Did Huckabee help his son avoid prosecution for animal cruelty?

Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | Did Huckabee help his son avoid prosecution for animal cruelty?

That's the questioned examined by an article in the latest issue of Newsweek, which reports on allegations that the former Arkansas governor's son David was involved in the hanging death of a stray dog at a Boy Scout camp in 1998. The younger Huckabee, who was 17 at the time, was fired from his job as a camp counselor over the incident but never faced a criminal investigation.

John Bailey, then the director of the Arkansas state police, tells the magazine that the governor's chief of staff and personal lawyer pressured him to write a letter denying a local prosecutor's request for help in determining whether any animal cruelty laws were broken: ...
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But as Salon reports, Huckabee is hardly the only GOP frontrunner with "puppy skeletons" in his closet: Rudy Giuliani's wife, Judith, previously worked for U.S. Surgical Corp. selling medical staplers to doctors by demonstrating the devices on live, anesthetized dogs. And in the early 1980s, Mitt Romney took his family on a 12-hour drive to vacation in Canada -- with their Irish setter in a crate strapped to the car's roof. That's a likely violation of Massachusetts animal cruelty laws. ...