Tag Archives: dark money

In the Future, Everyone Will Have a Super-PAC

by gerdi Posted on January 28, 2013

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Charles Spies has seen the future of American elections, and it is drenched with super-PAC cash—much of it aimed at getting single politicians elected.

That’s what Spies told me recently when I asked him to peer into his crystal ball and venture a prediction about the future of big-money politics in America. Spies (rhymes with “cheese”) is a well-connected Republican lawyer and former top adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 campaign. For the last election cycle, however, Spies choose to support Romney’s presidential bid in a new way: He started a super-PAC.

Restore Our Future, the super-PAC Spies launched with two other Romney ’08 alums, strategist Carl Forti and ad man Larry McCarthy, spent $161 million—the most of any super-PAC—to help elect Romney president, mostly by blasting President Obama with negative ads. Spies’ candidate, of course, lost, but his experience running Restore Our Future taught him a thing or two about the strange, rapidly changing new world of super-PACs.

Super-PACs may have spent $635 million during the 2012 elections, but that’s chump change compared to what they’ll likely unload in the next presidential election. (Only 45 months away!) Ditto for the 2014 midterm elections compared to the 2010 midterms. Spies predicts at least 250 new super-PACs will spend serious money on races up and down the ballot in 2014. And he says voters should expect a lot of them to be devoted to promoting the fortune of a single House or Senate candidate, big-money bazookas firing away to nudge their preferred politician that much closer to Washington.

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In the Future, Everyone Will Have a Super-PAC

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Post-Election, The Obama Machine Goes to the Dark (Money) Side

by um2rnxc Posted on January 18, 2013

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Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign was the most technologically advanced political operation in American history, a techie’s wet dream. The campaign, led by Jim Messina, amassed and distilled vast quantities of voter data, built apps and networks to mobilize voters and enlist volunteers, and practically perfected the science of email fundraising. Post-election, Messina and his lieutenants weren’t about to let their data files, email lists, algorithms, and grassroots machine simply gather dust. Instead, they will soon launch Organizing for Action, a standalone advocacy group created to bolster Obama as he pursues his second-term agenda. Messina wrote in an email to donors and staffers that the new group “will be a supporter-driven organization, as we’ve always been, staying true to our core principles: ‘respect, empower, include.'”

But there’s a rub: Organizing for Action will be formed under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, and will not be required to disclose its donors. (The Los Angeles Times first reported this.) For context, Karl Rove’s dark-money juggernaut, Crossroads GPS, is a 501(c)(4), as is the Koch-backed national conservative group Americans for Prosperity. The decision to make Organizing for Action a dark-money nonprofit makes sense strategy-wise: as a nonprofit the new group can meet and coordinate with members of the Obama White House, which it couldn’t do as a super-PAC. But the decision flies in the face of Obama and the Democrats’ supposed commitment to transparency.

Obama has pledged to make his administration the most transparent in history. His reelection campaign also took steps to be open to the public, including the admirable move of disclosing all its super-fundraisers, or “bundlers,” each quarter, which it didn’t have to do. (Mitt Romney’s campaign did not name its bundlers.) But going the dark-money route leaves Organizing for America vulnerable to criticism. “It’s the right vehicle from a legal perspective, but it is breathtakingly hypocritical,” says Charles Spies, a Republican lawyer who ran the pro-Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future.

The new group will be used to mobilize Obama supporters around the key issues of Obama’s second term in office. Those issues include battles over raising the debt ceiling, gun control, and immigration reform. Alums of Obama’s 2008 campaign launched a similar post-election effort called Organizing for America, but it had little impact, especially on the defining policy fight of Obama’s first term, health-care reform.

Organizing for Action, the post-2012 project, will accept individual and corporate contributions, according to the Associated Press, but not money from lobbyists or political action committees. (That said, Team Obama has found ways to sidestep earlier restrictions on interacting with lobbyists.) The new group, which will be separate from the Democratic National Committee, claims it will voluntarily disclose its donors even though it is not legally required to do so.

That’s well and goodâ&#128;&#148;if it follows through with the disclosure pledge. But even then, Organizing for Action will be far less transparent than a super-PAC. Super-PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, but they must disclose all donations and all spending in a timely way. The type of nonprofit Organizing for Action wants to become is not required to disclose its spending in a timely wayâ&#128;&#148;it will detail its spending in IRS filings made available many months after the fact. And it’s unclear how often the group will release the names of its donors. Monthly? Quarterly? Annually?

Organizing for Action could, if it wanted, go above and beyond what the law requires by disclosing its donors and spending in real time. For now, it remains to be seen whether the new group will live up to the president’s transparency promises.

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Post-Election, The Obama Machine Goes to the Dark (Money) Side

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You Need to See These 5 Shocking Facts About Money in the 2012 Elections

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 17, 2013

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Not since the years before the Watergate scandal has a small cadre of mega-donors influenced our elections as much as wealthy givers such as casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner did in 2012. These men and a few dozen others pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into super-PACs and shadowy nonprofits and raised tens of millions more for presidential and Congressional campaigns.

Now, a new report titled “Billion-Dollar Democracy” by the Demos think tank and the US Public Interest Research Group, both left-of-center groups, distills all the fundraising and spending on last year’s elections and spits out an array of eye-popping factoids about where all the money came from (or most of it, at least) and how it was spent. It is vital information as reporters, activists, and others try to make sense of an election season full of firsts—the first full cycle since the 2010 Citizens United decision, the first $1 billion campaign (Obama), and the first presidential race in which both major candidates rejected public financing.

I’ve plucked out five must-see highlights from the report, with graphics courtesy of Demos and US PIRG:

32

It took just 32 of the biggest super-PAC donors to match the total giving—$313 million—by every single small-dollar donor to Barack Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s campaigns combined. Donors who give less than $200 aren’t disclosed, but it’s at least 3.7 million people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


159 donors

A tiny sliver of the American population supplied most of the money super-PACs used during the 2012 campaign season. How tiny? Sixty percent of all super-PAC donations came from just 159 people.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


31%

Of the $1.03 billion outside groups spent last election cycle, 31 percent was “dark money,” meaning we don’t know who gave the money or where it came from.

Source: Demos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foundation data.


58%

Dark money fueled a huge chunk of those TV attack ads you noticed during commercial breaks for Parks and Recreation. Fifty-eight percent of outside groups’ TV spending on the presidential race was funded by dark money.

Source: The Washington Post, “Mad Money.”


322,000 average Americans

It would take 322,000 middle-income Americans—say, the entire population of Anaheim, Calif., minus a few thousand folks—giving 0.37 percent of their net worth to match casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s $91.8 million, which was 0.37 percent of his net worth. Forbes estimates Adelson’s fortune at $20.5 billion.

Source: DÄ&#147;mos and U.S. PIRG Education Fund analysis of FEC and Sunlight Foun- dation data.

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You Need to See These 5 Shocking Facts About Money in the 2012 Elections

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

by NielPostma231 Posted on January 10, 2013

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President Obama’s decision to let his 2013 inauguration committee accept corporate cash and million-dollar donations marks quite a reversal for the president: for his first inaugural in 2009, he capped individual donations at $50,000 and banned corporate money. The Associated Press calls the decision “part of a continuing erosion of Obama’s pledge to keep donors and special interests at arm’s length of his presidency.” But for former Sen. Russ Feingold, it’s yet another sell-out by his friends in the Democratic Party to the big-money forces so dominant in politics today.

No Democrat has so publicly ripped his own party for embracing super-PACs and dark-money nonprofits than Feingold. In a new article for the journal Democracy, Feingold, who co-wrote the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, the last major campaign finance restriction in the US, takes Democrats to the mat. He calls 2012 “a big step” back for Democratic-led efforts to get big money out of politics, and singles out Obama’s reversal on super-PACs. In February 2012, the president encouraged his donors to give to Priorities USA Action, the super-PAC backing him, while allowing his top deputies to appear at Priorities events. On the PBS NewsHour, top Obama strategist David Axelrod defended Obama by saying that the president hadn’t warned at all toward super-PACs but had to play by the rules of the game. You heard that a lot from Democrats in 2012. Yet with statements like that, Feingold says, Democrats were posing as a pro-reform party while tripping over themselves to “exploit any avenue to accept unlimited, corporate dollars to fund elections.”

Beltway Democrats, Feingold argues, aren’t going to reform big-money politics from the inside; they’re addicted and they just can’t quit. The task of fighting for real reforms to money in politics, of building what Feingold—who now runs his own pro-reform nonprofit, Progressives United—calls a “permanent majority” for reform, falls instead to liberal donors and activists outside of Washington.

Feingold says the most important thing big donors can do is stop giving—to super-PACs or any of the other Citizens United-enabled fixtures of our big-money politics. “Donors hold more leverage to create a movement for reform than almost any other actor in the political system,” he says. If donors ignore super-PACs and nonprofits, “Washington will notice.” And as for the liberal activists out there, they should redirect all the energy they’ve invested into passing a constitutional amendment reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and channel it into “achievable goals”—public financing of elections, disclosure of donors to dark-money nonprofits and shell corporations, overhauling the dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the nation’s top elections cop.

The stakes are high, in Feingold’s view, for the Democrats. “Unless Democrats embrace election reform as a central tenet of our platform,” he writes, “we will face another era reminiscent of soft money—when the dominance of corporate interests meant that no matter what party held power, the influence of Big Money always won.”

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Russ Feingold: Democrats Sold Out in 2012 and Need to Quit Big Money

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SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

by hanhuogekennog Posted on January 8, 2013

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In August 2011, a group of 10 law professors submitted a petition (PDF) to the Securities and Exchange Commission urging the agency to consider requiring publicly held companies to fully disclose their political spending to their investors. After the proposal received more than 320,000 public comments, an unprecedented number, the SEC placed it on its 2013 agenda on the Friday before Christmas.

As it stands now, corporations must publicly disclose much of their political spending, but there is no way to know their total spending, partly because they can cloak their contributions by channeling them through outside-spending groups with lax disclosure requirements. For example, the insurance giant Aetna handed over more than $7 million to the American Action Network and Chamber of Commerce to quietly influence recent elections; those donations were only revealed inadvertently.

The Corporate Reform Coalition, a collection of campaign-finace reform groups led by Public Citizen, is applauding the SEC’s willingness to consider the new rules. “Investors have been clamoring for this information from the SEC for some time,” said Robert Jackson, a Columbia University law prof who cosponsored the SEC petition, during a conference call organized by the coalition this morning.

Some corporations already voluntarily disclose all of their political spending; others argue that mandatory disclosure would be too burdensome. Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), a member of a newly formed House task force on election reform that’s taking aim at Citizens United and one of 42 members of the House to publicly support the SEC proposal, has rejected that argument, calling for the agency to “mandate uniform disclosure of a minimum dataset” of political spending.

Corporate response to shareholders’ demands for political spending disclosure, based on figures from the Center for Political Accountability.

While proponents of the proposal expect strong opposition from corporate America, they are hopeful that the SEC, influenced by what Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord called a “moderate, centrist, good-government impulse,” will implement the new rule this year. One of the SEC’s four commissioners, Luis Aguilar, is already an outspoken proponent of uniform disclosure requirements. Without them, he’s said, “it is impossible to have any corporate accountability or oversight.”

And for all the controversy surrounding Citizens United, the Supreme Court overwhelmingly upheld the constitutionality of disclosure requirements as part of its ruling. (Only Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.) The CU decision explicitly acknowledged the importance of shareholders’ “corporate democracy” in “determining whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits.”

Rep. Sarbanes has called the SEC’s willingness to consider the rule-change proposal “an incredibly important development.” On this morning’s conference call, he referred to outside spending groups as “money drones”: “You’re walking down the street running your campaign, next thing you know they come at you with a lot of money, and the people operating those drones are hidden because we don’t have proper disclosure.”

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SEC Could Require Corporations to Disclose Their Dark Money

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Watchdogs to IRS: Reject Rove Group’s Tax Application

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 5, 2013

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Two watchdog groups are calling on the IRS to reject Crossroads GPS’ request to be recognized as a social welfare nonprofit.

Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, nonpartisan outfits that favor tighter campaign finance regulations, wrote a letter to the tax agency today citing ProPublica’s recent reporting on Crossroads’ 2010 IRS application. The application said that the group’s activities seeking to influence elections would be “limited in amount, and will not constitute the organization’s primary purpose.”

In today’s letter, Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center called those statements by Crossroads GPS “simply not credible, in light of the actual practices of the organization and the tens of millions of dollars Crossroads GPS spent on campaign ads since then.”

Conceived by Karl Rove, Crossroads GPS was one of the biggest outside spenders in the 2012 elections, reporting more than $70 million in expenditures to the Federal Election Commission.

Recognition as a social welfare nonprofit is important for Crossroads because it allows the group to shield the identity of its donors. Under tax rules, such groups are allowed to spend money on political campaigns but must be primarily engaged in promoting social welfare.

Campaign Legal Center Executive Director Gerald Hebert said in a statement accompanying today’s letter, “The application filed with the IRS by Crossroads GPS is laughable in the face of the growing body of evidence against the pretense that Crossroads GPS is a ‘social welfare’ organization.”

Crossroads GPS spokesman Jonathan Collegio responded: “This sounds like the 25th identical letter that the partisans and ideologues at the Campaign Legal Center have sent to the IRS, and it doesn’t merit anyone’s attention.”

We’ve inquired with the IRS as to whether Crossroads’ has been recognized as a social welfare nonprofit—as of mid-December it had not—and we will update this post if we hear back.

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Watchdogs to IRS: Reject Rove Group’s Tax Application

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Powerful Tea Party Group’s Internal Docs Leak—Read Them Here

by biglermyrta910 Posted on January 4, 2013

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FreedomWorks, the national conservative group that helped launch the tea party movement, sells itself as a genuine grassroots operation, and for years, it has battled accusations of “astroturfing”—posing as a populist organization while doing the bidding of big-money donors. Yet internal documents obtained by Mother Jones show that FreedomWorks has indeed become dependent on wealthy individual donors to finance its growing operation.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Richard Stephenson, a reclusive millionaire banker and FreedomWorks board member, and members of his family in October funneled $12 million through two newly created Tennessee corporations to FreedomWorks’ super-PAC, which used these funds to support tea party candidates in November’s elections. The revelation that a corporate bigwig Stephenson, who founded the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and chairs its board, was responsible for more than half of the FreedomWorks super-PAC’s haul in 2012 undercuts the group’s grassroots image and hands ammunition to critics who say FreedomWorks does the bidding of rich conservative donors.

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Powerful Tea Party Group’s Internal Docs Leak—Read Them Here

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Dark Money Group Promised the IRS it Would Stay Out of Politics, Then Didn’t

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 4, 2013

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

Five conservative dark money groups active in 2012 elections previously told tax regulators that they would not engage in politics, filings obtained from the IRS show.

The best known and most controversial of the groups is Americans for Responsible Leadership, an Arizona-based organization. Not long after filing an application to the IRS pledging 2014 under penalty of perjury 2014 that it would not attempt to sway elections, the group spent more than $5.2 million, mainly to support Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The California Fair Political Practices Commission has accused Americans for Responsible Leadership of “campaign money laundering” for failing to disclose the origin of $11 million it funneled to a group trying to influence two state ballot propositions.

The other groups that filed applications for IRS recognition of tax-exempt status saying they wouldn’t engage in politics are Freedom Path, Rightchange.com II, America Is Not Stupid and A Better America Now.

Much hangs on these applications, all of which are still pending. The tax code allows social welfare nonprofits to engage in political activities as long as public welfare, not politics, is their primary purpose. If the IRS ultimately decides not to recognize these groups, they could have to disclose their donors.

Such decisions, along with IRS’ oversight of social welfare nonprofits overall, have come under increasing scrutiny as these groups have assumed an ever larger role in elections, pouring an unprecedented $322 million into the 2012 cycle.

ProPublica has documented how some social welfare nonprofits underreport their political activities, characterizing them to the IRS as “education” or “issue advocacy.” Other groups have popped up, spent money on elections and then folded before tax regulators could catch up with them.

The IRS sent the applications submitted by the five groups to ProPublica in response to a public records request, although the agency is only required to supply these records after groups are recognized as tax-exempt. (ProPublica also obtained the pending application of Crossroads GPS, the dark money group launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove that spent more than $70 million on the 2012 elections, which we wrote about separately.)

The IRS confirmed that none of the groups had been recognized as tax-exempt and referred ProPublica to its earlier response about Crossroads’ application. In that email, the IRS cited a law that says publishing unauthorized tax returns or return information is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison or a fine of up to $5,000, or both.

A lawyer for Americans for Responsible Leadership, Jason Torchinsky, cited the same law in an email.

“If you willfully to (sic) print or publish in any manner any information about Americans for Responsible Leadership that you do not lawfully possess 2014 and which may or may not be complete 2014 you will be doing so in violation of (the law) and we will not hesitate to report such unlawful publication to the appropriate law enforcement officials,” Torchinsky wrote.

The other groups for which ProPublica obtained IRS applications did not respond to calls or emails for comment.

ProPublica has published the applications of all five groups, but redacted parts to omit financial information.

“As we said when we published our story on the Crossroads application, ProPublica believes that the information we are publishing is not barred by the statute cited by the IRS, and it is clear to us that there is a strong First Amendment interest in its publication,” said Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s president.

Social welfare nonprofits do not need IRS recognition, though most opt to apply for it. They can operate, and spend money on politics, while their applications are under consideration.

Americans for Responsible Leadership incorporated in Arizona in July 2011 and applied for IRS recognition last September.

By that time, the group had already spent $5,300 on get-out-the-vote efforts for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and given $57,500 to two Republican political committees in Arizona.

Nonetheless, its IRS application said the group hadn’t spent any money to influence elections, nor would it. It also said the group planned to split its efforts between influencing policy and educating the public, in part by “promoting a more ethical and transparent government.”

According to Federal Election Commission filings, the group spent more than $5.2 million on campaign activities in October and early November, mostly on phone calls urging the defeat of President Barack Obama. In addition to the millions it pumped into California ballot measures, the group also spent $1.5 million on two Arizona propositions.

While the IRS doesn’t classify spending on ballot measures as political, California election authorities do.

When ProPublica read the group’s description of its activities on its IRS application to Ann Ravel, the chairwoman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission, she laughed.

“Wow,” she said, upon hearing that the group said it would not try to influence elections. “That’s simply false.”

The California commission pressed Americans for Responsible Leadership to identify who contributed the funds it aimed at the California ballot measures, a battle that reached the state Supreme Court. Just before Election Day, the court ordered the group to reveal its donors.

So, who were they? Another Arizona social welfare nonprofit, which got its money from a Virginia trade association, which also didn’t have to report its donors. California regulators are still trying to peel back the group’s layers, to see who’s behind the money.

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Dark Money Group Promised the IRS it Would Stay Out of Politics, Then Didn’t

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How Dark Money Helped Democrats Hold a Key Senate Seat

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 28, 2012

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

In the waning days of Montana’s hotly contested Senate race, a small outfit called Montana Hunters and Anglers, launched by liberal activists, tried something drastic.

More MoJo coverage of the 2012 Montana Senate race.


Meet the Libertarian Candidate Who Could Help Dems Hold the Senate


Democrat Jon Tester Wins Montana Senate Stand Off


Jon Tester Cuts the Second-Most Montana Ad of All Time


Inside the Dark-Money Group Fighting Reform in Montana and Beyond


Montana Senate Race: Who Hates Wolves More?


Montana Senate Race Turning Into the Most Expensive Thing Ever


Cowboy Up: Montana’s Weird and Wild Senate Race


Montana Dems: Denny Rehberg Is Such a Drunk

It didn’t buy ads supporting the incumbent Democrat, Sen. Jon Tester. Instead, it put up radio and TV commercials that urged voters to choose the third-party candidate, libertarian Dan Cox, describing Cox as the “real conservative” or the “true conservative.”

Where did the group’s money come from? Nobody knows.

The pro-Cox ads were part of a national pattern in which groups that did not disclose their donors, including social welfare nonprofits and trade associations, played a larger role than ever before in trying to sway U.S. elections. Throughout the 2012 election, ProPublica has focused on the growing importance of this so-called dark money in national and local races.

Such spending played a greater role in the Montana Senate race than almost any other. With control of the U.S. Senate potentially at stake, candidates, parties and independent groups spent more than $51 million on this contest, all to win over fewer than 500,000 voters. That’s twice as much as was spent when Tester was elected in 2006.

Almost one quarter of that was dark money, donated secretly to nonprofits.

“It just seems so out of place here,” said Democrat Brian Schweitzer, the governor of Montana who leaves office at the end of this year. “About one hundred dollars spent for every person who cast a vote. Pretty spectacular, huh? And most of it, we don’t have any idea where it came from. Day after the election, they closed up shop and disappeared into the dark.”

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How Dark Money Helped Democrats Hold a Key Senate Seat

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