The Daily Background

Here’s a statement issued by the New Hampshire Democratic Party today:

The headquarters of the New Hampshire Democratic Party in Concord were burglarized on the weekend of February 24 and 25, 2007. NHDP staff informed the Concord Police Department of the break-in first thing Monday morning and a complete and on-going investigation is currently underway. We want to assure everyone that it appears personal financial information has been protected.
We would like to thank the Concord Police Department for its prompt and professional response. If anyone has any information they think may be helpful to the investigation please call the Concord police at (603) 225-8600.

Thank you for your continued support.

Sincerely,
The NHDP Staff

And here’s the Associated Press, a short time ago from my home state, New Hampshire:

Office workers reported the break-in to police on Monday. Concord Police Sgt. Mike McGuire said some items were taken, but he declined to be more specific. The assessment was the same from Kathy Sullivan, the chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.

“Some things were taken, but I don’t really want to get into that right now,” Sullivan said on Tuesday.

There was no indication that any personal financial information was taken, said party spokeswoman Kathleen Strand.

“We want to assure our donors that their personal financial information, as far as we can tell, has been protected, and we hope to find out who did this soon,” she said.

Nobody is saying whether it looks politically motivated or not, but it seems highly improbable that the New Hampshire Democratic Party would just happen to be burglarized (Concord is hardly a high-crime place, like the rest of New Hampshire). Just to provide a little context, the New Hampshire Republican Party is really, really scummy, and they’ve not hesitated to break federal laws for political purposes in the past.

Case in point: the 2002 Senatorial election, when Republican operatives illegally hired telemarketers to flood Democratic GOTV (Get Out The Vote) call centers and those of firefighters unions to stifle voter turnout. It worked, and Republican Senator John Sununu was elected with 51% of the vote in a close election. (Sununu is up for re-election in 2008.) And as a result, four GOP operatives did prison time, including the Northeast regional field director for all NRSC operations.

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