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new stuff too
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New “Trump Saves America” Movie With 42 Days to Save America: An Urgent Call to Action from Dave Bossie
David Bossie: "President Trump Is Going To Win Pennsylvania If We Do Our Jobs."
by Kari Donovan
in Activism, American Greatness, Grassroots, Highlight, MAGA Nation, WarRoom Force Multiplier Alliance
Home Politics & Elections Activism
In a recent rallying cry on the WarRoom, Dave Bossie stressed the urgency of mobilizing conservative activism in the next 42 days before the election, emphasizing the need for grassroots efforts to ensure the survival of American values.
The Critical Countdown
"42 days, 42 days to save America. That’s what we are all about,” Bossie declared, setting a somber tone for the challenges ahead. With the election approaching, he underscored the imperative for conservatives to "put our shoulders to the grindstone” and dedicate every moment to the cause. His message is clear: the stakes are high, and the window for action is closing fast.
Just in time to rally the American people, Bossie introduced his newest movie from Citizens United called:
A Jaded Perspective
Drawing from his experiences growing up in the 1980s and witnessing the fall of communism, Bossie conveyed a deep-rooted fear of regressing to a time dominated by oppressive regimes. He warned that Kamala Harris’s election would usher in a return to the very policies that threaten the American way of life. "We need to make sure that we’re not going back to that,” he stated emphatically.
The Numbers Game
Stark statistics back the gravity of Bossie’s message. He reminded listeners that the 2020 election was decided by a mere 43,000 votes across three key states. "This election in 2024 could be even closer,” he warned, amplifying the urgency for conservative voters to mobilize. His call to action centers on ensuring that "every legal ballot is counted,” highlighting the necessity of grassroots efforts over expensive TV advertisements.
Mobilizing the Grassroots
Bossie emphasized that real change comes from on-the-ground efforts, saying, "It’s going to be the ground game that makes the difference here.” To this end, he encouraged listeners to engage with their communities, share information, and watch the film “Trump Saves America” to galvanize support for the upcoming election. "Make sure you send it around to your friends, family, neighbors to make sure they understand what’s at stake,” he urged.
Polling Insights
Delving into polling data, Bossie reported that key battleground states like Pennsylvania and Arizona show a competitive landscape, with Trump either leading or tied. He expressed confidence that, with concerted effort, Trump can secure Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. "Trump has never been behind in these states,” he noted, dismissing media narratives designed to suppress conservative turnout.
The Media’s Role
Bossie did not hesitate to criticize the mainstream media, which he accused of engaging in "election interference” by manipulating public perceptions through biased polling. "The corrupt media biased Washington Post put out a poll that said Joe Biden was up 17 points—outrageous!” he exclaimed, imploring his audience to recognize these tactics as barriers to genuine democratic engagement.
On the Offense
Bossie’s rallying cry is a clarion call for action: "Donald Trump is on offense. Kamala Harris is on defense.” He believes that if conservatives work diligently, they can capitalize on the current political landscape and secure victories across crucial states. "These states are vital, and it’s crucial that we understand the work that has been done and needs to be done,” he concluded.
In these final weeks before the election, Bossie’s impassioned remarks serve as a reminder of the power of grassroots activism and the importance of every individual’s contribution to the collective cause. The clock is ticking, and now is the time to act.
Resources-Where to Sign Up to Help:
Message from Steve Bannon from Prison: ‘Mobilize Voters and Election Workers to Stop the Steal’
For more context and to see a trailer of the movie, watch this segment from Wednesday’s WarRoom featuring Dave Bossie:
David Bossie: “President Trump Is Going To Win Pennsylvania If We Do Our Jobs.”
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IMDB 3 26 https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1733113/
Producer
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textfire
Trump’s ubiquitous portrayal as a renegade outsider, beholden to no political party or established decorum, might be the most unacknowledged fake news item of the past two years. Despite a lack of name recognition — or perhaps precisely because of their anonymity — the various forces working to install a President Trump have been actively pursuing their goals for a very long time.
Gears of this machine were turning years before Trump declared his 2016 candidacy, no matter what the Donald is saying to the contrary these days. All the major players were settling into their roles not only long before recent public awareness heated up, but well into the last millenium.
To catch up with current events, let’s rewind a few decades.
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1988Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who was attempting to win back the White House after 8 years of Ronald “Win One Proxy War for the Gipper” Reagan, had his underperforming campaign derailed by a TV advertisement paid for by a political action committee (PAC). Titled “Weekend Passes”, but colloquially known as the ‘Willie Horton ad’, it painted Dukakis as having shared responsibility for heinous crimes committed by a convicted murderer who’d run away while out on weekend furlough from a life sentence in prison.
Dukakis had endorsed but not initiated the furlough program while serving as governor of Massachusetts, but the facts became irrelevant in the wake of such a shocking true crime storyline. The discussion surrounding the accusations had been percolating for a few months prior to the TV ad’s debut on 22 Sept ’88, but controversy then erupted and dominated chatter straight through the election.
George H.W. Bush — the Republican nominee, sitting Vice President, former CIA chief, and staunch death penalty advocate — had begun to hype the Horton tale that summer, after taking a cue from Al Gore’s criticism of the furlough program during the Democratic primaries. Bush’s opposition research team then zeroed in on Horton as an excellent chance to play up racist fears and hammer Dukakis’s ‘soft’ Massachusetts liberalism.
Bush’s campaign team was led by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, both of whom were known for their no-holds-barred electioneering & media manipulation tactics. Atwater had been senior partner since 1984 at Black, Manafort, Stone, and Atwater, PR sister to the lobbying firm first co-founded during Reagan’s 1980 candidacy by longtime Trump allies Paul Manafort and Roger Stone; he was also a firm believer in playing the electoral race card by proxy as part of the new Southern Strategy. Ailes was a high-profile GOP strategist who had pioneered the concept of politicians as saleable products, and who’d later become ex-CEO, founder, and alleged serial sex fiend of Fox News.
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Lee Atwater in 1985 (Getty)
Ailes latched on to the Horton angle, running focus groups in May ’88 which found ‘Reagan Democrats’ responded very well to its inherent negativity, with many test subjects completely turning against Dukakis after hearing some choice accusations. Smelling blood, Atwater boasted to GOP brass, “By the time this election is over, Willie Horton will be a household name.” Ailes agreed, saying: “The only question is whether we show Willie Horton with a knife in his hand, or without.”
Bush then began acting on those focus group results by first mentioning furloughs during the June ’88 Texas Republican convention, after which his poll numbers finally started to climb past those of then-frontrunner Dukakis. Traditionalist-leaning Readers Digest conveniently published a Horton article in July titled “Getting Away With Murder,” which the Bush campaign reprinted for its own mass distribution. Bush continued to highlight the angle that summer, even going so far as to reference it during his Republican National Convention (RNC) nomination acceptance speech in August.
Ailes and Atwater would go on to create a followup ad for the official Bush campaign known as “Revolving Door”, which effectively replaced the Willie Horton ad after an abbreviated 2-week TV run, debuting it on 5 Oct 1988. Horton wasn’t named or shown, but actors were depicted as ‘scary criminals’ going in & out of prison all willy-nilly. Both of these ads led to extensive media coverage of the ads themselves, remarkably, with the major TV networks’ nightly newscasts frequently discussing them during October and November.
Scarecap from “Weekend Passes” 
The first Willie Horton attack ad is credited to media hitman Larry McCarthy, working on behalf of the Americans for Bush (aka AmBush) offshoot of the National Security Political Action Committee (NSPAC). McCarthy had spent the previous seven years working as a senior executive for Ailes Communications, creating ads for his mentor Roger Ailes while assisting a number of high-profile GOP candidates throughout the 80s.
Another former Ailes employee involved in the ad production was Floyd Brown, who was serving as president of Americans for Bush at the time, though he is widely acknowledged as the true mastermind behind both ads. In fact, official complaints were filed after the election alleging illegal collusion between the Bush campaign and AmBush/NSPAC.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated the allegations, but despite evidence of communication between the organizations, the FEC commissioners deadlocked 3 to 3 on reaching an official decision. Therefore, no punishment was disbursed and no rule advisories were made.PR guru Roger Stone has since claimed Atwater showed off the “Weekend Passes” tape to him, prior to handing it off to NSPAC for distribution.
Also after the election, in November 1988, an AmBush-invigorated Floyd Brown decided to strike out on his own — with a dollop of financial help from the Koch brothers — and start a new political “nonprofit”, bearing a name you might recognize: Citizens United.
1992As the Bush 41 presidency was gearing up for its reelection campaign, Citizens United was preparing for its first. That election cycle saw Brown bring aboard David Bossie as ‘chief researcher’ & director of political affairs, but he would become the key member of the organization throughout the following 25 years. Bossie had cut his teeth at Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute from 1988–90, but he lucked into his true calling in 1992 when Bill Clinton skyrocketed to fame.
Starting in early ’92, Brown & Bossie (really the only 2 people at Citizens in those days) went hard after Clinton, beginning with an investigation into his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Citizens set up a 1–900 hotline phone number which purported to play exclusive recordings of Flowers and Clinton’s conversations for $4.99/minute, though the tapes were in fact fraudulently manipulated & doctored, which implored customers to call “our Bill Clinton fact line and learn first-hand about Clinton’s womanizing, drug use, draft dodging and other lies.” They would also go on to publish the weekly gossip newsletter Clintonwatch, which was regularly sent to over 1,200 journalists.
Bossie also managed to get into a fistfight in Little Rock, Arkansas — while boarding a flight inside an airport — because he refused to pay a private investigator named Larry Case, who was hired to dig up dirt on Roger Clinton, Bill’s wayward brother. Case was representing the [somehow unrelated to CU] organization he co-founded, Citizens for Honest Government, which had originally drummed up the Flowers allegations and would go on to produce the popular direct-mail attack DVD Clinton Chronicles, promoted and distributed by Reverend Jerry Falwell.
After ‘leaking’ allegations to 30 major news bureaus in April, Bossie repeatedly contacted & stalked the family of a long-dead suicide victim for “confirmation” of an affair with Bill Clinton. In July, he followed the late woman’s mother to a hospital, where her husband was seriously ill and recovering from a stroke, and then “burst into the sick man’s room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter’s suicide.”
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Former Reagan administration Director of Communications Pat Buchanan spent a great deal of time attacking the Clintons (and the rest of the time hyping his tagline of “America First, Second and Third”), often using the same talking points Citizens United were attempting to disseminate, which nearly allowed him to defeat Bush in the key New Hampshire primary.He ended up fading away, but his infamously religio-nativist “culture war” speech at the August RNC event focused on his personal feelings of disgust for Hillary Clinton. (Note that Hillary was only yet popularly known as a spouse, not a politician.) Though none of this negative publicity was ultimately able to derail Clinton’s campaign, two other challengers stirred up intrigue during the ’92 election.}:
Ross Perot ran as an Independent and was a surprisingly strong contender for a short period of time after he joined the race in May. In early June, Perot led the national public opinion polls with support from 39% of the voters (versus 31% for Bush and 25% for Clinton). His numbers started to slip before he suddenly dropped out of the race in July, only to rejoin the fray in October.
Perot’s explanation for his midsummer’s disappearance was that he’d been blackmailed by what he thought were third-party affiliates of the Bush campaign, an accusation which included the familiar-sounding claim that POTUS Bush was having his CIA friends employ “dirty tricks” of wiretapping Perot’s phone lines and installing viruses on his computers.
Based on what we know about Bossie & Brown’s behaviors that year, it’s a little surprising we can find no news reports exploring any potential links between Citizens and Buchanan, nor any items being anything less than spitefully condescending toward Perot and the possibility that his paranoia might be based on true events.
In fact, the only major player to call out Bossie’s behavior that year was President Bush, who repeatedly repudiated Citizens’ “filthy campaign tactics” during 1992. His son Dubya denounced Floyd Brown’s behaviors in a letter to supporters asking them not to donate to Citizens, and Bush publicly took issue with the wildly unethical Flowers hotline, calling it “the kind of sleaze that diminishes the political process.” To his exceedingly rare credit, Bush even filed a complaint with the FEC in July ’92 against Brown’s Citizens-related Presidential Victory Committee and Bossie’s stalking of the suicide victim’s family.
So that makes two elections in a row with major FEC complaints filed against the media manipulations of Floyd Brown (with help from his protégé David Bossie), and yet no punishment was doled out.
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2000David Bossie stayed in the thick of political dealings during the 1990s, serving as a key personal aide with the Senate Whitewater Committee and later as chief investigator for the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, which was then primarily devoted to unearthing campaign finance crimes of POTUS Clinton.
Bossie made many enemies when he did things like urge his boss to reenact the death of former White House deputy counsel Vince Foster — officially ruled a suicide but an ongoing obsession of “Clinton crazies” & Whitewatergaters — by shooting bullets into a melon in the backyard of the congressman’s home. He repeatedly leaked incendiary conspiracy theories to all-too-willing reporters, drawing the ire of his colleagues, but he finally ended up being fired in 1998 for [again] falsifying key evidence.
A frequent boast of Bossie’s was that he had major news media wrapped around his finger, using his dozens of pitched New York Times articles as examples. That power evidently didn’t satiate him, asBossie caught the film bug and edited a video to fraudulently implicate Hillary Clinton in a crime, prompting then-Speaker Newt Gingrich —who resigned under GOP fire six months later — to demand Bossie’s resignation and unleash a tirade stating “the circus” that was the Oversight Committee should feel “embarrassed”.
Bossie took over as president of Citizens United in 2000 but laid reasonably low for the next few years, continuing to establish several activist ‘nonprofits’ under the CU banner. He popped back into the spotlight in 2004 to file his own complaint with the FEC, by which he’d attempted to get Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 blocked from public showings within 60 days prior to Election Day. His plan failed, as the FEC found Fahrenheit to not be “electioneering communications,” and therefore not subject to FEC oversight.
That decision must have haunted Bossie, for he filed another FEC complaint in 2007, this time because the new multimillion-dollar-budget Citizens United Productions hitpiece Hillary: The Movie was blocked from cable TV & paid public airings within 30 days prior to the January 2008 primaries. In this instance the FEC found Citizens’ first big film to indeed be biased electioneering communications, and upheld the ‘ban’ based on the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, commonly referred to as ‘McCain-Feingold’.
2008The BCRA had been the culmination of an extremely long fight over campaign finance reform, which extended back further than the initial creation of the FEC in 1974, even back to the seminal Tillman Act of 1907. Most modern US campaign finance laws were defined in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, with subsequent amendments in the wake of Watergate leading to the establishment of the FEC. Further changes throughout the ’70s chipped away at those laws, easing restrictions on outside money and political ads.
:{:{}:
The BCRA mandated that clear electioneering communications and issue advocacy ads for federal candidates without disclaimers — focusing on political topics, as opposed to blatant demands for votes — could not be aired within 30 days of a primary vote, nor within 60 days of a general election.Had the BCRA existed in 1988, these regulations could have rendered illegal the late September debut airing of the Willie Horton ad.}:
Though advertisements, ‘soft money’, and nonprofits/PACs were certainly nothing new in 1988 — as Roger Ailes, former Nixon media aide & breakout star of bestseller The Selling of the President 1968 can attest — the ‘Willie Horton ad’ series of events had pried open a floodgate. Eyes were opened to that sea change when Citizens United blew the gates wide in 1992, but Bush 41 vetoed a reform bill before he left office. BCRA was originally set to launch in 1995, but struggled through seven years of DC infighting before it finally passed in 2002. McCain-Feingold’s fiercest opponent during those years had been majority whip Mitch McConnell, who then immediately mounted his own Supreme Court challenge against the new laws.
Just as in the ’70s, the regulations were chipped away through a series of Supreme Court cases, but it was Bossie et al’s dogged pursuit of Citizens United v FEC case that struck a crushing blow. Argued in front of the Supreme Court twice in 2009, which is unusual, 21 January 2010 saw the Court strike down key provisions of BCRA related to donation limits, independent expenditures, and electioneering communications.
Citizens’ lawyer during that time was Ted Olson, who was legal counsel for Ronald Reagan during his defense against Iran-Contra allegations; assisted Paula Jones, a Bill Clinton accuser; represented Bush in 2004’s Bush v Gore, for which he would be rewarded with a Solicitor General appointment; and went on to work for Hobby Lobby, Rudy Giuliani, Paul Ryan, and Tom Brady.
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A large majority of the attention the case has publicly received focuses on the idea that it resulted in the establishment of something to the effect of: ‘corporations are people, too, so they have a right to freedom of speech, and money is a form of speech, which means corporations are now free to speak as loudly as they want via PACs & now SuperPACs.’ }:
That interpretation is not wrong, but what gets lost at the end of that translation is the true ultimate mechanism of the $peechbuck$: media, marketing & advertising.
Olson successfully argued — with help from Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia’s leading interrogation — for what amounted to near-total elimination of regulations defining issue advocacy electioneering communications and [protected/free] corporate speech. This occurred despite the dissenting Court opinion, which proclaimed the 5–4 decision and its cited precedent to be “not a correct statement of the law.”
Campaigns need money to rent hotels and pay travel expenses, but the largest disbursements of funds are almost always related to advertising. Things like banners, buttons, signs, and especially mass media communications are the tools used to amplify ‘speech’. Third party political advocacy previously had clearly outlined limitations, but in Citizens the Court decided that the previous bar of defining “electioneering communications” was too unwieldy.
Buckley v Valeo in 1976 had established the “eight magic words” which defined express political advocacy were: “vote for; vote against; elect; support; cast your ballot for; [Smith] for [Congress]; defeat; reject,” or any variations thereof. Disseminated media — meaning created content such as film, print, audio, etc. — which did not contain those words was largely exempt from campaign finance laws.
In Citizens, those ‘eight magic words’ were thrown out, as the Court said they violated the First Amendment right to free speech; the Roberts Court also declared that a corporation, if considered as a group of people which collectively holds the same rights as a “person”, would also be entitled to that right.
With that list of clearly defined linguistic restrictions no longer in place, the Court simultaneously proclaimed that the effort required to parse out the intent of all suspect pieces of media would be too great a burden for the federal government. As a result, nearly all unofficial media is exempt from campaign finance laws, which means the soft money (“independent expenditure” and 3rd-party sourcing) used to produce the media is also exempt from campaign finance laws.
The logic of that decision seems to be a self-contained feedback loop, where corporations — nonprofit, such as the plaintiff Citizens United, andfor-profit, for no apparent reason — were magically granted the common human right of free speech, but only as a means to anoint them with an entitlement to totally unfettered freedom to purchase infinite levels of amplification to broadcast that speech. Only the wealthy can afford exorbitant advertising costs.
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With these newly opened doors to political speech-via-media, unregulated issue advocacy using independent expenditures became a wide-open battleground. Suddenly, something like Hillary: The Movie could be engineered to target voters with no funding, calendar, or content restrictions. }:
Bossie’s efforts to accomplish this feat did not go unnoticed during the case’s journey up the ladder to the Supreme Court, and in 2008 he had already started making some new best friends. To that end, the popular adage of “corporations are people, too” was one result, though tweaking the tagline to ‘corporate personhood mandates deregulation of the dissemination of obscenely expensive political advertising & propaganda’ could perhaps provide a stronger vector of situational awareness. Unfortunately, our version doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, plus superficial imagery dictates optimum virality.
First to the party was chronic gatecrasher and Hollywood reject Steve Bannon.
Bannon had joined up with and violently commandeered a variety of projects since quitting the Navy and Goldman Sachs, including his implosion of climate research project Biosphere 2; a soap opera at a World of Warcraft videogame-gold-mining operation; and horning in on Saudi investment deals.
He’d managed to broker the deal for TV syndication of Seinfeld, as well as secure executive producer credits on 2 movies in the ’90s and buy out indie film distributor Wellspring Media, but he and his longtime writing partner had failed to get even one of their own original projects made during their 18 years together; not even their gory, sexy space opera about intergalactic “beings of light”, based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, nor their rap musical based on the Bard’sCoriolanus.
Looking to finally do something successful and not stolen, Bannon had self-funded his first and then-only movie in 2004, a love letter to Ronald Reagan based on a book by Peter Schweizer (so, mostly not stolen). It was at the L.A. premiere of that film where Bannon met Andrew Breitbart, who was then working with the highly influential conservative news aggregator The Drudge Report, striking a friendship that would soon see Bannon joining Breitbart’s eponymous new media startup on the explosively blossoming “internet” (keep in mind 2004 was the year thefacebook.com launched on college campuses, before opening up to the public and becoming Facebook the following year).
Speaking of the Gipper, however, Bannon certainly took interest in the fact that Bossie had also produced a separate Reagan movie via Citizens in 2008. The video was hosted by Newt Gingrich, who must’ve had a change of heart after being “embarrassed” a decade earlier by Bossie’s House Oversight Committee falsifications.
After he and Bossie met in 2008, Citizens United Productions would go on to produce Bannon’s next 3 ‘films’ and another 3 over the following few years, comprising the lion’s share of the company’s output. All of their collaborations were exactly the sort of issue advocacy affected by the Citizens United v FEC decision, all attacked Democrats & the Left, all were expensive propaganda pieces paid for by dark money, and all were released in election years: 2010, 2012, and 2016.
Soon after Bossie came into his life, Bannon’s writing partner Julia Jones said his political views took a dark turn. Jones stopped working with Bannon in 2009 because he had become so fixated on the destruction of left-wing politics and the eradication of poor people.Though Bannon had been meandering down that road for years, Jones has said she blames Bossie for the final twisted transformation.
Another new fan of Bossie’s was Steve Wynn, the hotel and casino magnate. Wynn noticed Bossie’s brash style and his success with the final Court ruling, so Wynn passed along his admiration to his dear frenemy, Donald J. Trump. Bossie and Trump ending up meeting in early 2010, around the same time as Bannon & Bossie released their first feature together, Generation Zero, which blamed baby boomers’ pinko liberalism for the 2008 financial debacle.
Trump’s long-standing friendship with the Clintons — extending to wedding attendances, political ...ings — was possibly a point of contention between he and Bossie, but they did agree on a shared mutual dislike of Barack Obama.
Floyd Brown, founder of Citizens United, also managed to engineer continued mainstream news coverage of accusations stating Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. Brown became chairman of WorldNetDailyfounder Joseph Farah’s lesser-known far-right muckraking outfit, the Western Journalism Center (WJC), and together they spearheaded a well-funded effort to smear Obama by generating media & public discussion about Obama’s genealogy and country of birth.
Founded in 1991, the WJC had previously funded high-profile “investigations” into the Clintons — conducted by Chris Ruddy, who went on to create conservative media powerhouse Newsmaxin 1998—as an affiliate of the Richard Mellon Scaife-funded Arkansas Project.
After it became clear Obama was going to secure the 2008 nomination, Bossie had pivoted from the litigation-pending Hillary: The Movie to a Citizens joint called Hype: The Obama Effect, which was somehow released less than two months before Election Day. Not only did it appear in small cinemas, but Citizens spent over a million dollars to insert 1,250,000 DVD copies into newspapers across the USA within a week of the election. Hype appears to compare Obama to Hitler by echoing scenes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, which Bossie confirmed was intentional. “There are no accidents in this film,” he said.
It was widely assumed that Trump was attempting to leverage his birtherism rhetoric into a run at the 2012 GOP nomination — though any speculation was taken with a large grain of salt, after his many false starts over the previous several elections, most of which found Pat Buchanan and/or Roger Stone nearby — so it should be unsurprising that he had been consulting with the professional conspiracist Bossie during this time, and that Bossie was the one to first introduce Trump & Bannon.
Despite Trump’s >recent claim that he didn’t collaborate with Bannon until late in the 2016 campaign, the first time they worked together was in fact early 2011. Demands for publicly released copies of Obama’s birth certificate had made headlines since at least 2007, the same year Brown joined WJC, but it’s easy to imagine Bossie was a prime influencer prior to Trump’s sudden assault on Obama in March/April 2011. For six weeks, Trump climbed up on every soapbox he could find in order to spread the so-called “birther” angle, until Obama finally did release a certified copy in late April. Obama then went on to
to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner mere days later, eliciting white-hot Donaldian rage.
Plans were sketched for what would ultimately lead to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy being headed by campaign CEO Steve Bannon and deputy campaign manager David Bossie, as behind the scenes and from multiple angles of attack, everything was quietly being forced into place. According to Bossie, the three of them quickly started drafting the image of a potential Trump presidential campaign and “how to build this thing out.” Those plans were formally paused a few weeks after Obama’s roasting landed a hard ego uppercut and showed he would be unbeatable in 2012, but Donald, David, and Steve continued to conspire & plot in the shadows.
==
not at libertyfest videos?
2011
Blogger Lunch with Citizens United Productions – Delaware Ballroom PresidentDavid N. Bossie& short video presentation: David v. Goliath: The One Year Anniversary of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Open CPAC bloggers
==
crooks & liars
Zombie Michelle Malkin Rises Again With New Movie, Voter Fraud Claims
By Karoli Kuns
10/22/14 7:00am
She's baaaaaack and just in time for midterms, too! After months of blessed silence from her particular brand of harpy-ism, Malkin has returned with a new film about how four liberal billionaires have "taken over" Colorado.
The trailer is about all sane people should be able to handle. They shoveled in as many wingnuts as possible to talk about guns, gays, God, and of course, voter fraud. That was part of the focus of her appearance with Megyn Kelly on Tuesday night, because we have an election coming up and what would an election be without Fox angst over brown people voting?
Over the course of a decade, a once-red state has become more Democratic – and a new film, hosted by Michelle Malkin, tells the story of how that happened. “Rocky Mountain Heist,” produced by Citizens United, is a documentary which reveals how a wealthy liberal quartet took over the state.
Malkin and Citizens United President David Bossie were on “The Kelly File” tonight to discuss the film.
Malkin said that Citizens United and Bossie “have been absolute warriors in this fight” to inform the public. She said it was even a battle to get the film out, calling it a victory for conservative political speech.
“What happened here in Colorado can happen in the rest of the country,” she warned, explaining that the “Gang of Four” coordinated and used “shady nonprofits” to plot to take over the state Legislature.
“The hypocrisy reeks, it smokes, it burns," she said.
She also blasted the new voting law “voter fraud Frankenstein.”
Here's the trailer, so you can see how far over the top it goes. It's Tancredo-worthy.
If you're Malkin, everyone in Colorado is just getting high and living on the dole, I guess. Here's more on the film:
What was the result of the “Rocky Mountain Heist,” according to Citizen United?
“Now, homelessness is at an all-time high, marijuana is smoked in once family-friendly parks, gun control is rampant and the state’s energy industry is under constant assault,” the group said in announcing the trailer Wednesday. “Unfortunately, the State of Colorado is now a perfect example of President Obama’s promise to ‘fundamentally transform America.’”
The release was held up while Citizens United went to court in Colorado to fight the requirement that they disclose the financial backers to the film. Because of course, no one would be the slightest bit interested in who paid for this fine piece of election-year scare-mongering bullshit.
Here's what has Malkin's panties in a twist about the voting laws in Colorado:
About 16 months ago, the Democratic governor signed an election law which allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then turn them over to collectors. Critics say this could lead to voter fraud, and they allege it was pushed through the state Legislature to keep Democrats in power.
Oh noes! Let all the people vote and Democrats keep power! How terrible!
Voter fraud is not an issue. Lying and misleading people about the state's politics might be, but letting people print their ballot and mail it in is not.
I expect we shall hear more harpy songs in the days to come.
==
The Denver Post
Citizens United given go-ahead to run ads for…
POLITICS ELECTION
Citizens United given go-ahead to run ads for “Rocky Mountain Heist”
In this Jan. 21, 2010, file photo Citizens United President David Bossie talks on his cell phone outside the Supreme Court in Washington after the court’s ruling on the campaign finance reform case.
By JOEY BUNCH | jbunch@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
PUBLISHED:October 20, 2014 at 8:58 am | UPDATED: April 26, 2016 at 10:32 am
Citizens United, the conservative group behind the new film “Rocky Mountain Heist,” can run ads promoting the movie but still risk answering for it in court, the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said.
Any person or group could file a complaint alleging the advertisements are election-time attack ads, not a means of reporting news, Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert told Citizens United in an advisory opinion.
Citizens United announced Sunday it intends to spend $170,000 on TV ads and an additional $40,000 for online promotion between now and Nov. 4 of the documentary about how liberals have gained ground in Colorado.
“We are glad that the Secretary of State’s Office has recognized Citizens United as a media entity and that advertisements for our film ‘Rocky Mountain Heist’ will be exempt from reporting and disclosure requirements just as advertisements made by The Denver Post or any other media entity would be,” the organization’s president, David N. Bossie, said in a statement.
The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Citizens United should have the same protections as traditional media, meaning the Virginia-based nonprofit would not have to disclose the donors who paid for the movie.
The court, however, said the secretary of state’s office could determineif ads that specifically name a candidate up for election qualify as electioneering, which would require disclosure.
“Historically, Colorado broadcast facilities and publishers making exempt electioneering communications or expenditures have not disclosed the money raised for or spent on associated advertising because the activity falls within the regular scope and course of business,” Staiert stated in the opinion.
She said she had reviewed the ads and they qualified for the exemption.
The liberal-leaning Colorado Ethics Watch and other critics of Citizens United claimed victory last week when the appeals court said ads that attack candidates could still be deemed an attempt to influence voters immediately before an election.
The first TV ad that could start showing this week is titled “You Don’t Know Hick,” as in Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is in a tight race against Republican candidate Bob Beauprez. The 30-second spot has 12 seconds focused on Hickenlooper.
“We expect Citizens United will comply with Colorado law, and so no complaint will be necessary,” said Luis Toro, director of Colorado Ethics Watch.
Although the ads don’t specifically cite the upcoming election or urge support for Beauprez, the law states that anyone who spends more than $1,000 on ads and names a candidate during the last 60 days before the election must disclose the source of that money, Toro said.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch
TAGS: ELECTION 2014
Joey Bunch
Joey Bunch was a reporter for 12 years at The Denver Post before leaving to join The Gazette in Colorado Springs. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry. He likes stories more than reports.
=--
did she get wrong info from bossie?
https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/oct/30/megyn-kelly/megyn-kellys-errant-claim-about-colorado-voters-pr/
Fox News host Megyn Kelly began a recent show with explosive news out of Colorado, where she said "a new law has opened the door to possible voter fraud" just weeks before voters decide a crucial U.S. Senate race.
Before you can say yikes, there’s more. This law, Kelly said, "literally allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to ‘collectors’ in what appears to be an effort to do away with traditional polling places."
"What could go wrong?" Kelly asked before bringing on special guests Michelle Malkin and Citizens United president David Bossie to discuss their conservative documentaryRocky Mountain Heist,which details how the state turned from red to blue.
In the days that followed, Colorado-based
as well as
* said Kelly’s segment was misleading and wrong.
A reader asked for our take.
In 2013, Colorado enacted a law (HB 1303) that moved the state to an "all-mail" absentee voting system, among other changes. Every active voter gets a ballot sent to his or her residence, and they can choose to mail it in by Election Day or turn it into a county clerk’s office. They can also still vote in person at a voting service and polling center.
We repeat, the ballot is mailed to them -- they don’t print it out.
Voters can also give their ballot to someone they trust to turn in for them -- what Kelly refers to as a "collector." That person is not allowed to turn in more than 10 ballots.
The Colorado law, championed by Democrats and signed into law by Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper, also authorizes same-day voter registration.
Meanwhile, military or overseas Colorado voters have access to an online ballot they can fill out and send back to county elections clerks via email, fax or mail. Some military personnel who reside within the United States, or even station within Colorado, also have this option, said Rich Coolidge, Colorado Department of State spokesman. This was not a new change ushered in by HB 1303.
But everyone else is on the normal mail-in system, which also exists in Oregon and Washington state.
Kelly addressed the criticism about her original comments during her Oct. 27 show:
"Last week, we said the new law also allows all voters to print out their ballots at home," she said. "That actually is not the case. Members of the military and some others, like Coloradans overseas, can indeed print out their ballots at home, but this is the case even before the new law passed."
Our ruling
In a recent segment, Kelly went after a new Colorado law that raises fears of voter fraud for allowing "residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to ‘collectors.’"
That’s wrong, a fact Kelly later admitted. The big change in Colorado with the 2014 midterm elections is a universal mail-in system for active, registered voters. Those ballots are mailed to voters; voters do not print them out.
The only people who have access to an online system are members of the military and Coloradoans who live overseas, and that system predates the most recent law.
Kelly’s claim rates False.[she did corect?]
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https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21859/fox-romances-the-rat/
chs p oct 2014
is long past time for my business to stop treating the Fox News Channel as anything more than the wingnut clown show it was designed to be.
Kelly referenced Gov. John Hickenlooper's (D-Colorado) signing of a new election law advanced by his fellow Democrats in the state legislature in 2013. The host described it as a "first of its kind election law: a set of rules that literally allows residents to print ballots from their home computers, then encourages them to turn ballots over to 'collectors' in what appears to be an effort to do away with traditional polling places." While traditional polling places are a thing of the past (in-person voters can go to Voter Service Centers instead of traditional precinct polling places) because of the law, the claim that it allows for home-printed ballots is simply false. We ran this by the office of Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican and a vocal opponent of the Democrats' new election law. Gessler's office told 9NEWS that most Colorado voters can not print a ballot on their home printer and use it to vote.
Megyn, you may recall, is the smart one. And there is, of course, a punchline.
The comments on Fox News came as a set-up to a segment featuring Michelle Malkin and David Bossie, who created a film called Rocky Mountain Heist for the conservative group Citizens United.
It is all a seamless garment, from Malkin's hysterics to Bossie's propaganda -- Thanks again, Anthony Kennedy -- to the Fox News studios. Bullshit in, bullshit out. It is the universe of which Gordon Liddy and Donald Segretti dreamed, where none of those rats have to go to all the effort to fk themselves.
==
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1733113/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
bs bio
David N. Bossie has served as president of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation since 2001.
Bossie is the former Chief Investigator for the United States House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. During Bill Clinton's two terms as president, he led investigations ranging from the Whitewater land deal to the transfer of dual-use technology to China and to foreign fundraising in the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign. He has authored four books, including the best-selling "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11".
Most recently, Citizens United won a landmark First Amendment decision at the United States Supreme Court in "Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission". The case, which saw the government assert during oral arguments that it had the Constitutional authority to ban political books, struck down two decades of unconstitutional restrictions on free speech.
As president of Citizens United Productions, Bossie has produced 21 documentaries since 2004, including the award-winning Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny (2009), Broken Promises: The United Nations at 60 (2005), with the late Ron Silver, and Perfect Valor (2000), a documentary narrated by Senator Fred Dalton Thompson, about the service and sacrifices of our troops in Iraq. More recently, Citizens United Productions has done films with Governor Mike Huckabee, The Gift of Life (2012), and Senator Rick Santorum, Our Sacred Honor (2012).
In 2010, Citizens United Productions released five documentaries. The first, Generation Zero (2010), is a probing look at the recent financial crisis which posits that the degradation of American cultural, social, and economic values that has taken place since the 1960s, rather than a failure of capitalism, is responsible for the meltdown. "Generation Zero" has been the subject of a one-hour special on FOX News' Hannity(2009), and screened to rave reviews at the National Tea Party Convention and CPAC.
The second, narrated by Newt Gingrich and Callista Gingrich, is Nine Days That Changed the World (2010), which chronicles Pope John Paul II's historic 1979 pilgrimage to Poland at the height of the Cold War, his message of faith and freedom to those behind the Iron Curtain, and his role in the fall of Communism.
The third, America at Risk (2010), which is also narrated by Newt and Callista Gingrich, looks into the War on Terror and the prosecution of the war by the Obama Administration. The fourth, Fire from the Heartland(2010), is a powerful statement about women in the conservative movement. "Fire from the Heartland" is a highly stylized film of breathtaking beauty and remarkable power. The cast list ranges from Phyllis Schlafly to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.
Finally, the fifth movie, Battle for America (2010), with Dick Morris, the documentary is a no-holds-barred examination of the Obama Administration and Democrat Congress that set out to "transform" America but ended up energizing grassroots Conservatives and lighting the fuse for a populist rebellion called "The Tea Party" movement.
In 2012, Citizens United Productions produced the widely-publicized documentaries,Occupy Unmasked (2012) and The Hope & the Change (2012). "Occupy Unmasked" features the late conservative icon Andrew Breitbart, as well as former leftist radicals-turned-patriotic citizen journalists Brandon Darby, David Horowitz, Pam Keys, Anita MonCrief, Mandy Nagy and Lee Stranahan, among others. This film delves beneath the surface of the Occupy movement to show its anarchist roots, led by those who advocate the use of violence and intimidation as protest tactics. These tactics stem back to the anti-war protests of the 1960's, the anti-nuclear weapons protests of the 1980's, the WTO protests and Environmental Liberation Front of the 1990's, and the IMF protests of recent years.
"The Hope & the Change" examines the journey of forty Americans - Democrats and Independents - who supported and voted for President Barack Obama four years ago. The diverse cast encompasses a broad cross-section of America's racial and socio-economic spectrum and comes from seven swing states that experts say will decide the 2012 presidential election. Viewers will see how their nation's economy and society has changed over the past four years under the policies of President Obama.
Born in Boston, Bossie attended the University of Maryland. He has proudly served for the last 20 years as a volunteer firefighter in Montgomery County, Maryland, where he resides with his wife, Susan Bossie, and their four children; Isabella, Griffin, Lily Campbell, and Margaret Reagan.
Citizens United was founded in 1988, and is one of the leading conservative advocacy groups in the country, with over 500,000 members and supporters. Through its films, op-eds, policy papers, newsletters, and grassroots organizing, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security.
- IMDb Mini Biography By: Citizens United
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8/1/16 recoverbossie2 dnstrs:
see new scams at end; fired for doctoring tapes a la o'keefe later
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_N._Bossie
David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United and president and manager of The Presidential Coalition, "earned a reputation as a relentless sleuth -- or right-wing hit man, depending on one's political persuasion -- during his years as a high-profile Republican congressional investigator and conservative activist."[1] Contents1 Swiftboating Hillary2 Hillary: The Movie3 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission4 Obsessed with the Clintons5 More controversy6 "accidental filmmaker"7 Books8 Resources and articles 8.1 Related SourceWatch articles8.2 References8.3 Profiles8.4 Books about David Bossie8.5 Articles by David Bossie8.6 2008 Swiftboating Hillary
Hillary Clinton is "ahead in the polls and on course to become the Democrats' presidential candidate for 2008. So it is no surprise that a right-wing smear campaign is gathering speed to derail Senator Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House," Paul Harris wrote June 17, 2007, for the UK's The Observer. "Conservative groups and political figures are planning a film, books and a concerted media campaign to demonise Clinton, who is already one of the most polarising figures in American politics."Top of the list of projects is a planned movie, being filmed by veteran Republican operator David Bossie.[2] Bossie is raising money for the film through his conservative group Citizens United, which is appealing for video footage, stories about Clinton and money. It plans a release by the end of the year, just as the first primary elections are held in New Hampshire. Bossie is being helped in the project by Dick Morris, a former top Clinton aide who has become a leading Clinton critic," Harris wrote.[3]"Citizens United and other Republican groups are set to model their anti-Clinton operation on the notorious Swift Boat campaign that derailed John Kerry's 2004 bid for the White House. That aggressive smear campaign focused on Kerry's Vietnam war record and was seen as critical in President George W Bush's election victory. 'The Swift Boat campaign is going to be a direct model. They have openly come out and said that,' said Terry Krepel, editor of Conwebwatch, a website that monitors the output of conservative news media," Harris wrote. Hillary: The MovieBossie's film Hillary: The Movie became a subject of controversy during the 2008 presidential election when Bossie was barred from advertising it. A federal court ruled that "Citizens United could not run ads for its negative film on Hillary Rodham Clinton without disclosing the ad’s donors. The group wants to release and promote 'Hillary: The Movie' to coincide with the dates when many states will hold primary elections, but the court found that in order for the ads to adhere to current campaign finance law, Citizens United would have to disclose who paid for the ads."[4] The group has appealed this case all the way to the Supreme Court. For more information about the legal arguments in that case and its implications for individual rights in a democracy as compared with corporate rights, see Portal:Corporate_Rights Citizens United v. Federal Election CommissionIn January 2010, the case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in a divided 5-4 vote, held that section 441b of the 2002 McCain-Feingold federal campaign finance law (Bipartisan Campaign Reform) was unconstitutional. The law prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make independent expenditures for "electioneering communication," or for speech expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate.The ruling effectively protected corporate speech the same as individual speech. The majority’s ruling about corporate electioneering marked a dramatic break from the past. In doing so, the Court rejected a century of previous court decisions that ruled corporate donations can, and should be regulated. In its ruling, the court never explained why corporate identity demands the same treatment as individual identity.[5] Obsessed with the Clintons"Through the 1990s, Bossie spent much of his time assembling caches of documents to push his admittedly ideological agenda. He was a ready promoter of stories about President Bill Clinton's sexual and ethical lapses, proved and otherwise."[6]Note: According to an October 10, 2003, archived version of his Citizens United profile, "Bossie served as president and chief investigator for the Center for Government Integrity, a government watchdog group investigating the then-Clinton Administration."[7]The Center for Government Integrity is a project of Citizens United and not a separate entity, as the profile indicates.Center for Government IntegrityThe Center for Government Integrity (CGI), affiliated with Citizens United, states that it "conducts research, analyzes issues and provides information to the public on an array of issues relating to ethics in government. CGI and its founder, David N. Bossie, were instrumental in exposing corruption in the Clinton administration and the project continues to work to expose and root-out corruption and abuses of power at all levels of government," the Citizens United website states.[1] Contents[hide]1 Solicitations2 Mailing lists3 Contact information4 Resources and articles 4.1 References4.2 External articles SolicitationsResponse Dynamics Inc. is under contract with the Center for Government Integrity and American Sovereignty Action Projects through August 27, 2008.[2] Mailing listsThe mailing list for CGI was sold to "CHRISTIAN PAC DONORS AND ACTIVISTS" by Response Unlimited.[3] Contact information1006 Pennsylvania Avenue, SEWashington, DC 20003Phone: 202 547-5420Toll-Free: 800 362-4788FAX: 202 547-5421URL: http://www.citizensunited.org/ Resources and articlesReferences? Citizens United website.? List of Paid Solicitors for Charitable Organizations, September 1, 2006 through September 1, 2007.? "Usage for CHRISTIAN PAC DONORS AND ACTIVISTS," Response Unlimited, 2000-2004. External articlesDavid M. Walker, Comptroller of the United States, Plaintiff v. Richard B. Cheney, Vice President of the United States and Chair, National Energy Policy Development Group, Civil Action No. 02-0340 (JDB), United States District Court for the District of Columbia, December 9, 2002; posted online by FindLaw: "The Court has received amicus curiae briefs from the Center for Government Integrity, on behalf of defendant, and from Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, on behalf of plaintiff." re Cheney Energy Task ForceJosh Margolin and Ted Sherman, "Legislator drawn into the scandal at UMDNJ. U.S. Attorney looks at Sen. Bryant's job," he Star-Ledger (N.J.), April 7, 2006.Category: Politics (U.S.) Note: The same profile states that "After Clinton's election, Bossie wrote investigative pieces for the monthly newsletter, Clinton Watch. It was at this time Bossie began investigating what is now known as 'Whitewater' and provided key information to the FBI and the national television and print media, which led to the appointment of an Independent Counsel."[8]"Not long into the Clinton Presidency, Citizens United produced the video Clinton Chronicles, based largely on dirt Bossie had been digging in Arkansas. The video, filled with a plethora of factual errors and uncorroborated or disproven rumors, has been almost completely discredited," Dave Gonzo wrote in American Politics Journal May 7, 1998.[9]Trudy Lieberman wrote in the May/June 1994 issue of Columbia Journalism Review:[10]"Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation's press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill. Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency,""Bossie, who says he works sixteen hours a day on Whitewater, earned his Republican stripes as the national youth director in Senator Robert Dole's 1988 presidential campaign, and then moved on during the 1992 Bush campaign to become executive director of the Presidential Victory Committee. His boss, Floyd Brown, worked as Dole's Midwest political director during the 1988 campaign, but is best known for producing the Willie Horton commercial that helped sink the presidential ambitions of Democrat Michael Dukakis.""Bossie was fired from his job as an investigator working for Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee in 1998"[11] while "investigating Clinton-Gore campaign finances."[12] According to a May 7, 1998, front-page article published by the Washington Post,[13] Bossie was fired "after overseeing the release of recordings of Hillary Rodham Clinton's phone conversations with [imprisoned] Whitewater figure Webster L. Hubbell. The tapes were edited to create the impression that Clinton was involved in billing irregularities at the Arkansas law firm where she and Hubbell worked."[14]Note: According to an October 10, 2003, archived version of his Citizens United profile, Bossie said that he "was recruited to this position by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and Chairman Burton to investigate then-President Clinton's illegal foreign money entering the United States to influence the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections. Bossie managed Burton's transition into the Chairmanship; managed a $10 million annual budget; directed personnel matters; and, supervised a 40-plus person investigative staff."[15]Note: In their June 18, 2007, piece for Newsweek, Jonathan Darman and Mark Hosenball noted that "All the digging didn't amount to much: six years after the Clintons left the White House, Burton is a little-heard-from member of the minority party and Hillary Clinton is the front runner to be the Democrats' nominee for president in 2008."[16]"Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Burton, in response to the controversy, 'I'm embarrassed for you, I'm embarrassed for myself, and I'm embarrassed for the [House Republican] conference at the circus that went on at your committee.'"[17]The archived October 2003 Citizens United profile also states that, "Prior to serving Chairman Burton, Bossie served in the United States Senate as an investigator for Senator Lauch Faircloth on the Special Committee to investigate Whitewater Development Corporation and related matters, chaired by Senator Alfonse D'Amato [sic]."[18]"Bossie and his Citizens United gang also made a mark in the 1992 campaign, when it produced an ad featuring Gennifer Flowers and sent out a fund-raising letter that gave the impression it was tied to the official Bush campaign. (The Bush campaign asked the [Federal Election Commission] to shut down Bossie's political action committee.)," David Corn wrote May 7, 1998, for Salon.[19]Bossie's October 13, 2005, archived version of his Citizens United profile has been substantially webscrubbed, with the greatest mention of his involvement investigating the Clinton administration stated as follows:[20]"During Bill Clinton's two terms as president, Bossie led investigations ranging from the Whitewater land deal to the illegal foreign money schemes in the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign and the illegal transfer of dual-use technology to China." More controversyIn a November 2002 Washington Times opinion piece[21], Bossie wrote:"The Carter-Mondale administration is well-remembered as the most beleaguered period in the 20th century. Every American recalls the days of double-digit inflation, interest rates of 20 percent, double-digit unemployment and gas lines that stretched several city blocks."According to published statistics, however, the unemployment rate during Carter's tenure never exceeded 7 1/2 percent, although inflation did reach 13 1/2 % in 1980.[22]In a July 20, 2004, Salon profile of Bossie, Eric Boehlert calls him "a political hit man by trade" and a "renowned Republican dirty trickster" who spent the 1990s "often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish -- and usually unsubstantiated -- assertions about White House wrongdoing".[23]The article notes that he returned during 2004 with books and actions aimed at John Kerry and Michael Moore.According to a July 6, 2002, archived version of his Citizens United profile, Bossie was "State Youth Director for Linda Chavez for U.S. Senate (MD) in 1986; and, the Maryland State Deputy Youth Director for Reagan/Bush re-elect in 1984."[24]The same 2002 profile states:[25]"From 1988 to 1990, Bossie was the Director of Programs for the Leadership Institute which trains young men and women in campaign technology, student publications and the operations of Congress. Also, Bossie organized, managed and lectured at over 40 seminars per year. ..."Bossie has also been the subject of many newspaper stories, columns, and editorials and made an impact in the Clinton Administration."Bob Novak wrote in the forward to Bossie's book, Prince Albert: the Life and Lies of Al Gore, 'the pattern of making maximum accusations that sound outrageous to many people but backing them up with fastidious documentation is Bossie's style.' And 'Bossie is an invariably accurate source' and '?accuracy is his watchword.'"James Carville, President Clinton's top political operative, has said, 'Bossie is responsible for the greatest trick in American history, this entire Whitewater thing.'"Don Baer, former Clinton White House Communications Director said, 'Bossie is the absolute epicenter of the obsession with bringing down Bill Clinton.'"Bossie is also a central character in the national bestseller Bloodsport, written by Pullitzer Prize winning author James Stewart. Stewart wrote that Bossie 'was the tireless conservative operative who became a one-man army against the Clintons and even penetrated a network news operation.'"Bossie attended Towson State University and the University of Maryland where he studied Government and Politics."Note: Bossie's most recent Citizens United profile, accessed June 28, 2007, states the following regarding his education: "Born in Boston, Bossie attended the University of Maryland." There is no longer any mention of Towson State University.[26] "accidental filmmaker""David Bossie, a veteran conservative operative and self-described 'accidental filmmaker,' provided one of the event's most memorable offerings" at the November 10, 2006, weekend Liberty Film Festival in Hollywood, Max Blumenthal wrote November 16, 2006, in The Nation.[27]In 1998, Bossie was "fired from his job as chief investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight" after being "caught selectively editing tapes of former Clinton Administration official Webster Hubbell's prison conversations in a false effort to implicate Hillary Clinton for overbilling his law firm. ... Now Bossie has begun applying his tape-doctoring skills to film, installing editing equipment in the basement of Citizens United's offices and funneling millions of dollars from his group's coffers into producing full-length 'documentaries'," Blumenthal wrote.[28] BooksDavid N. Bossie, Floyd G. Brown, "Prince Albert: the Life and Lies of Al Gore", Merril Press, June 2000, ISBN 0936783281."Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11, WorldNetDaily (WND) Books, May 2004. ISBN: 0785260749David N. Bossie, "The Many Faces of John Kerry", WND Books, July 2004. ISBN 0785260757While the author details on the Amazon listing for Prince Albert: the Life and Lies of Al Gore state Bossie "authored the best selling book, Slick Willie, Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton" the listing of that title only credits Floyd Brown as the author.[1]. A biographical note on the Young America's Foundation website states that Bossie "conducted the research and co-wrote, with Floyd Brown, Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton."[29] Resources and articlesRelated SourceWatch articlesCitizens UnitedCraig ShirleyJeff GerthThe Presidential Coalition References? Michael A. Fletcher, "Taking the Cause to the Big Screen. Conservative Advocate David Bossie Turns to Filmmaking After Looking to Counter 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," Washington Post, August 30, 2006.? Hillary: The Movie at HillaryMovie.com.? Paul Harris, "Anti-Hillary dirty tricks war hots up. Republicans use the internet, books and a film to try to derail Clinton's White House campaign," The Observer (UK), June 17, 2007.? "Some Movie Ads Require Disclosure," CQ's MoneyLine, January 15, 2008.? The Daily Star The court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission Excerpts of the decision. January 28, 2010? Michael A. Fletcher, "Taking the Cause to the Big Screen. Conservative Advocate David Bossie Turns to Filmmaking After Looking to Counter 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," Washington Post, August 30, 2006.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version October 10, 2003. Note: This profile is available in its archived version at WayBackMachine.org.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version October 10, 2003.? Dave "Doctor" Gonzo, "David Bossie, Vast Right-Wing Conspirator of the Week," American Politics Journal, May 7, 1998.? Trudy Lieberman, "Churning Whitewater," CJR (Columbia Journalism Review), May/June 1994. Also archived at FindArticles.com.? "Washington Post, AP ignored Bossie's controversial past in articles about his new ad," Media Matters for America, May 11, 2004.? David Corn, "One-man rumor mill bites the dust," Salon, May 7, 1998.? "Washington Post, AP ignored Bossie's controversial past in articles about his new ad," Media Matters for America, May 11, 2004.? Michael A. Fletcher, "Taking the Cause to the Big Screen. Conservative Advocate David Bossie Turns to Filmmaking After Looking to Counter 'Fahrenheit 9/11'," Washington Post, August 30, 2006.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version October 10, 2003.? Jonathan Darman and Mark Hosenball, "The New War on Hillary," Newsweek (MSNBC), June 18, 2007 (issue).? "Washington Post, AP ignored Bossie's controversial past in articles about his new ad," Media Matters for America, May 11, 2004.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version October 10, 2003.? David Corn, "One-man rumor mill bites the dust," Salon, May 7, 1998.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; most recent archived version October 13, 2005. This profile is available in its archived version at WayBackMachine.org.? No reference cited. However, the URL http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021105-37509625.htm was blocked by the site owner. See the discussion on this entry in the Wikipedia.? "Myth: Carter ruined the economy; Reagan saved it. Fact: The Federal Reserve Board was responsible for the events of the late 70s and 80s," Korpios.org, first archived October 29, 2000.? Eric Boehlert, "You can't teach an old attack dog new tricks", Salon.com, July 20, 2004.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version July 6, 2002. Note: This profile is available in its archived version at WayBackMachine.org.? About staff: David N. Bossie, Citizens United; archived version July 6, 2002.? David Bossie, Citizens United, accessed June 28, 2007.? Max Blumenthal, "Hooray for Right-Wing Hollywood," The Nation, November 16, 2006.? Max Blumenthal, "Hooray for Right-Wing Hollywood," The Nation, November 16, 2006.? Featured Speakers: "David N. Bossie, President, Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation," Young America's Foundation event. Profiles"David Bossie", American Review, undated, accessed October 2004.Guest Info: David Bossie, NewsGuests.com, accessed June 28, 2007.David Bossie, IMDb.com, accessed June 28, 2007. Note: this profile mirrors Bossie's most recent Citizens United profile.David Bossie in the Wikipedia."MEDIAGATE: The Hyping of Whitewater. An Archive," American Review. Includes article links 1992-1998. Books about David BossieGene Lyons, "Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater" (Paperback), Franklin Square Press; 1st ed edition July 1996, ISBN-10 1879957523 / ISBN-13 978-1879957527. Articles by David Bossie"Fahrenheit 9/11: Thumbs Down: Violates Federal Election Campaign Act", Washington Post, June 25, 2004. 2008Bill Berkowitz, Anti-Obama Echo Chamber in Full Swing, Inter Press Service, August 20, 2008.Categories: Politics (U.S.) | Elections (U.S.) | Conservatives | Political dirty tricks | Civil liberties (U.S.) | Needs review
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aug 30 http://cnsnews.com/news/article/**efforts-amend-constitution-limit-speech-will-fail-citizens-united-president-says**
...They’re wasting a lot of their time and energy, which I love,” Citizens United President David Bossie told CNSNews.com. “I wish them all the best in their efforts. I hope that they work tirelessly to no result, because they want to create incumbent protection programs, which is what McCain-Feingold was, which is what the DISCLOSE ACTis.” The landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Citizens United vs. Federal Elections Commission lifted restraints on political speech, allowing corporations and unions to spend money on elections as long as they do not donate directly to a candidate’s campaign.
The ruling overturned much, but not all, of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act.Obama and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) have led the effort to curtail the impact of the ruling.Schumer has proposed the DISCLOSE ACT, which would require greater disclosure requirements for anyone contributing money to the election or defeat of a political candidate.But on Wednesday, during an online chat on the website Reddit, Obama suggested that the Constitution be amended to restrict political donations.“Money has always been a factor in politics, but we are seeing something new in the no-holds barred flow of seven and eight figure checks, most undisclosed, into super-PACs; they fundamentally threaten to overwhelm the political process over the long run and drown out the voices of ordinary citizens,” the president wrote. “We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who. We should also pass legislation prohibiting the bundling of campaign contributions from lobbyists.”
“Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn't revisit it),” Obama wrote. “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”Bossie said the Democrats’ goal is to gain advantage over Republicans:“Citizens United [decision] leveled the playing field,” Bossie said. “What they loved was, for decades, the unions being able to spend their union members’ money unfettered. They loved to be able to have the George Soroses and the MoveOn.orgs. The second conservatives can do the same thing, they cry their crocodile tears.”Bossie referenced oral arguments before the high court to demonstrate the dangers of political speech restrictions.“The most important thing during my case was the government’s admission in the Supreme Court in oral arguments that the logical extension of McCain-Feingold was that if it could ban documentary films, it could ban books,” Bossie said. “That is a dangerous thing.”The Republicans National Convention adopted a plank in their party platform for the full repeal of the McCain-Feingold law. Though the provision restricting outside groups from spending on elections was struck down in the Citizens United ruling, some of the law’s restrictions -- such as individual contributions limits, disclosure requirements and disclaimer requirements -- still exist.
Bossie called the GOP plank “a great first step.”“The party must allow your average American to participate in the political process,” Bossie said. “McCain-Feingold criminalizes political speech. That’s all it does. The American people don’t realize just how arduous and rigid the federal election law is. The barriers to entry for your average person, there are criminal penalties for it if you do it wrong. That’s why people need batteries of lawyers and accountants to meet all the regulatory burdens the U.S. government puts on them.”The Republican platform says, “We oppose any restrictions or conditions that would discourage Americans from exercising their constitutional right to enter the political fray or limit their commitment to their ideals. As a result, we support repeal of the remaining sections of McCain-Feingold, support either raising or repealing contribution limits, and oppose passage of the DISCLOSE Act or any similar legislation designed to vitiate the Supreme Court’s recent decisions protecting political speech in Wisconsin Right to Life v. Federal Election Commission and Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.”Citizens United says it is dedicated to restoring government to citizens' control. “Through a combination of education, advocacy, and grass roots organization, Citizens United seeks to reassert the traditional American values of limited government, freedom of enterprise, strong families, and national sovereignty and security,” its website says.---- dailybeast: David Bossie, the group’s president, had been impressed by Michael Moore’s 2004 anti-Bush polemic, Fahrenheit 911—not only by the film’s commercial success, but by the impact of the advertising campaign promoting the film.
Bossie considered Moore’s ads by far the best political spots of the 2004 cycle, and he decided to transform Citizens United into a political production company. He’d make conservative films targeting liberal candidates, perhaps making some money through the sale of DVDs. But his larger purpose was to use the advertisements for his films as political weapons, exempt (he hoped) from the restrictions of campaign-finance laws because they were in support of a commercial product. ---- Bill Berkowitz, Anti-Obama Echo Chamber in Full Swing, Inter Press Service, August 20, 2008. Bill Berkowitz* 2008 OAKLAND, California, Aug 20 2008 (IPS) - Right-wing groups are stepping up their campaign against Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, with two new books on the best-seller lists, another on the verge of publication, and a full-length documentary that will premiere during the party conventions later this month. Jerome Corsi, a veteran of the 2004 Swiftboating campaign that helped sink the candidacy of the Democratic Party’s John Kerry, had his book “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” debut at No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list on Sunday. Aug. 17 – although the list’s editors noted that some bookstores have reported receiving bulk orders. “The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media’s Favorite Candidate” by David Freddoso is currently ranked at number five. And another Obama-bashing tome, expected sometime next month, is tentatively titled “Obama Unmasked,” and is written by Floyd Brown – the creator of 1988?s infamous Willie Horton television advertisement that helped put the kybosh on the presidential hopes of the Democrat’s Michael Dukakis.Now, on Aug. 24, the eve of the Democratic Party’s convention in Denver, “Hype: The Obama Effect” – a full-length documentary that attacks everything about the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee – will be premiering at the Regal Pavilions 15 in the host city. The free showing is being sponsored by Citizens United and Chairman Dick Wadhams of the Colorado Republican Committee.(The Regal Entertainment Group, which own Regal theaters, is the largest motion picture exhibitor in the world – it operates nearly 20 percent of all indoor screens in the U.S. The chain is owned by Philip Anschutz, an oil magnate, media mogul, and long-time contributor to conservative political causes.)The film, through interviews with a host of Republican Party supporters, criticises Obama’s political positions, mocks the so-called cult of personality that many critics claim embodies his campaign, casts doubts about his judgment, and questions his character. “While ‘Hype’ may not generate large box office receipts, it is sure to become another prong in the right-wing attack machine,” Mike Reynolds, a longtime investigative reporter covering politics and religion, told IPS. “[Citizens United head David] Bossie might be hopeful that as the campaign moves forward, some right-wing websites might offer the film as a premium as they have for the books.” “In order to get regular voters to go see the movie, it will have to garner media buzz on the cable television news networks, like the anti-Obama books have,” Reynolds said. “Looking at both the television advertisement for the film and its five-minute trailer, it’s clear that neither Bossie nor Alan Peterson, the film’s director, have chops; they’re no Michael Moore.”During the 2004 presidential campaign, one of the earliest attacks against the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate Senator John Kerry – predating by several months the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mega-attack on the candidate’s military record – was spearheaded by Floyd Brown’s group, Citizens United, a long-time conservative enterprise.The ad became one of George W. Bush’s major themes: Based on Mastercard’s famous ad campaign, the spot cataloged the cost of Kerry’s expensive taste in clothes and his ownership of properties worth millions of dollars. It ended with “Another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he’s a man of the people? Priceless.”The goal of the Citizens United advertisement was to make Kerry look like an elitist; a premise that Bush advisor Karl Rove and the campaign of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, has revived again this year. These days, in addition to the Obama-is-an-elitist message, he is also being defined by McCain as an empty suit – a “celebrity” who is out of touch with regular folks.In June of this year, Rove – now a roving right-wing commentator with the Fox News Channel, the Wall Street Journal and other mainstream media platforms – pulled the snob card from the deck. Speaking at a country club, Rove likened Obama, to “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”In other words, Obama, the first African American to run for the presidency, is oddly enough being tagged as an elitist who is out of step with the U.S. public.Bossie, who co-produced “Hype: The Obama Effect”, which was directed and written by Alan Peterson – who also directed “Fahrenhype 9/11,” a response to Michael Moore’s award-winning documentary “Fahrenheit 911? – recognises that the film will likely have a very limited – if any – run in theaters and he intends to market it via mail-order sales on the Citizen United website, and through other DVD outlets.“Bossie is a political hatchet man whose career is based on smears and attacking Democrats,” John Stauber, the executive director of the Centre for Media and Democracy, told IPS. “His Obama documentary will provide plenty of footage for use on the internet and in commercials, but I doubt that in and of itself that “Hype” will make much difference in the campaign.”“I assume that the overall theme of Obama as ‘socialist agent disguised as cult hero’ must be resonating in the political marketing surveys of the Bossie-types and the McCain operatives, or they would switch to something more effective,” Stauber added.“Going back to the days when he was unremitting in his attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton, Bossie’s forte has never been accuracy,” Reynolds said. “It has been bloodletting. And in that regard, if ‘Hype’ gets any traction at all, it is likely to be viewed as the political counterpart of [the horror movie franchise] Saw V, due to be released just before the election.”
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2014
breitbart
CITIZENS UNITED HEAD DAVID BOSSIE: CONSERVATISM UNDER ATTACK FROM WITHIN
Earlier this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, David Bossie, the president of Citizens United and a veteran congressional investigator during the Clinton years, did not mince words."The conservative movement," he said, "is always under attack from the left. But right now, more importantly, we're under attack from within our coaltion as well.""The movement is fractured," he said, because groups like the American Conservative Union are "straying from our shared conservative values."Citing the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who wrote that the conservative movement is "on the side of excellence rather than newness," Bossie asserted that the conservative movement is threatened now because "certain groups are trying to buy their way into [it]."According to Bossie, the conservative movement "is not part of the Republican Party, whose mission is to elect Republicans." Instead, Bossie said, "our mission is to promote conservative candidates and our core conservative values and principles." "The [conservative] coalition that men like Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan built stood on three equally important foundations : fiscal conservativism, strong national defense, and a social conservativism that held society should adopt a moral code set down by God, the same God from whom we derive our most important civil rights.""Conservativism itself cannot stand divided. There are some groups today who want to do just that," Bossie said. But Bossie reminded his audience,"it was the unity of the Reagan Coalition that gave it strength."Bossie called for a vigorous defense of the conservative movement's core principles. "Some of conservativism's enemies . . . would see social conservatives silenced and driven out of the movement." Others would see both social conservatives and national security supporters driven out. "These forces constantly scold us," he said, "that we shouldn't stand in front of history and yell stop, but rather stand aside and politely wave as history passes by.""They tell us we shouldn't defend the rights of the unborn . . . [or] the institution of marriage," he added.Bossie said the forces opposing the historical principles of the conservative movement resort to tactics based on propaganda rather than intellectual honesty. "They call us names. They call us bigots," he said. "They call us intolerant for daring to speak up against the intellectual cliques of the cosmopolitan left."But Bossie rejected this distortion of the modern conservative movement. "Theirs is a conservative movement that would be enslaved to the moral fallacies and fads... of the moment."Conservatives, Bossie concluded, should reject this approach because it is "a recipe for a crippled movement, a losing coalition in a failing country."You can watch Bossie's entire speech here:=DAVID BOSSIEBack in the year 2000, colleagues David Bossie and Floyd G. Brown collaborated on a book entitled, “Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore.”There’s little surprise there given the fact that both men are devout climate change deniers and evolution myth theorists.David Bossie, an acolyte of Ronald Reagan, went to work for Floyd Brown at the Presidential Victory Committee back in 1992. He had already come into prominence, and perhaps flown into Brown’s radar, when he and another colleague attempted to show that Susann Coleman had become impregnated by, and committed suicide, after an affair with her law professor, Bill Clinton. Interestingly, Bossie was hired by Fred Thompson’s U.S. Senate Investigation of the Whitewater Scandal as a lead investigator, to look into Clinton’s financial abuses.During the investigation it came to light that Bossie, et. al. had published tapes that had been redacted. Bossie was summarily fired.Once sitting pretty in Brown’s Citizens United Foundation, and feeling right at home with those of the same mind-set, Bossie began to focus his attention on the Citizens United Productions division. Creating such films as: Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration; Celsius 41.11; Rediscovering God in America, hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich; Hillary: The Movie; and Occupy Unmasked, Bossie and friends were riding high in their saddle as a major righ-ring propaganda mill.It was, of course, Hillary: The Movie that brought them into the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court of the United States. When they were sued before the film was scheduled to be released in early 2008, the suit also brought with it an injunction. Unfortunately, for Bossie and friends, the appeals court did not hear the case until 2010, and the movie was then untimely. However, the Supreme Court ruling referred to by us today simply as Citizens United, sent an outcry throughout the country which is still reverberating today.In addition to his office at Citizens United, Bossie is a member of the National Conservative Campaign Fund, and has served as Director of Programs at the prestigious right-wing Leadership Institute which is home to many of the Christian right politicians. Additionally, he is listed as the President and Manager of the Presidential Coalition, a Republican front group that is closely affiliated with Citizens United and instrumental in funding state and local candidates – so close, in fact that they share the same address at 1006 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s a cozy relationship. But, that’s not the only coziness that Bossie enjoys. Sleaze or not, his gallery of running buddies is vast as you can see on the chart below:
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see new scams at end; fired for doctoring tapes a la o'keefe later
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2014
You have to wonder how many people in America, even those who are well informed, make the connection between the notorious Supreme Court decision that unleashed unprecedented campaign spending and the slimy political assassination outfit called Citizens United that brought the case? It's not that people of low character have never succeeded in winning Supreme Court cases before. But it's difficult to find a group with less integrity than this one.
You may recall that the case itself was about a film called "Hillary: the Movie," which was produced by Citizens United in anticipation of the 2008 election and which the FEC ruled was not a movie at all but rather a 90-minute campaign commercial that was "susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her." This designation as an advertisement ran afoul of elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation and Theodore Olson, Citizens United's attorney, filed a case against the FEC claiming its First Amendment rights had been violated. And the rest is history.
What many people may not know, however, is the history of Citizens United. It goes all the way back to the 1980s when it was created by the notorious hatchet man from Arkansas, Floyd Brown of Willie Horton fame. In 1992, in anticipation of a flood of juicy opportunities for character assassination of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, he brought on David Bossie, a young and ambitious GOP operative. Their joint effort was a massive and instant success with the media, which used it as a major "source" for years. As early as 1994 some media critics were concerned about the group's allure among the press corps. Trudy Lieberman wrote an exposé of the group called "Churning Whitewater" for the Columbia Journalism Review, although nobody in the mainstream media seemed particularly concerned.
Lieberman described the scene this way:
In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp,handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. "I have a whole file on bond transactions," Bossie tells Ingersoll. "I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out." A few minutes later Bossie says, "I don't know what I have to give you," but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. "You're on deadline, I understand that." He then points Ingersoll in another direction. "Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm," he adds.
"Lot 7," Bossie tells me between calls, is the next big story. "ABC and U.S. News & World Report are looking at Lot 7. We're the only ones that have the abstract. Wade [Chris Wade, a real estate agent who sold some of the Whitewater lots] dumped the property and got something from the Clintons."
The phone rings again. Bossie addresses the caller as "Judge." "That judge who called," Bossie explains later, "called me in August and said he had a friend, [another judge named] David Hale, who was in trouble because of Bill Clinton." It was this phone call and the charges that Hale later made through Bossie's organization, Citizens United, that fueled David Bossie's zealous investigation into Whitewater. Bossie's efforts have, in turn, generated daily page-one headlines and another chapter in the saga of American pack journalism. "I'm the information bank," he says.
The dreadful performance of the press in that era was fully exposed in the book "The Hunting of the President" by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons and Lyons' earlier "Fools for Scandal." (If you are a young person who is unfamiliar with the moldy details, these are the books you'll need to read to get up to speed before the next election.) The media claque was dazzled by the gothic and byzantine world of small state politics and there were, as usual, plenty of con artists and grifters ready to feed them exactly the kind of lurid tales that would appeal to their big city imaginations. Citizens United became a clearinghousefor all this shady material, alternating between spoon feeding enticing tidbits to the press and dumping vast amounts of incomprehensible material that sounded bad but ended up being misleading at best when the facts were untangled. This was the essence of '90s-style "smell test" politics in which many people observed the sheer volume of complicated accusations, threw up their hands and assumed that where there's this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere.
But David Bossie didn't stop there. He was a major player in a later scandal of his own when he moved up the conservative ladder to serve as the chief investigator for congressman Dan "watermelon man"Burton and was eventually forced to resign in disgrace. The Washington Post reported on his sordid denouement in May of 1998:
The chairman of the House investigation into Clinton-Gore campaign financing abuses apologized to fellow Republicans yesterday for the uproar over his release of transcripts of Webster L. Hubbell's prison conversations and removed his chief investigator under pressure from House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
The move came as Gingrich sought to contain the damage, condemning "the circus" that took place within Indiana Republican Dan Burton's Government Oversight and Reform Committee and scolding Burton at a closed Republican Conference meeting for refusing to say that he was embarrassed by the episode...
His hard-driving chief investigator, David Bossie, submitted a letter of resignation later in the day, saying that he wanted to blunt the "unjustified attacks" coming from House Democrats and the White House.
The editing and release of the Hubbell tapes, subpoenaed by the committee last year, was described by one insider as a "Dave Bossie project," opposed by the panel's chief counsel and other committee staffers but ultimately approved by Burton.
In meetings this week, Gingrich and other leaders have voiced their concerns over Burton's staff. While Burton defended his senior investigator publicly and said Bossie was leaving of his own accord, Gingrich told the conference yesterday that Bossie, who had survived repeated previous attempts, had been fired.
When even Newt Gingrich thinks you're beyond the pale, you are beyond the pale. But this is the GOP we're talking about and its practitioners of the dark art of character assassination have more lives than a feral cat. Within a year Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his “outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement” and was soon after merrily pimping conspiracy stories and cultivating his fan base in the press corps. By 2004 he was all over television talking about his lawsuit against Michael Moore, with the Federal Election commission claiming that Moore's film "Fahrenheit 451" violated campaign finance laws. Yes, that was the same David Bossie whose organization Citizens United just four years later made "Hillary: the Movie" into a crusade that ended up leaving the campaign finance system in tatters. You can't make this stuff up.
Charles Pierce caught up with himat the 2012 Republican convention where he was the toast of the hall and described Bossie's new state of grace: He "has had his life's work blessed through the incredible naivete of Justice Anthony Kennedy by the highest court in this land. He is sanctified by it. His entire career has been made pure."It was the highlight of a long, illustrious career of dirty tricks and hatchet jobs.
So what's Bossie up to these days, you wonder? Well, he's turned up in Colorado with a new film made in tandem with another longtime conservative operative Michelle Malkin about the leftist billionaires who have turned the state into a dystopian hellhole crawling with gun-grabbing potheads who are trying to destroy the energy industry. And, needless to say, once more Citizens United stands accused of selectively editing interviews to deceive the audience and give the opposite impression of what the subject actually meant.
David Bossie told Charles Pierce back in 2012:
"I think your career has different chapters. Before the Supreme Court was a chapter. Just leading Citizens United. Post-the Supreme Court decision is a different chapter. My time on Capitol Hill as an investigator was a chapter. My time as a fireman living in a firehouse was a chapter. So, you know, everybody has a chapters in their lives.
The book on David Bossie is actually a pretty unlikely tale. He's a standard-issue Republican dirty trickster whose mundane wet work has somehow managed to have a profound effect on the American political system for more than 20 years.In the world of partisan hit men he may be the best there ever was. And he isn't done yet.
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
MORE FROM HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
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http://web.archive.org/web/20040427023804/http://archives.cjr.org/year/94/3/whitewater.asp
May/June 1994 | Contents
CHURNING WHITEWATER
by Trudy Lieberman
Lieberman is a senior editor atConsumer Reports.
"The mainstream media (to which we mail ClintonWatch regularly) is now beginning to parrot much of the information and analysis we break."
-- ClintonWatch, November 1993
"Citizens United has been a powerful force behind the exposure of the biggest story to hit Washington D.C. since Watergate."
--Citizens Agenda, February 1994
In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter forThe Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. "I have a whole file on bond transactions," Bossie tells Ingersoll. "I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out." A few minutes later Bossie says, "I don't know what I have to give you," but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. "You're on deadline, I understand that." He then points Ingersoll in another direction. "Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm," he adds.
"Lot 7," Bossie tells me between calls, is the next big story. "ABC andU.S. News & World Report are looking at Lot 7. We're the only ones that have the abstract. Wade [Chris Wade, a real estate agent who sold some of the Whitewater lots] dumped the property and got something from the Clintons."
The phone rings again. Bossie addresses the caller as "Judge." "That judge who called," Bossie explains later, "called me in August and said he had a friend, [another judge named] David Hale, who was in trouble because of Bill Clinton." It was this phone call and the charges that Hale later made through Bossie's organization, Citizens United, that fueled David Bossie's zealous investigation into Whitewater. Bossie's efforts have, in turn, generated daily page-one headlines t and another chapter in the saga of American pack journalism. "I'm the information bank," he says.
Bossie, the twenty-eight-year-old political director for Citizens United, a conservative Republican operation, runs an information factory whose Whitewater production lines turn out a steady stream of tips, tidbits, documents, factoids, suspicions, and story ideas for the nation's press and for Republicans on Capitol Hill.Journalists and Hill Republicans have recycled much of the information provided by Citizens United into stories that have cast a shadow on the Clinton presidency.
Bossie, who says he works sixteen hours a day on Whitewater, earned his Republican stripes as the national youth director in Senator Robert Dole's 1988 presidential campaign, and then moved on during the 1992 Bush campaign to become executive director of the Presidential Victory Committee. His boss, Floyd Brown, worked as Dole's Midwest political director during the 1988 campaign, but is best known for producing the Willie Horton commercial that helped sink the presidential ambitions of Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Brown, with Bossie as a principal researcher, wrote"Slick Willie": Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton, a 192-page paperback released during the 1992 presidential campaign. At the time, the press paid little attention to the book's revelations, including a preview of the current Whitewater scenario.
Since the Arkansas judge's telephone call last August, Citizens United has collected thousands of facts and documents on Whitewater and packaged it all to catch the attention of the press and to restoke the story whenever it threatened to die down.
Bossie and Brown have been briefing people since October -- "the top fifty major publications, networks, and editorial boards," Bossie says. "We've provided the same material on the Hill both on the House and Senate side." An equal opportunity source, Bossie says he would gladly provide documents to Democrats, but they haven't asked.
Francis Shane, publisher of Citizens United's newsletter,ClintonWatch, hesitates to say exactly whom they've worked with -- "We don't particularly like to pinpoint people" -- but he does say, "We have worked closer withThe New York TimesthanThe Washington Times." Jeff Gerth,The New York Times's chief reporter on Whitewater, hesitated to talk on the record. He did say, "If Citizens United has some document that's relevant, I take it. I check it out like anything else."
Most of the information is found in five thick packets stacked up around the Citizens United offices, four of them neatly bound and bearing the Citizens United emblem -- an eagle and a flag -- on the front. There's the volume titled "Arkansas Bond Deals with Stephens Inc.," which, among other things, details the potential problems Citizens United perceives with a 1989 Arkansas Student Loan Association bond issue. "Truly there are many areas of this issue which need further investigation," the volume points out. Bossie himself says, "They were making sweetheart deals through bonds," and then he adds, "The ones working on this areMoney magazine andThe Bond Buyer." A second volume covers Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's tax returnsfrom 1980 through 1990; a third details lawsuits involving James McDougal; a fourth is a collection of real estate abstracts; and a fifth is a package titled "Whitewater Documents," which contains an assortment of deeds, mortgages, checks, letters, reports, balance sheets, and press releases. Citizens United has also compiled an eighteen-page list of "Criminal statutes relating to potential Whitewater Crimes," complete with legal citations.
ClintonWatch, a newsletter dedicated to "Proving Character Does Count in a President," is sent to all media and contains tales and tidbits that have found their way into the nation's news. The organization's official newsletter, Citizens Agenda, sent to its 11,000 subscribers periodically, offers a morsel or two and boasts about the group's success in siccing the media on to the Whitewater story. Citizens United's newest information effort is a Whitewater Fax Bulletin, also calledClintonWatch, which is fed to the media almost daily. "Nobody seems to have all the answers, but by sharing our information with members of the media, we can start putting pieces together ... We are making new discoveries every day," Brown said in launching his new fax service in early March. One of the first Fax Bulletins was aimed at stirring up interest in Lot 7, which Bossie had told me was the next big story.
The March 1994 issue ofClintonWatch characterized the organization's impact on Whitewater press coverage this way: "We here atClintonWatch have been working day and night with the major news media to help them get the word out about the Clintons and their questionable dealings in Whitewater and Madison Guaranty." Of course, Citizens United is not the only source of information on Whitewater. And reputable reporters do their own digging and doublechecking. Still, an examination of some 200 news stories from the major news outlets aired or published since November shows an eerie similarity between the Citizens United agenda and what has been appearing in the press, not only in terms of specific details but in terms of omissions, spin, and implication.Here are four cases in point.
David Hale talks
Citizens United takes full credit for blowing the Whitewater story wide open with what it calls Floyd Brown's "exclusive news-making interview with Arkansas Municipal Judge David Hale." Hale, who owned Capital Management Services, a Small Business Administration-approved lending company, claims he was pressed by then Governor Clinton to make a loan of $ 300,000 to Susan McDougal, one of the Clintons's Whitewater partners, who, he said, did not qualify. Part of this loan allegedly found its way into the coffers of the Whitewater Development Corp.
The November 1993 issue ofClintonWatch recounts much of what Hale told Brown in a feature called "Clinton Fingered in Loan Cover-Up." As that issue was making its way to the news desks of the nation's media, Citizens United began arranging interviews for Hale with various news organizations. "Everything Hale has done [with the media] has gone through us," Shane told me.
On November 2The New York Times andThe Washington Post broke the Hale story. Both deny that Brown was the source. "Mr. Hale asserted in interviews with reporters," that Clinton had personally pressed him to make the $ 300,000 loan, theTimes article said. A few days laterThe Washington Times featured in its news columns a copy of the $ 300,000 check payable to Susan McDougal and signed by Hale. That check is in Bossie's Whitewater document collection labeled exhibit "B-1."
Over the next several weeks, virtually all of the major media carried Hale's version of the loan transaction, but few looked into his political connections, his motives, or his credibility. Many referred to interviews they had had with Hale himself. On November 7, for example, the Los Angeles Times said, "In a series of interviews, Hale provided this account...." On November 11, NBC reported: "Now this man, a former local judge under indictment on an unrelated case, has told NBC News...." The November 15 issue of Newsweek mentioned a "telephone interview" with Hale. On December 15, ABC'sWorld News Tonight noted, "This is David Hale, until recently a Little Rock investor...."
Hillary seeks power of attorney
In the same story that featured the $ 300,000 check,The Washington Times lobbed another grenade: it printed a copy of a letter Hillary Clinton wrote to McDougal on November 28, 1988, asking for power of attorney over Whitewater matters. TheTimes portrayed the letter as proof that, despite their disclaimers, the Clintons were active in the management of Whitewater.
The letter filtered through the press. In January,USA Today creditedThe Washington Times's disclosure with keeping the Whitewater issue alive, andThe Wall Street Journal in a March 18 story on the "scrappy 12-year-old broadsheet" noted the paper's power-of-attorney "scoop." A Nexis search turns up thirty-one news organizations that cited the power of attorney letter. Some used it to show the Clintons were more than passive investors in Whitewater; a few amplified the facts.The Boston Globe, for example, reported that Hillary Clinton obtained the power of attorney;USA Today noted, correctly, that she didn't. The letter seeking power of attorney is in the Citizens United file as exhibit "K-1."
The fact that Hillary Clinton asked for power of attorney in 1988 is intriguing, but does it prove the Clintons's long-standing involvement? Or could them have been other explanations? For example, was McDougal, who had experienced health problems, incapable of cleaning up the mess Whitewater supposedly had become?
The Sheffield Nelson tapes
Newsweek's February 7 issue revealed that Sheffield Nelson, a Little Rock attorney who ran against Clinton for governor in 1990, had taped conversations with McDougal. In those conversations, McDougal claims that the Clintons had not been truthful about their Whitewater losses, and is quoted as saying, "I could sink [the claim of a $ 69,000] loss quicker than they could lie about it .... And Bill Clinton knows it."Newsweek said the tape was obtained from "independent sources" but had been "authenticated" by Nelson. Several newspapers picked up Newsweek's findings.
Two weeks later Representative Jim Leach, the ranking Republican on the House Banking Committee, handed to the press additional portions of the Sheffield Nelson tapes -- giving the "sink and lie" quote even wider circulation.The Los Angeles Times in a story crediting Leach with release of the tapes did note that a portion of Nelson's interview with McDougal "was previously provided to some reporters by sources who asked not to be identified."
CNN picked up the story, named Leach as the source of the tapes, and cited "new evidence resurrecting some of the most serious questions about President Clinton's role in the Whitewater controversy." CNN showed viewers a $ 6,300 Whitewater check for payment of a mortgage taken out by Hillary Clinton, which it said "appears to back up at least part of the McDougal tape," but did not explain how. Nowhere in the broadcast did CNN demystify the implied connection between the mortgage payment and McDougal's taped statement. (Exhibit "J-9" in the Citizens United collection shows a "Whitewater Development Co. check #130, reflecting a $ 6,361.65 interest payment on H. Rodham. #23039.")
NBC waited until mid-March to do its version of the Nelson tape, which it said "NBC News has obtained." It, too, gave prominence to the "sink and lie" quote. But NBC used a different check to back up McDougal's allegation on the tape, that the Clintons did not lose money on Whitewater. NBC said that among the Clintons's losses for 1982 was a check for $ 20,744. NBC noted that the White House said the money was for repayment of a Whitewater-related loan. On camera, McDougal said the check was repayment for a personal loan. (Exhibit J-4 in the Bossie Whitewater collection notes: "Bill Clinton check #621 for $ 20,744.65 to Madison Bank & Trust noted as repayment of note." ABC had shown the same check five weeks earlier.)
In his press conference at the end of March, Clinton admitted the check was not a Whitewater loss, but a loan, which he had forgotten about, taken out to help his mother buy a cabin.
Was Citizens United a source for NBC's piece?ClintonWatch publisher Shane says only, "We have a close relationship with them. We've worked with all the networks. Ira [producer Ira Silverman] does a good job." An incident reported in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reveals how close that relationship is. In January, the paper said that former Arkansas Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett Schaffer accused Bossie and an NBC crew of ambushing her outside her office and then stalking her after she refused to grant an on-camera interview. Silverman was quoted as saying the incident was the result of "aggressive journalism," noting that Bossie was in Arkansas "for another aspect of NBC's investigation" into Whitewater. Silverman says, "I talk to them [Citizens United] along with everyone else. Back in October and November it was difficult to develop sources." He added that early on Bossie provided sources.
The only reporter who acknowledged a connection between Citizens United and the tape was John Aloysius Farrell of theThe Boston Globe, who reported that conservative activist Floyd Brown "is up to his old tricks.... This week Brown released a typical nugget to the press: a tape of a spring 1992 visit by Clinton's partner in Whitewater Development Co., James McDougal, to the law offices of GOP attorney Sheffield Nelson."
4 Vince Foster solicits the FDIC
In 1989, Vince Foster wrote to the FDIC seeking legal work for the Rose law firm from the government, which was beginning to clean up the savings and loan mess. The government was trying to recoup some of its losses by suing Frost & Co., a Little Rock accounting firm that had been hired by the state to examine the books of Madison Guaranty. The government contended that Frost had issued a misleading report about Madison's financial condition. In his letter, Foster said the firm does not represent any savings and loan, although the firm apparently had previously represented Madison Guaranty, a potential conflict of interest. Rose got the job.
The Washington Post, citing FDIC records, broke the story of Foster's letter on November 3, three and a half months after his suicide. It was picked up later that month byThe Washington Times and publications covering the thrift industry.The Wall Street Journal mentioned it in a mid-December editorial.
But it wasn't until early January, after Citizens United featured Foster's letter inClintonWatch, that it received prominent play in the media. The newsletter said that the Rose firm had settled its $ 60 million suit against Frost for $ 1 million and then "billed the government $ 400,000 for its trouble." It also emphasized a pointThe Washington Post had made in passing. It quoted from Foster's letter: "[the] firm does not represent any savings and loan association in state or federal regulatory matters," but added this embellishment: "(note the use of the present -- not the past -- tense)."
From January 1 to the end of March, twenty-three news organizations referred to the Foster letter -- more than triple the number that picked up the story after the November 3Washington Post piece. Many, includingThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution,The Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic, andThe Boston Globe, mentioned the $ 400,000 fee highlighted inClintonWatch. Newsday, on January 16, called attention to Foster's use of the present tense in his letter.
All of the surveyed papers quoted the same portion of Foster's letter. Only theMinneapolis Star Tribune gave the letter a fuller presentation. It added this from the letter: "... while there may be individual transactions or situations where a conflict of interest would arise, we believe that the firm would not be ethically disqualified from serving as fee counsel." The paper goes on to point out that Foster does not mention Rose's past involvement with Madison.
TheStar Tribune story was only one of two stories during that period that we found which brought some balance to the charges flying about the Clintons, and to question what the fuss was all about. The other was a January 31Business Week story, which pointed out that the "Whitewater case could end with a whimper, not a bang," because, among other reasons, the government has already investigated many of the dealings of James McDougal and come up empty handed, a point that should have been made in other stories. (Recently, the Chicago Tribune andThe Wall Street Journal featured stories exploring the link between Bossie and Brown and the Whitewater story.)
In mid-February, the FDIC cleared the Rose law firm of conflict of interest in the Frost & Co. matter. William Satire referred to FDIC investigators as "whitewashers." Republicans prevailed on the FDIC to reopen the case.
Back in October,ClintonWatch exhorted the Washington news media to "end their endless babbling about Camelot and get down to the business of investigating the legal, ethical, and moral shortcomings of the Clinton administration."
Whitewater is about character, publisher Fran Shane tells me. "The American people have elected a president with 43 percent of the vote. He is a man of no character. He may have to tell the people he didn't come clean. We're saying Bill Clinton may not be worth saving."
Many news organizations explain the importance of Whitewater in similar terms. TakeTime, for instance. In a January 24 story laced with references to documents that also appear in Bossie's Whitewater collection, the magazine pronounced that "the investigation concerns the much larger issue of whether a President and First Lady can be trusted to obey the law and tell the truth."
The character issue can be turned on the press, which has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization, with revenues of more than $ 2 million a year, without identifying the group as the soume of their information.
Of course, journalists get leads and documents from all kinds of sources, savory and otherwise. Then the good journalist goes on to corroborate, amplify, and analyze the facts, and judge whether Fact A really does connect to Fact B. Those elements were missing from most of the pieces we examined.
Some stories did point out that no crimes and no illegalities had been committed. Often they nevertheless went on to string together assorted facts, without the connective tissue. Instead, the stories were peppered with such phrases as "those interviewed also wonder aloud," "eyebrows are raised," "questions persist," "scandalous odors," and "ethically suspect sweetheart deal." This approach had the effect of implying guilt by innuendo. The bigger the pile, the guiltier the Clintons must be.
As of this writing in early April, it appeared that Citizens United was still conducting outreach. A briefing led by Floyd Brown for the Washington press corps was held at the National Press Club on March 15 "to discuss information and documentation regarding Whitewater." According to Shane, the experience was like "trying to explain it to the learning disabled." Apparently, though, Citizens United was getting through. The next day the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that Brown handed out a "treasure trove of information" to reporters, "who grabbed them up like goodies."
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https://www.salon.com**/2004**/07/20/david_bossie/
for David Bossie, professional Clinton-era agitator and renowned Republican dirty trickster, these must seem like the good old days. During the 1990s Bossie, as a grass-roots activist and congressional staffer, was often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish -- and usually unsubstantiated -- assertions about White House wrongdoing. Once Clinton left the national stage, Bossie, a political hit man by trade, seemed adrift professionally.
But with the emergence of a new political campaign and a new Democratic presidential candidate, Bossie has returned to his partisan groove. This week sees the publication of his quickie attack biography, "The Many Faces of John Kerry," which is sure to garner him cable-TV face time during and after next week's Democratic Convention, as bookers seek out Kerry critics to liven up their coverage. This product comes on the heels of Bossie's May release, "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11," in which Bossie reinvents himself as a national security expert and blames Clinton (of course) for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
In June, Bossie hit a publicity -- and presumably fundraising -- geyser when the archconservative Citizens United group, of which he is president, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, insisting that TV ads for Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11,"if aired after July 31, would violate new campaign finance laws because they double as political advertising. The FEC has not ruled on the matter, but the complaint itself once again thrust Bossie into the media limelight.
Topping off Bossie's comeback was the recent release of Clinton's memoir, "My Life." Not only did that publishing phenomenon give Bossie yet more opportunities to spout off against Clinton in the media, including ananti-Clinton attack ad broadcast during the former president's "60 Minutes" interview,but the book also solidified the unusual status Bossie had achieved. Anyone who gave Clinton's hefty book the Washington read (that is, a quick skim of the index pages) quickly discovered that Clinton made several mentions of Bossie.
"How often does a president know the name of a Hill staffer?" asks Glenn Ivey, who battled Bossie during the congressional Whitewater investigation. Ivey served as Democratic Sen. Paul Sarbanes' counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee, while Bossie worked behind the scenes as a staffer for congressional Republicans. "That's a strong statement as to the level, the profile, Bossie has developed."
Ivey rarely, if ever, agreed with the relentlessly partisan Bossie during the investigation. Yet he did see something he admired: "I respected the energy David brought to the enterprise. He was their driving force." One of Ivey's former congressional colleagues, who was also immersed in the perpetual Whitewater investigation, is less generous, recalling Bossie as "a lunatic."
Bossie's style during the investigation was to lob scattershot allegations toward an appreciative press corps that rarely seemed upset when the charges he gave them to amplify -- that Whitewater was a criminal enterprise, for instance -- failed to pan out as factual. As Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, "He made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps." But none of this appears to have marred Bossie's reputation with reporters, even when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- no stranger to hardball partisan politics -- reportedly ordered Bossie fired from his congressional staff position in May 1998. Bossie had overseen the bungled release of supposedly incriminating recordings of Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell's jailhouse phone conversations about Hillary Rodham Clinton -- recordings that had been edited, deleting obvious exculpatory remarks.
Now some critics wonder how a political prankster like Bossie has managed to maintain respectability in Washington, particularly among the press. A Nexis search retrieves more than 100 press references to Bossie this year, with MSNBC proving to be especially accommodating toward him. "Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we're defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously," says former Clinton aide Paul Begala. "There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them."
"We've evolved into celebrity journalists. We judge them by Hollywood standards; if you're big enough, it doesn't matter why or how you got big in the first place," says Gene Lyons, coauthor with Joe Conason of "The Hunting of the President," which details many of Bossie's misadventures. "Now the same is true with political operatives. The fact that Bossie's name is known and he's achieved a certain celebrity status trumps the fact that he achieved that celebrity status by making shit up and twisting evidence to vilify Democratic politicians. He's a modern-day Donald Segretti," says Lyons, referring to the young Republican attorney hired by Richard Nixon's 1968 election team to sabotage Democratic campaign events -- "rat fucking" is what Segretti and his buddies called the tactic.
Bossie, through his spokeswoman, declined to comment for this story. So did Citizens United's founder, Floyd Brown.
Bossie joined Citizens United in 1992 as its director of political affairs, which he quickly transformed into a full-time job of hounding the Clintons. The group was essentially a two-man operation. Four years earlier Citizens United had produced the infamous race-baiting Willie Horton ad. "That spot was, is, will ever after be a nightmare," GOP strategist Mary Matalin once told the Chicago Tribune.
In fact, in 1992, Bush's father condemned Bossie and Brown's gutter practices, telling reporters: "We will do whatever we can to stop any filthy campaign tactics." During that same campaign, George W. Bush, on his father's behalf, even sent out a letter to 85,000 Republican contributors encouraging them not to contribute to Brown and Bossie's effort.
"What does the RNC [Republican National Committee] say about Bossie today?" wonders Begala. Terry Holt, spokesman for the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign, did not return calls seeking comment regarding Bossie, whose group bankrolled an anti-Kerry ad earlier this year.
The press has also been hesitant to discuss, or dissect, Bossie's current role. For instance, during the controversy surrounding the release of "Fahrenheit 9/11," many news outlets, including the New York Times in a June 27 article, simply identified Bossie as the president of Citizens United. But the Times is well acquainted with Bossie's modus operandi; he has boasted about feeding information to its reporters, especially Jeff Gerth, every step of the way in their ill-advised, and since discredited, Whitewater investigation. "We have worked closer [on Whitewater] with the New York Times than the Washington Times," Bossie's colleague Brown once bragged to the Columbia Journalism Review.
And as the Washington Times noted, Bossie made a deal to leak the Senate Whitewater Committee's final report to the New York Times. Yet years later, when Bossie reemerges in the news as a critic of "Fahrenheit 9/11," to unsuspecting Times readers he's described simply as another grass-roots Republican activist.
"At the very least, you'd expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes," says David Brock, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal online research and monitoring organization. "That doesn't seem like the type of person whose words are worth much."
"As a principle I'd agree readers ought to know where particular sources are coming from," says Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who has dealt with Bossie for many years. "On the other hand, I don't think David Bossie makes any secret about what his agenda is and where he's coming from."
In the past, reporters who fed off Bossie's wayward leaks were reluctant to shed light on his ability to engineer stories behind the scenes. In the early 1990s, the press printed and broadcast verbatim the Whitewater allegations being leveled by Citizens United and its ready-made press packets. Yet reporters rarely made public the source of their Whitewater leads. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time, the press "has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization without identifying the group as the source of their information."
"There's no doubt journalists have been compromised by [Bossie]," says Begala. "Once [they] make a commitment to somebody like that, they stick with him through thick and thin."
Adds Ivey: "If you look at how the press covered Bossie's ethical lapses and compare it with how they covered ethical issues raised about the Clinton administration, he really got kid gloves -- because reporters were the ones he had been feeding information to."
Bossie has generated unusual loyalty from some in the press corps. "Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me," ABC News producer Chris Vlasto notoriously told the Washington Post in one of its several Bossie profiles in the 1990s. Vlasto, who did not return a call for comment for this story, made that statement in 1997, five years after the accusations about Whitewater were first raised and two years after the Clintons were exonerated by the Resolution Trust Corp., whose conclusions were confirmed by every subsequent official investigation. "On this record," the RTC reported, "there is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct ... It is recommended no further resources need be expended on the Whitewater part of this investigation." Yet those reporters who subsisted on Bossie's handouts, including some at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News, did not report the RTC's vindication of the Clintons. ABC's Vlasto, who had invested mightily in the Whitewater story, insisted in '97, "If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I'd believe Bossie any day."
Reporters weren't the only ones who paid a price for cozying up to Bossie. During the 1990s he worked most closely with four members of Congress investigating Whitewater and other Clinton-related matters: Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C.; Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y.; Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.; and Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa. Bossie served as Faircloth's personal aide on the Senate Whitewater Committee and later as Burton's chief investigator on the Government Reform Committee. He was also a key source of Whitewater allegations for Leach's press spokesman, Joe Pinder, and personally funneled information to D'Amato. None of these four politicians survived their reliance on Bossie with their political reputations unblemished, and two -- Faircloth and D'Amato -- were voted out of office in 1998.
The truth is that Democrats saw Bossie as something of an insurance policy during Whitewater and subsequent Clinton hearings, because with him onboard the inquiries would never be taken completely seriously. After all, it was reportedly Bossie who urged Burton to reenact the death of former White House deputy counsel Vince Foster by shooting bullets into a melon in the backyard of the congressman's Indiana home.
Bossie's habit of shooting himself in the foot, or at least his political allies' feet, persists to this day. Despite his prediction on the eve of its release that "Fahrenheit 9/11" would "go nowhere," the movie became the most successful documentary ever made and is likely to be one of the summer season's most profitable films.Of the movie's historic $24 million take during its first weekend in theaters, one could argue that some large portion may be the result of Bossie's publicity campaign against it, which in many news accounts was rendered in the shorthand "Group tries to censor anti-Bush movie." Moore has promised to send Bossie a holiday card later this year to express his gratitude for Bossie's help in creating a bonanza for the film.
Bossie stands in a long and dubious tradition of political attack hacks whose hyperaggressive tactics frequently lead them to step over the line of fair play. On the media side, the granddaddy of the GOP hit men, credited with creating the modern attack ad, is Alex Castellanos, who is now producing commercials for the Bush-Cheney campaign. In 2000, for instance, Castellanos embarrassed the Bush campaign when someone discovered that an attack ad he had produced flashed the word "rats" on the screen for a split second. Castellanos denied using subliminal advertising, but put on the defensive, Bush had to yank the spot.
Bossie has engaged in such questionable or downright slimy tactics on many occasions. Here are some of his more famous misses:
- During the 1992 presidential campaign, Bossie got into a fistfight with a Little Rock, Ark., private investigator, Larry Case, who said he had damaging information on Clinton. Bossie told police that Case had punched him after Bossie refused to pay Case a $10,000 advance as they were preparing to board a flight at Little Rock National Airport.
- That same year, Bossie set out to prove that a young pregnant woman named Susan Coleman had committed suicide in 1977 after having an affair with Clinton. Coleman's mother told CBS that Bossie hounded her relentlessly with his false story, even following her to an Army hospital in Georgia, where she was visiting her husband, in recovery from a stroke. Bossie and another man "burst into the sick man's room and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide," CBS reported.
- Also in 1992, President George H.W. Bush, repudiating Bossie's tactics, filed an FEC complaint against Bossie's group after it produced a TV ad inviting voters to call a hot line to hear (almost certainly doctored) tape-recorded conversations between Clinton and Gennifer Flowers.
- In 1994, Bossie traveled to Fayetteville, Ark., with an NBC producer, where the two allegedly "stalked" and "ambushed" Beverly Bassett Schaffer, a former state regulatory officer and a lawyer who had played a small role in the so-called Whitewater conspiracy. The two confronted Schaffer outside her office and, after she refused an on-camera interview, reportedly chased her across town, until she found refuge in the lobby of an office building.
- In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had "dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater." Another mailing reported that Bossie was "on the inside directing the probe." Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D'Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.
- In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logsof former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie's deceptive presence to "Ollie North running around the House."
- In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of "unrelenting" self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible "to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney's Office." (Bossie's habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)
The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw the release of the doctored Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the time, "At Bossie's request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth] Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell's prison conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was indicted." According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close working relations with Starr investigators.
The tapes were edited for "privacy" considerations, according to Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.
Yet, in 1999, Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his "outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement." And it wasn't just the conservative base that continued to embrace Bossie after the Hubbell tape disgrace; so did many in the Washington press corps.
It's hard to imagine that if a high-level Washington operative with a rap sheet like Bossie's even existed on the left, he or she would be celebrated by the Democratic Party or courted by the press the way Bossie has been. "There are kooks on the left, no doubt about it, people who believe Bush is guilty of murder," Begala says. "The difference is, journalists don't pay attention to kooks on the left, and neither do Democrats."
When the Clintons exited the White House, Bossie seemed rudderless as he jumped from one political target to the next. During the 2000 presidential campaign he coauthored another quickie attack book, "Prince Albert: The Life and Lies of Al Gore," but it didn't seem to play much of a role in the disputed election. During the summer of 2001, Bossie played the Gary Condit game, going on cable TV to tie the Democratic congressman to a dead intern. ("Gary Condit doesn't have much credibility left," Bossie said.) No evidence linking Condit to the murder ever emerged, and he was never charged. The next year, when the Enron scandal broke, Bossie appeared on Fox News and repeated GOP talking points that both political parties deserved blame because, after all, Enron's former CEO, Kenneth Lay, slept in the Lincoln bedroom once while Clinton was in office. But that in fact never happened. Also that year, Bossie appeared on TNN'S late-night show, "Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon," where he dissected, yet again, the supposed mysteries surrounding the suicide of Clinton aide Foster. Plus, Bossie guaranteed that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2004.
In early 2003, Bossie's group released a pro-Iraq War commercial starring former Tennessee senator and "Law and Order" actor Fred Thompson -- to "combat the left-wing propaganda" Bossie asserted was coming from Hollywood. Bossie also made TV appearances to rail against France for its Iraq stance and call for an American boycott of French products.
This spring Bossie returned to his roots, producing an anti-Kerry adthat used recent "priceless" MasterCard ads to parody "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts." (According to Bossie, the ad's light touch was meant to stand in contrast to the left's "hate-filled speech and vitriol" aimed at Bush.) The spot, actually seen by very few TV viewers, produced a nice publicity bump for Bossie as the same network of reporters and pundits he'd cultivated for years with tips and leaks welcomed him into the unfolding campaign coverage. MSNBC's Chris Matthews announced on "Hardball": "Let me go to David Bossie. That ad is great, by the way."
Bossie's press welcome extended into May, when he began promoting his polemic claiming Clinton was responsible for 9/11. In June, Bossie boasted to the Washington Times that he is "one of the few people who actually know the facts about Whitewater, Travelgate, campaign finances and the Monica Lewinsky affair," and declared, without citing any facts, that Clinton's just-released memoir was not truthful.
Then came the "Fahrenheit 9/11" press bonanza and Bossie's self-styled cameo featuring the FEC. Thanks to Citizens United's filing, the FEC is considering a ban on the movie's TV ads because the new campaign finance law prohibits corporate-funded ads that identify a federal candidate just before a primary or election. For purposes of the law, the Republican National Convention, which begins at the end of August, is considered a primary. The same ban would hold for 60 days prior to the general election in November.
What is odd about this is that if the FEC ultimately agrees with Bossie on the ads, all Moore has to do to make them legit is to replace Bush's fleeting image in the TV ads with someone else, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In addition, Moore's distributor spent a relatively tiny $3 million on TV advertising on the eve of the movie's premiere, and the chances that it will spend anything in August are very slim.
Even the editorial page at the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post mocked the notion that ads for a movie should be regulated for political content. "Have affairs really come so far that government has vested in itself the power to constrict the political debate -- right before an election, when voices and opinions matter most?" the paper asked.
Yet Bossie, once again, insists that the fight is about the rule of law and taking on a proven liar. During an online discussion hosted by Washingtonpost.com, Bossie insisted that Moore "never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. He doesn't exactly have a track record of credibility. His reputation as a liar are well documented."
For those who have watched Bossie wrestle with the truth over the years, that's a curious claim for him to make.
ERIC BOEHLERT
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."
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2x
no links TUESDAY, OCT 28, 2014 04:00 AM PDT
GOP’s shady partisan hit man: How dirty trickster David Bossie is ruining politics
David Bossie isn't famous, but his shady work in the trenches is altering democracy -- and there's more to come
HEATHER DIGBY PARTON TOPICS: BILL CLINTON, CITIZENS UNITED, DAVID BOSSIE, EDITOR'S PICKS, GOP, HILLARY CLINTON, HIT MAN, MICHELLE MALKIN, NEWT GINGRICH, PARTISANSHIP, SCANDAL, SUPREME COURT, THE RIGHT, WHITEWATER, POLITICS NEWS
GOP's shady partisan hit man: How dirty trickster David Bossie is ruining politics You have to wonder how many people in America, even those who are well informed, make the connection between the notorious Supreme Court decision that unleashed unprecedented campaign spending and the slimy political assassination outfit called Citizens United that brought the case? It’s not that people of low character have never succeeded in winning Supreme Court cases before. But it’s difficult to find a group with less integrity than this one. You may recall that the case itself was about a film called “Hillary: the Movie,” which was produced by Citizens United in anticipation of the 2008 election and which the FEC ruled was not a movie at all but rather a 90-minute campaign commercial that was “susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her.” This designation as an advertisement ran afoul of elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation and Theodore Olson, Citizens United’s attorney, filed a case against the FEC claiming its First Amendment rights had been violated. And the rest is history. What many people may not know, however, is the history of Citizens United. It goes all the way back to the 1980s when it was created by the notorious hatchet man from Arkansas, Floyd Brown of Willie Horton fame. In 1992, in anticipation of a flood of juicy opportunities for character assassination of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, he brought on David Bossie, a young and ambitious GOP operative. Their joint effort was a massive and instant success with the media, which used it as a major “source” for years. As early as 1994 some media critics were concerned about the group’s allure among the press corps. Trudy Lieberman wrote an exposé of the group called “Churning Whitewater” for the Columbia Journalism Review, although nobody in the mainstream media seemed particularly concerned. Lieberman described the scene this way: In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. “I have a whole file on bond transactions,” Bossie tells Ingersoll. “I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out.” A few minutes later Bossie says, “I don’t know what I have to give you,” but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. “You’re on deadline, I understand that.” He then points Ingersoll in another direction. “Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm,” he adds. “Lot 7,” Bossie tells me between calls, is the next big story. “ABC and U.S. News & World Report are looking at Lot 7. We’re the only ones that have the abstract. Wade [Chris Wade, a real estate agent who sold some of the Whitewater lots] dumped the property and got something from the Clintons.” The phone rings again. Bossie addresses the caller as “Judge.” “That judge who called,” Bossie explains later, “called me in August and said he had a friend, [another judge named] David Hale, who was in trouble because of Bill Clinton.” It was this phone call and the charges that Hale later made through Bossie’s organization, Citizens United, that fueled David Bossie’s zealous investigation into Whitewater. Bossie’s efforts have, in turn, generated daily page-one headlines and another chapter in the saga of American pack journalism. “I’m the information bank,” he says. The dreadful performance of the press in that era was fully exposed in the book “The Hunting of the President” by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons and Lyons’ earlier “Fools for Scandal.” (If you are a young person who is unfamiliar with the moldy details, these are the books you’ll need to read to get up to speed before the next election.) The media claque was dazzled by the gothic and byzantine world of small state politics and there were, as usual, plenty of con artists and grifters ready to feed them exactly the kind of lurid tales that would appeal to their big city imaginations. Citizens United became a clearinghouse for all this shady material, alternating between spoon feeding enticing tidbits to the press and dumping vast amounts of incomprehensible material that sounded bad but ended up being misleading at best when the facts were untangled. This was the essence of ’90s-style “smell test” politics in which many people observed the sheer volume of complicated accusations, threw up their hands and assumed that where there’s this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere. But David Bossie didn’t stop there. He was a major player in a later scandal of his own when he moved up the conservative ladder to serve as the chief investigator for congressman Dan “watermelon man” Burton and was eventually forced to resign in disgrace. The Washington Post reported on his sordid denouement in May of 1998: The chairman of the House investigation into Clinton-Gore campaign financing abuses apologized to fellow Republicans yesterday for the uproar over his release of transcripts of Webster L. Hubbell’s prison conversations and removed his chief investigator under pressure from House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The move came as Gingrich sought to contain the damage, condemning “the circus” that took place within Indiana Republican Dan Burton’s Government Oversight and Reform Committee and scolding Burton at a closed Republican Conference meeting for refusing to say that he was embarrassed by the episode… His hard-driving chief investigator, David Bossie, submitted a letter of resignation later in the day, saying that he wanted to blunt the “unjustified attacks” coming from House Democrats and the White House. The editing and release of the Hubbell tapes, subpoenaed by the committee last year, was described by one insider as a “Dave Bossie project,” opposed by the panel’s chief counsel and other committee staffers but ultimately approved by Burton. In meetings this week, Gingrich and other leaders have voiced their concerns over Burton’s staff. While Burton defended his senior investigator publicly and said Bossie was leaving of his own accord, Gingrich told the conference yesterday that Bossie, who had survived repeated previous attempts, had been fired. When even Newt Gingrich thinks you’re beyond the pale, you are beyond the pale. But this is the GOP we’re talking about and its practitioners of the dark art of character assassination have more lives than a feral cat. Within a year Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his “outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement” and was soon after merrily pimping conspiracy stories and cultivating his fan base in the press corps. By 2004 he was all over television talking about his lawsuit against Michael Moore, with the Federal Election commission claiming that Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 451? violated campaign finance laws. Yes, that was the same David Bossie whose organization Citizens United just four years later made “Hillary: the Movie” into a crusade that ended up leaving the campaign finance system in tatters. You can’t make this stuff up. Charles Pierce caught up with him at the 2012 Republican convention where he was the toast of the hall and described Bossie’s new state of grace: He “has had his life’s work blessed through the incredible naivete of Justice Anthony Kennedy by the highest court in this land. He is sanctified by it. His entire career has been made pure.” It was the highlight of a long, illustrious career of dirty tricks and hatchet jobs. So what’s Bossie up to these days, you wonder? Well, he’s turned up in Colorado with a new film made in tandem with another longtime conservative operative Michelle Malkin about the leftist billionaires who have turned the state into a dystopian hellhole crawling with gun-grabbing potheads who are trying to destroy the energy industry. And, needless to say, once more Citizens United stands accused of selectively editing interviews to deceive the audience and give the opposite impression of what the subject actually meant. David Bossie told Charles Pierce back in 2012: “I think your career has different chapters. Before the Supreme Court was a chapter. Just leading Citizens United. Post-the Supreme Court decision is a different chapter. My time on Capitol Hill as an investigator was a chapter. My time as a fireman living in a firehouse was a chapter. So, you know, everybody has a chapters in their lives. The book on David Bossie is actually a pretty unlikely tale. He’s a standard-issue Republican dirty trickster whose mundane wet work has somehow managed to have a profound effect on the American political system for more than 20 years. In the world of partisan hit men he may be the best there ever was. And he isn’t done yet. Heather Digby PartonHeather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
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http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9601230758/churning-whitewater
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recover see new scams at end; fired for doctoring tapes a la o'keefe later http://www.salon.com/2014/10/28/gops_best_partisan_hit_man_how_dirty_trickster_david_bossie_changed_the_world/no links TUESDAY, OCT 28, 2014 04:00 AM PDTGOP’s shady partisan hit man: How dirty trickster David Bossie is ruining politicsDavid Bossie isn't famous, but his shady work in the trenches is altering democracy -- and there's more to comeHEATHER DIGBY PARTON TOPICS: BILL CLINTON, CITIZENS UNITED, DAVID BOSSIE, EDITOR'S PICKS, GOP, HILLARY CLINTON, HIT MAN, MICHELLE MALKIN, NEWT GINGRICH, PARTISANSHIP, SCANDAL, SUPREME COURT, THE RIGHT, WHITEWATER, POLITICS NEWS You have to wonder how many people in America, even those who are well informed, make the connection between the notorious Supreme Court decision that unleashed unprecedented campaign spending and the slimy political assassination outfit called Citizens United that brought the case? It’s not that people of low character have never succeeded in winning Supreme Court cases before. But it’s difficult to find a group with less integrity than this one. You may recall that the case itself was about a film called “Hillary: the Movie,” which was produced by Citizens United in anticipation of the 2008 election and which the FEC ruled was not a movie at all but rather a 90-minute campaign commercial that was “susceptible of no other interpretation than to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her.” This designation as an advertisement ran afoul of elements of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation and Theodore Olson, Citizens United’s attorney, filed a case against the FEC claiming its First Amendment rights had been violated. And the rest is history. What many people may not know, however, is the history of Citizens United. It goes all the way back to the 1980s when it was created by the notorious hatchet man from Arkansas, Floyd Brown of Willie Horton fame. In 1992, in anticipation of a flood of juicy opportunities for character assassination of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, he brought on David Bossie, a young and ambitious GOP operative. Their joint effort was a massive and instant success with the media, which used it as a major “source” for years. As early as 1994 some media critics were concerned about the group’s allure among the press corps. Trudy Lieberman wrote an exposé of the group called “Churning Whitewater” for the Columbia Journalism Review, although nobody in the mainstream media seemed particularly concerned. Lieberman described the scene this way: In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. “I have a whole file on bond transactions,” Bossie tells Ingersoll. “I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out.” A few minutes later Bossie says, “I don’t know what I have to give you,” but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. “You’re on deadline, I understand that.” He then points Ingersoll in another direction. “Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm,” he adds. “Lot 7,” Bossie tells me between calls, is the next big story. “ABC and U.S. News & World Report are looking at Lot 7. We’re the only ones that have the abstract. Wade [Chris Wade, a real estate agent who sold some of the Whitewater lots] dumped the property and got something from the Clintons.”The phone rings again. Bossie addresses the caller as “Judge.” “That judge who called,” Bossie explains later, “called me in August and said he had a friend, [another judge named] David Hale, who was in trouble because of Bill Clinton.” It was this phone call and the charges that Hale later made through Bossie’s organization, Citizens United, that fueled David Bossie’s zealous investigation into Whitewater. Bossie’s efforts have, in turn, generated daily page-one headlines and another chapter in the saga of American pack journalism. “I’m the information bank,” he says.The dreadful performance of the press in that era was fully exposed in the book “The Hunting of the President” by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons and Lyons’ earlier “Fools for Scandal.” (If you are a young person who is unfamiliar with the moldy details, these are the books you’ll need to read to get up to speed before the next election.) The media claque was dazzled by the gothic and byzantine world of small state politics and there were, as usual, plenty of con artists and grifters ready to feed them exactly the kind of lurid tales that would appeal to their big city imaginations. Citizens United became a clearinghouse for all this shady material, alternating between spoon feeding enticing tidbits to the press and dumping vast amounts of incomprehensible material that sounded bad but ended up being misleading at best when the facts were untangled. This was the essence of ’90s-style “smell test” politics in which many people observed the sheer volume of complicated accusations, threw up their hands and assumed that where there’s this much smoke there must be a fire somewhere.But David Bossie didn’t stop there. He was a major player in a later scandal of his own when he moved up the conservative ladder to serve as the chief investigator for congressman Dan “watermelon man” Burton and was eventually forced to resign in disgrace. The Washington Post reported on his sordid denouement in May of 1998:The chairman of the House investigation into Clinton-Gore campaign financing abuses apologized to fellow Republicans yesterday for the uproar over his release of transcripts of Webster L. Hubbell’s prison conversations and removed his chief investigator under pressure from House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The move came as Gingrich sought to contain the damage, condemning “the circus” that took place within Indiana Republican Dan Burton’s Government Oversight and Reform Committee and scolding Burton at a closed Republican Conference meeting for refusing to say that he was embarrassed by the episode…His hard-driving chief investigator, David Bossie, submitted a letter of resignation later in the day, saying that he wanted to blunt the “unjustified attacks” coming from House Democrats and the White House. The editing and release of the Hubbell tapes, subpoenaed by the committee last year, was described by one insider as a “Dave Bossie project,” opposed by the panel’s chief counsel and other committee staffers but ultimately approved by Burton. In meetings this week, Gingrich and other leaders have voiced their concerns over Burton’s staff. While Burton defended his senior investigator publicly and said Bossie was leaving of his own accord, Gingrich told the conference yesterday that Bossie, who had survived repeated previous attempts, had been fired.When even Newt Gingrich thinks you’re beyond the pale, you are beyond the pale. But this is the GOP we’re talking about and its practitioners of the dark art of character assassination have more lives than a feral cat. Within a year Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his “outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement” and was soon after merrily pimping conspiracy stories and cultivating his fan base in the press corps. By 2004 he was all over television talking about his lawsuit against Michael Moore, with the Federal Election commission claiming that Moore’s film “Fahrenheit 451? violated campaign finance laws. Yes, that was the same David Bossie whose organization Citizens United just four years later made “Hillary: the Movie” into a crusade that ended up leaving the campaign finance system in tatters. You can’t make this stuff up.Charles Pierce caught up with him at the 2012 Republican convention where he was the toast of the hall and described Bossie’s new state of grace: He “has had his life’s work blessed through the incredible naivete of Justice Anthony Kennedy by the highest court in this land. He is sanctified by it. His entire career has been made pure.” It was the highlight of a long, illustrious career of dirty tricks and hatchet jobs.So what’s Bossie up to these days, you wonder? Well, he’s turned up in Colorado with a new film made in tandem with another longtime conservative operative Michelle Malkin about the leftist billionaires who have turned the state into a dystopian hellhole crawling with gun-grabbing potheads who are trying to destroy the energy industry. And, needless to say, once more Citizens United stands accused of selectively editing interviews to deceive the audience and give the opposite impression of what the subject actually meant.David Bossie told Charles Pierce back in 2012:“I think your career has different chapters. Before the Supreme Court was a chapter. Just leading Citizens United. Post-the Supreme Court decision is a different chapter. My time on Capitol Hill as an investigator was a chapter. My time as a fireman living in a firehouse was a chapter. So, you know, everybody has a chapters in their lives.The book on David Bossie is actually a pretty unlikely tale. He’s a standard-issue Republican dirty trickster whose mundane wet work has somehow managed to have a profound effect on the American political system for more than 20 years. In the world of partisan hit men he may be the best there ever was. And he isn’t done yet. Heather Digby Parton Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.refdhttp://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/9601230758/churning-whitewater