Bush OUI in Maine in 1976
Lawyer who disclosed Bush’s OUI get harassed:
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| In short, it hasn’t been pretty. First came the death threats from Bush zealots convinced that [Tom] Connolly, Maine’s 1998 Democratic candidate for governor and a delegate to the 2000 Democratic National Convention, was the hit man tapped by the Al Gore campaign to blindside Bush with a last-minute smear as Election Day neared. To this day, Connolly insists he acted at no one else’s behest. . . Twice in the days following the election, while the recount in Florida dragged on, Connolly was physically assaulted. Once, he said, a man got out of a pickup truck on Congress Street, knocked him to the ground, got back in the pickup and drove away. Then, one evening in a supermarket, another man rammed Connolly from behind with a shopping cart and whacked him on the back of the head. "I’m lying there on top of the Pampers wondering, ‘What is this? What’s going on here?’ " Connolly recalled. "And then the guy just takes his cart and hurries away." Then came the property damage. “One day, someone smashed the back window of my car,” Connolly said. Another day, a pickup drove onto the front lawn of his home in Scarborough and dumped a load of foam packing peanuts all over the place. “You think it’s funny now,” Connolly said, wagging his finger. "But believe me, it wasn’t funny then. Those things were blowing all over the lawn for a year!" Still another day, Connolly looked out his window to see a truckload of raw garbage strewn across the yard. He spent hours combing through it, looking for a name or address. “Nothing,” he muttered. It gets worse. As Bush prepared, at long last, for Inauguration Day, Connolly began getting nasty notices from motor vehicle bureaus in three states: New Jersey, Georgia and Louisiana. Each informed him that his license to drive had been suspended in that state because he had failed to show proof of insurance following an alleged accident there. “In New Jersey, the report had me hitting Caroline Kennedy,” Connolly said. "In Georgia, they had me hitting Amy Carter . . . which was good, because it made it a little easier to get it all cleared up." Finally, there’s the mail. In what began as a trickle and eventually turned torrential, Connolly received daily bundles of magazines and newspapers to which he had never subscribed. His first reaction, and a naive one at that, was that they were “comps” sent by countless news organizations to whom he’d granted interviews. “But then they kept coming,” he said. “It got to the point where we were receiving about 300 a day. My favorite was Southern Living.” |