Tag Archives: dark money

Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

by EmmettF826676 Posted on October 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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New Hampshire voters came home last night to find an alarming warning in their mailboxes. Voting for Democrat Maggie Hassan in her Senate race against incumbent Sen. Kelly Ayotte, they were told, would essentially mean voting for terrorists to target their children. The large glossy mailer warns on the front that radical Islamic terrorists are searching for their next city to target:

The crosshairs motif continues on the inside, which bashes Hassan for supporting the Iran nuclear deal and emphasizes—over a silhouette of a woman and a young girl walking hand in hand—that terrorists are “searching for soft targets…”:

The back of the mailer shows yet another crosshairs over an American flag outside a home, paired with a warning that terrorists are an imminent threat and support for Hassan could put “our families at risk”:

Where did the money come from to create the provocative mailer? We’ll probably never know. According to the fine print at the bottom, the mailer was sent by One Nation, a politically active 501(c)(4) nonprofit, also known as a dark money group. According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, One Nation was taken over earlier this year by operatives from American Crossroads, Karl Rove’s outside money operation.

Federal Election Commission records show that One Nation paid about $44,000 for the mailer, but as a nonprofit organization, One Nation will never have to disclose who donated the money to fund the mailer. It’s not clear whether One Nation has sent similar mailings in other states, though FEC records show the group is spending money on mailers in Nevada, Indiana, and North Carolina.

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Karl Rove’s Group Injects Scare Tactics Into New Hampshire Senate Race

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Scott Walker Corruption Case Threatens to Implicate Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices

by Bradly2804 Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s the campaign scandal that just won’t die. For three years, prosecutors in Wisconsin tried to investigate what they believed was illegal campaign coordination between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and conservative outside groups. The investigation has become a political flash point in the state: Walker and conservatives claim it is a witch hunt led by liberal prosecutors, while liberals believe it is about the power of dark money in Wisconsin politics.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court dismissed the case, but on Friday, the case moved to the national stage when prosecutors signaled their intention to take it to the US Supreme Court. And the focus is now set to shift from the actions of Walker and his allies to potential ethical violations by the Wisconsin Supreme Court justices themselves.

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Scott Walker Corruption Case Threatens to Implicate Wisconsin Supreme Court Justices

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Campaign Finance Regulators Won’t Do Their Job. Can a Lawsuit Force Their Hand?

by FlorentShq Posted on December 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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It’s a case that has haunted campaign finance watchdogs for years. The Commission on Hope, Growth, and Opportunity (CHGO) emerged in early 2010 as a nonprofit that would not engage in political work. Then, in the six weeks before the 2010 elections, the group spent about $4 million on political ads across 15 congressional races, all attacking Democrats. But in filings with the IRS, the group maintained that none of its spending was campaign-related, and it did not disclose any of its spending with the Federal Election Commission. Facing complaints from federal regulators, the group folded. Some of its key players—including Scott Reed, now a top strategist at the US Chamber of Commerce, and Wayne Berman, the chief fundraiser for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign—split more than $1 million in leftover funds. No one involved was ever sanctioned.

Almost all the money CHGO raised came from a single donor. The group’s ability to spring up, use secret money to influence elections, and then disappear provides a template for rich donors who want to pick off or boost candidates without revealing their political activity.

But one watchdog group, the Democratic-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), believes it has found a way to hold the group’s key players accountable. If successful, the effort could set its own template for forcing lax federal regulators to crack down on campaign finance violations by the types of outside groups that have been awash in money since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling.

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Campaign Finance Regulators Won’t Do Their Job. Can a Lawsuit Force Their Hand?

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court Just Removed a Major Threat to Scott Walker’s Presidential Campaign

by GiselleMcCorkin Posted on July 16, 2015

Mother Jones

On Thursday morning, the Wisconsin Supreme Court squashed a criminal investigation into whether Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign illegally coordinated with conservative dark-money groups to defeat a recall effort against him in 2012. The sharply worded decision aggressively slapped back the local prosecutor leading the probe and contended there was no constitutional basis for the investigation. This move appears to permanently settle a matter that posed a potential threat to Walker’s presidential ambitions.

The inquiry focused on whether Walker’s top advisers worked with a dozen outside groups—politically active nonprofits that do not disclose their donors—to run campaign ads opposing the recall campaign that was launched after Walker crushed public sector unions in his state. On the federal level and in most states, it is illegal for outside groups that can collect unlimited amounts of money to work closely with candidates they support. In today’s decision, the Wisconsin court ruled there was no legal rationale for an investigation because the dark-money groups did not explicitly call for voters to vote against the recall. Instead, they put out a slightly less specific message: support Walker. As a result, the court ordered the investigation to halt immediately—and they instructed prosecutors to destroy all related documents and free witnesses from the obligation to cooperate.

“To be clear, this conclusion ends the…investigation because the special prosecutor’s legal theory is unsupported in either reason or law,” Justice Michael Gableman wrote for the majority in the four-to-two decision. “Consequently, the investigation is closed.”

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The Wisconsin Supreme Court Just Removed a Major Threat to Scott Walker’s Presidential Campaign

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Rick Perry Is on the Payroll of His Super-PAC’s Biggest Sugar Daddy

by DelphiaHopwood Posted on July 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rick Perry’s fundraising for his second presidential campaign is off to a tepid start. Last week, his campaign announced a $1.07 million haul since Perry officially declared his candidacy at the beginning of June. Though he entered the race later than some of the other GOP candidates, that’s far lower than the amounts raised by some of his rivals including Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson.

Things were a bit better for Perry on the super PAC front, where a trio of interlocking groups supporting his campaign claimed $16.8 million in donations, according to CNN. The largest donor to this outside spending effort is the billionaire owner of a Texas pipeline company that also happens to write Rick Perry’s paycheck.

As Mother Jones reported last month, Perry is still sitting on the corporate board of Energy Transfer Partners, even after making his presidential campaign official. Perry had joined the board of the oil and natural gas pipeline company in early February, shortly after leaving the Texas governor’s office. Politicians typically step down from such jobs before launching a presidential bid to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, but Perry’s kept his board spot while hitting the campaign trail. While the company isn’t willing to disclose his salary for the board spot, past Securities and Exchange Commission records show that the job has recently come with about $50,000 in compensation.

But Energy Transfer Partners’ CEO Kelcy Warren is putting far more money into Perry’s presidential ambitions. According to CNN, Warren accounts for $6 million of Perry’s super PAC donations to date. Warren—worth $6.7 billion according to Forbes—chipped in just $250,000 to the pro-Perry super PAC in 2012, but he is clearly more invested in Perry’s second campaign. In addition to ponying up the most money for the super PAC’s, Warren is working for the official campaign as its finance chairman.

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Rick Perry Is on the Payroll of His Super-PAC’s Biggest Sugar Daddy

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How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

by doyoubringlaptopstoclassincollege Posted on May 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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For three years, Wisconsin prosecutors have been investigating whether Republican Gov. Scott Walker broke campaign finance laws as he battled a 2012 recall effort sparked by his push for a law that undercut the power of public sector unions. Prosecutors allege that Walker and his aides illegally coordinated with conservative groups that were raising money and running ads to support Walker and his Republican allies. At least one group at the center of the probe, the Wisconsin Club for Growth, has gone to court to stop the investigation. Its fate now rests with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which will rule any day now on whether the inquiry can proceed.

But there’s a rub. Two key targets of the investigation—the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC), the state’s leading business group—have spent over $10 million since 2007 to elect a conservative majority to Wisconsin’s top court. Given their involvement in the investigation, and the Wisconsin Club for Growth’s position as a party to the case, good government advocates question whether the four conservative justices elected with the help of these two groups should be presiding over the case.

Read about the scandal that could that could crush Scott Walker’s presidential hopes.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC did not make direct contributions to the campaigns for these justices. Instead, they poured millions into so-called independent issue ads that clearly conveyed messages that supported these campaigns. And in an odd twist, due to lax recusal guidelines—which were adopted at the urging of one of these conservative outfits—these justices on the state’s high court are not compelled to sit out a case involving these two groups.

The Wisconsin Club for Growth and WMC are top players in a years-long undertaking by Walker and his allies to create a conservative majority on the Supreme Court that is friendly to conservative policies—an operation that has included spending millions on ads, ending public campaign financing for Supreme Court elections, rewriting the court’s ethics guidelines, and amending the state’s constitution. This effort has led to one of the most partisan and dysfunctional judicial bodies in the country, a court with liberal and conservative justices who won’t appear together in public. And it could well end up benefiting the conservative groups under investigation should the jurists they helped elect rule the probe should stop.

“This large amount of money and special interests has impacted the workings of the court, the reputation of the court, and how it’s interacting internally,” says former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske, who served on the court from 1993 to 1998.

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How Scott Walker and His Allies Hijacked the Wisconsin Supreme Court

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It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

by Jamie Cox Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Even before presidential candidates started lining up billionaires to kick-start their campaigns, it was clear that the 2016 election could be the biggest big-money election yet. This chart from the political data shop Crowdpac illustrates where we may be headed: Between 1980 and 2012, the share of federal campaign contributions coming from the very, very biggest political spenders—the top 0.01 percent of donors—nearly tripled:

In other words, a small handful of Americans* control more than 40 percent of election contributions. Notably, between 2010 and 2012, the total share of giving by these donors jumped more than 10 percentage points. That shift is likely the direct result of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which struck down decades of fundraising limits and kicked off the super-PAC era. And this data only includes publicly disclosed donations, not dark money, which almost certainly means that the megadonors’ actual share of total political spending is even higher.

It’s pretty fair to assume that most of these top donors are also sitting at the top of the income pyramid. Out of curiosity, I compared the share of campaign cash given by elite donors alongside the increasing share of income controlled by the people who make up the top 0.01 percent—the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The trend lines aren’t an exact match, but they’re close enough to show how top donors’ political clout has increased along with top earners’ growing slice of the national income. Again, note the bump around 2010 and 2011, when the Citizens United era opened just as the superwealthy were starting to recover from the recession—a rebound that has left out most Americans.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that a few hundred people control 40 percent of election contributions, based on my own calculations. According to Crowdpac, the number is around 25,000.

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It’s Not the 1 Percent Controlling Politics. It’s the 0.01 Percent.

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

by AnnelieseHXW Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Though they usually don’t get much attention, judicial elections have become just as cutthroat and cash-driven as other political races. To win a judgeship, many candidates must slime their opponents and win the financial backing of often unaccountable interests that may have business before them in court. (Read more in this Mother Jones investigation.)

The amount of money flowing into these races is staggering: State judicial candidates raised $83 million in the 1990s. Yet during the two years 2012 election cycle, they raised more than $110 million—and that doesn’t include outside spending. Altogether, more than $250 million has been spent on judicial races since 2000.

Judges themselves often hate the process of fundraising and mudslinging, but view it as a necessary evil. Sue Bell Cobb, a career judge and the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, just wrote about her experience for Politico. Her story is worth a full read, but here’s a taste:

While I was proud of the work I did for the next 4 1/2 years, I never quite got over the feeling of being trapped inside a system whose very structure left me feeling disgusted. I assure you: I’ve never made a decision in a case in which I sided with a party because of a campaign donation. But those of us seeking judicial office sometimes find ourselves doing things that feel awfully unsavory.

…

When a judge asks a lawyer who appears in his or her court for a campaign check, it’s about as close as you can get to legalized extortion. Lawyers who appear in your court, whose cases are in your hands, are the ones most interested in giving. It’s human nature: Who would want to risk offending the judge presiding over your case by refusing to donate to her campaign? They almost never say no—even when they can’t afford it.

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Ex-State Supreme Court Justice: Judicial Elections Are Like "Legalized Extortion"

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The Koch Brothers’ Network Aims to Spend $889 Million on the 2016 Elections

by WendiU62wzrbajc Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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$889 million.

That’s how much Charles and David Koch’s political network hopes to spend on the presidential race, House and Senate contests, and other elections and policy fights in 2016. That figure is not far off from how much President Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s presidential efforts each spent in 2012. It is well over what John Kerry and George W. Bush together spent during the 2004 campaign. This fundraising target was announced Monday morning at the Koch brothers’ winter retreat for members of their elite donor network.

And there’s a good chance that much of the money the Kochs and their allies plan to unleash will be spent in the dark—that is, with little disclosure of the true source of those millions. (Key parts of the Koch network are nonprofit advocacy groups that engage in political work without revealing their donors.)

If the Koch network—which included 450 or so attendees at this weekend’s donor confab—meets it $889-million goal for 2016, it would more than double its outlay from the last presidential election season. During the 2012 campaign, the Kochs’ collection of nonprofit groups spent over $400 million, with a sizable chunk of that aimed at defeating President Obama.

The Kochs and their donor-allies are now essentially their own political party. As the New York Times‘ Nick Confessore points out, the Koch network’s $889 million exceeds the spending power of the Republican Party:

Here’s some context from the Washington Post about how that money—it’s unclear how much of it will come from the Koch family itself—could be spent:

The $889 million goal reflects the budget goals of all the allied groups that the network funds. Those resources will go into field operations, new technology and policy work, among other projects.

The group—which is supported by hundreds of wealthy donors on the right, along with the Kochs—is still debating whether it will spend some of that money in the GOP primaries. Such a move could have a major impact in winnowing the field of contenders but could also undercut the network’s standing if it engaged in intraparty politics and was not successful.

Marc Short, the president of Freedom Partners, which hosts the Kochs’ donor enclaves, told the Post that “2014 was nice, but there’s a long way to go.” He said that putting free-market ideals at the center of American life is the goal of the Kochs and their allies, adding, “Politics is a necessary means to that end, but not the only one.”

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The Koch Brothers’ Network Aims to Spend $889 Million on the 2016 Elections

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Mitt Romney Has a Koch Problem

by ZitaBazley Posted on January 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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This weekend, a select group of Republican presidential hopefuls will arrive in southern California to attend one of Charles and David Koch’s biannual donor retreats, a coveted invite for GOP politicians seeking the backing of the billionaire brothers and their elite club of conservative and libertarian mega-donors. Featured guests at the conclave will include Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was also invited to the confab but is unlikely to attend.

Notably absent from the guest list for the Koch winter seminar: Mitt Romney.

Romney recently barged his way back into the political fray, suggesting he might launch a third presidential bid. He told a group of donors earlier this month, “Everybody in here can go tell your friends that I’m considering a run.” In a presentation over the weekend at a resort near Palm Springs, California—as it happens, the same venue that has played host to previous Koch seminars—Romney delivered what sounded an awful lot like a presidential stump speech, talking about poverty (“I believe that the principles of conservatism are the best to help people get out of poverty”), education (“We have great teachers. I’d pay them more”), and even climate change.

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Mitt Romney Has a Koch Problem

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