Josh Marshall's new website had an interesting piece earlier this week that pointed out how that maverick reformer John McCain had recently hired a rather dirty Republican operative. And as luck would have it, Senator McCain swung into Seattle today to promote the futile campaign of the Republican candidate for the Washington State senate race. Somewhere in between fundraisers the campaign finance reformer found time to stop by and help a local right-wing radio host with a different effort: the campaign to sell McCain to the local Republican base.

One clever caller decided to take advantage of McCain's appearance to try and get some "straight talk" on the senator's recent hire:

CALLER: Thanks, I had a question for the senator. For a reformer, I'm kind of curious why he would hire a guy like Terry Nelson as a senior advisor.

Here's a guy who was actually in the indictment of Delay on his money laundering charges. When he was at the RNC, he agreed to take the corporate contributions from Delay's PAC and then recycle them back into the Republican congressional races.

And he was also, this guy Nelson was also the supervisor for James Tobin, who was the guy convicted last year for helping jam the Democratic get-out-the-vote phone lines in New England a couple years ago.

So I'm curious why would you hire someone with such a shady background?

MCCAIN: None of those charges are true.

CALLER: Do you believe what was actually written in the indictment from Texas?

MCCAIN: No.

CARLSON: All right.

[nervous laughter]

MCCAIN: I will check it out. But I've never heard of such a thing. I know that he was a grassroots organizer for President Bush year 2000 and 2004, and had a very important job in the Bush campaign as late as 2004, but the other charges I will go and look and see if any of them are true, but I've never heard of them before.

Audio

Isn't it amazing how a few blogs can know more about McCain's senior advisor than McCain himself? I'll leave a few references that should speed up the good senator's "research", courtesy of TPM Media:

• The Delay indictment that lays out Nelson's role in money laundering is available here
• The witness list that shows Nelson's connection to the phone jamming scam is available here