How David Vitter Got Nabbed in Madam Scandal

Original Link: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/sleuth/2007/07/how_david_vitter_got_nabbed_in.html

By Mary Ann Akers

In a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt gloated over taking credit for catching socially conservative Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on the phone list of the D.C. Madam. But while he hinted that he has the goods on other members of Congress, he doesn't - at least not yet.

As for Vitter, Dan Moldea, the gumshoe Washington-based reporter who moonlights as an investigator for Flynt, says his birthday was the magic date that led him to ensnare the Louisiana senator in the D.C. Madam scandal.

Moldea also had a different set of phone records than Brian Ross of ABC News, the reporter who had the exclusive market on the client list of Deborah Jeane Palfrey but who turned up very little in the way of scoop, in fact - a real dud as sex scandals go.

Moldea is working for Flynt -- as he did in 1998 when Flynt successfully nailed Republicans leading the impeachment brigade against President Bill Clinton -- to expose "hypocrites" on Palfrey's client list. The gumshoe decided to take the phone records from Nov. 2000 to Jan. 2001 - records Ross did not have - because Moldea thought he'd try to snag some giddy new Bush administration officials fresh in town and ready to celebrate their newfound power.

When he got home with a CD rom of the phone records given to him by Palfrey's attorney and started reverse checking all the thousands of numbers, he quickly grew weary and cross-eyed. It was a daunting task and it was getting late and still, no big names had surfaced.

"I said to myself, 'When am I going to stop?' I said, 'OK, I'll stop on my birthday.'"

His birthday, February 27, happens to be the fateful date on which Vitter was shown to have made a call from his home number in Washington to Palfrey's escort service, Pamela Martin and Associates.

Moldea tells us that he put the number he found on the Feb. 27 record through a reverse-search engine he was using, and the name popped up as "David Vitter." He ran the name twice more through two other search engines and got the same result.

He sent an email to Flynt and telephoned him to say "I got one." Flynt's first question was, "Is he a hypocrite?" Moldea says he replied, "Just wait 'til you see this guy."

Flynt, in a news conference from his office in Beverly Hills, said Vitter rose to his threshold of hypocrisy because he had campaigned on the sanctity of marriage and co-sponsored the federal marriage amendment to keep same-sex marriage illegal.

"He was to the right of Attila the Hun, every step of the way," Flynt said, adding, "I don't want a man like that legislating for me, especially in the areas of morality."

Flynt, the king of smut, also audaciously claimed, "You have people that don't have an ounce of the character that I have who are running our government."

And while he referenced a $106,000 ad he took out in the Washington Post last month and repeated the ad's claim that "we have high-ranking Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and the House" - he really doesn't "have" them, at least not yet, according to Moldea, who's doing all the investigative leg work for Flynt.

"Do I have them, do I have evidence against them? No," Moldea told the Sleuth. "Do I have leads that I'm pursuing? Yes."