Sen. Ensign’s galling claims of innocence

By Jon Ralston

Friday, March 12, 2010 | 2 a.m.

In the wake of new revelations in the drip-drip-drip of scandal slowly drenching Sen. John Ensign and washing away any vestiges of his credibility or political life, a national reporter asked me a question: Did I think the latest dollops, spooned out this week by The New York Times and indicating Ensign went out of his way to help his former staffer/former best friend Doug Hampton, whose wife he bedded, might force him to resign?

My answer: If someone could have the stupendous arrogance to sleep with his best friend’s wife while both were on staff, pay them off with $96,000 of parental cash, continue to see the wife while twisting arms to get the cuckold a job, all the while harboring presidential aspirations, why would he not have the hubris to try to tough it out?

Ensign clearly is immune to shame after spending a public career on a moral high horse while horsing around in private. This is a man who put a false front to the world, the sanctimonious Senate preacher actually living a double life at that Playboy Mansion East on C Street. And now, with two probes closing in on him like a vise, Ensign, through his spokesman, offers up fodder no nightclub comic could lampoon: “Sen. Ensign has consistently acted in an ethical manner to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”

My God, man. Or as Hampton put it in an e-mail discovered by the Times: “Who are you John? ... You continue to reveal who you really are ... a self-centered, self consumed person who only cares for their (sic) own well being.”

Indeed, at every drip in this scandal, Ensign’s self-protection mechanism has trumped all others. And whether he is ever found to have violated Senate ethics rules, as now seems more likely, or federal law, which is much harder to prove, his moral bankruptcy continues to unfurl itself at every turn.

The e-mails posted on the Times site indicate more strongly than ever that Ensign was so desperate to placate Hampton that he was willing to ask business folks to take on his former best friend — executives who were faced with a choice to do the bidding of a U.S. senator or risk the consequences. As the Times reported about Bob Andrews, a vice president of a biodiesel company, Ensign brought up the “idea” of hiring Hampton at the same time the company was asking for the senator’s assistance.

From the Times report: “The senator mentioned ‘that we might have somebody we should talk to who might be able to provide us with assistance in our biodiesel program,’ Andrews said, adding, ‘I took this as a helpful hint.’ ”

I wonder if Ensign winked at him. That sure seems as if the senator was — let me recall the phrasing — acting “in an ethical manner to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”

It may be difficult (or not) to prove that Ensign was conspiring to help Hampton violate a federal cooling-off period, which could result in an indictment. But my guess is this case is not an isolated one and that others besides Andrews might have knowledge of Ensign trying to set up Hampton in jobs — unseemly but not necessarily illegal — that may have also involved lobbying, which Hampton was banned from doing.

It is impossible not to note that while Ensign, as has now been further documented, was scurrying around trying to get Hampton work, he also was still carrying on with Cynthia Hampton. Ensign has said the affair continued until August 2008; the meeting with Andrews occurred in May 2008.

This moral swamp, this unimaginable grotesquerie, this repellent scenario boils down to this: From the moment the Hamptons were sent packing from Washington in spring 2008, with that “gift” of $96,000 from Ensign’s parents, the payoffs — or attempted payoffs — were just beginning. As Ensign continued the affair, he was simultaneously trying to buy Hampton’s silence. And when, as these e-mails further confirm, Hampton realized the senator would never make him whole, he wrote a letter to Fox News that forced Ensign into that infamous June 16, 2009, confessional news conference.

Hampton’s version of events, from his first appearance a month after Ensign’s disclosure to various national news reports, has yet to be contradicted. He surely has led law enforcement and Senate ethics investigators on the scent of more evidence like what the Times reported this week.

Could it finally force Ensign to resign? Why should he?

So far as anyone knows, he has — wait for it — “consistently acted in an ethical manner to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.”