Pfotenhauer, N
connected koch to iwf
scotus intercept
A 2016article by Joan Walsh in The Nation describes how IWF and IWV have come to take on a platform increasingly aligned with the Koch brothers. Walsh traces this shift to 2001, whenNancy Pfotenhauer, the former top lobbyist for Koch Industries, became the president of IWF. In 2003, Pfotenhauer also became president ofAmericans for Prosperity, a right-wing political advocacy group founded by the Koch brothers. While Pfotenhauer has since left IWF, the ties remain: Sixteen of the current staff and board members of IWF and IWV have worked for organizations that have received Koch funding, according to an analysis provided to The Intercept by True North Research.
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Now, IWF and IWV have turned their attention to pushing for the rapid confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, including staging an “I’m With Her” rally outside of the Supreme Court on October 17, at the same time as a Women’s March. They have been quick to place op-eds in support of Barrett for the Washington Examiner, the Washington Times, and the National Review. On Fox News,where IWF and IWV are regular commentators, Kelsey Bolar, a senior policy analyst at IWF,criticized the Women’s March for “advocating against women, protesting a highly qualified female nominee to the Supreme Court” — part of a broader strategy of casting criticism of Barrett as anti-woman. IWF and IWV did not return a request for comment.
dk $:
PR: Philip one P ellender 2 l koch ind PR plays rough → kochfacts www ad hom attacks on reporters inc mayer (lobby firm ex congr JC Watts); Michael Goldfarb gop pol op
Vigilant resources howard Safir nyc police comm under giuliani (adam son); led by nancy pfotenhauer; jon strong at dailer caller plagiarism; algor to find similar phrases? Found no dirt on life so #2. Tmed to ~ NYer natl mag award. Ed Crane made fun of MBM → shares, co fdr Cato, later forced out, nancy p and Kevin gentry before added to bd; wanted intel ammo for AFP not academic.
bd of vis bs
Nancy Mitchell Pfotenhauer
Nancy Pfotenhauer currently is the president of MediaSpeak Strategies,a communications firm. Prior to launching her company, Ms. Pfotenhauer served as a Senior Policy Advisor and National Spokesperson with the McCain for President campaign, appearing almost daily on cable networks.She is the former President and C.E.O. of the Independent Women's Forum (IWF), serving in that position from 2000-05. She was Vice Chairman of IWF's Board of Directors from 2005-07. Ms. Pfotenhauer joined IWF after leavingKoch Industries, the largest privately held company in the country with more than $80 billion in assets, where she was Director of the Washington, D.C. office.
A veteran television and radio commentator, Ms. Pfotenhauer has an uncanny ability to reduce difficult public policy issues to lively, easily understood and memorable subjects of discourse for television, cable and radio audiences. As a daily morning talk show host for NET (carried on cable and television networks nationwide), she made the case for free market policy solutions to problems facing the country. Her television and cable appearances include segments on ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, FOX and PBS. In 2004, Washingtonian magazine named her one of the most important conservative leaders in the nation's capitol. In 1994, she appeared on the cover of National Journal, which referred to her as one of Washington's rising stars. Additionally, Ms. Pfotenhauer has been featured inNewsweek, George, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.
Ms. Pfotenhauer began her career in Washington, D.C. in 1987 as a senior economist at the Republican National Committee and was promoted to chief economist in 1988. Selected by the Bush transition team at age 24, she served as the economist for the independent regulatory agencies task force for then President-elect George H.W. Bush, overseeing the policy, budget and personnel recommendations for both the Federal Trade Commission and the Interstate Commerce Commission. Thereafter, she worked as economic counsel to Senator William Armstrong, a member of the Republican Leadership, serving on both the Finance and Budget Committees. In 1990, Ms. Pfotenhauer joined the President's Council on Competitiveness as the economist serving that elite regulatory review group. This appointment involved daily interaction with the highest level career and political personnel at the Office of Management and Budget, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Interior, Transportation and Treasury.
In 2002, Ms. Pfotenhauer was nominated by President George W. Bush to serve as a delegate to the United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women and served during the 46th session of the Commission. The Bush Administration also appointed her to the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women reporting to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Health and Human Services Thompson. Additionally, she served on advisory committees reporting directly to Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao and former Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. In addition, Ms. Pfotenhauer served on the team charged with handling the budget for the Romney transition, and she was recently named to the Board of Directors at the CATO Institute.
Ms. Pfotenhauer holds a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Georgia and a master of arts degree in economics from George Mason University. She sits on Mason's Board of Visitors.
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http://www.desmogblog.com/2016/01/19/jane-mayer-dark-money-book-koch-brothers-nypd-fbi
The just-published book “Dark Money,” penned by New Yorker staff reporter Jane Mayer, reveals that the Koch Brothers hired the former commissioner of the New York Police Department (NYPD) — and his daughter, a former FBI agent — to smear her as a “plagiarist” in the months after the release of her August 2010 bombshell article on the Kochs.
That article, titled “Covert Operations,” served at the time as one of the first in-depth pieces of long-form investigative journalism on David and Charles Koch and the influential right-wing political and climate change denial Tea Party network they had Frankensteined. Mayer's book exposes that the Kochs hired the firm Vigilant Resources International, run by former NYPD head Howard Safir and his daughter Jennifer Safir (the former FBI special agent), to do dirty work on their behalf.
The story, as Mayer told it in “Dark Money,” began when she received a January 3, 2011 email from her New Yorker editor, David Remnick.
“In his e-mail,” to me, Mayer wrote, “Remnick explained that ten minutes earlier he’d received a baffling inquiry about me from Keith Kelly, the reporter who covered the media industry for the New York Post.”
Remnick's query centered around accusations — most likely emanating from somewhere within Koch World and handed to the New York Post and other outlets — that Mayer's journalistic track record, according to their research, was rife with plagiarism. The main issue: it wasn't in the slightest. Mayer has impeccable journalism credentials.
That didn't stop the witch hunt from proceeding and nearly reaching take off mode, though.
Smear Appears
With or without real evidence, the point of the covert campaign was not to find genuine evidence of plagiarism, but rather a classic case of attacking the messenger.
“Their aim, according to a well-informed source, was to counteract The New Yorker’s story on the Koch brothers by undermining me,” wrote Mayer. “'Dirt, dirt, dirt' is what the source later told me they were digging for in my life. 'If they couldn’t find it, they’d create it.'”
Vigilant Resources International, “Dark Money” details, got a retainer fee to help the effort along according to sources who spoke to Mayer on the condition of anonymity.
“VRI’s Threat, Risk and Vulnerability Assessments focus on safety and value and address a full spectrum of physical security, integrity, intellectual property and other operational risks,” VRI explains of its work on its website.
VRI goes on to explain of its business conduct:
We provide our findings and prioritized recommendations as actionable 'blueprints' for what should promptly and continuously be addressed to drive the best outcomes in risk management, crisis prevention and mitigation for each facility assessed. Our findings, recommendations and plans comport with applicable regulatory requirements and present industry best practices that are custom-tailored to the unique organizational structure, culture, profile and operations of each client.
After receiving initial contact from the New York Post, Mayer also got what she described in her book as a more alarming plagiarism query from the right-wing news website The Daily Caller, along with more benign ones from The Washington Post, ThinkProgress and a couple others. The Washington Post and ThinkProgress denied plagiarism victimhood, however, as did two other outlets not named by Mayer in the book.
“Paul Kane, a reporter at The Washington Post, quickly looked up the story in question and sent me an e-mail saying, 'Not only did you not steal from me, you Frickin’ credited me in the VERY NEXT line,'” Mayer explains in “Dark Money.” “The New Yorker had even linked to his story online. And, I later learned, my husband, who was then an editor at The Washington Post, had edited the story that I supposedly stole.”
Lee Fang, now a reporter at The Intercept and formerly a blogger for ThinkProgress, similarly denied the copyright infringement accusation.
“Ms. Mayer properly credited me in her story, and clearly did a ton of her own research,” Fang declared in a January 2011 statement provided to the New York Post. “I have nothing but admiration for her integrity as a journalist.”
Smear Disappears
Mayer killed the smear campaign before it gained any momentum or press time, however, mostly due to deft handling of the situation before it spun out of control and developed a life of its own.
“With only a few hours before these allegations were set to go online, all I could do was to try to get out the truth before the lies were spread,” Mayer explained of how she management of accusations. “By midnight, I had reached three of the four authors from whom I was alleged to have plagiarized. All offered to make public statements supporting me and denying I had misappropriated their work.”
Most importantly, Mayer had the truth on her side. The allegations? Tantamount to a ruse, as she laid out in the book:
Someone, probably using a computer program, had mechanically sifted through almost a decade of my work and isolated quotations from officials, and other widely repeated phrases, to argue that 'the structure and wording' were 'quite close' to four other reporters’ news stories. None of the supposedly purloined sentences were of any particular significance…Even sillier, in two of the four stories I was alleged to have 'plagiarized,' I had specifically given credit to the authors whose work The Daily Caller was claiming I'd stolen.
Rather than plagiarism becoming the story, then, the genesis of how the smear campaign appeared and subsequently disappeared was picked up by the likes of the New York Post, Business Insider and Salon. At the heart of that campaign was The Daily Caller, an alternative right-wing version of The Huffington Post founded by Tucker Carlson, the former MSNBC host and senior fellow at the Koch-founded and Koch-funded Cato Institute.
“In the end, even the Daily Caller found the allegations to be unfounded, and to its credit, abandoned the story,” wrote the New York Post. “The story is dead but the person or persons behind the allegations remains a shadowy mystery.”
Tucker Carlson proclaimed cluelessnessas to how his publication was tipped off to the so-called story to begin with.
“I never ask the reporters where they get stuff, only whether it’s true,” he told the New York Post. “In this case, we didn’t have enough.”
Safir and VRI did not confirm or deny any retainer ties to the effort, Mayer reported in the book.
A source told Mayer that Nancy Pfotenhauer— former head of Koch front group Americans for Prosperity and Citizens for a Sound Economy, as well as former Koch Industries lobbying in Washington, DC and senior adviser to U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) — served as one of several ringleaders of the effort.
Koch Industries already came out swinging in advance of the book's publication, responding to an advanced review by New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore by accusing Mayer of working to “further an agenda-driven story line [that] is grossly inaccurate.”
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http://mediamatters.org/people/nancy-pfotenhauer
mamogram denier , easter proclamation
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Koch hired her to do hit job on Mayer, J http://thinkprogress.org/media/2011/03/03/147953/bloggers-kneel-to-koch/
Nancy Pfotenhauer, President of PR firm MediaSpeak Strategies, TV pundit and former Senior Policy Advisor and spokesperson for the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign.
Pfotenhauer was a lobbyist for Koch Industries in its Washington, DC office before becoming the President, CEO and later Vice Chairwoman of the Independent Women’s Forum, which has received almost $500,000 from Koch foundations since 1997. She also was Executive Vice President of Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which was established by Charles Koch and affiliate Richard Fink, and was propelled by $13 million in grants from Koch foundations. After CSE split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), Pfotenhauer served as President and CEO of AFP.
While studying at George Mason University for a graduate degree in economics, Pfotenhauer served as a research assistant to Walter Williams. Accessed, a substitute host on the Rush Limbaugh Show. Williams is also director of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundation.
afp
Background and history
AFP was established in late 2003 as a successor to the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, an industry-funded think tank,[5]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_For_Prosperity#cite_note-4) following an internal rift between Citizens for a Sound Economy and its affiliated foundation.[6]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_For_Prosperity#cite_note-5) AFP was formally affiliated with the Independent Women's Forum. Both organizations shared the same Washington address, and formerly shared most of the same operational staff.[7]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_For_Prosperity#cite_note-6) In 2008, IWF moved to separate office space.
The October 2003 Washington Times report on the formation of AFP stated, "Nancy Pfotenhauer, an executive of Citizens for a Sound Economy [CSE] in the 1990s who helped defeat Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care reform proposal, has been tapped to head a new national advocacy organization to protect 'every American's fundamental right to pursue prosperity.'"[8]^(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_For_Prosperity#cite_note-7)
"Before joining the Independent Women's Forum in 2001, [Nancy] Pfotenhauer headed the Washington office of Koch Industries, a conglomerate with holdings in oil and gas, chemicals, minerals, ranching, and securities; Koch Executive Vice President David Koch was a founder and a chairman of the CSE Foundation and is now on the AFP board," reported the National Journal in November 2003. "Pfotenhauer worked with Koch in the mid-'90s, when she was executive vice president of both CSE and the CSE Foundation. But she has an even longer history with AFP board member Walter Williams, for whom she was a graduate research assistant at George Mason University 20 years ago."[9]