Here is how the print edition* of today’s Wall Street Journal explains Senator Tim Scott’s decision to vote against the nomination of Thomas Farr to a federal district judgeship:
Mr. Farr served as a legal adviser to the late Republican Sen. Jesse Helms in his 1990 re-election campaign, which was sued by the Justice Department for mailing postcards allegedly aimed at intimidating black voters. The case was ultimately settled.
In written answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Farr said he wasn’t aware of the mailing until after the cards were sent.
In announcing his opposition, Mr. Scott cited a 1991 Justice Department memo that called into question whether Mr. Farr told the truth about his involvement with the postcards.
During the confirmation process, he told senators he had nothing to do with them. The memo suggests he was the “primary coordinator” of those efforts, according to a congressional aide who had seen it.
If this is Senator Scott’s actual thinking, it reflects an elementary confusion between the 1984 Helms campaign and the 1990 Helms campaign. The 1991 DOJ memo states in a footnote (page 12, note 7) that “Farr was the primary coordinator of the 1984 ‘ballot security’ program.” This is entirely consistent with Farr’s testimony. In a letter to Senator Booker last December (discussed more fully in this post of mine), Farr stated that he “managed a ballot security program” in the 1984 campaign—and that “[t]here were no complaints about the legality of the 1984 mailings.”
In short, contrary to WSJ’s account of Scott’s thinking, there is nothing in the 1991 DOJ memo that “call[s] into question” Farr’s testimony that he had no involvement with the postcards that the 1990 campaign sent out.
* The online version of the article originally contained a similar passage, but after I pointed out the confusion, the reporters eliminated the error, even as they, in the version I now see, falsely credit Scott’s claim that the 1991 memo “shed additional light” on Farr’s work. As I explain here, there is nothing in the 1991 memo that wasn’t known a year ago, and that memo confirms Farr’s testimony.