GOP Aide’s Trial on Ballot-Fraud Charges Begins

SANTA ANA — Twenty months after Republican activists helped field a Democratic spoiler in a critical recall election, congressional aide Rhonda Carmony went on trial Monday for her alleged role in promoting the scheme to ensure Curt Pringle of Garden Grove would become speaker of the state Assembly.

In opening statements before a jury in Superior Court here, Carmony’s attorney, Creighton Laz, said the evidence would show that it was Pringle’s staff--and the state’s most powerful conservative political action committee--that were actually to blame for the plan to splinter the Democratic vote.

“Figure out who was the captain that day and who was the crew,” Laz urged the jurors in his 55-minute opening statement. “It wasn’t Rhonda Carmony. Rhonda Carmony didn’t organize it. . . . She had no responsibility for it,” he said.

Laz said Carmony, then the campaign manager for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) and now his fiancee, did acknowledge that she asked one person to sign a petition for the decoy candidate, Laurie Campbell.

But he said all of the blame for the overall scheme belongs to three of Pringle’s aides and a Rohrabacher campaign worker. Three of those pleaded guilty last year to fraudulently gathering signatures for Campbell. He declined to say whether Carmony will take the stand and place blame in her own words.

The case has attracted statewide attention, and testimony is expected to touch on how some of California’s most powerful Republicans became involved in the bid to oust Assemblywoman Doris Allen of Cypress, the maverick Republican who temporarily denied Pringle the speakership by getting herself elected in 1995 on the strength of her vote and those of the Assembly’s Democrats.

Carmony, 27, who appeared to be nervous as she watched the opening day’s proceedings, is charged with three felonies: falsely making a nominating petition, falsely filing a nominating petition and conspiring to falsely file a nominating petition.

Prosecutors allege that she persuaded other Republican activists to gather voters’ signatures on Campbell’s nominating petitions, knowing that the candidate would be called upon to swear that she collected the signatures herself. While it is not against the law to recruit a decoy candidate, it is illegal to falsify nominating petitions or to file falsified ones.

Assistant Dist. Atty. Brent Romney told the jury that Carmony wanted to help Rohrabacher protege Scott Baugh replace Allen, but he was running in a field crowded with other Republicans against a lone Democrat.

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The driving force behind the spoiler candidacy, Romney said, was the powerful California Independent Business PAC, which, along with other wealthy Republicans around the state, had bankrolled the recall against Allen to the tune of $500,000 and wanted to make sure that the money wasn’t wasted.

“When the CIBPAC speaks, everybody listens. . . . CIBPAC was very concerned a Democrat could win,” Romney told the jury.

Besides being pressured by the PAC, Carmony also wanted to boost Rohrabacher’s handpicked candidate, Baugh, Romney said.

Carmony was worried that without CIBPAC’s hefty contributions, Baugh, a political newcomer, would be unable to compete with better-known and better-financed Republicans, Romney said.

The Carmony defense embraced the prosecution’s arguments that CIBPAC was behind the recall, but took issue with the alleged involvement of Carmony, who was joined in court for part of the day by about 10 family members and friends, including her twin sister, her mother and Rohrabacher.

Laz said Rohrabacher approved of the idea of recruiting a Republican woman to splinter the female vote and thus hurt the chances of Baugh’s chief competitors--Democrat Linda Moulton Patterson and Republican Haydee V. Tillotson--but warned Carmony not to get involved with recruiting a Democrat.

Carmony said: “No, no, no,” when asked to do that by Pringle aide Jeff Flint and campaign consultant Dave Gilliard, said Laz, who added that Rohrabacher told her, “Yes, you can help get a Republican woman on the ballot as long as you are not involved with any Democrat.”

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Laz conceded that Carmony joined Campbell and Pringle aide Jeff Gibson in a car outside the registrar of voters’ office as Campbell signed the nominating petitions just minutes before the filing deadline on Sept. 21, 1995. He also said she filled in several addresses where ditto marks had been. That is not illegal, he said, adding that it was Gibson, not Carmony, who was “telling Campbell what to do.”

Prosecutors argued otherwise, insisting that Carmony instructed Richard Martin, another GOP aide who worked for Rohrabacher, to circulate Campbell petitions as the deadline approached.

Romney ridiculed the idea that Rohrabacher had warned Carmony away from the spoiler scheme. “I do not believe for one minute that Congressman Rohrabacher told Miss Carmony not to get involved,” he said.