February 07, 2006 (original story...)
When he walked into an office at the Republican Party of Virginia headquarters and listened in on Democrats talking about private business over a speakerphone, Gary R. Thomson, the state GOP chairman, thought only of politics.
"And it wasn't at the time that I was necessarily having a conversation with myself anything other than this was something political going on," Thomson recalled in a sworn deposition he gave in the eavesdropping case that cost him his chairmanship and resulted in a misdemeanor charge against him.
Was there something about politics that may have excused your doing something like this? Thomson was asked.
"That's fair to say," answered the Chester accountant, a preacher's son who rose to the chairmanship from the Christian-right movement.
The Democratic victims of the eavesdropping, who won a $750,000 settlement from the Republican Party of Virginia and four other defendants last week, say the scandal reflects a "win-at-any-cost" mind-set that dominated the Republican Party.
Republicans say it reflected more the mind-set of an overly aggressive executive director, Edmund A. Matricardi III, who sucked other Republicans into a mess of his own making.
Using a passcode provided him by a disgruntled Democrat, Matricardi listened in on Democratic conference calls on March 22 and March 25 of 2002. That was a violation of the federal wiretap act.
At the outset, Matricardi was gleeful about his covert operation.
"You wouldn't believe what I just did. You wouldn't believe what I just heard," he told Anne Petera on Friday night, March 22, 2002, after listening in on the first phone call. "I'm going out with a bang as far as leaving the state party."
Matricardi was planning to resign as executive director to take a political job in another state.
At one point, he said, "We're political, we go over the top."
Petera was chief of administration in the office of Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore. She was also the Republican national committeewoman from Virginia. She continues to hold those jobs.
In sworn testimony, Petera said she told Matricardi that what he had done was wrong. When he insisted it was legal, Petera responded, "I told him I'm sure he had taught his 5-year-old not to do it."
That didn't stop her from leaving Matricardi's office with the notes he had taken of the first intercepted phone call.
In his sworn testimony, Matricardi disputed Petera: "I recall she was very interested in the information . . . very interested in what they were saying about her boss."
Her boss, Kilgore, the likely Republican candidate for governor, has distanced himself from the scandal. When Petera approached him with information about the eavesdropping on Saturday, March 23, 2002, he said he did not want to know any details and referred her to his chief counsel, Bernie McNamee. Kilgore maintains that as the state's top lawyer, he should remove himself from any scandal that might involve a state investigation.
What the Democrats, including Gov. Mark R. Warner, who participated in the first intercepted call, said about Kilgore was not flattering.
The two calls were about redistricting. Democrats had won a lower-court decision declaring a Republican-authored legislative redistricting plan unconstitutional. Republicans were appealing to the Virginia Supreme Court through Kilgore's office.
Democrats on the conference call were angry at Warner because they felt his office should have handled the appeal.
There was so much badmouthing of Warner that he broke into the call to defend his decision not to handle the appeal.
According to Matricardi, Warner said, "I have done you a big favor by keeping Kilgore in the case." His rationale was "they [the attorney general's office] are not the greatest lawyers and if we wouldn't have let them appeal it, then the State Board of Elections would have just gone and hired a fancy high-dollar law firm in Richmond to represent them and, you know, they are a lot harder to go against than the morons down at the attorney general's office," Matricardi summed up the phone call.
Matricardi's testimony also showed that the Democrats were not blameless in the scandal.
Jackie Daniel, a former Democratic Party operative, called Thomson and Matricardi on Friday and asked if they would be interested in listening in on a Democratic conference call that "was going to be a bloodbath."
According to Matricardi, Daniel was angry because of personnel changes at the Democratic Party of Virginia - she had been fired. Daniel, who is black, said some Democratic black legislators were angry because they feared Democrats would dilute the black population in legislative districts in the hopes of winning more seats and endanger black incumbents.
She gave Matricardi the passcode to the conference call after obtaining it from Joseph W. Lee III, an aide to Del. Fenton L. Bland Jr., D-Petersburg, who is black.
After a Virginia State Police and FBI investigation, Matricardi pleaded guilty to a felony wiretapping charge. Thomson; Claudia D. Tucker, then chief of staff to Speaker of the House S. Vance Wilkins Jr., R-Amherst; and Lee pleaded guilty to lesser misdemeanor offenses. All paid fines.
Thomson, Tucker and Jeff Ryer, then an aide to Del. H. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, the House majority leader, listened in on the second phone call.
Ken Hutcheson, who will be Kilgore's campaign manager in the race for governor and was his campaign manager in the 2001 race for attorney general, was briefed on the contents of the first call by Matricardi, as was Wilkins.
On Sunday, March 24, 2002, Petera notified McNamee, Kilgore's chief counsel, of the eavesdropping - McNamee says he was not told that Matricardi was involved. McNamee called in the state police the next day and the investigation began.
Mark Rozell, a political scientist at George Mason University, said he does not think Kilgore or the Republicans will be damaged significantly by the scandal, because it will be old news by the time of next year's election.
"The public thinks both parties are tainted by political scandals," he said. "They will dismiss this as politics as usual."
