The Daily Background

The LA Times reports that staunchly anti-abortion conservative Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson once lobbied on behalf of a pro-choice group:

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, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.
[…]
[Former President of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association Judith] DeSarno said that Thompson, after being hired, reported to her that he had held multiple conversations about the abortion rule with Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff and the president’s point man on the rule.

Thompson kept her updated on his progress in telephone conversations and over meals at Washington restaurants, including dinner at Galileo and lunch at the Monocle, she said. At one of the meals, she recalled, Thompson told her that Sununu had just given him tickets for a VIP tour of the White House for one of Thompson’s sons and his wife.

“It would be an odd thing for me to construct that thing out of whole cloth,” DeSarno said. “It happened, and I think it’s quite astonishing they’re denying it.”

Thompson’s past lobbying connections with Big Tobacco might not hurt his chances with Republican primary voters, but this is the type of thing that justttttt might. Naturally Thompson denies having done it, sort of. Well, he denies remembering having done it. Or something. It’s a bit murky.

It seems to me, if they could say unequivocally that it didn’t happen, then they would say unequivocally that it didn’t happen. Instead, his we-aren’t-a-campaign-yet campaign is pushing back sort of lopsidedly saying that he has no recollection of it, and therefore it couldn’t have happened. We’ll see how this story develops… I’m sure we’ll see some more reporters digging into it and Thompson will get asked about it before much longer. A pretty clear picture is now developing that Thompson used to be pro-choice at least to some extent, as evidenced by surveys he took while running for office in the 1990s.

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