Legal fees fought false rumor of affair, says Republican

Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) said Wednesday that $20,000 in legal fees revealed in his latest campaign finance reports went toward fighting a false story in a recent book, which echoed a report that he had an affair with a House colleague’s wife.

The settlement is part of an emerging 13-year saga in which Shadegg has tried repeatedly to quash suggestions that he had an affair with the wife of former Rep. Jon Christensen (R-Neb.) in the mid-1990s.

Shadegg provided documents from a pending settlement that he said is a done deal, but hadn’t been signed by the other party as of Wednesday evening.

{mosads}The book at issue, titled “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” was written by Republican operative Stephen Marks and published by Sourcebooks, Inc., earlier this year.

Shadegg said Marks has acknowledged fault in publishing the rumor – a contention backed up by the documentation.

Reached by phone, Marks confirmed to The Hill that a settlement had been reached but declined to discuss the details of the case.

Shadegg said a story was making its way around Capitol Hill in the 1990s about Christensen catching his wife in the act of having an affair. Shadegg said his name was wrongly substituted for the person Christensen actually caught.

“It was absolutely false – never happened. At least it never happened involving me,” Shadegg said.

Contained in the settlement Shadegg provided are affidavits from Christensen and another congressman involved in the rumor, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), stating that the rumor is false.

{mospagebreak}Shadegg also furnished documents from two past settlements with authors and publishers who, documents show, admitted publishing the false rumor.

Al Regnery, who was president and publisher of Regnery Publishing when the first case was settled in the 1990s, confirmed the settlement with Shadegg over the book “Below the Beltway,” by John Jackley.

“I know that John Shadegg went away satisfied, and we admitted that we were wrong,” Regnery said. “How it got into the book, I don’t know.”

{mosads}The previous two settlements never made their way into the public sphere, and Shadegg said the other side agreed to pay his legal fees in both cases.

In the latest case, though, Shadegg’s Federal Election Commission (FEC) reports showed that he has paid the law firm Sidley Austin nearly $20,000 in legal fees from his campaign committee since July.

When it was suggested that the fees might have had something to do with the case against indicted Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.), Shadegg went public.

Phone calls between Renzi and Shadegg were recorded as a part of the government’s investigation into Renzi, who is not running for reelection. Shadegg admitted earlier this year that he received a Department of Justice notice that his call to Renzi was caught on a wiretap.

Shadegg spokeswoman Abby Winter said Monday that Shadegg “has never, ever spoken with counsel, retained a lawyer, talked to a lawyer with anything having to do with the Renzi case” and that he “has absolutely no need to.”

Shadegg faces a difficult reelection race in two weeks against Democrat Bob Lord, and national Democrats are spending heavily to go after the seat.

The congressman announced earlier this year that he would retire from Congress, but changed his mind and decided to seek reelection. He said the persistent rumor had nothing to do with his initial decision to retire.

Shadegg admitted that the latest settlement likely wouldn’t have become public if he hadn’t paid for the legal fees through his campaign fund. But he said that he couldn’t afford them without using his campaign committee.

He said he is paying the legal fees because the matter dragged on for too long and that he needed to get it resolved.

“Because it was a matter that pertained to my reputation, the fees were paid out of campaign funds,” Shadegg said. Of the other party paying for his legal fees, he said, “They haven’t agreed to that yet, and I don’t think they are going to agree to that now.”
 
He added that the rumor is “going to crop up in the next two weeks, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

The documentation in the second settlement, with author Bill Crawford, Renaissance Media and St. Martin’s Press, showed Crawford paying $17,000 of Shadegg’s legal fees and Renaissance paying a further $15,500 of the lawmaker’s legal fees.

Neither Crawford, whose book was titled “Republicans Do the Dumbest Things,” nor the two companies in this case could be reached Wednesday evening.

According to the New York Daily News website, the rumor was reported in a gossip column on Nov. 28, 1995.

The paper cited an unnamed congressman stating that Christensen and Hayworth confronted Shadegg just off the House floor about the affair and threatened to “gerrymander the districts of his face.”

Shadegg also clashed with bloggers earlier this year when they cited the rumor in Jackley’s book.