The Effer has effed up more than is humanly possible.

We really thought that story about Freddie lobbying in support of abortion rights during the George the 41st presidency, and then lying about it this month, was all done. We buried what we thought was going to be the last act in that story — a kind of epilogue, really — in a “Links” post yesterday. And today the ghost of that story walks the streets again.

That name we hung on him was really an inspired one. This guy has a real talent for effing up. Here’s a quick recap, followed by the latest development:
• On July 7, the L.A. Times ran a story saying: “Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction.”
• That story also carried two denials by the Thompson non-campaign. In an email, Thompson spokesman Mark Corallo said: “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period!” In a telephone interview, Corallo added: “There’s no documents to prove it, there’s no billing records, and Thompson says he has no recollection of it, says it didn’t happen.”
• However, the L.A. Times reported, the minutes of a Sept. 14, 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. show that the group hired Thompson to lobby for them that year.
• At that point, it was clear that Thompson and his non-campaign had been caught lying about something they preferred had never happened.
• Yesterday, the NYT banged in what we thought was the last nail in the coffin of this story by reporting that there were too billing records: “Billing records show that former Senator Fred Thompson spent nearly 20 hours working as a lobbyist on behalf of a group seeking to ease restrictive federal rules on abortion counseling in the 1990s, even though he recently said he did not recall doing any work for the organization.” The records show that Freddie “spoke 22 times with Judith DeSarno, who was then president of the family planning group”.
• So yesterday the Freddie Thompson water-testing machinery decided to keep the scandal alive by attempting to defend their previous denials. They were obviously hoping that everyone had been so distracted by the David Vitter story that they wouldn’t remember exactly what denials had been issued. (Yes, they don’t seem to understand that those tubes on the internets have no drains through which old facts are consigned to a vast internet sewage system.)
• “A supporter close to Fred Thompson’s unofficial campaign” emailed this explanation to Pat Robertson‘s Christian Broadcasting Network:

There’s been a lot of confusion and inaccurate reporting about Thompson’s position – did he deny, or does he claim not to remember? Are those contradictory positions?

For what it’s worth, Thompson’s denial was to the allegation the LAT made – that Thompson lobbied Sununu for this group. Period. That was what the LAT claimed they had proof of, and that was what we thought was being denied.

Later, the allegation changed a bit – notice that Sununu is not in this NYT story? – and in response to that, Thompson has acknowledged that he genuinely doesn’t recall whether he’d ever spoken to people from that group in ’91. I believe he’s been, and remains, consistent on those two points:

He didn’t lobby Sununu for this group, and…

He doesn’t recall whether he ever spoke to, consulted, offered legal or political information, etc for this client.

As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in these NYT records that suggests Thompson lobbied Sununu, as was alleged. It appears that Thompson was simply consulted, and asked questions of people he knew in the Bush administration. To the best of my understanding, those are the facts.”

Funny how “Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period!” turned out to mean only that he hadn’t lobbied Sununu. Just to be sure, I looked up “period” in all the online dictionaries. I can report with authority that none of them gives “Sununu” as an alternative meaning.

So now somebody will put in the hours to pull up proof that Freddie did too lobby Sununu. That’ll give the whole story one more airing. Then, presumably, Freddie’s non-campaign will not be able to stop themselves from responding with another round of some sh*t or the other.

With any luck, the Freddie Thompson lobbying-and-lying story will provide gainful employment in the journalism industry till whatever date Freddie finally pulls the plug on his presidential aspirations (or has it pulled for him).

May his political epitaph be: “The effing Effer effed, and having effed, moved on.”