Concord – An accused Republican phone-jamming conspirator may tell a court he believed his actions were authorized by the national Republican Party or the White House, his attorney said yesterday.

Jeffrey Levin, the federal public defender for Shaun Hansen of Spokane, Wash., says in papers filed in U.S. District Court that Hansen directed his former telemarketing firm workers to jam the phone lines of Democratic and firefighters union offices with hang-up calls on Election Day, 2002, because he had been assured by political operatives and an attorney it was legal.

Hansen also “reasonably assumed” the political consulting firm that hired him “was a governmental entity, or at least that the activities that his business was being ask to perform had been approved in advance by the national Republican Party,” Levin wrote.

Hansen, who headed the Idaho telemarketing firm Mylo Enterprises, had been paid $2,500 to place the hang-up calls by GOP Marketplace, a Virginia consulting firm. Its president, Allen Raymond, had been paid $15,600 to arrange the phone jam by Charles McGee, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee at the time.

McGee later admitted masterminding the operation, which Democrats say may have influenced a U.S. Senate contest won by Republican John Sununu over Democrat Jeanne Shaheen.

McGee and Raymond have admitted their roles in the scheme and have served time in prison. Former Republican National Committee official James Tobin has been convicted of conspiracy to violate a federal telephone harassment law after a jury found he had put McGee in touch with Raymond to carry out the operation. Tobin is appealing.

Hansen, the fourth man indicted in the scheme, has been charged with conspiracy to commit and aiding the commission of telephone harassment. His trial is scheduled for Oct. 3.

Levin, Hansen’s court-appointed attorney, this week filed a “notice of affirmative defenses,” which, he told the New Hampshire Union Leader, “is done to keep your options open in terms of what defenses you can argue at trial.”

“We don’t know what our defense will be at trial,” Levin said, “but generally speaking, Mr. Hansen’s story has been the same from the outset. He was asked to do this thing by these political operatives, and these people who are involved in politics told him it was legal. Someone got on the telephone who said he was an attorney and said that this is all legal, so don’t worry about it.”

Levin said he will not argue — and Hansen will not testify — that Hansen knew of any direct White House involvement. And Levin’s filing, clarifies, “It is not known . . . what involvement, if any, anyone at the White House may have had concerning the alleged scheme.”

But Levin cited a host of recent media reports that Tobin made many calls to the White House political affairs office in the weeks — and hours — leading up to the election morning operation. The reports were based on telephone records filed as part of Tobin’s trial.

“These reports indicated that there may have been — and I say again, may have been, because we don’t have an indication there necessarily was — links between some of these political operatives and the White House,” Levin said.

“To the extent that this was approved and vetted at that level, it would be possible for us to raise that particular defense,” he said.

His filing says that such a defense “permits an acquittal when the defendant was reasonably mistaken in believing his criminal activity was authorized by the government.”

Levin said an answer could lie in a separate phone-jam civil suit brought by the state Democratic Party against the state Republican Party. A judge on July 13 will hear the Democrats’ request to take pre-trial depositions from several high-ranking Republican officials, including former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, former White House political affairs staffer Alicia Davis, consultant and former RNC official Terry Nelson and consultant and former National Republican Senatorial Committee official Chris Lacivita.

Based on that proceeding, Levin said, “Who knows what evidence will be available to us at the time of Shaun Hansen’s trial?”

RNC Robert Kelner told The Associated Press that Hansen’s defense seems “completely fanciful.” But a spokesman for the Senate Majority Project, a Democratic group researching the scandal, charged, “Even the phone-jammers themselves now argue they believed they were carrying out the scheme with the full seal of approval from the White House and the RNC.”