Brad Blog article on 8/14/09:
Claiming that Ohio's Republican U.S. House Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-2nd) is "conced[ing] that she does deny the Armenian Genocide," the campaign of her Democratic challenger David Krikorian has just issued a press release (posted in full below), stating that Schmidt has dropped four of her "false statements" complaints against him in her Ohio Election Commission (OEC) case, while petitioning the court to add a new claim in the bargain.
The news comes on the heels of last Saturday's deposition by the FBI's former Turkish-American translator Sibel Edmonds who had been subpoenaed last week to testify in the case.
The whistleblower had been previous-gagged by two different assertions of the "state secrets" privilege during the Bush Administration. She was finally able to testify on Saturday, under oath, about alleged infiltration, bribery, and blackmail by Turkish agents, of current and former members of the U.S. Congress and other high ranking officials in the Departments of State and Defense.
Schmidt had challenged Krikorian's claim, during his 2008 independent campaign against her, that she accepted "blood money" from Turkish agents in exchange for helping to block a Congressional resolution recognizing the 1915 killing of some 1.5 million ethnic Armenians as a genocide....
In today's statement, Krikorian says: "Jean and her friends at the Turkish Legal Defense Fund are on a fishing expedition ... First she brought the charges, then she realized that she could not win her case and petitioned the court to drop the charges, now she is adding a new one. Typical Jean Schmidt behavior, it's a shame she is not putting forward this kind of effort on the health care debate."
The campaign said that "the statements Schmidt claimed were false are in relation to her denial of the Armenian Genocide," adding that "In dropping the charges, Schmidt essentially conceded that she does deny the Armenian Genocide."
"Being #1 on the Turkish Lobby scoreboard has financial advantages for Jean, but what does it do for our district?" Krikorian asked in the release. He has alleged that the 2nd Congressional district in Ohio has very few, if any, ethnic Turk's among the voting population. Yet, he notes, "Jean Schmidt took more money from the Turkish Lobby during the 2008 election cycle than any other member of Congress."
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