FIGHT BETWEEN TURKS, ARMENIANS LANDS AT OHIO ELECTIONS PANEL
By Michael Doyle
MiamiHerald.com
McClatchy Newspapers
s/AP/story/1258393.html
Tuesday, 09.29.09
WASHINGTON — A 19th-century Midwest skyscraper is the unlikely
stage for an acutely modern drama involving political speech, foreign
lobbying and the fraught relations between Armenia and Turkey.
On Thursday, the Ohio Elections Commission is set to rule on whether
a challenger made reprehensible false statements when he claimed that
a Republican incumbent had taken "blood money" from Turkish interests.
"This is not an acceptable way to campaign; you can’t just run out
and accuse people of taking bribes," Bruce Fein, an attorney with
the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, said Tuesday.
With its colorful cast of characters and superheated rhetoric, the
case known as Schmidt v. Krikorian is far more theatrical than the
conventional political dispute.
Participants include Fein’s opposite number, Armenian-American lawyer
Mark Geragos, whose past clients have ranged from former California
Rep. Gary Condit to convicted wife murderer Scott Peterson. Fein,
a former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration,
and Geragos have been regular guests on various cable-television shows.
Some allegations, too, seem torn from the tabloids, including an
unproven but incendiary claim that female foreign agents have been
used to sexually entrap members of Congress.
"These Turkish organizations and operatives, if they can’t do it
by money, they do it by blackmail, so they collect information on
sexual lives and other information like that," Sibel Edmonds, who
served several months as a part-time contract translator for the FBI,
declared in an Aug. 8 deposition.
Turkish Embassy officials couldn’t be reached for comment Tuesday, but
Fein dismissed Edmonds’ claims as a "phantasmagoria" and an "utterly
ridiculous concoction." Edmonds didn’t play any role in challenger
David Krikorian’s campaign, and Fein contends that Edmonds was summoned
as a witness in order to create a with "salacious" allegations.
The one certainty in the case is that the seven-member Ohio Elections
Commission won’t end the debate no matter how it rules Thursday.
"It’s certainly an opportunity to delve deeper into the extent of
foreign government manipulation of the American political system,"
said Elizabeth Chouldjian, a spokeswoman for the Armenian National
Committee of America.
The hearing Thursday at the election commission’s headquarters in
downtown Columbus is the second in the "blood money" complaint. The
complaint arises from a 2008 campaign in which Krikorian contended
that Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, had accepted $30,000 in Turkish
contributions in exchange for opposing an Armenia genocide resolution.
Lawmakers whose districts include many Armenian-Americans long
have supported the congressional resolution’s characterization of
a genocide. The resolution says that 1.5 million Armenian "men,
women and children were killed" during the Ottoman Empire’s final
years. The empire was based in what’s now the Republic of Turkey.
Other lawmakers, as well as the Pentagon and the State Department,
oppose the genocide resolution as diplomatically disastrous because
of how it would alienate Turkey, a key NATO ally.
Some stress uncertainty about what happened in the collapsing Ottoman
Empire from 1915 to 1923.
"I’m not a student of history, and I’m still trying to figure it all
out," Schmidt repeated several times during an Aug. 24 deposition,
adding that, "I wasn’t there."
Krikorian, who ran as an independent last year but has since identified
himself as a Democrat, claimed that Schmidt’s opposition to the
Armenian genocide resolution was tied to her campaign contributions.
"I ask the people of Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District to ask
themselves if our representative should be taking money from a foreign
government," Krikorian declared in one campaign flier.
The contributions alluded to included money that Schmidt raised in
a February 2008 event at a restaurant called Cafe Istanbul, where
participants inc h Coalition of America President Lincoln McCurdy.
"We have a member of Congress from Ohio who is willing to stand up
to the Armenian lobby, and it is important for the Turkish community
to support her," a fundraising e-mail from the Turkish Coalition of
America said.
Schmidt, though, said that she didn’t ask people why they contributed
to her campaigns, declaring her "hope that it’s because they believe
I’m a great American."
Contributions to campaigns by foreign governments are illegal. McCurdy
said in his deposition that his organizations relied on U.S. citizens
and legal residents for campaign contributions.
If the commission decides that Krikorian lied or spoke with
"reckless disregard" for the truth or falsity of his statements,
commissioners could reprimand him or forward the case for possible
criminal prosecution under an Ohio "false statement" law.