Bush, McCain to sue over attack ads

President Bush yesterday joined forces with Sen. John McCain, Arizona Republican, to mount legal and legislative challenges to third-party attack ads, including those that question Sen. John Kerry’s Vietnam record.

The move came as new polls by Gallup, the Los Angeles Times and Rasmussen showed Mr. Bush edging ahead of the Massachusetts Democrat in advance of next week’s Republican National Convention. The first two polls attributed the shift to a series of anti-Kerry ads by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

But the president wants to stop the ads, along with other spots by third-party groups, known as 527s because of their tax designation. Yesterday, he telephoned Mr. McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, from Air Force One and enlisted him in a planned lawsuit to force the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to quash the ads.

“Since the FEC failed to act, we would now be asking the courts to force the FEC to act to shut down all this activity,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. “There would be a lawsuit.”

“The president said if the court action doesn’t work, then he would be willing to pursue legislative action and work with Senator McCain on that,” Mr. McClellan said.

Mr. McCain issued a statement saying: “I look forward to working with the president, both in the courts and through legislation, to force the Federal Election Commission to regulate 527s.”

Mr. Kerry responded by suspending ads that feature Mr. McCain criticizing Mr. Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries, when the two were rivals. Mr. McCain had been calling on Mr. Kerry to drop the ads for days.

“It’s long past time that George Bush also take John McCain’s advice and do the right thing by putting an end to the smears and lies attacking John Kerry’s military service,” said Kerry spokesman David Wade.

Both Mr. McCain and the Bush campaign already had filed complaints with the FEC in an effort to curb political advertising by 527s, which sprung up through a loophole in the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which Mr. Bush signed in 2002.

Failure by the FEC to act on such complaints within 120 days entitles the complainants to sue the commission.

“They did not act,” Mr. McClellan told reporters on Air Force One. “They failed to pursue that action.”

But FEC spokesman Ian Stirton cautioned that such comments might be premature.

“They don’t know that,” he said. “They don’t know what we’ve done on the complaints.”

He explained that preliminary action on the complaints is confidential, adding that final action rarely occurs within the 120 days because of procedural and regulatory hurdles.

Swift Boat Veterans spokesman Mike Russell said the group has no intention of halting their ads, including a third one released yesterday.

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