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Synhorst, T

The DCI Group, LLC is the top Republican lobby and public relations firm with offices in Washington, Brussels, and Houston. DCI has been associated with telemarketing company Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI and the direct-mail firm FYI Messaging. The DCI Group was the publisher of the now defunct website, Tech Central Station, and had close ties to the George W. Bush administration. Incorporated in 1997 in Phoenix, Arizona, Timothy N. Hyde, Douglas M. Goodyear, and Thomas J. Synhorst are listed as the LLC's managers.

Powers Behind the Throne

by Laura Miller

A handful of sibling companies with close ties to the Republican Party and roots in the tobacco industry are at the top of heavy-hitting corporate and political campaign strategists. Four limited liability corporations are at the nexus of millions of dollars of influence-buying money:

The companies have overlapping clients and are most visibly linked to each other by Thomas Synhorst, a founding member of each. They took in $20 million for their work to help elect George W. Bush in 2004, and they count AT&T, Microsoft, and the giant trade association Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) as clients.

The DCI Group calls itself a "strategic public affairs consulting firm" and boasts that it handles corporate issues like political campaigns. "We are a political firm and all of our partners have political campaign experience. We thrive in competitive circumstances, and are used to fluid situations and tight deadlines," their website claims. DCI Group offers services that include national, state and local lobbying; coalition building; and generating "grasstops" and constituent support for issues. The firm has been linked to several industry-funded coalitions that pose as grassroots organizations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise as DCI advertises its ability to provide "third party support" to clients. "Corporations seldom win alone," the group's website says. "Whatever the issue, whatever the target - elected officials, regulators or public opinion - you need reliable third party allies to advocate your cause. We can help you recruit credible coalition partners and engage them for maximum impact. It's what we do best."

The use of third-party front groups is common in the business of swaying public opinion. Traditionally, however, strategic influencers view the news media as the channel through which their message flows from the front group to the target audience. DCI and its affiliates offer "direct contact" that bypasses the media entirely. The client's message is directly delivered via phone banks, regular mail and/or the internet. Direct contact provides the campaigners with complete control over the message. Freed from the filters created by news outlets, they can be as biased and inflammatory as the message shaper deems necessary.

"We play to win," proclaims FLSphones.com, the website of Feather Larson Synhorst-DCI. In addition to phone banks, the firm offers a "letter desk" service, explained as follows: "Personal letters from constituents are proving to be increasingly effective in swaying legislators' opinions on hot issues. FLS can economically generate hundreds or thousands of letters on your behalf - all unique, but conveying your desired message. Each letter is personalized, individually signed and often includes a handwritten postscript from the constituent."

FLS also offers "patch-through" calling, in which people reached via phone bank are immediately patched through to their legislators, thus generating a stream of constituent phone calls that echo the client's message: "FLS has worked to design scripting and call systems that generate high-quality patch-through calls," the website boasts. "Constituents are connected directly to their legislators, and in some cases are giving individual talking points to help convey your message to their elected official in a personal way." Other services offered include automated phone calling using pre-recorded messages; inbound phone services, meaning the company provides staff to answer incoming calls to toll-free numbers; and information collection services, including emails.

FLS-DCI co-founder Tony Feather, who served as a political director of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, is also responsible for the creation of Progress for America, a soft-money group that raised and spent $28.8 million to support Bush in 2004. FLS-DCI's website prominently features a quote from top Bush advisor Karl Rove, himself a direct mail expert. "I know these guys well," Rove states. "They become partners with the campaigns they work with. From designing the program to drafting scripts; from selecting targets to making the calls in a professional, successful way they work as hard to win your races as you do."

Smoking Out DCI's Past

What the DCI Group "does best" - creating "credible coalition partners" - is a skill that the group's managing partners - Tom Synhorst, Doug Goodyear, and Tim Hyde - developed during nearly a decade of work in the 1990s for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

DCI chair Thomas J. Synhorst got his start working in the 1980s as an aide for Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). In 1988 Synhorst ran Bob Dole's presidential primary campaign in Iowa, winning the state's early caucus over George H.W. Bush. He later worked on Dole's 1996 presidential bid, having by then set up the political consulting and telemarketing firm, Direct Connect, Inc. Simultaneously, Synhorst also worked as a Midwestern field representative for R.J. Reynolds. Some of details of his work in that capacity can be found through internet searches of RJR's internal documents that were publicly released as part of the states attorneys general lawsuit against the tobacco industry. As early as 1990, Synhorst's name turns up in in a letter from RJR field operations manager Mark Smith. The letter outlines the tobacco company's strategy for undermining a workplace smoking ban at a Boeing plant in Wichita, Kansas. Synhorst was one of the RJR field coordinators suggested to meet with a Boeing employee who opposed the anti-smoking policy.

The work of a field coordinator for RJR included keeping track of state and local smoking bans and cigarette tax initiatives; monitoring workplace smoking bans; meeting with company sales representatives; developing and supporting "smoker's rights" groups, including setting up meetings, circulating petitions, and providing materials; contacting school districts concerning RJR's youth program; placing people in public meetings and meetings with legislators to support the tobacco industry's position; getting letters to the editor printed in local and regional newspapers; and creating alliances with organizations with similar concerns, such as anti-tax groups.

In one internal memo, field representatives were instructed: "Xerox like crazy. When a favorable letter to the editor is printed, getting people to copy the letters and send them to their elected officials with a note saying (essentially) 'This is what I think, too,' is key. [Letters to the editor] now become a two-step process: Step One is getting them published. Step Two is circulating them as widely as possible."

The DCI Group's CEO, Douglas M. Goodyear, used to work on behalf of R.J. Reynolds. Before joining the DCI group, he was a vice president at Walt Klein and Associates, a PR firm whose work for RJR dates back to at least the1980s. In 1993, Goodyear was instrumental in the creation of Ramhurst Corporation, an organization that received money from R.J. Reynolds to ensure that tobacco industry efforts in Washington were supported by and coordinated with RJR's nation-wide fake grassroots operations. According to internal RJR documents, in 1994 Ramhurst received $2.6 million for "executing tactical programs on federal, state or local issues; developing a network of smokers' rights groups and other coalition partners within the region that will speak out on issues important to the Company; implementing training and communication programs designed to inform activists and maintain their ongoing involvement in the grassroots movement." Synhorst was one of Ramhurst's field operators.

Timothy N. Hyde, another DCI employee, was the senior director of public issues at R.J. Reynolds from 1988 to 1997. Hyde oversaw all of RJR's PR campaigns. His weekly reports, also available in the R.J. Reynolds online archive, provide a running history of the discussion of tobacco in the public sphere and the industry's efforts to shape that discussion.

With Goodyear's expertise at coordinating astroturf activities in all 50 states, Synhorst's on-the-ground field experience combined with his telemarketing work, and Hyde's years of corporate work, the DCI Group offers clients a vast body of experience and contacts. The tobacco industry's efforts in the 1990s to fight regulations, taxs and lawsuits created a money-soaked training ground where dozens of political operatives and strategists learned their craft. Since most of the anti-tobacco efforts were led by Democrats, tobacco industry money began flowing primarily into Republican coffers, further strengthening ties between GOP political advisors and the underworld of fake grassroots campaigning.

All these factors have made the DCI Group and its sibling companies a natural choice to help top U.S. companies such as Microsoft and highly-regulated sectors such as the pharmaceutical industry as they, too, have sought to fend off regulators, consumer advocates, and trial lawyers.

2015

Partners

Thomas J. Synhorst (pronounced "Sign" not "Sin"), is a partner in Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI , chairman of DCI Group, and co-manager of the Goodsijn venture funds. A "well-known Republican strategist" and a former tobacco industry "grassroots specialist"[1], Synhorst originally founded DCI Companies, Inc. in 1988. He "has worked extensively with political and corporate clients on strategic message development and delivery."[2] He has been referred to as the "Johhny Appleseed" of astroturf.[3]

After the 2000 presidential election, Synhorst and Tony Feather created the Washington DC-based DCI Group with other well connected Republican lobbyists and political insiders. DCI Group considers itself a full service "grassroots" consulting firm. The group has been involved with the creation of several front groups for the Bush administration and telecommunications, pharmaceutical and computer industries.

Synhorst worked for both the 1988 and 1996 Presidential campaigns of Bob Dole. He's credited with engineering Dole's victory in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucuses. An Iowan, Synhorst had served as Sen. Charles E. Grassley's aide in the 1980s before working on Dole's campaign. In 1996, Dole's campaign employeed Synhorst's Kansas-based company Direct Connect, Inc. for campaign telemarketing. Synhorst also was affiiliated with the Mission, Kansas based Synhorst & Schraad, Inc., which was listed in Campaign & Elections Political Pages as providing telephone and direct contact services. The Kansas City Star reported in 1996 that Keith Schraad was a founder of Direct Connect.

He aslo worked on George Walker Bush's Texas gubernatorial campaign, as well as campaigns for Governor Mike Huckabee (AR), Congressman Johnny Isakson (GA), and The Republican Party of Florida, Republican Party of Iowa, and Republican Party of Arizona.[4] He was an advisor to Bush/Cheney 2000 and worked with Senator Elizabeth Dole to launch her 2002 campaign.[5]

The Associated Press reported in June 2001 that Synhorst "has been linked to South Carolina 'push polls' in the 2000 Republican primary that attacked candidate John McCain as 'a cheat, a liar and a fraud,' according to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee."

Joshua Micah Marshall wrote in July 2000: "DCI is the creation of Tom Synhorst, a Republican political operative and onetime field coordinator for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, who first made a name for himself by helping Bob Dole pull off an upset victory over George Bush in the 1988 Iowa caucuses. In subsequent years, Synhorst remained close to Dole, but he found his real niche in phone bank work. DCI, as well as a cluster of allied companies in which Synhorst also holds an interest, has worked for the tobacco industry for most of the 1990s. In 1998, when Congress was poised to sign off on a comprehensive tobacco settlement, the industry retained both DCI and Direct Impact to engineer a coordinated campaign of grass-roots opposition to the bill. In 1999, in the wake of the Columbine school shootings, the NRA paid out more than $300,000 to DCI and another phone bank operator, Optima Direct, to rev up opposition to renewed efforts to regulate firearms."

Marshall also reports that Synhorst has often been link to Ralph Reed. And the two were suspected of running push polls against Steve Forbes' 1996 presidential campaign in Iowa.

Snyhorst has ten limited liability corporations registered in the State of Arizona under his name. They include:

During the 2004 election cycle, DCI Group, FLS-DCI and FYI Messaging took in $17 million from the Bush campaign and the Republican Party according to FEC data released on October 30, 2004 and posted on the Center for Responsive Politics website. Progress for America, a 527 committees associated with the DCI Group, spent $2.62 million on services provide by FYI Messaging, TSE Enterprises, and DCI Group. In other words, of the $28.8 million PFA spent on the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign nearly 10 percent ended up with Synhorst's affliated LLCs.

Tradenames registered in Arizona to Synhorst's companies include:

In the State of Minnesota, FLS-DCI, LLC is registered to the same Arizona address as the Arizona registration.

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Synhorst, Thomas J.

Texas Attorney General Dan Morales broadcast a clear message last fall: If tobacco companies were making millions in Texas, then they could help contribute to the billions in Medicaid costs spent in Texas for smoking-related illnesses. Several other attorneys general already had filed lawsuits against the tobacco industry to recover such health care costs. But before Morales could follow their lead, half a dozen tobacco industry lobbyists visited him and delivered a private poll from the political consulting firm Public Opinion Strategies.

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The poll, commissioned in January by the Covington & Burling law firm on behalf of the four largest tobacco firms and the industry's advocacy group, The Tobacco Institute, claimed the people of Texas wouldn't support Morales if he filed the suit. The proof? Two-thirds of the more than 800 Texans polled had said they wouldn't favor the proposed lawsuit.

But then Morales took a closer look at the poll. He discovered it was actually a "push-poll," designed not to gauge public opinion but sway it. The poll's telemarketing script began with basic, unobtrusive political questions--then quickly zeroed in on Morales. "Elected officials are held to high standards in public life," the script read. "Here are some reasons people are giving to vote against Dan Morales."

Among the reasons: Morales was "pro-affirmative action"; he "supports gun control"; and his 1994 campaign contributed money to Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. (Morales' staffers had purchased two tickets to a dinner thrown by a local chapter of the Nation of Islam.) Those polled were also told that Morales' proposed lawsuit could cost thousands of jobs, prevent the attorney general from fighting crime, and reward only a few wealthy personal injury lawyers. Finally--the spin complete--those polled were asked what they thought of the suit. It's hardly surprising that they overwhelmingly opposed it.

Despite its bias, the poll served its purpose: to deliver a not-so-veiled threat that, on a moment's notice, the tobacco companies could make many more such calls throughout Texas and, through strategies such as push-polling, mobilize an untold number of voters against the suit--and against Morales.

Still, Morales proceeded with the suit.

And the man who runs the polling firm, William McInturff, went back to his day job--as chief pollster for Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole.

This particular tie between tobacco and the Dole campaign ended in February when Dole fired McInturff because of his failure to predict the majority leader's embarrassing loss to Steve Forbes in the Delaware primary--not because of his tobacco connections.

Dole and the tobacco industry share the need to win at all costs, which has forged a mutually beneficial relationship. By March, nearly every major media outlet reported the increase in Big Tobacco's contributions to the Republican Party: from $546,224 in "soft" donations in 1993 to $2.4 million in 1995. But few have investigated Dole's current ties to the industry. As one of tobacco's top congressional allies, the powerful Kansas senator has helped the industry broaden its overseas markets and battle domestic foes, such as Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler.

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Now, as Dole wages his campaign for the presidency, many of the tobacco industry's biggest hitters are whispering in his ear.

Lobbyists for businesses, trade groups, and other special interests often attach themselves to presidential campaigns, seeking future jobs and political chits. Tobacco operatives are no exception. But the sheer number of tobacco lobbyists, lawyers, and pollsters working for the Dole team sets a new standard. For example:

Others working for Dole are less well-known within the Beltway, but play important roles in the tobacco industry's emerging national strategy. Steve Merksamer, for example, joined the Dole campaign last fall as a senior adviser and California strategist. His Sacramento law firm, Nielson, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor, has collected $1.9 million from the industry since 1988, more than any other California firm.

In 1994, Nielson, Merksamer was paid an additional $350,000 to write Proposition 188, called the Tobacco Control Act. The proposition promised tough statewide restrictions, but its language actually weakened state law by acting as a "pre-emption law" to kill dozens of tougher local restrictions throughout the state. When the media exposed Proposition 188 as a tobacco industry ploy, voters defeated it.

But the tobacco industry's behind-the-scenes maneuvers in California may well be the model for a national strategy under a Dole presidency and a Republican Congress: Defeat popular grassroots anti-smoking measures with secret legislative and executive overrides, pre-emptions, and subversions. For example, the tobacco industry is using California Gov. Pete Wilson and the Republican California Assembly to gut anti-smoking education efforts financed by the state's 25-cent-per-pack cigarette tax. Tobacco companies, in a convenient alliance with the California Medical Association, lobbied legislators to divert money out of California's anti-smoking efforts (which activists call the single greatest threat to the tobacco industry) and into low-income health care programs--effectively using financially needy programs as a cover to derail anti-smoking campaigns.

Other operatives link Dole to the tobacco industry's secretive grassroots campaign, specifically, Midwest strategist Tom Synhorst and Alaska campaign coordinator Frank Bickford, who were both field coordinators for RJR's "grassroots" efforts in the states.

Synhorst has particularly close ties to Dole. A star in the majority leader's 1988 presidential campaign, Synhorst masterminded Dole's primary win in Iowa. In between stints for Dole's two presidential campaigns, Synhorst has been a grassroots organizer for RJR. He co-founded his telemarketing firm, Direct Connect, with top RJR lobbyist Read deButts.

Direct Connect is the Dole campaign's telemarketing firm of choice, with monthly billings exceeding $60,000. Dole's former leadership PAC, Campaign America, also paid Direct Connect more than $20,000 a month last year.

Synhorst and Bickford illustrate an important aspect of the tobacco industry's survival plan: Create grassroots front groups to make pro-tobacco legislation handed down by state and national politicians appear to be the public's will. These groups, many posing as "anti-tax" organizations, are key to the tobacco industry's efforts to win over the anti-big government segment of the electorate. This is also a crucial audience for Dole, who writes in his campaign brochure's "personal message": "My mandate as President would be to rein in the Federal government in order to set free the spirit of the American people."

Tobacco doesn't seem an obvious benefactor for a senator from Kansas, where there are plenty of wheat fields but few tobacco farms. Still, Dole has received more than $330,000 directly from RJR, Philip Morris, and U.S. Tobacco during his career, in addition to untold tobacco soft money through the Republican National Committee. Meanwhile, Dole has consistently fought tobacco tax increases--even when proposed by fellow Republicans.

During this presidential campaign, Dole has gone after FDA Commissioner David Kessler, promising an audience of pharmaceutical giants at a GOP fundraiser last September that Kessler would be out of a job if Dole were elected. Three months later, Dole was one of 32 senators who signed a letter to the FDA protesting its proposed crackdown on tobacco advertising. Dole also spoke out against Kessler's plans to limit cigarette advertising at sporting events. Before an appreciative crowd at a NASCAR auto race in Darlington, S.C., he waved a T-shirt that read, "Let Winston Cup make the rules for NASCAR, not the FDA."

In less dramatic fashion, Elizabeth Dole has also earned Big Tobacco's appreciation. In 1987, while serving as secretary of transportation, she refused to ban smoking on airplanes, ignoring recommendations from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and the National Academy of Sciences. Perhaps coincidentally, tobacco contributions to the American Red Cross, which she heads, have escalated. Philip Morris, Brown & Williamson, and RJR gave the charity a combined $265,530 in 1995, compared to a total over the previous five years of $231,427.

But Bob Dole's friendship with the tobacco companies is not limited to the industry's domestic battles. With tobacco's popularity dying in the United States, companies must hook foreign populations. For this, the industry needs unfettered access to large global markets. Dole has been crucial in helping them get it.

In 1985, Reagan trade representatives focused their attention on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, threatening retaliatory tariffs on their exports if they declined to open their tobacco markets. Tobacco lobbyists actually sat in on the official trade negotiations.

During talks with South Korea in 1987, Brown & Williamson's lobbyist, Thomas Humber (now the chief of Philip Morris' National Smokers Alliance), wrote the office of the U.S. trade representative corporate liaison Sandy Kristoff to inform her of a favorable meeting between South Korea's U.S. ambassador, Dole, Sen. Jesse Helms, and senators from four other tobacco states. According to the letter, the senators expressed "their support for fair market conditions in Korea" during the meeting. The ambassador, in return, thanked Dole and Helms for voting against threatened trade sanctions against Korea. Then, Humber wrote, "[The ambassador] assured the Senators of Ôbest efforts' toward market expansion" for U.S. tobacco companies.

Trade agreements on tobacco have shifted under Clinton. Last year, U.S. trade representatives allowed South Korea to enact tobacco advertising restrictions after approval from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency. Officials from both agencies now sit in on trade proceedings to decide whether tobacco restrictions reflect health and environmental concerns.

Under a Dole presidency, this would probably change. Helms would play a dominant role in foreign trade policy, as would Robert Lighthizer, a former top Dole aide and Dole's rumored choice for his chief of staff or U.S. trade representative. Lighthizer, currently an attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, used to work for Covington & Burling and served as deputy U.S. trade representative from 1983 to 1985. During that period, the United States began bullying countries to open their tobacco markets. Should Lighthizer have a prominent trade role, he might turn back the clock to a time when tobacco lobbyists, not health officials, sat in on trade negotiations.

The GOP convention in San Diego this August promises to be even more of a tobacco-fest than the 1992 convention. Ken Rietz, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C., office of the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, is a vice chairman of this year's convention host committee. Rietz oversaw the California chapter of the National Smokers Alliance, which worked against tobacco control ordinances in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Rietz candidly admits convention sponsors get opportunities for private meetings with political bigwigs. But he calls the high number of tobacco lobbyists involved with the convention and the Dole campaign pure coincidence. "If you look at Burson-Marsteller, [tobacco is] only one of thousands of clients," Rietz says. But of those thousands, Philip Morris and NSA sit comfortably among the firm's top five Washington clients.

As Mother Jones went to press, GOP convention plans were still being negotiated, but Philip Morris had already scored one coup, signing a letter of intent to rent the sought-after space at the San Diego Museum of Art, and was reportedly trying to book the San Diego Zoo for another event. The company has yet to decide on specific receptions but is likely to sponsor the high-profile reception for the GOP's Team 100 (party contributors who give $100,000 or more) and the reception for the Republican Governors Association.

But ultimately, if the tobacco industry achieves what it wants, these festivities will be only a warm-up. The real tobacco party will come in January, at Bob Dole's inauguration.

Sheila Kaplan is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist.

Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI

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Feather, Larson & Synhorst DCI (FLS-DCI) are "Specialists in Telephone Contact Business." The telemarketing company used to be known as Feather Hodges Larson & Synhorst DCI. In 2000, the Washington DC-based DCI Group was spun off from FLS-DCI.

FLS-DCI has been one of the largest corporate receipents of funds from the Republican National Committee in 2004. FLS-DCI has close ties to key White House advisor Karl Rove and others in the GOP.

FLS-DCI specializes in creating phony front groups to make it appear as if there's a groundswell of support for its clients' issues.

One of its most prominent front groups is Voices for Choices. This fake coalition of conservative groups is runing ads nationwide in support of AT&T's key issues. AT&T, which has donated millions to the Republican Party and the Bush Campaign in 2004 - and whose general counsel served on Bush's transition team, is one of FLS-DCI's largest and most important clients.

Other FLS-DCI phony productions include Responsible Electronic Communications Alliance and Hands Off the Internet.

On its web site, FLS-DCI states:

"We use state-of-the-art technology to target and communicate with key constituencies. We have a reputation for connecting the right message to the right people. Our team has experience designing and implementing successful phone programs in all 50 states.

"Our client list consists of the last five Presidential Campaigns including Bush/Cheney 2000. We also provide services for the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and hundreds of Republican State Parties and candidates on all levels, as well as corporations, associations and other organizations.

Advisor to President George Walker Bush, Karl Rove's endorsement of FLS-DCI reads:

Contents [hide]

The Company

Partners

Clients

National Campaigns and Associations

Candidates and Campaigns

National Republican Organizations

Contact

Phoenix Office

2401 West Behrend Drive Suite 7

Phoenix, AZ 85027

Phone: 602-387-8000

Fax: 602-387-8001

Web: http://www.fls-dci.com/index.asp

St. Paul Office

570 Asbury Street, Suite 201

St. Paul, MN 55104

Phone: 651-999-0249

Fax: 651-649-0486

866-FLS-2002

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