The lurid revelations from the Senate Ethics Committee’s report on John Ensign’s alleged cover-up of an extramarital affair have raised a battery of questions, including why the Department of Justice and Federal Election Commission investigations stalled. Here are a few lingering issues:
Who else got wrapped up in this?
A few prominent Republicans were involved in the sordid drama, including Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum. On June 15, 2009—the night before Ensign publicly admitted the affair—Doug Hampton sent Santorum, then a commentator for Fox News, a copy of a letter he had sent to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly revealing the affair. Santorum, who served in the Senate with Ensign, forwarded the e-mail to Ensign’s Gmail account, according to the report, triggering Ensign’s decision to fess up to his staff. The document doesn’t speculate why Santorum was targeted or accuse him of any wrongdoing.
Tom Coburn, the Republican Senator from Oklahoma and Ensign’s roommate in the controversial “C Street townhouse” on Capitol Hill, was a more central figure. As Peter Boyer reported in a New Yorker story last year, Coburn learned of Ensign’s affair with Cynthia Hampton in the winter of 2008. He spearheaded an intervention, pressing his friend to end the dalliance and apologize to Hampton. The cooling-off period was brief. After the affair resumed and became public, members of the Fellowship Foundation–the Christian group that owns the C Street House and ministered to Ensign–devised a plan to pay off the Hamptons and relocate them to Colorado, according to the report. Coburn “was in favor of the plan” and played a pivotal role in haggling with Hampton’s lawyer over the terms of a financial settlement, the document alleges.
According to the report, the lawyer contacted Coburn on May 22, 2009, as the Senator was mowing his lawn in Oklahoma. The attorney proposed that Ensign pay the Hamptons $8 million for housing and relocation costs, as well as living expenses and a college fund for his children. Coburn called the figure “ridiculous,” but was receptive to a revised offer of $2.8 million. “Okay, that’s what I had in mind and I think is fair,” Coburn said, according to the report. After claiming doctor’s privilege and invoking the secrecy afforded by his role in the church, Coburn later cooperated with the investigation, denying that he negotiated a settlement and casting his role as a conduit of information. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the watchdog group that first filed a complaint against Ensign, has urged a probe into Coburn’s conduct. The Senator has repeatedly declined to comment in the days since the report broke.
How close were the Ensigns and the Hamptons?
Extremely. The friendship between Cindy Hampton and Darlene Ensign dated back to high school, and Hampton was a bridesmaid at the Ensigns’ 1987 wedding. The former Republican Senator and Doug Hampton were golf buddies who vacationed together at the Ensign family’s California lake house. It was their “dream,” Cindy Hampton said, to “walk through life together,” according to the Ethics Committee. To that end, when the Hamptons moved to the Las Vegas area in 2004, they bought a house within a three-minute walk of the Ensigns’ abode. The Hamptons twice refinanced their new home with $40,000 in loans from Ensign.
According to the document, that wasn’t the only financial support the couple received from the former Senator. In 2006 and 2007, he forked over $39,140 for the Hampton kids’ private school tuition so that they could be educated alongside his own children. The Ensigns also whisked their friends away on a posh excursion to Maui, which included the services of a private chef, a chartered boat and travel by private jet. It’s not clear from the report who footed the $43,000 bill, but it wasn’t the Hamptons. The two couples were so closely entangled that even after Doug Hampton became aware of the affair on Dec. 23, 2007, the foursome spent Christmas Eve together.
What was it like to work for Ensign?
John Lopez, Ensign’s chief of staff during the scandal, had what must have been among the strangest gigs on Capitol Hill. A veteran staffer, Lopez was promoted from the deputy’s slot to the top job in 2006. According to Lopez, Ensign had a preference for “alpha males” and was skittish about handing the reins of his office to an aide who characterized their relationship as “an inch deep and a mile wide.” To compensate, Ensign delegated management of the office to his confidante Hampton, while Lopez handled legislative business and the communications shop.
That portfolio changed as the office scrambled to scuttle the scandal. During a deposition, Lopez admitted that after the tryst became public, he lied to the press “to paint the best picture of the Senator on this. Keep in mind, I was still drinking the Kool-Aid at that point.” As the other half of the office’s leadership tandem was trying to extract a seven-figure severance payment, Lopez served as the contact point for Ethics Committee investigators and worked political backchannels to help land Hampton a lobbying job. When a Nevada bigwig was reticent to put the under-qualified Hampton on his payroll, Ensign instructed Lopez to “jack him up to high heaven.” According to the report, Lopez told investigators: “I really felt like this is wrong. I remember feeling like that was abusing the office.”
The aide would go on to serve as the intermediary between Hampton and Ensign’s office once Hampton began lobbying his former boss on behalf of aviation and energy clients. Lopez, who lost his job with a Nevada communications firm in the wake of the report, was granted immunity by a federal judge and could be a key witness against Ensign if the case sees a courtroom. Given the feds’ lax standards the first time around, it’s an open question whether that will happen.