US Senator's wife pleads to e-mail dirty tricks
Former US Senator Rod Grams' (Republican, Minnesota) wife, Christine Gunhus,
has pleaded no contest to charges of sending pseudonymous e-mail nastygrams
maligning her husband's Democratic rival, Mike Ciresi, in flagrant violation of
Minnesota election regulations, Washington correspondent Declan McCullagh
reports via his Cluebot Web site.
Ciresi lost the primary, but Grams lost the general election and failed to regain his
Senate seat.
The technologically semi-literate Gunhus apparently believed that sending her
messages as 'Katie Stevens' from a Hotmail account (kylomb@hotmail.com) would
cover her tracks. How surprised she must have been to learn that prosecutors had
not the slightest trouble tracing the originating IP back to a machine at her
residence, and verifying that the account's chief user dialed in from a phone also
located there.
Gunhus' electronic trail of breadcrumbs extended even further, just in case the
police were asleep at the switch. "The e-mail attacks included Microsoft Word
attachments, which a Ciresi aide investigated. The aide found that Word listed the
document authors as Grams staffers including -- you guessed it -- Christine
Gunhus," McCullagh says.
The charge to which Gunhus has pleaded carries a possible 90-day jail sentence
and a fine of $210 to $700, but prosecutors have agreed not to seek jail time in the
case.
