Oklahoma senator denies he told Ensign to pay Hampton

The Oklahoma U.S. senator who counseled U.S. Sen. John Ensign to end his extramarital affair with a campaign staffer last year told reporters today that he didn’t tell the Nevada Republican to pay off the woman and her husband.

Doug Hampton, who was a top staffer in Ensign’s Senate office at the time his wife, Cindy, was Ensign’s lover, claims Coburn and others confronted Ensign and urged him to give the Hamptons millions of dollars in restitution in February 2008.

Coburn acknowledges the confrontation but denied today that he suggested a financial settlement or that he had Ensign write a contrite letter to Cindy Hampton.

“I was never present when a letter was written, never made any assessment of paying anybody anything,” Coburn told reporters outside his Washington office this morning, according to Politico. “Those are untruths. Those are absolute untruths.”

Coburn said Hampton “is in error, and he’s manipulating the situation and you are all buying it.”

Coburn, a Republican Christian conservative who lives with Ensign in a Washington house owned by a church foundation, previously said he advised Ensign to end the affair and “repair the damage he had caused” to the Ensign and Hampton families. He declined today to detail the advice he gave Ensign.

“I’m not going to go into that,” he said. “That’s privileged communications. I’m never going to talk about that with anybody ... not to a court of law, not to an Ethics Committee.”

Ensign faces Federal Election Commission and Senate Ethics Committee complaints for the circumstances of Doug and Cindy Hamptons’ departure from his employ in May 2008. Doug Hampton says his wife received a “severance” payment of more than $25,000 when the pair were forced out of the Senate and campaign offices. No such payment was reported as coming from campaign funds.

Coburn, a medical doctor and ordained deacon, suggested he could not be forced to testify about his conversations with Ensign on the matter, according to Politico. He also upbraided the media for pursuing the details of the affair, which Ensign announced in a news conference last month.

“You’ve got two families that are back together and you guys are going to help tear them apart,” Coburn said.

Contact reporter Molly Ball at mball@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2919.