Dirty Tricks Without Illusions

"The truth is malleable," he says, sitting in his living room. "You're just crafting the message you know will win."

Raymond kept rising in the Republican ranks. In 1998, Sen. Mitch McConnell hired him to work for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. In 2000, he became deputy political director for Steve Forbes's presidential campaign.

Raymond suggested that Forbes attack his main opponent for the Republican nomination, George W. Bush, as a former drunk driver. When Forbes refused, Raymond was disgusted: "I remember thinking, you will never win, nor should you, because you don't have what it takes to go rip the guy's face off."

In 2000, Raymond founded a company called GOP Marketplace, which brokered deals between Republican political campaigns and telemarketing companies. Among Raymond's investors was Haley Barbour, his former boss at the RNC, who is now the governor of Mississippi.

Shortly before Election Day of 2002, Raymond received a call from Chuck McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican Party. McGee asked if GOP Marketplace could arrange for a barrage of phone calls that could tie up telephone lines set up by Democrats to arrange for rides to the polls in a closely contested Senate race. Raymond said he thought he could. He found a telemarketer who agreed to flood the Democrats' lines with automated calls for a fee of $2,500. Raymond called McGee and agreed to take the job for $15,600 -- a tidy profit of $13,100.

The scheme worked: On election morning, the Democrats' lines were barraged with automated calls that came from a company in Idaho. But McGee got cold feet, called Raymond and told him to stop the calls. Raymond did, and before noon the calls were finished. Still, the FBI investigated the case and Raymond and McGee pleaded guilty to a federal charge of conspiracy to make harassing phone calls.

They both agreed to testify against James Tobin, the RNC official who had told McGee that Raymond was the go-to guy for phone-jamming. In 2005, Tobin was convicted on two counts of telephone harassment and sentenced to 10 months in prison.

Ultimately, Raymond served three months, McGee served seven months, and Tobin's conviction was reversed by an appeals court.

Now, Raymond declines to defend or apologize for his career as a dirty trickster.

"I was a [bleep]," he says.

His wife, Elizabeth, is sitting across the living room, listening. She is asked: "Was he a [bleep]?"

"No comment," she says.