Whether Ensign has paid the ultimate price remains to be seen

If you believe the Senate Ethics Committee, John Ensign is a conniving liar. If you believe Ensign's attorneys, John Ensign makes stupid mistakes.

I believe both sides.

Ensign has already been tagged in news accounts as "the disgraced senator from Nevada" and based on the in-depth Senate ethics investigation, the Republican rightfully earned that description.

The details of the ethics panel's investigation have been well-covered by the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The deception. The bullying. The self-preservation.

But my interest was piqued by the 12-page missive Ensign's attorneys made public Wednesday, the same day the committee's damning report was released.

That letter noted that Ensign "has already paid the ultimate price for his conduct that the Committee and the institution of the Senate could have imposed, the loss of his seat in the United States Senate."

Doug and Cindy Hampton most likely disagree about who paid the ultimate price. They're the ones who lost their jobs because of Ensign's eight-month affair with Cindy, the best friend of Ensign's wife, Darlene.

The Ensign marriage is still intact. Not so the Hampton marriage.

Ensign remains financially secure. Not so the Hamptons.

Doug Hampton was indicted for breaking the Senate's lobbying laws. The Justice Department gave Ensign a pass. So did the Federal Election Commission.

The committee provided the FEC with an excuse for not filing charges, saying the FEC didn't have as much information available to them as the ethics panel did about the $96,000 payoff to the Hampton family from Ensign's parents.

Worthy of note: In the letter to the FEC, the ethics chairman said the materials showed John Ensign "and others" violated campaign finance laws and made possible false statements to the FEC and the ethics commission. Well, the "others" would be Mike and Sharon Ensign, who said one thing in their affidavits and another when they were interviewed.

In his quest to keep the affair secret, John Ensign seems to have dragged his privacy-loving parents down into the muck, exposing them to federal charges.

The ethics investigators provided no excuse for the Justice Department's failure to indict Ensign, but they asked Attorney General Eric Holder to reconsider filing charges against "Ensign and others" for violating federal law, including making false statements to the FEC.

The committee said its investigation showed "substantial credible evidence" that Ensign aided and abetted Doug Hampton, and conspired with him to violate the one-year ban on his lobbying the senator.

Ensign's attorneys, Abbe Lowell and Robert Walker, offered complex legal arguments about why Ensign didn't aid or conspire with Hampton.

Plus, they used the "he's dumb" defense. Because paying the Hamptons a severance from the parents was such an obvious violation of campaign laws, the attorneys argued Ensign didn't know the legal meaning of the word "severance" all those times he used it when talking about paying the Hamptons.

The word isn't that complex, and if Ensign was smart enough to be a U.S. senator for 10 years, he's smart enough to know what severance means.

The second "I'm stupid" defense involved destruction of documents. When the ethics committee launched its probe, it wrote him and told him not to destroy documents.

Ensign, according to his attorneys, "may have made a mistake in failing to realize that his computer in his home was covered by the Committee's requests in this matter." They said the documents that were destroyed were "stupid mistakes on his part."

Destroying documents seems like just one more instance where Ensign would do what he could to protect himself. Not his children. Not his parents. Not the wife who stood by her man.

All this was about protecting John Ensign.

And for that, as one older friend said to me, "he should be hung by his dingdong."

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison.