coordination campaign
see FEC
see shuffle shell
see social welfare 501c4
john doe WI rivkin/ okeefe cfg
an 6 22 kickass
On September 2020, a dark-money group called the Rule of Law Defense Fund convened a meeting in Atlanta of staffers from the fund's corporate sibling, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA). Their purpose was to run "war games," to be ready in the event Donald Trump lost reelection in November. A little over three months later, the same group would help to assemble the mob before the White House on Jan. 6, 2021.
This wasn't an isolated incident. Shadowy preparations like these began long before the violence of Jan. 6. As the House Select Committee investigating those events begins hearings this week, we may learn much more about those preparations and the people behind them.
But it will be difficult to see the full picture, because much of the preparation is shrouded in dark-money secrecy, with funds channeled through front groups that don't have to disclose who controls them.
For now, we're left with mysteries, like Georgia. It was Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger whom Trump personally pressured to "find" the 11,779 votes necessary to flip the state in Trump's favor. Georgia was ground zero for some of Trump's lawyers' most desperate and ridiculous legal claims about the election results — like the "Kraken" suit alleging a role by the deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez in rigging Dominion voting machines. Georgia is where the Rule of Law Defense Fund hatched its scheme. Georgia also saw efforts to create an alternative slate of Trump electors.
Then came the attempt to wield the power of the Justice Department to attack Georgia's election results. For this mission, someone cranked up Jeffrey Clark, a relative unknown who was acting chief of the Department's Civil Division as a result of pre-election DOJ vacancies. Clark prepared a draft letter alleging, falsely, that the department was investigating accusations of voter fraud in Georgia. Of course, we don't know if Clark actually wrote that letter himself; he had no expertise in this area, and evidence suggests the White House communications office was involved. Either way, on New Year's Eve 2020, Trump tried to install Clark as acting attorney general, until then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputies threatened mass resignation.
As the Georgia maneuvers foundered, the effort shifted to Washington. The Rule of Law Defense Fund — the same group convened in Atlanta months earlier — made robocalls hours before Jan. 6 urging followers to "march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal." President Trump whipped up insurrectionists at the rally and sent them down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. Violence ensued.
In the aftermath, many of these actors were quick to close ranks. RAGA's leader, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, claims to have had no knowledge of the robocall, but he also refuses — to this day — to admit that Joe Biden is the "duly elected and lawfully serving" president of the United States. At the end of the Trump administration, Clark landed a job at a right-wing dark money group.
Given the anonymity dark money affords, we likely cannot connect all the dots between these dark-money groups, Trump's Georgia obsession and the Jan. 6 riots. We don't know who paid for the planning of the Rule of Law Defense Fund's "war games"; we don't know how Jeffrey Clark nearly vaulted into the attorney general's office to attack Georgia's election results, where his letter came from or who paid his salary when he was gone; we don't know who was behind groups like Women for America First, which footed much of the bill for the Jan. 6 rally.
Successful investigations often "follow the money." But when the money flows through anonymizing channels, investigators hit impenetrable dead ends. The select committee must rely instead on texts, emails, testimony and other documents to make its case. It doesn't have to be this way. Our political system doesn't need to aid and abet the destruction of our democracy.
For starters, we could enforce the rules on the books. Groups like the Rule of Law Defense Fund and Women for America First are 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations. As such, they do not have to disclose their donors, but they are also not allowed to spend more than half their funds on political activity. Is anyone checking compliance with those rules?
Spending reports from 501(c)(4) groups to the IRS can differ markedly from what they report to the Federal Elections Commission. Filing conflicting reports to two federal agencies meets the prima facie definition of a criminal false statement. There is adequate predication for the Treasury Department, the FEC and the Department of Justice to take a look. Have they?
Although dark-money groups can hide their influence apparatus from the IRS and the public, nothing says that grand juries can't get access to that information. In the Watergate investigation, courts decided that even executive privilege had to yield to grand jury investigative subpoenas. But investigators won't get what they don't ask for — or don't subpoena.
The strongest solution is to require disclosure of who spends to influence our politics. My DISCLOSE Act would require groups that spend money in elections — including super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups — to disclose donors who gave $10,000 or more during an election cycle. Pass this law and the American people might find out who funded the Jan. 6 insurrection.
The dark channels of influence that have corrupted our politics for years were used to plan and execute the Jan. 6 coup attempt. The American people ought to know who the planners are and what they wanted — and we ought to help them find out.
russian $ to gop eg ron johnson, blackburn, #partyoftraitors?
https://nrawatch.org/case/improper-campaign-spending/ -->
https://www.thetrace.org/**2018**/12/trump-nra-campaign-coordination/
da National Rifle Association spent $30 million to help elect Donald Trump — more than any other independent conservative group. Most of that sum went toward television advertising, but a political message loses its power if it fails to reach the right audience at the right time. For the complex and consequential task of placing ads in key markets across the nation in 2016, the NRA turned to a media-strategy firm called Red Eagle Media.
One element of Red Eagle’s work for the NRA involved purchasing a slate of 52 ad slots on WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, in late October 2016. The ads targeted adults aged 35 to 64, and aired on local news programs and syndicated shows likeJeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune.In paperwork filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Red Eagle described them as “anti-Hillary” and “pro-Trump.”
The Trump campaign pursued a strikingly similar advertising strategy. Shortly after the Red Eagle purchase, as Election Day loomed, it bought33 ads on the same station, set to air during the same week. The ads, which the campaign purchased through a firm called American Media & Advocacy Group (AMAG), were aimed at precisely the same demographic as the NRA spots, and often ran during the same shows, bombarding Norfolk viewers with complementary messages.
The two purchases may have looked coincidental; Red Eagle and AMAG appear at first glance to be separate firms. But each is closely connected to a major conservative media-consulting firm called National Media Research, Planning and Placement. In fact, the three outfits are so intertwined that both the NRA’s and the Trump campaign’s ad buys were authorized by the same person: National Media’s chief financial officer, Jon Ferrell.
“This is very strong evidence, if not proof, of illegal coordination,” said Larry Noble, a former general counsel for the Federal Election Commission. “This is the heat of the general election, and the same person is acting as an agent for the NRA and the Trump campaign.”
Reporting by The Trace shows that the NRA and the Trump campaign employed the same operation — at times, the exact same people — to craft and execute their advertising strategies for the 2016 presidential election. The investigation, which involved a review of more than 1,000 pages of Federal Communications Commission and Federal Election Commission documents, found multiple instances in which National Media, through its affiliates Red Eagle and AMAG, executed ad buys for Trump and the NRA that seemed coordinated to enhance each other.
Individuals working for National Media or its affiliated companies either signed or were named in FCC documents, demonstrating that they had knowledge of both the NRA and the Trump campaign’s advertising plans.
Experts say the arrangement appears to violate campaign finance laws.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a situation where illegal coordination seems more obvious,” said Ann Ravel, a former chair of the FEC who reviewed the records. “It is so blatant that it doesn’t even seem sloppy. Everyone involved probably just thinks there aren’t going to be any consequences.”...
https://www.thetrace.org/2018/09/nra-starboard-strategic-campaign-finance-senate-races/
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Bang for the Buck
Despite FEC Complaint, the NRA Is Still Using a Mystery Firm to Back Senate Candidates
The gun group's first big ad buy of the 2018 cycle was made through a company that, according to an election watchdog, exists only to circumvent campaign finance laws.
By Mike Spies Sep 10, 2018
NRA Youtube
The Trace
The National Rifle Association made its first major foray into the 2018 election cycle last week, unleashing ads on behalf of Republican challengers to Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. And in both cases, the gun group continued to pay a mysterious vendor that, according to one election watchdog, appears to be a shell company set up to circumvent election laws limiting how much the NRA can spend on candidates.
That firm, according to the NRA’s latest filings with the Federal Election Commission, is Starboard Strategic Inc. As The Trace and Politico Magazine reported in July, Starboard Strategic, which is the NRA’s top election contractor — to the tune of more than $60 million from the gun group since 2014 — appears to be little more than the alter ego of an established firm calledOnMessage, Inc. The two entities share the same office addresses and partners, one of whom registered Starboard’s opaque, skeletal website (after our story was published, the domain registration was privatized).
OnMessage is a prominent consulting firm that works directly with GOP campaigns. According to an FEC complaint that the Campaign Legal Center filed shortly after our investigation, Starboard Strategic and OnMessage are “functionally indistinguishable.” The NRA is free to independently spend as much as it wants on political candidates, so long as the group isn’t coordinating its messaging and strategy with the candidates’ campaigns. Any spending that is coordinated, however, is subject to caps and disclosure requirements. By paying Starboard for ads in support of candidates while OnMessage was working directly with the same candidates’ official campaigns, the complaint says, the NRA “made excessive and unreported contributions…in violation of…reporting requirements and contribution limits.”
In 2014, the NRA paid Starboard millions of dollars for ads in support of three Republican Senate candidates: Tom Cotton in Arkansas; Cory Gardner in Colorado, and Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Simultaneously, those campaigns contracted with OnMessage. All three candidates defeated Democratic incumbents. In 2016, a similar arrangement played out again inWisconsin: Republican Ron Johnson, who beat back a challenge from Russ Feingold, employed OnMessage. Later in the campaign cycle, the NRA placed anti-Feingold ads through Starboard.
Federal law allows outside groups and campaigns to use common vendors. But the firm working for either client must ensure that employees do not share election-related information. Usually, a firm seeks to prevent coordination by requiring its staffers to read and sign astrict firewall policy, which functions both as an agreement to comply with the law and an acknowledgement that there are penalties for failing to do so. Despite repeated requests, OnMessage has never produced a copy or provided any details of its policy.
The ad the NRA ran against Tester raises fresh questions about potentially illegal coordination. The gun group paid Starboard almost $400,000 for costs relating to the spot. Meanwhile, the campaign of Tester’s opponent, Matt Rosendale, has already paid OnMessage more than $400,000 this cycle.....
https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/steve-bannon-2655746168/
In 2016, the British data firm Cambridge Analytic (which supported Donald Trump during that year's presidential election) used Steve Bannon as its director of U.S. operations — and Cambridge had a billionaire backer in Rebekah Mercer. But now, according to the :{Daily Beast:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:'s Roger Sollenberger, Mercer is distancing herself from the far-right MAGA Republican.
"The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center alleges that the Trump campaign and a pro-Trump super PAC run by Bannon illegally coordinated through Cambridge to pump out millions of dollars in political ads for Trump," Sollenberger reports in an article published on November 16. "Brendan Fischer, director of reform at CLC, said the evidence generated in the closed investigation specifically strengthens their case against Bannon, who was named in the foreign national probe but was never questioned."
Bannon and Mercer were allies in 2016. But now, according to Fischer, Mercer appears to be throwing Bannon under the bus.
"Federal election filings show the Trump campaign paid Cambridge Analytica $5.9 million in the 2016 cycle, and MAN1 reported paying another $5 million to the firm after the super PAC began backing Trump," Sollenberger explains. "It isillegal for campaigns and outside groups to coordinateelection-related activity through a common vendor without appropriate firewalls in place. Fischer pointed out that Mercer, Bannon's former business partner and billionaire Cambridge financier, appears to have betrayed Bannon, with the right-wing megadonor pinning the blame for any illicit activity on him."
Fischer told the Beast, "The response from Mercer's attorney was that Bannon was running the show, so the idea that he'd also been running both the super PAC and the Trump campaign — and that both of them were contracting with the firm Bannon had also been running just boggles the mind. These are not novel issues. It's anticipated in the law that a shared vendor might act illegally as a conduit between campaigns, but this is something we haven't really seen before."
According to Mercer's attorney, Mark Hansen, any problematic activity with Cambridge could not be blamed on her, but would lie with Bannon or Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix.
"While Hansen acknowledged that Mercer worked at 'a high level' in the organization," Sollenberger writes, "she had been 'simply swept in' with Bannon and Nix, he said. As the company's top executives, Hansen continued, it was Bannon and Nix who 'directed what CA employees did or did not do in their U.S. campaign work for US political campaigns.'"
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2020/04/22/fec-complaint-alleges/
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FEC complaint alleges a Utah candidate illegally coordinated with outside group to attack Rep. Chris Stewart
(J. Scott Applewhite | AP file photo) In this Sept. 19, 2019, file photo, Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, leaves a meeting with national intelligence inspector general Michael Atkinson about a whistleblower complaint, at the Capitol in Washington.
By Thomas Burr
·
Published: April 22
Updated: April 23, 2020
Washington • Just days before the Utah Republican Convention, a watchdog group is filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging a congressional candidate in Utah illegally accepted an in-kind contribution by coordinating with an outside group to attack Rep. Chris Stewart.
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Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust (FACT) says in a letter to the FEC that a person once identified as a campaign manager and spokesman for Republican challenger Mary Burkett’s campaign was behind a mass anti-Stewart text message from a group called Stronger America Fund Inc. Stewart is a fellow Republican.
Stronger America Fund Inc., based in the District of Columbia, lists Patrick Krason as its founder and “governor.” Krason is also listed as the treasurer of Burkett’s campaign and had been identified as a campaign manager and spokesman in news releases.
Federal law prohibits coordination between campaigns and political advocacy groups registered as nonprofits — which can take in unlimited funds from contributors and corporations without identifying their donors.
“There is reason to believe Stronger America Fund made, and Burkett and Burkett for Utah accepted, an illegal in-kind contribution in the form of a coordinated communication,” the complaint to the FEC says.
“The two entities both appear to be affiliated with the same individual during the time Stronger America Fund disseminated and paid for a communication beneficial to Burkett,” the complaint continues. “If so, it would constitute an illegal in-kind contribution to Burkett’s campaign. We request the Commission immediately investigate and if a violation is found, act immediately and impose appropriate penalties.”
The complaint stems from a text message apparently sent earlier this month urging GOP delegates to oust Stewart from office for voting to raise the nation's debt limit while in office.
“Anybody else would be a better choice at convention,” the text reads, adding that it was paid for by Stronger America Fund, Inc. and not authorized or paid for by any campaign.
Burkett, of St. George, is running a second time for the 2nd Congressional District seat held by Stewart.
She said the accusations against her “are false. Neither I, nor my campaign, have ever coordinated with any outside group.”
She said Wednesday that Krason had worked on her campaign but left its payroll in November and now is a volunteer. Burkett adds that she had no knowledge of the text message that went out from the group tied to Krason.
Burkett, who had previously posted on Facebook that she had nothing to do with the text message and reiterated that Wednesday, said the irony is that she’s being attacked for something she didn’t do.
“He's doing the very thing he accused me of doing, by the way,” Burkett said of Stewart. “He accused me of hiding behind a third group. He's doing exactly what he accused me of. And I had nothing to do with it.”
Burkett says she had “absolutely” no involvement in the text message that was sent and went online as soon as she heard about it to ask the group to stop attacking Stewart.
She says the FEC complaint shows “Chris is vulnerable and he knows it.”
“A Washington, D.C., group questioning a little grassroots campaign in southern Utah?” she said. “Come on. You know, this had to come from Chris’ people somehow, someway.”
FACT says it was filing the complaint on its own and not in concert with Stewart's campaign.
Stewart’s campaign said it was unaware of the complaint and was not involved.
Stewart won the GOP nomination in 2010 under what his competitors complained were questionable circumstances surrounding allegations of collusion against other candidates.
Then-Eureka Mayor Milt Hanks, who was vying for the open seat, alleged right before delegates began casting ballots that four contenders had conspired to drop negative information about Stewart — charges that those candidates denied and claimed was foul play by Stewart’s camp.
Other candidates running for the GOP nod alleged Hanks was a Stewart plant who had never spent any money in the race and then made unsubstantiated, 11th-hour allegations. A Utah Republican Party investigation overseen by then-Chairman Thomas Wright found no criminal wrongdoing, but did chastise Hanks.
FACT, which touts itself as a group “dedicated to promoting accountability, ethics, and transparency in government and civic arenas," says it is nonpartisan and has filed complaints against Democrats and Republicans.
The group came into the national spotlight when its former president, Matt Whitaker, was named acting attorney general after the resignation of Jeff Sessions. Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney, had led FACT, which The Washington Post said “is part of a national network of nonprofits that often work in concert to amplify conservative messages.”
Whitaker received more than $1.2 million during his three years as the head of the nonprofit.
The Post reported that FACT's address in D.C.'s K Street is a virtual office and mailing address shared by 200 other organizations.
The FEC now has only three of the six commission seats filled, meaning it can still investigate complaints filed with the agency but lacks a quorum to issue fines or make rulings.
a h
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/heres-the-damning-evidence-of-felony-coordination-between-trump-campaign-and-russians-that-the-mueller-report-overlooked-report/
Some Democrats and critics of President Donald Trump have been railing against Republicans for admitting that they haven’t read former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report for the Russia investigation and for saying that they don’t plan to. But journalist and Trump critic Jed Shugerman takes a different approach in an in-depth piece published in the Daily Beast this week: rather than attacking Republicans and Trump supporters for not bothering to read the report, Shugerman argues that Mueller’s report isn’t as damning of the president and his allies as it should have been — and that Mueller isdownplaying the importance of some key events.
“The bottom line is that the Mueller Report is a failure not because of Congress or because of public apathy, but because it failed to get the law, the facts or even the basics of writing right,” Shugerman asserts. “When Mueller testifies before Congress on July 17, he should be pressed on all of this."
In his report, Mueller concluded that the 2016 Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians, although questionable, didn’t rise to the level of a full-fledged criminal conspiracy. But Shugerman views Mueller’s analysis as flawed.
“It seems Mueller did not hire any legal experts with experience in campaign finance regulation,” Shugerman complains. “Given that this investigation was about campaign crimes, this appears to a revealing oversight with serious consequences.”
Shugerman goes on to say that Mueller’s “errors meant that, first, he failed to conclude that the Trump campaign criminally coordinated with Russia.” And the Daily Beast writer adds that Mueller “failed to indict campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, for felony campaign coordination."
In 2018, Manafort was vigorously prosecuted in federal court for a long list of financial crimes thanks to Mueller’s investigation — and Gates became the prosecution’s star witness. But neither of them was accused of “felony campaign coordination,” Shugerman writes.
Shugerman, in his article, goes on to list and describe, in detail, interactions between Trump’s campaign and Russians in 2016 — and those interactions, he believes, are more damning than Mueller concludes in his report.
For example, Shugerman asserts, “Mueller should have concluded that both Manafort and Gates engaged in felony campaign coordination, and he should have indicted Manafort for it. Manafort is a lawyer with decades of experience working for presidential campaigns: it would be less difficult to establish knowing and willful violations. And Manafort’s extraordinary record of lying to prosecutors — and coordinating his lies with Trump’s lawyers — would help prove the case as an inference of consciousness of guilt.”
Shugerman concludes his piece by stressing that when Mueller publicly testifies before two committees in the House of Representatives on July 17, he hopes members of Congress will address some of the ways in which his report falls short — and why the Trump campaign’s interactions with Russians three years ago were more damning than the report indicates...“Given Mueller’s failure and Trump’s exploitation of that failure,” Shugerman stresses, “it is now Congress’ duty to the public, the candidates under investigation and future candidates to identify the law clearly and to explain that some of this behavior was a civil violation — and in fact, a criminal violation.”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/the-nra-may-have-illegally-coordinated-campaign-ads-with-republican-candidates-in-key-senate-races-report/
TheNational Rifle Association appears to have illegally coordinated campaign ads with Republican candidates in key Senate races, according to Federal Communication Records (FCC) records obtained by The Trace.
This article first appeared in Salon.
According to the report, the NRA’s ads on behalf of Missouri Senate candidate Josh Hawley and Montana Senate candidate Matt Rosendale in 2018, as well as North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr in 2016, were all authorized by the same media consulting firm that they candidates used for their ads. (Hawley and Burr won their races, but Rosendale lost to Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.) The scheme appears to be in violation of laws barring independent groups from working in concert with political campaigns.
According to the FCC records, at least 10 purchases by both the NRA and three Senate campaigns were made by the same person, National Media CFO Jon Ferell.
The Trace reported that the company used the “assumed or fictitious name” Red Eagle Media to buy ads for the NRA while using the name American Media & Advocacy Group to buy ads for the Senate candidates.
The Trace previously reported in December that President Trump’s 2016 campaign had the same type of scheme with the NRA. In that case, the campaign and the NRA hired different National Media affiliates to approve ads on their behalf. National Media employees using different corporate names placed ads for both Trump and the NRA around the country.
Campaign finance laws prohibit independent groups from sharing election-related information with campaigns. Though it is not illegal for the groups and campaigns to use the same vendor, the Federal Election Commission requires vendors to prevent workers from sharing information.
Larry Noble, who served as general counsel for the FEC for more than a decade, told The Trace that “all evidence points to coordination.”
“It’s hard to understand how you’d have same person authorizing placements for the NRA and the candidate and it not be coordination,” he said.
Last year, The Daily Beast obtained audio in which Rosendale, during his 2018 campaign against Tester, admitted that Chris Cox, the top political strategist for the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Action, assured him that the NRA would aid his campaign by August.
“I fully expect the NRA is going to come in … in August sometime,” Rosendale said in the recording. “The Supreme Court confirmations are big. That’s what sent the NRA over the line. Because in ’12, with [Republican Senate nominee Denny Rehberg], they stayed out, they stayed out of Montana. But Chris Cox told me, he’s like, ‘We’re going to be in this race.’”
The NRA followed up Rosendale’s prediction by spending more than $400,000 on political ads targeting Tester by September.
Both the NRA and Rosendale denied any coordination after the recording was released.
Even before that story broke, Politico reported in July 2018 that two NRA groups had illegally coordinated spending in support of Republican candidates, using a shell company created by the Republican consulting firm OnMessage.
Alex Tausanovitch, who served four years as counsel to commissioners on the FEC, told Montana Public Radio that the coordination between Rosendale’s campaign and the NRA was as blatant as it gets.
“The spirit of the rule is candidates are supposed to be entirely independent of these outside groups, and here we have a recording of the candidate talking about what seems to be a private, substantive conversation with an outside dark money group about the specifics of the campaign,” Tausanovitch said. “That is the kind of thing the FEC could easily look into.”
The NRA is now the subject of two pending complaints before the FEC, but The Trace noted that the federal laws barring such coordination are rarely enforced, in part because the FEC has been deadlocked along partisan lines for years.
Ann Ravel, who served on the FEC until 2017, said that the NRA cases “show how weak the campaign finance system is.”
“There is so much documentary evidence that it wouldn’t even require a lengthy investigation,” Ravel said. “Some cases are hard to prove, but this, on its face, is so obvious. I would not think that there is any basis for not at least investigating the matter.”
“What this reflects is the FEC’s lack of enforcement and the lack of respect that the NRA and the vendor are showing toward the FEC and the law,” added Larry Noble. “You do this if you think no one is going to investigate.”
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https://www.jsonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/09/23/secret-cash-helped-those-who-rewrote-state-law-block-lead-claims/1405053002
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Secret cash helped those who rewrote Wisconsin law to block claims of lead-poisoned kids
ONE ADVOCATE CALLS WISCONSIN THE ‘DARKEST OF DARK MONEY STATES’ AS MILLIONS FLOW INTO RACES FOR GOVERNOR, LEGISLATURE AND STATE SUPREME COURT
Pawan Naidu
Published 3:51 p.m. CT Sept. 23, 2018
At age 2, Yasmine Clark was lead-poisoned so severely that she had to be hospitalized for emergency chelation treatment to cleanse her blood of life-threatening levels of the heavy metal.
At age 5, Yasmine was again diagnosed with lead poisoning. She suffered significant brain damage. Her IQ declined. She developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
So, in 2006, at age 5, Yasmine became a plaintiff in a Milwaukee County lawsuit filed against multiple paint companies, including National Lead, now called NL Industries, which had made lead paint like that found in the rental homes where she was raised in Milwaukee.
She was among about 170 Wisconsin children named as plaintiffs in lawsuits against the paint companies. The suits sought compensation for medical expenses and other damages for what their attorneys said were severe and permanent injuries from ingesting lead-tainted paint chips.
While these children had compelling personal stories, NL Industries had something even more powerful on its side: Republican politicians facing recall elections in 2011 and 2012 who secretly benefitted from $750,000 contributed by NL’s owner, Harold Simmons, to an “independent” political group.
At the request of NL’s lobbyist, Republicans inserted a handful of words into the 2013-15 state budget that sought to halt such lead-paint lawsuits, including the one filed by Yasmine, according to a memo obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning watchdog organization that exposes corruption in government.
The politicians’ effort — ultimately blocked by judges — demonstrates the power of secret contributions to reshape state law while the public is kept in the dark.
Contributions up, citizens alarmed
The flow of cash to outside groups seeking to influence Wisconsin elections has widened since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision held that corporations could not be barred from making so-called independent expenditures. The court declared that corporations have the same First Amendment free speech rights as do people.
George Penn, a volunteer withSouth Central Wisconsin United to Amend, presents to the group at the Sequoya Library in Madison on April 10. The nonpartisan citizens group meets twice a month to discuss ways to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision that loosened restrictions on campaign contributions.
(Photo: Coburn Dukehart, Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism)
In 2015, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out a state-led John Doe investigation into coordination between Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign, Club for Growth and other “issue ad” groups by overturning a state law that prohibited such coordination. The four conservative members of the court who ordered an end to the investigation had themselves been beneficiaries of an estimated $8 million in outside spending by the same political groups under scrutiny in the Walker investigation.
Later that year, the Wisconsin Legislature passed a law that allows corporations to donate to political parties and legislative campaign committees.The law overturned a corporate contribution ban that had been in place since 1905. Republicans said the change gave corporations parity with labor unions, which could contribute to political parties and which traditionally supported Democrats.
The loosening of Wisconsin’s rules comes as a large majority of the American public is concerned about the influence of money in politics. A nationwide poll released in June by the bipartisan Democracy Project found that 77% of respondents agreed that “the laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what powerful special interests and their lobbyists want.”
Activists, alarmed by the rise of corporate influence on politicians and the electoral process, are fighting back.
United to Amend, a nonpartisan national campaign active in Wisconsin, aims to get local and state governments to endorse changing the U.S. Constitution to counteract the effects of Citizens United. And several states, including Arizona, Colorado, Massachusetts, Missouri, North Dakota and South Dakota, have or are working toward measures on the November ballot that seek to further regulate campaign spending.
Four powerful words
The Guardian news organization, citing leaked documents from the Wisconsin John Doe investigation, found that lead executive Simmons had made donations totaling $750,000 to Wisconsin Club for Growth between April 2011 and January 2012. The spending was used to beat back recall elections against Walker and Republican senators sparked by passage of the controversial Act 10 collective bargaining law.
Lead poisoning of children has largely been tied to contact with old, peeling paint. Here, a Milwaukee rental home is investigated for lead in a 2015 inspection. Language was inserted into the 2013-15 state budget at the request of a paint industry lobbyist whose client had secretly given $750,000 to a group seeking to help Gov. Scott Walker and Senate Republicans recalled in 2011 and 2012. The budget language sought to block lawsuits filed on behalf of lead-poisoned children, but that move ultimately failed.Photo taken Nov. 23, 2015.
In 2013, four words were inserted into an omnibus budget motion passed in the early morning hours by the Republican-run Joint Finance Committee.
Those words, “whenever filed or accused,” effectively halted the claims of Yasmine and the other 170 or so lead-poisoned children by retroactively exempting NL Industries and the other lead-paint manufacturers from liability.
In the memo obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, documented the request by NL lobbyist Eric Petersen to insert the language into the budget.
Milwaukee attorney Peter Earle represents plaintiffs
Milwaukee attorney Peter Earle represents plaintiffs suing paint companies for lead poisoning. Four words inserted into the 2013-15 state budget at the request of a paint industry lobbyist sought to block the plaintiffs from pursuing claims against the industry, but two judges ruled the move could not block the lawsuits, allowing them to proceed.
(Photo: Kevin Harnack, Wisconsin Law Journal)
Attorney Peter Earle, who represented Yasmine in the lead-paint case, said the language inserted into the 2013-15 budget was “obscure and last-minute,” and added “without notice, sponsors or a public hearing.”
“It was done because of greed,” the Milwaukee attorney said. “Politicians chose the interests of their donors and corporate special interest groups over the rights of innocent children.”
The secretive budget move was short-lived, however. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge David Hansher found that Yasmine had the right to bring her lawsuit, a decision that was upheld on appeal.
“The sole inquiry before the court is whether it is constitutional for the Legislature to deprive innocent and injured plaintiffs of their vested right to pursue claims against manufacturers and sellers of white lead carbonate,” Hansher wrote. “In this Court's view, it is not.”
In 2017, Hansher granted a motion filed by Earle to dismiss the case with the option of re-filing it at a later time. Earle said he cannot discuss the reasons for the dismissal.
‘Darkest of dark money states’
Wisconsin and Florida are the only two states in the nation that have legalized coordination between candidates and outside special interest groups that engage in “issue advocacy,” according to Daniel Weiner, senior counsel at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice,which aims to reform, revitalize and defend democracy and justice.
Contributions to “issue ads,” which often support or oppose candidates without using words including “vote for” or “vote against,” are not required to be reported to the Wisconsin Ethics Commission.
David Buerger, staff counsel at the ethics commission, said the state now bans coordination only involving “express advocacy” — communication that specifically calls for the election or defeat of a candidate.
In a 2015 move that further obscures the influence of money on politics, Wisconsin’s Legislature on a party-line vote eliminated the requirement that candidates list the employers of their donors, removing a key detail behind publicly reported campaign contributions.
In the same bill, lawmakers legalized unlimited contributions to political parties and legislative campaign committees,except for corporations and groups such as labor unions, which can contribute up to $12,000 a year.
Madison attorney Mike Wittenwyler is a campaign finance
Madison attorney Mike Wittenwyler is a campaign finance law specialist. Polls show most Americans are concerned about loosening restrictions on campaign contributions, but Wittenwyler agrees with court decisions that have found spending on elections to be a free-speech right. "I want to live in a society where everyone is allowed to speak without any government oppression of what you're going to hear." Wittenwyler appears here on Wisconsin Public Television explaining coordination in campaign finance law in 2014.
(Photo: Wisconsin Public Television)
Mike Wittenwyler, a Madison attorney who specializes in campaign finance issues and who has represented outside political groups, said the law changes were “long overdue.” The last major rewrite was in the 1970s, he said, prior to several key court decisions that clarified the limits and rights of donors and candidates.
A Marquette Law School poll found that most citizens of Wisconsin disagreed with the Legislature’s 2015 decision to remove contribution limits on state political parties. In a poll, 61% of respondents said they opposed unlimited contributions, while 13% supported them. Another 25% said they had not heard enough on the issue.
Taken together, these changes have made Wisconsin the “darkest of dark money states,” said Jay Heck, executive director of the Common Cause in Wisconsin, which promotes clean, open and responsive state government.
Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, another good government group, offers a similar assessment. “Wisconsin,” he said, “is open for bribery.”
Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin
Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, speaks at Maps Madness: Voters vs. Politicians, a rally organized by the Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition on March 7, 2018. Rothschild has called the secretive process used by Republicans in the Legislature in 2011 a “grotesque” deprivation of people’s “First Amendment rights to speak and be heard.”
(Photo: Cameron Smith, Wisconsin Center for Investigati)
Weiner said secret campaign contributions can come from interests on the left or the right, especially in state elections.
“On the state level, we see a lot more ‘Company X wants a mining concession,’ or something like that,” Weiner said. “And they put a lot of dark money in to basically influence legislative officials to get what they want.”
That is not just an idle example. Documents briefly unsealed during the John Doe investigation show that Gogebic Taconite secretly donated $700,000 to Wisconsin Club for Growth during the recalls in 2011 and 2012. The next year, in 2013, Walker signed the bill loosening mining restrictions — a bill that Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald acknowledged in a video was written by the company seeking to build a controversial mine in northern Wisconsin. After several years, the company abandoned the project as not feasible.
People vs. Citizens United
Some advocates for stricter campaign finance laws feel that the only way to blunt such corporate influence over the political system is with a constitutional amendment to override the Citizens United decision.
Wisconsin United to Amend is mobilizing people to sign a petition and to convince city councils and town and village boards to vote on resolutions calling for this constitutional amendment.
The campaign’s messages are: “Money is not speech” and “Corporations are not people.” Currently, more than 130 local governments in Wisconsin and 19 state legislatures have passed the resolution.
“More and more people are understanding … these politicians cannot fix it, because they are bought by those who don’t want to fix it,” said George Penn, a representative from South Central Wisconsin United to Amend.
Many on the left see the Citizens United decision as a stab at the heart of democracy. Wittenwyler takes the opposite view. He believes the decision expands free speech rights.
“Everyone should be able to speak and you shouldn’t make arbitrary decisions based on how an entity may or may not be established,” Wittenwyler said. “I want to live in a society where everyone is allowed to speak without any government oppression of what you’re going to hear.”
Voter John Tyler, speaking outside his Lake Mills polling station during the Aug. 14 primary election, said corporations have too much influence in our democracy.
“How is the regular person supposed to stand up and be counted compared to corporations that give millions of dollars and influence policy and have the legislatures just do what they wanted?” Tyler asked.
Eric Blumreich, a Green Bay resident who participated in Wisconsin Public Radio’s Beyond the Ballot series, agreed. But he believes voters still have some leverage.
“The 2016 presidential election was decided by razor-thin victories for (President) Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania,” Blumreich said in an email. “In my opinion, this indicates that your vote counts in Wisconsin and that vote is perhaps the best indicator … when it comes to political power and having a voice.”
Dee J. Hall contributed to this story, which was produced as part of an investigative reporting class in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication under the direction Hall, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s managing editor.
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hmn, these might be miscell breaking of campaign laws, not speifically coord of c3, c4, c6?
standard move is sis c3 and c4? one is secret, one is unlimited?
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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/09/13144/top-ten-emails-john-doe-document-leak
On September 14, the Guardian newspaper which published the Snowden revelation, published a massive set of documents from the Scott Walker dark money probe know as the "John Doe" investigation. We highly recommend the lengthy expose on secret money and backroom deals, which you can access here. If you don't have time to read all 1,500 emails and documents in the cache, our staff has picked out some of the most illuminating.
At the heart of the matter are three men. Scott Walker,RJ Johnson (whosimultaneously worked for Walker and the dark money machine Wisconsin Club for Growth, say prosecutors) and Keith Gilkeswho was Walker'schief of staff in 2011 and his campaign manager in 2012. Prosecutors were investigating whether campaign money was channeled through a purportedly "independent group" in order to circumvent state and federal rules that set limits on political contributions and require them to be publicly revealed, explains the Guardian.
1. National Club for Growth's David Keating questions RJ Johnson of Wisconsin Club for Growth, who becomes Walker's top campaign advisory shortly after this email, about the legality of his activities way back in 2009 prior to Walker's run for Governor in 2010. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT1, p.25)
2. Nick Ayers of Republican Governors Association outlines a coordinated "battle plan" to Gov. Walker and Reince Priebus at an early date March 2011. RGA would go on to spend a whopping $9.5 million on the recall as an "independent" expenditure group. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT1, p.28)
3. RJ Johnson, gives talking points to Gov. Walker that boast about the success of the coordinated efforts in the 2011 recalls. No talk of "issues" here, just bare-knuckled politics. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT1, p.55)
4. Scott Walker talks to Karl Rove. "Bottom Line: RJ helps keeps in place a team that is wildly successful in Wisconsin. We are running 9 recall elections and it would be like 9 congressional markets in every market in the state and twin cities." (Key-Misc-Set-One, p.16)
5. RJ Johnson talks to Keith Gilkes, Walker campaign manager, and Gov. Walker about why they need to keep activities of the 3rd party groups under their command. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT1, p.2)
6. Fundraiser Kate Donor explains the strategy of locking down commitments from a host of supposedly "independent" groups like the Koch Brothers Americans for Prosperity to Keith Gilkes, RJ Johnson and Gov. Walker. (Fundraising-Coordination, p.14)
7. Keith Gilkes forwards "oppo" opposition research on controversial potential donors, including Harold Simmons, Dallas-based CEO of a lead pigment company, to Gov. Walker. After this exchange, some checks from these givers are sent to Wisconsin Club for Growth where they will remain secret and not be publicly disclosed as a campaign contribution to Walker. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT1, p.61)
8.Harold Simmons, NL Industries/CONTRAN, scheduled contact with Walker plus his personal and corporate checks. (2012-08-14-Exhibits-01-100-PT2, p.127; Corporate-Checks-Sanitized, p.5-6)
9. Affidavit of Wisconsin Club for Growth director Eric O'Keefe who explains its all about "liberty and fiscal responsibility" not winning elections. (WICFG-Quash-Aff)
- Jay Rosser, a representative of T. Boone Pickens, email to RJ Johnson and Kate Doner. Interestingly, declines to give: "we recognize the opportunity to give anonymously, but frankly that is just not our style." (Fundraising-Coordination, p.4) It is likely that not all the people mentioned in these documents gave secretly to Walker.
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boston globe
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A leading lead manufacturer was among a host of corporate leaders who donated to a conservative group that helped Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators fend off recall challenges, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The Guardian obtained more than 1,000 pages of leaked documents from a secret investigation into whether Walker’s recall campaign illegally coordinated with outside conservative groups. That investigation was halted in 2015 by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.[previously stacked? prosser?]
The documents show Walker was interested in getting Harold Simmons, the billionaire owner of NL Industries, which was a major producer of leadthat was used in paint before such practices were banned, to donate to the conservative Wisconsin Club for Growth. Simmons gave the group $750,000 in 2011 and 2012, the height of the recalls.
Walker and his fundraisers also solicited money from hedge-fund billionaire Stephen Cohen, who gave the club $1 million; Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, who gave $25,000; and hedge-fund manager and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research Chairman Paul Singer, who gave $250,000.
such donations are legal under the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision,which said restrictions on corporations’ political spending were unconstitutional.
Prosecutors had alleged Walker and his fundraising team asked potential contributors to donate to Wisconsin Club for Growth and other groups so they could run ads supporting him in the recalls, which stemmed from Walker’s signature law that stripped public unions of nearly all of their bargaining rights. But the state’s high court said Walker had done nothing illegal because coordination between candidates and outside groups on so-called issue advertising — ads that don’t expressly call for a candidate’s election or defeat — is permissible.[what did the ads actually say? TV? direct mail?]
Prosecutors have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let them re-start the investigation. Justices will consider that request on Sept. 26.
Walker campaign spokesman Joe Fadness issued a statement Wednesday calling the investigation ‘‘baseless’’ and that there is ‘‘no evidence of any wrongdoing. He didn’t comment on the documents.
Club For Growth attorney David Rivkin said in an email that prosecutors made up crimes that don’t exist and called their appeal ‘‘legally frivolous and just another publicity stunt intended to tarnish their targets’ reputations and salvage their own.’’
Walker signed a measure in January 2011, before Simmons made his donations, that made lead paint manufacturers immune from lead-poisoning liability lawsuits goingforward. The recalls took place later that year. And after Simmons’ last donation, the Wisconsin Legislature’s finance committee tucked language into the 2013-15 state budget making manufacturers immune from pending lawsuits.
Staff members for three Republicans on that committee who faced recall in 2011 didn’t immediately respond to email messages from The Associated Press inquiring about whether the lawsuit immunity was in return for the Club for Growth donations. One of them, Sen. Luther Olsen of Ripon, told the Cap Times of Madison it was not.
‘‘I think that’s quite a jump,’’ he said. ‘‘I voted for something in the budget and somebody else got some money ... that’s not pay-to-play.’’
Previously released documents show iron mining company Gogebic Taconite gave the club $700,000. Walker later signed a bill easing regulations to help clear the path for the company’s mine near Lake Superior. The company ultimately gave up plans for the mine, however.
Minority Democrats said during a news conference that the documents raise more questions about what other legislation may have been passed in exchange for donations to outside groups.
‘‘It appears we have more payback than policy,’’ Rep. Dana Wachs of Eau Claire said.
Spokeswomen for Republican Senate and Assembly leaders didn’t immediately respond to emails.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said in a statement that whoever leaked the documents committed a crime because the investigation is a John Doe probe — equivalent to a grand jury investigation.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/09/15/wis-governor-sought-corporate-donations-recall/qMt4DpRkWC5OqoHULJdg0H/story.html
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http://www.progressive.org/news/2016/01/188520/dark-money%E2%80%99s-front-man
In November 2013, a little-known conservative activist named Eric O’Keefe brazenly disobeyed a court order and leaked information to The Wall Street Journaleditorial page about a secret “John Doe” investigation involving campaign finance violations by political operatives surrounding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. O’Keefe’s group, the conservative Wisconsin Club for Growth, was among the parties being investigated.
It was the beginning of an extraordinary scorched-earth campaign by O’Keefe to harass and undermine the John Doe investigators, who had targeted alleged illegal coordination between Walker and conservative groups including Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. But O’Keefe had a bigger goal in mind: overturning decades of established law in America saying that independent advocacy groups could not coordinate with political campaigns.
O’Keefe launched a series of suits against the prosecutors leading the investigation, continued to leak information about the probe, and publicly denounced it as a “partisan” attack on free speech. He went on conservative talk radio to accuse prosecutors of imposing “a traumatic, unconstitutional abuse on people” and compared those being investigated to “a rape victim”—adding, “I am saying this deliberately.”
Together with his lawyer, David Rivkin, O’Keefe pushed the idea that the John Doe investigators conducted early morning “paramilitary raids” violating the constitutional rights of those being investigated, and which resulted in stories in conservative publications like National Review. Stories of these abuses were discredited by an audiotape in which investigators treated their alleged victim politely. Yet a majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in July released an extraordinary ruling that shut down the John Doe probe, with three of the four-member majority citing unproven violations of constitutional rights.
The Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce had together provided more than $8 million supporting these four justices in their last elections, accounting for anywhere from 48 percent to 76 percent of the total spent on each justice’s behalf.The justices returned the favor, writing a decision that seemed to ignore Wisconsin law and decades of U.S. Supreme Court decisions holding that independent advocacy groups cannot coordinate with political campaigns, since that would make them no longer independent.
It was a huge victory for O’Keefe and for Walker, one that has legalized the unlimited use of dark money in campaigns in Wisconsin and could influence how such cases are handled in other jurisdictions. Long after the end of Walker’s 2016 Republican presidential campaign, O’Keefe’s national aspirations still have legs.
“Wisconsin has sort of become ground zero for the testing of how far outside groups could coordinate with candidates,” says Tara Malloy, senior counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit advocacy group that has closely followed the Wisconsin fight. But she notes that what is happening here is part of a much larger conservative agenda. Across the country, Malloy says, “The envelope is being pushed on coordination in all areas.”
All of which has made O’Keefe a public figure, despite a long history of quietly effective conservative advocacy. He has been dubbed the “third Koch brother” for his efforts to lead and recruit donors to numerous advocacy groups connected to billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch.
O’Keefe founded the Sam Adams Alliance, which has trained Tea Party activists. He helped establish a network of rightwing journalistic publications, hired lawyers who are gradually chipping away at legal restrictions on independent advocacy groups, and created groups to challenge Obamacare. Though poorer than the Kochs, he is arguably just as indispensable to the rightwing agenda.
O’Keefe, sixty-one, was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit known as a wealthy community for auto executives. His father was an investor and Eric did well in the stock market, telling friends he was independently wealthy by age twenty-five. When David Koch ran as a Libertarian for vice president in 1980, O’Keefe served as the party’s national field coordinator. As The Washington Post reported, he “became friendly with the Koch brothers, with whom he has joined in many battles.”
O’Keefe has been at the center of a series of national rightwing policy efforts, including the fight for term limits and a so-called taxpayer bill of rights. Paul Jacob, executive director of U.S. Term Limits, has written that O’Keefe “should be known, but isn’t, as the man who came up with the plan to blitz the country with statewide ballot initiatives aimed at limiting the terms of politicians.”
O’Keefe was a founding board member of U.S. Term Limits, and also served as president of Americans for Limited Terms, which during the 1994, 1996, and 1998 congressional election cycles ran ads bashing candidates who opposed term limits. The movement also pushed twenty-three states to put congressional term limit initiatives in front of voters. The Koch brothers were “the main financial backers” of the effort, The New York Times reported.
Some $300,000 went into a series of attack ads targeting House Speaker Tom Foley, Democrat of Washington, for attempting to overturn the term limits law voters in his state had approved in 1992. The TV ads, relates O’Keefe on his website, “showed a tear rolling down the cheek of the George Washington face” on Mount Rushmore.Foley became the first Speaker to lose re-election since the Civil War.
O’Keefe also served on the board of Americans for Limited Government, founded in 1996 and funded by the Koch brothers.The group has backed “taxpayer bill of rights” ballot initiatives in Colorado and other states, with a goal of slashing state government spending. The group systematically savaged President Obama, calling him “‘the biggest liar of all” and comparing his vision of a national volunteer service agency to the Hitler Youth.
A fierce opponent of the McCain-Feingold law’s campaign finance restrictions, O’Keefe helped create theCenter for Competitive Politics in 2005. The group filed briefs in Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that allows unlimited campaign donations by corporations and unions to the kind of independent advocacy groups O’Keefe has used to target incumbents for defeat. This greatly expanded the political might of these groups, many of which do not disclose their donors. OpenSecrets.org found that 72 percent of all such spending in 2014 was by conservative groups.
O’Keefe also launched the Health Care Compact Alliance to combat Obamacare and undermine Medicare and Medicaid by letting states use the funding as they wished. The group’s approach reinforced the anti-Obamacare ads by Americans for Prosperity.
The Sam Adams Alliance, which O’Keefe created in 2006, helped train citizen activists and bloggers and provided key support to the Tea Party, as did the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity. In 2009, the group provided the seed money to create the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, which has bankrolled a huge new network of conservative news publications. By 2012, Media Matters reported,there were “fifty-five news sites covering state government in thirty-nine states that have ties to the Franklin Center.”
The total amount of spending by the vast network of rightwing advocacy groups O’Keefe has helped create is unknown but formidable indeed. While much of the money came from the Kochs, O’Keefe has also “created a network of uber donors and of fundraisers,” says an O’Keefe sympathist who declined to speak on the record.
But when asked about concerns over wealthy donors spending fortunes to influence elections and government policy, O’Keefe told The Washington Post that voters don’t care. “That’s inside baseball,” he said.
R. J. Johnson, a longtime Republican operative, was likely the person who connected O’Keefe to Scott Walker, first elected governor in 2010. Walker’s campaign paid Johnson’s consulting firm more than $130,000 between July 2009 and January 2012. Johnson also worked as a top adviser to Wisconsin Club for Growth.
Justthree days after Walker introduced his bill gutting collective bargaining for public employees in February 2011, the Center for Media and Democracy reported, “Wisconsin Club for Growth began running slick ads accusing state workers of not having to sacrifice, and urging support for the legislation to make state workers ‘pay their fair share.’ ”
When the bill passed, and opponents tried to recall a group of state senators and Walker himself, Club for Growth spent an estimated $9 million on the recalls, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Johnson served as a key consultant to both Club for Growth and Walker’s campaign in his 2012 recall election.
That would seem to make it impossible for coordination not to have occurred between the two groups, and such coordination was then considered illegal in Wisconsin. Emails later showed that Walker secretly fundraised for the Club for Growth; his staff advised the governor to “stress that donations to [Club for Growth] are not disclosed.” Walker met with donors who soon contributed to Club for Growth.
There was every reason to believe the John Doe might succeed. It was actually the second probe involving Walker launched byMilwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, a reputed straight arrow who had previously angered Democrats by prosecuting several Democratic politicians.The first probe, which concerned Walker’s tenure as the Milwaukee County executive, led to the convictions of six people, including three members of his staff, for campaigning on government time.
While Chisholm was a Democrat, the special prosecutor he chose was Francis Schmitz, a longtime Republican who revealed that he voted for Walker in the recall election. Two Republican district attorneys and three chief judges of circuit courts with Republican credentials also took part in the multicounty, bipartisan investigation.
Yet Walker supporters condemned the probe as a “partisan witch hunt,” and this became a conservative mantra on talk radio and at WisconsinWatchdog.org, one of the rightwing news sites funded by the Franklin Center. To date, it has published more than 300 stories condemning the probe and repeating O’Keefe’s criticisms of it. Those criticisms have been echoed by The Wall Street Journal and National Review.
O’Keefe went on the offensive right away. He hiredRivkin,a top attorney in Washington, D.C., tosue Chisholm and all the prosecutors involved in the John Doe probe, accusing them of violating the civil rightsof those under investigation and demanding personal damages from the prosecutors. A WisconsinWatchdog story cheered this, warning that Chisholm and company are “in for a very unpleasant time. He’s got a tiger by the tail, and he’s not up to it.”
O’Keefe and Rivkin launched a barrage of suits, tied the investigation in legal knots, and eventually brought it to a halt. Frank Gimbel, a top Milwaukee defense attorney for more than five decades who represented one of the Walker aides convicted in the first John Doe probe, marvels at what O’Keefe has done.
“I have not ever seen an individual being investigated who has gone on the offensive like this,” Gimbel says in an interview. “Most of the time it’s an uneven battle with the police and prosecutors. But he has gone on the offensive with very high quality lawyering.”
Malloy of the Campaign Legal Center agrees. “It’s definitely become a bit of an ugly personal fight,” she says of O’Keefe’s effort “to hold the prosecutors personally liable.” A federal appeals court rejected this line of contention, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for review.
To further frighten Chisholm, O’Keefe and other conservatives threatened to bankroll a recall effort against him. It never materialized, but the threat hung over his head for a year or so.
O’Keefe also put a scare into Walker. In June 2014, as news surfaced that the governor was seeking an out-of-court settlement to the Doe probe, The Wall Street Journal editorial page excoriated Walker, charging that while O’Keefe’s group “fights for its First Amendment rights to speak out on the issue, the Walker campaign apparently seeks to negotiate a settlement with the prosecutors that will keep the issue out of the spotlight.” It concluded: “Mr. Walker has to decide whose side he’s on—his own, or the larger principles he claims to represent.”
or O’Keefe and other conservative activists, Walker’s re-
Walker’s collapse as a presidential candidatedoes not mean much to O’Keefe and company either. They have a loftier goal: doing away with campaign finance limits and other regulations that keep the wealthy from swaying elections.
Rivkin is probably the foremost proponent of the view that the First Amendment prohibits coordination between political campaigns and independent advocacy groups only when the groups expressly advocate for someone’s election, rather than simply running ads condemning or praising a candidate.
The U.S. Supreme Court, since the *Buckley v. Valeo* case of 1976, has repeatedly ruled that once groups have coordinated with campaigns the money they spend becomes subject to campaign finance disclosure laws. Yet the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision bought Rivkin’s argument and ignored both Buckley v. Valeo and a recent Seventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals ruling on the John Doe which found that “no opinion issued by the [U.S.] Supreme Court, or by any court of appeals, establishes. . . that the First Amendment forbids regulation of coordination between campaign committees and issue-advocacy groups—let alone that the First Amendment forbids even an inquiry into that topic.”
Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Patrick Crooks, who died suddenly in September, dissented in part from the court’s decision, calling it “erroneous” and “unprecedented.” As for O’Keefe’s complaint that the John Doe infringed on his First Amendment rights, Crooks wrote, “There is a simple solution to that problem: stop coordinating. In the absence of coordination, the contributor is free to discuss candidates and issues.” Crooks said the John Doe probe “should not be terminated.”
The ruling was a tremendous victory for O’Keefe, but there were more to come. In the fall of 2015, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law ending the use of John Doe probes into political corruption, a measure The New York Times dubbed “The Revenge of Scott Walker.” Another law dismantled the Government Accountability Board, a nationally praised nonpartisan watchdog of ethics and elections,which had been involved in the John Doe probe, replacing it with two toothless boards whose funding to pursue cases must be approved by the Republican-controlled legislature.
A third law lets independent advocacy groups coordinate with candidates they favor, clearly violating past U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and even opens the door toexpress advocacy groups (which openly tell people how to vote) to coordinate with candidates, so long as the candidate doesn’t specifically ask that the groups spend campaign money in a certain way.
“This is a loophole large enough to drive a Koch Industries truck through,” declared Matt Rothschild, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. Another longtime observer of state politics, Jay Heck of the group Common Cause in Wisconsin, said the new laws, all of which Walker signed, were products of “the Eric O’Keefe session of the Wisconsin legislature.”
Malloy thinks the U.S. Supreme Court might consider a review of the case, seeing it as an opportunity to rethink its past positions and open the floodgates to new kinds of campaign activity. And, she says, “Walker’s departure from the presidential race can only improve slightly the case’s chance of being heard, because the issues are at least somewhat less politically ‘hot.’ ”
O’Keefe’s many legal and legislative victories will allow the nation’s wealthiest people and corporations to secretly bankroll the candidates and political outcomes they favor in Wisconsin. But his long-term goal is to achieve a similar victory in other jurisdictions and, ultimately, turn the entire country into a land where dark money rules all politics. ω
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At the heart of the John Doe files is Scott Walker, the governor who shot to national prominence – a hero for conservatives, pariah for liberals – soon after taking office in February 2011 when he introduced thehyper-partisanAct10. The legislation instantly made Wisconsin the battleground state in the fight between boardroom might and union muscle.
The state capital Madison erupted in weeks of protests in which the legislative building was overrun with thousands of protesters. Democratic lawmakers fled the state and took up residence in neighboring Illinois in a failed attempt to foil Walker's plans.
In the fallout of Act 10, progressive groups retaliated by dragging Walker and several other Republicans through a series of bitter recall elections. Six GOP senators were forced to defend their seats in 2011, and Walker himself was put through the recall furnace in 2012.
Those recall elections, and the question of whether Walker flouted campaign finance regulations in order that he and other Republican politicians could stay in office and preserve their anti-union legislation, were the focus of the investigation that generated the files now leaked to the Guardian. It was run by five Wisconsin prosecutors, led by Francis Schmitz, a former federal counter-terrorism expert.
It was known as a John Doe investigation because, much like a grand jury, its subjects were kept anonymous while officials weighed whether or not to press charges. In this case, prosecutors alleged that there was evidence to indicate that Walker and his team of advisers and associates had set up a coordinated effort with lobbyists and major donors to swing elections by secretly pouring huge amounts of corporate cash into the races.
The money was channeled through a third-party group, the DAs alleged, in order to circumvent state and federal rules that set limits on political contributions and require them to be publicly revealed.
The documents show the governor and his fundraising team going after, and receiving cash from, many of the most prominent rightwing donors in the country. In addition to Adelson, there was business magnate Carl Icahn who was approachedfor $100,000 though nothing in the files indicates that he donated; the hedge-fund billionaire Stephen Cohen, whoarrangeda wire transfer of $1m; and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone who gave $25,000.
Paul Singer, hedge-fund manager and chairman of the Manhattan Institute, also crops up in the documents. Three months before Walker's recall election, Singer attended a forum of business leaders held by the American Enterprise Institute in a luxury resort off the coast of Georgia.
Walker was also there, arriving at the resort armed with a to-do list from his chief fundraiser Kate Doner. It bore thepithy command: “Paul Singer: Grab him”.
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The governor presumably did as he was told. Two months later a check from Singer was banked for $250,000.
What particularly caught the attention of the prosecutors was that when the money came in it did not go directly to Walker's personal campaign committee, Friends of Scott Walker. To do so would have been problematic, as any campaign committee directly linked to a candidate is limited in Wisconsin to accepting contributions of up to $43,000 that have to be fully disclosed.
The prosecutors alleged in court filings published here for the first time that Walker's campaign found a way around these restrictions by banking the corporate cash through the third-party group, Wisconsin Club for Growth. WCfG describes itself as a “pro-liberty, pro-fiscal restraint” organisation, sharing the same small government and anti-union ideology as Walker. It is a tax-exempt group, or 501 (c) (4), that is supposed to be primarily concerned with “social welfare” rather than partisan politics and as such is not obliged to reveal its donors.
In court submissions, the prosecutors alleged that Walker's campaign used WCfG as a shadow committee that allowed him to solicit large sums of corporate cash without scrutiny or accountability. “Contributions were personally solicited by Governor Scott Walker to WCfG ... in order to circumvent the reporting and contributions provisions of Wisconsin statutes,” an investigator working for the prosecutors in the John Doe investigation, Robert Stelter, alleged.
A good example of the way things worked was the donation made by Donald Trump. On 3 April 2012, two months before the governor faced the electorate, Walker flew to New York for a rapid-fire string of fundraising meetings with big money interests.
He travelled the length of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, making stops at the investment bank Morgan Stanley, a hedge fund, a corporate law firm, and the residence of publishing tycoon Steve Forbes. He also enjoyed a 45-minute audience with Trump in his Fifth Avenue lair.
There is no record of the conversation between the two men. But it appears to have been a warm encounter, as the John Doe files show that Trump wrote a check for $15,000 on the same day. Who was the beneficiary of Trump's generosity? Wisconsin Club for Growth.
Another example of the pattern is the casual comment Walker dropped into an email to his fundraiser dated 14 June 2011:“Also, I got $1m from John Menard today”. Eight days later a check for $1m is cut on a corporate check of Menard Inc, the billionaire John Menard's home improvement chain Menards, and made out not to the governor's campaign committee but to Wisconsin Club for Growth. There the donation remained a secret until the publication of the Guardian's leaked files.
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Friends of Scott Walker, Wisconsin Club for Growth and other parties named in the John Doe investigation have all vigorously denied any legal violations. They point out that no charges have been brought against any subject of the inquiries.
John Fadness, spokesman for the Scott Walker campaign, told the Guardian: “As widely reported two years ago, the prosecutor’s attorney stated that Governor Walker was not a target. Several courts shut down the baseless investigation on multiple occasions, and there is absolutely no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
In June 2014, the special prosecutor Schmitz said through a lawyer that Walker was not a target of his John Doe investigation. Yet legal documents contained in the John Doe files identify as the anonymous “Movant No. 1” of the investigation “Friends of Scott Walker, the personal campaign committee of Scott Walker.”
David Rivkin, the attorney representing Wisconsin Club for Growth and its director Eric O'Keefe, said in a statement to the Guardian: “As the Wisconsin Supreme Court explained, theJohn Doe prosecutors made up crimes 'that do not exist' under Wisconsin law in order to target 'citizens who were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.' Because the U.S. Supreme Court does not review matters of state law, it should be obvious that the John Doe prosecutors' appeal is legally frivolous and just another publicity stunt intended to tarnish their targets' reputations and salvage their own.”
Further insight into the position of the subjects of the investigation – the “movants” as they are technically known – is given in court papers including in the Guardian's John Doe Files.[x link] They criticise the prosecutors for making fundamental mistakes in their reading of campaign finance law. They said that regulatory restrictions on the size and source of donations only applied to groups that were expressly advocating for or against a named political candidate.
WCfG's director Eric O'Keefe said in an affidavit that the club's involvement had stemmed purely from its commitment to “advancing liberty and fiscal responsibility”. Its role in the recall elections was “to educate Wisconsin citizens ... The Club paid for advertisements that advanced its pro-liberty, fiscal responsibility, pro-Act 10 beliefs. None of the advertisements expressly urged voters to vote for or against any candidate.”
The movants also complained that in issuing over-broad subpoenas for evidence and conducting pre-dawn raids on the homes of some individuals, the prosecutors strayed well beyond their legitimate powers and into the realm of governmental abuse.
In the course of the John Doe investigation, the prosecutors obtained hundreds of emails and bank records under subpoena. An email sent by Kate Doner, Walker’s fundraiser, in April 2011, summed up the strategy.She said the aim was to raise $9m in six weeks, to pay for political advertising – she called it “issue advocacy efforts” – in the senatorial recall races.
Walker, she said, wants all the ads “run thru one group to ensure correct messaging”, [aka COORDINATION? ]and that group, the governor declared, should be Wisconsin Club for Growth. “The Governor is encouraging all to invest in the Wisconsin Club for Growth [which] can accept Corporate and Personal donations without limitations and no donors disclosure.”
The email trail shows a pattern of behavior developing: Walker meets up with big corporate donors and encourages them to contribute unlimited sums of money through WCfG in secret, then shortly after the checks start to flow. In June 2011, the emails show, the governor had dinner with the CEO of the largest privately owned trucking company in the US, Schneider National, in the hope of getting him and his peers to donate $250,000.
“Stress the donations to WiCFG are not disclosed and can accept Corporate donations without limits,” Walker's talking points said....
==
Three years ago the river was caught in an environmental battle, and a local conservation group called theAnglers of the Au Sable sued Michigan's environmental agency.Pregler, president of the Anglers, watched as the case became subsumed in a state supreme court election financed in large part by nationally funded advocacy groups. Money came from unions, corporations and tax-exempt social welfare organizations.
Social welfare groups — known as 501(c)(4)s,after their designation in tax law — are becoming a vehicle of choice for big donors to hide large donations in politics. Unlike donors to political committees, those who give to social welfare groups can give unlimited amounts while remaining private and bypassing public disclosure laws.
NPR and the Center for Responsive Politics investigated the world of these secretive social welfare groups, using tax records to track money not otherwise reported and found that millions of dollars is traded between groups. CRP data show that their federal political spending increased more than 80-fold between the 2004 and 2012 election cycles. It's an abrupt swing in campaign financing.
We also found that significant sums of money are moved around within networks of social welfare groups, as some organizations finance others. Overall, transfers among the groups have exceeded $386 million since 2008.
Conservative groups are better financed and more numerous than liberal groups — at least so far. For example, CRP data show that in the 2012 presidential, Senate and House campaigns, conservative groups constitute five of the six 501(c)(4)s that spent more than $10 million in explicitly political advertising.
But none of this affected the Au Sable until the 2010 elections.
The Appointment Of Alton Davis
Back in 2005, an energy company wanted to pump treated — but still polluted — water into the Au Sable watershed. When the state approved the plan, Pregler says the Anglers "looked at this and said, 'Why are you transferring contaminated water from one watershed to a clean, pure water?' " And they sued.
The case wound up at the Michigan State Supreme Court, where, as Pregler says, it took some real twists. The first twist: One justice abruptly resigned, and Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm appointed a new one. Incoming Justice Alton Davis tipped the court's balance from conservative to liberal, and he sympathized with the Anglers' arguments.
==
paulblumenthal@huffingtonpost.com
'Dark Money' Group In Arizona Discloses Donors As Other 'Dark Money' Groups
Posted: 11/05/2012 1:48 pm EST Updated: 11/05/2012 3:04 pm EST
WASHINGTON --
A "dark money" non-profit that funneled $11 million into two ballot initiative fights in California revealed to the state's campaign finance oversight board that it had received the money after the funds passed through the hands of two other "dark money" groups.
California's Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) revealed that the Arizona-based Americans for Responsible Leadership received the **$11 million from the**:{**Center to Protect Patients' Rights**:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, which originally received the money from the non-profit Americans for Job Security.
A press release from the FPPC called the scheme, "the largest contribution ever disclosed as campaign money laundering in California history."
"In California, money laundering is a crime," FPPC chair Ann Ravel told The Huffington Post. "It's a misdemeanor and so it can be charged this way."
"Dark money" groups are organized as either social welfare nonprofits under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code. Since these groups qualify for tax-exempt status, they are also exempt from disclosing their donors, which political committees are required to do.
Ravel explained that the attorney general's office would be responsible for bringing criminal charges, or that civil charges could be brought, resulting in a fine of equal value or in excess of the amount laundered, in this case $11 million.
"We're definitely going to pierce through [these non-profits] and find out what we can and take appropriate actions," Ravel said.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who would be responsible for starting any criminal inquiry, said previously, "This case is simply about protecting the transparency and integrity of elections in California."
The Center to Protect Patients' Rights is a well-known pass-through for "dark money" in elections with connections to the billionaire Koch brothers. Areport by the Center for Responsive Politics found that the group, "gave more than $44 million in 2010 to other tax-exempt groups, many of which spent millions on TV ads attacking Democrats running for the House and Senate and have begun spending for the same purpose this year."
Americans for Job Security is a corporate-backed "issues advocacy" group that has been running political advertisements since it was founded in 1997. The group reportedly was founded by a $1 million contribution from the American Insurance Association. In 2007, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) found that AJS had violated campaign finance laws by not registering as a political committee, which would require it to disclose its donors, but Republican commissioners forced a deadlock vote on enforcement of the violation.
AJS has ties to Karl Rove and was founded by Republican power players Mike Dubke and Dave Carney. The pair now run Crossroads Media, which handles the advertising operations for Rove’s American Crossroads, the biggest gun in the massive campaign arsenal that Rove assembled in 2010. Americans for Job Security, meanwhile, is currently led by a young operative named Stephen DeMaura, who physically works out of Crossroads Media's Alexandria office.
In a lawsuit against the FEC, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland names AJS as a major recipient of undisclosed corporate cash.
But that’s about as much as anyone knows about AJS. “We don’t have clients. We have members,” said AJS head DeMaura. “Like all organizations of our type, we’re not required to disclose or discuss our members.”
The contributions into California were intended to influence two top priorities of conservative activists both inside and outside the state. Americans for Responsible Leadership passed the contributions it received to a campaign to defeat Proposition 30, which would raise taxes, and to support Proposition 32, which would ban unions from making payroll deductions for political contributions.
California's Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of forcing Americans for Responsible Leadership to disclose its donor list in a 7-0 vote on Sunday.
Aside from sending $11 million to California for the ballot initiatives campaigns, Americans for Responsible Leadership has also spent $2.5 million on federal election races. Almost all of that was spent on phone calls targeting President Barack Obama.
Another "dark money" group, Western Tradition Partnership, was forced to disclose its donors by a court in Montana. That disclosure was forced after a joint ProPublica/Frontline report showed that the group may have lied to both Montana courts and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in its application for tax-exempt status.
[[
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/01/republican-governors-association-perry-michigan
The 20 Biggest Donors of the 2012 Election [2]
[
Read more of our coverage of political dark money. [3]
Created in December 2009 and shut down shortly after the election, RGA Michigan 2010 had come out of nowhere to spend [4] nearly $8.4 million—54 percent more than any other PAC had poured into any election in Michigan history. Ninety-six percent of the group's donors lived outside the state, and its top three funders included Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, Koch Industries' David Koch, and New York City hedge fund CEO Paul Singer. On the other side of the ledger, RGA Michigan 2010 had given $5.2 million to the Michigan Republican Party—no surprise there—but, mysteriously, it had also funneled $3 million into the campaign coffers of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Robinson, the executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, began to connect the dots. He remembered the phone calls from reporters in Maine and Florida asking if Robinson knew why money from the Michigan Chamber of Commerce had ended up with PACs in their states. The state's Chamber, which usually spent more than $1 million on TV ads during Michigan elections, officially didn't spend a dime on ads in 2010, according to Robinson. But it had given an unprecedented [4] $5.37 million to a national organization that, Robinson now realized, was at the root of the anomalous spending he'd uncovered: the Washington, DC-based Republican Governors Association.
During the midterms, while many campaign finance observers were fixated on the proliferation of super-PACs and shadow-spending groups, the RGA spent [5] $132 million—more than the five biggest conservative super-PACs and 501(c) groups combined. It was instrumental in electing a slate of GOP governors—Wisconsin's Scott Walker, Ohio's John Kasich, Georgia's Nathan Deal, and Iowa's Terry Branstad, among others—who hastened to crack down on public-sector unions and roll back environmental regulations. These electoral successes were fueled in part by the creative campaign finance strategy that Robinson began to piece together.
Since 2008, he explains, theRGA has used a network of at least 15 state-level PACs to shuffle campaign cash around the country.Doing so serves a couple of purposes. First, it enables the RGA to scrub the identity of a donor to avoid image issues. For instance, Rick Perry taking $3 million from a Texas oil baron might be controversial, but if that baron gives $3 million to the national RGA, which then diverts the money to RGA Michigan PAC and then to Perry? Harmless.
The RGA's cash shuffle also allows it—and its corporate allies—to skirt campaign finance laws. For instance, in Michigan, corporations can't donate directly to candidates or political parties. But the state's Chamber of Commerce donated millions to the national RGA, which then directed some of the money to its PACs in Florida and Maine, where no such corporate-money bans exist. Why would a Michigan group want its money flowing to races in other states? Chamber CEO Rich Studley told [6] Maine Public Radio that its members supported funding "pro-business" candidates outside Michigan.
Robinson has a different theory. During the 2010 election cycle, theMichigan Chamber donated more than $5 million to the RGA. In turn, the RGA's Michigan PAC directed $5.2 million—contributions that largely came from individuals outside the state—to the Michigan Republican Party. Robinson believes that, through this roundabout process, the Chamber's corporate money was swapped out with individual contributions, allowing it to be deployed in Michigan in a more potent form. (The Chamber acknowledges that the RGA called the shots on where its money was spent. Studley says his group's political spending "has been in full compliance with all Michigan and federal laws." The RGA did not respond to a request for comment on this practice.)
Robinson and other campaign finance watchdogs liken the RGA's methods to the corporate-contribution laundering scheme that got former GOP congressman Tom DeLay indicted. "The whole thing," Robinson says of the RGA's tactics, "was about wiping the fingerprints off the money."
An RGA spokesman, Mike Schrimpf, says the group and its network of PACs "aren't really unique," but he declined to respond to specific questions. "The RGA and the [Democratic Governors Association] both have to use state PACs in some states to comply with the state campaign finance laws," he says. The RGA, however, is by far the more powerful of the two, outspending the DGA [7] in the last four election cycles by anywhere from $10 million (2004) to $67 million (2010).
The RGA wasn't always a political juggernaut. Founded in 1963 [8], the group for decades was content to convene meetings and publish the occasional white paper. That began to change in the early 1980s, when Pennsylvania Gov. Dick Thornburgh became chairman and the RGA started to raise serious money. With the RGA's backing, the GOP netted seven governor's seats in the 1986 election.
In 1994, while Newt Gingrich and Co. took control [9] of Congress and rang in the Republican Revolution, the RGA was instrumental in the election of 11 GOP governors and successfully defended every Republican incumbent. When the dust settled, Republicans controlled 30 governorships, their first majority since 1970. The last time Republicans had performed so well in gubernatorial races was 1867.
Beyond its electoral victories, the RGA established itself as a launching pad for Republicans with presidential aspirations. The group helped to foster alliances between GOP governors and gave them access to deep-pocketed donors and top fundraisers, helping to catapult politicians like Ronald Reagan (an RGA chairman), George W. Bush, Rick Perry (twice chairman), Mitt Romney (2006 chairman), and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie [10] (current vice chair) onto the national stage.
The RGA's rise has been fueled by a close alliance with corporate America—especially tobacco companies and Big Pharma. In the mid-'90s, the organization awarded seats on its board to executives from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, which each donated $40,000 a year. In November 1995, tobacco lobbyists swarmed the RGA's annual meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, pressing governors to write letters opposing pending tobacco regulations from the Food and Drug Administration. In exchange for their support, the tobacco companies pledged financial backing when election time rolled around. They came through: In February 1996, Philip Morris held a Washington, DC, gala for the RGA that raised $2.6 million.
The increasing influence of corporate donors turned off some Republican governors, including Arne Carlson, Minnesota's governor from 1991 to 1999. Carlson recalls attending a few RGA meetings, but he stopped going due to the group's increasingly partisan tenor and insistence that donors be given access to the governors. "It was no longer Republican governors getting together," Carlson says. "It was the moneyed interests getting together with governors. I found it detestable."
In June 2002, the McCain-Feingold Act went into effect [11], banning federal party committees from raising "soft money"—donations from labor unions and corporations outside the scope of federal campaign finance law. So to keep the corporate cash flowing, the RGA officially broke away [12] from the Republican National Committee (of which it had been an affiliate) and established itself as a 527 tax-exempt group. That way it could continue raising soft money from banks, drug companies, and energy companies. (A few years earlier the DGA had parted ways with the Democratic National Committee for the same reasons.)
Today, RGA's donor list [5] reads like a who's who of corporate titans: Koch Industries, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, AT&T, and Pfizer. The organization's largest donor in both the 2008 and 2010 elections was Perry Homes, the homebuilding empire run by Bob Perry, which plunked down $1.15 million in 2008 and $8 million in 2010.
But as the corporate money gushed in, the RGA ran afoul of the law. In 2008, a top official with the North Carolina state elections board testified that the RGA had illegally funneled contributions to its North Carolina PAC. (The elections board ultimately declined to pursue the matter.) Last October, a Vermont judge ruled [13] that the RGA violated state elections law when it ran ads supporting the Republican gubernatorial candidate without registering as a state PAC. (TheRGA argued the spots were merely issue ads.)
In 2012, the RGA promises to be a force to be reckoned with. Led by chief [14] fundraiser Fred Malek [15], the finance co-chairman of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign, the RGA had by last fall raised $22 million (twice as much as the DGA) for the 2012 election cycle. Don't be surprised if that money starts turning up in odd places again, says Mike McCabe, who tracks money in state politics at the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign: "It's a deliberate strategy to keep the public in the dark about who is really buying our elections."
]]
note this is by a law firm, and how outrages conduct was [also criminal ] AND got a plea deal! what is trump DOJ gonna do?
https://www.venable.com/political-law-practices/
Justice Department Brings First Criminal Case for Campaign, Super PAC Coordination
By Larry Norton & Ron Jacobs on February 17, 2015 [nb Obama era]
POSTED IN CAMPAIGN FINANCE, SUPER PACS
The U.S. Department of Justice has announced the first criminal prosecution for a violation of federal laws prohibiting outside groups from coordinating their activities with the candidates and campaigns they support.
The six-member Federal Election Commission, which is primarily responsible for interpreting and enforcing federal campaign finance laws, has deadlocked repeatedly over whether to investigate complaints of coordination. But with this announcement, the Justice Department, which may pursue knowing and willful violations of the same laws, has stepped into the breach.
In the plea agreement, a Virginia-based political consultant admitted serving as campaign manager for a U.S. candidate for Congress, while at the same time operating a Super PAC that spent $325,000 on ads attacking that candidate’s opponent. No one else has been charged in the case. Interestingly, there is no indication in the charging documents that the candidate knew about the work the consultant was doing for the Super PAC. However, the coordination rules apply not just to candidates, but also to their staff, and in some circumstances, their volunteers. Violations may be established even if the candidate is unaware of a representative’s unlawful activity.
How the Coordination Rules Work
Super PACs and other independent groups may discuss certain subjects with campaigns, but they may not work together on the Super PAC’s spending and strategy. Thus, for example, if a campaign asks a Super PAC to run an ad, or the campaign shares nonpublic information with a Super PAC that the PAC uses to develop or determine the timing of an ad, the cost of the ad is considered an in-kind contribution to the campaign. Because corporations (and incorporated nonprofits) are prohibited from making any contribution in federal elections, and individuals are subject to a $2700 per election limit, a coordinated expenditure can be, and usually is, an illegal in-kind contribution.
Reading the Tea Leaves
Should politically-active groups, such as Super PACs and 501(c)(4)s, be worried about this case?
On the one hand, the case does not appear to be a close call. In papers released by the Justice Department, the consultant admitted to concealing the coordinated expenditures by, among other things, using an online alias, changing the Super PAC’s address, and threatening legal action against an inquiring party official. The consultant also made a lot of money – upwards of 23% of the Super PAC funds raised – while promising contributors that administrative costs would not exceed two percent. Although no charges stem directly from the consultant’s use of the Super PAC to enrich himself and his family, these facts are part of the plea agreement and add color to the case. To top it off, the consultant has pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents. In short, the conduct here does not fall into the gray area of the coordination rules.
On the other hand, coordination is the most significant legal risk that independent expenditure groups face, and this case establishes that a violation of the coordination rules can lead to a criminal prosecution. This alone should get the attention of anyone involved in forming and running a Super PAC or politically-active 501(c)(4).
An Ounce of Prevention
What should such groups do? There are at least four things groups should do when making independent expenditures to support or oppose a candidate:
- They should have a written coordination policy that details the limits on what employees, vendors, and volunteers for the group may do and how they may interact with the candidate and candidate’s supporters.
- The group should incorporate its coordination policy into its agreements with vendors to ensure that if vendors work for both the candidate and the independent expenditure group, necessary firewalls are in place (e., different staff perform the work and they do not share information).
- The group should be careful when interacting with campaign representatives, including former campaign staff and donors, to ensure that information is not being shared impermissibly, or that the campaign is not asking for support or giving a green light to the outside group’s plans.
- The group should put in place a governance structure to ensure that campaign staff do not serve an impermissible role in the organization – and to be sure the group is spending donor funds appropriately.
Fundraising Activities
The plea details how the consultant directed a maxed-out donor to give money to the Super PAC, and that donor then gave the Super PAC approximately $300,000. Generally, the mere fact that maxed out donors to a candidate also give to a Super PAC supporting the same candidate is not a problem. There are even some permissible ways for campaign staff to suggest that donors who wish to help the candidate contact a Super PAC. And the FEC has blessed candidate appearances at fundraisers for the Super PACs that support them.
In this case, however, because the campaign manager was also running the Super PAC, his effort to steer the donor crossed the line. The case shows that campaign staff must be very careful in responding to questions about a Super PAC, and independent groups must be similarly careful about how they interact with a campaign’s donors and volunteers.
Looking Ahead
It is difficult to say whether this case portends more enforcement of federal coordination laws. But groups making independent expenditures can no longer count on the inaction of the FEC. There is a new cop on the beat, and outside groups should be careful not to make themselves the next target.