing will not go away which, in my mind, means that there's a lot more to it that what has been reported. I would love to see the FBI do exactly what the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is seeking.....an FBI investigation into the $96,000 payment Ensign's parents made to the Hampton family.
The Senate itself has the power to look into the whole Ensign mess but don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen......that's kind of like allowing a guilty judge to determine and pass sentence on himself...
Time to get a real job.
You think Ensign has started saying "Why ME?"
If we have this right, he is going from being in a bed with his staffer, to being in bed with new business and pharmaceutical lobbyists as his replacement staff. It would probably cost the country less if he just gets a new girlfriend, because these new lobbyist ties will cost all taxpayers billions in the long run instead of just costing daddy $100,000 per girlfriend.
To paraphrase to late, Great Molly Ivins: "Poor John...he was born with a silver putter in his mouth".
Ensign is doing the best thing he can to draw attention away from the non-story of the Hamptons, which the Nevada media refuses to forego and which the liberal media outght to dig up some other non-sensical trash (preferably on democrats).
Smart move here by Ensign. Let morons worry about salary structures within a political electee's office, and concentrate on serious stuff like limiting government and lowering taxes, if that is humanly possible with leftwing democrats in charge for now.
While I personally don't much care that he was banging his friend and subordinate's wife (and it takes two to tango), Ensign needs to go. His hypocrisy and lack of judgement on personal matters, and his (at best) questionable fiscal management ability, are doing nothing but serving to distract the public from the much more serious and far more costly Democratic circus going on in DC.
I was more than willing to give our Senator a pass until these revalations about this house on C Street started to be made public.
There are times when, we the people call our Senators offices regarding issues which may be near and dear to us. And we don't always expect the Senator to agree with our positions. When calling Senator Ensign's office I always found his staff to be very courteous, good listeners, and left me with the feeling that our Senator was willing to take ALL comments into consideration before making up his mind on any particular issue. That is his job.
I feel betrayed. Our Senator has no mind of his own.
He is a Stepford Senator, pre-progammed and open to nobody elses ideas or opinions.
These people who live at C Street revel in a privilege bestowed upon them from G-d. They can commit adulterous affairs, commit heinous crimes and all will be forgiven by G-d almighty because these particular Senators and congessmen, Democrat and Republican, who live and work at C Street don't have to answer to anybody but themselves.
They care nothing about health care. Their fervent religiocity prohibits it. Stem cell research that can help people inflicted with disease, denied by them. A pre-emptive war declared by them, a "crusade" so labled by President Bush which has spent our country out of monies that could have been spent far more wisely on our needs here at home. Taxpayer money, our hard earned dollars funneled to Vice President Cheney's former companies. The Ensign crowd.
Our Senator is a robot, not a representitive. And if C Street "family" has provided him with cover, so be it. It's expected of this cult. If his blood family, however, structured transactions as a payoff for the Senator's illegal, illicit and hypocritical behavior he should go to jail.
Stuart & Robert Wyman-Cahall
Las Vegas, NV 89142
This guy is a cancer on Nevada.
The Ensign family has no morals.
Ensign stays. We need him badly, as the other rightwinger said it best previously " a democratic circus in Washington.".
New Time poll also comes up with a pro-health care figure of 71%--46% say it is "very important" to pass major health reform and 25% say it is "somewhat important."
Healthcare reform is another phrase for "taxes going up radically on those that work, folks".
Senator Ensign and others who share his approach to life and religion would do well to reflect on their Sunday School lessons.
From Romans 2--17Now you, if you call yourself a Jew (can we substitute "Christian"?); if you rely on the law and brag about your relationship to God; 18if you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by the law; 19if you are convinced that you are a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, 20an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth-- 21you, then, who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? 22You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? 23You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? 24As it is written: "God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles (can we substitute "unbelievers"?) because of you."
If they thought being called hypocritical was bad, it would seem that disgracing their faith would be many times worse.