LAT: Despite Denials, Candidate Aided Own Dirty Trick

Ever since The Los Angeles Times reported that Tan Nguyen, the Republican challenger in California’s 47th District, was under investigation for attempted voter suppression, he’s been doing what he could to salvage his already failing challenge. And it just gets worse.

The feds are probing Nguyen’s campaign for sending a letter to approximately 15,000 Latino voters sometime in the last two weeks warning that “if… you are an immigrant, voting in a federal election is a crime that could result in jail time.” The letter was made to appear as if it came from a local immigration reform group and was signed by an apparently fictional name.

Today, the Times reports that, despite his categorial denials, Nguyen was personally involved in the mailing.

At first, Nguyen denied knowing anything about the letter. He fired the staffer he said was responsible for it and announced that “I will do whatever I can do to encourage all citizens in this district to vote.”

But he reconsidered. His staffer hadn’t done anything wrong after all, he decided. So he un-fired her and asked her to come back onboard.

The reason he changed his mind, Nguyen’s lawyer explained, was that the letter hadn’t actually sought to suppress the votes of legal immigrants. All this hubbub, his lawyer reasoned, was due to the inaccurate translation of a key word in the letter:

Former U.S. Atty. William Braniff, a lawyer for Nguyen’s campaign, said Sunday that the controversy was caused by the news media and others who inferred that the word emigrado, or immigrant, included U.S. citizens. In fact, Braniff said, emigrado in the letter merely referred to U.S. immigrants who have legal status but not citizenship — and thus do not have the right to vote.

That ruse might have worked, if Los Angeles didn’t have several million fluent Spanish speakers. The Times blew their story:

The word “means anyone who comes from elsewhere,” said Octavio Pescador, a visiting social science professor at UCLA who is an expert on Latino culture. “It doesn’t mean that a person only possesses legal residency. It has no legal connotation.”

To make matters worse for Nguyen, the Times also reports that he personally bought the list of voter names — a list narrowly tailored to include only registered Democrats in his district with Spanish surnames who were born outside the United States. The head of the local Republican party even says that Nguyen even called the mail house that produced the piece and asked that it be expedited.

Nguyen is running against Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), who’s fluent in Spanish. Her hold on the seat is considered safe.

Update: We’ve added a copy of the letter with accompanying translation to our document collection.