Fight Between Turks, Armenians Ends up at Ohio Election Panel

[Louisiana1976]

WASHINGTON — A 19th-century Midwest skyscraper is the unlikely stage for an acutely modern drama involving political speech, foreign lobbying and the fraught relations between Armenia and Turkey.

On Thursday, the Ohio Elections Commission is set to rule on whether a challenger made reprehensible false statements when he claimed that a Republican incumbent had taken "blood money" from Turkish interests.

"This is not an acceptable way to campaign; you can't just run out and accuse people of taking bribes," Bruce Fein, an attorney with the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund, said Tuesday.

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"It's certainly an opportunity to delve deeper into the extent of foreign government manipulation of the American political system," said Elizabeth Chouldjian, a spokeswoman for the Armenian National Committee of America.

The hearing Thursday at the election commission's headquarters in downtown Columbus is the second in the "blood money" complaint. The complaint arises from a 2008 campaign in which Krikorian contended that Rep. Jean Schmidt, R-Ohio, had accepted $30,000 in Turkish contributions in exchange for opposing an Armenia genocide resolution.

Lawmakers whose districts include many Armenian-Americans long have supported the congressional resolution's characterization of a genocide. The resolution says that 1.5 million Armenian "men, women and children were killed" during the Ottoman Empire's final years. The empire was based in what's now the Republic of Turkey.

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