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March 17, 2005 -- CAMPAIGN-FINANCE reform has been an immense scam perpetrated
on the American people by a cadre of left-wing foundations and disguised
as a "mass movement."
But don't take my word for it. One of the
chief scammers, Sean Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable
Trusts, confesses it all in an astonishing videotape I obtained earlier
this week.
The tape — of a conference held at
USC's Annenberg School for Communication in March of 2004 — shows
Treglia expounding to a gathering of academics, experts and journalists
(none of whom, apparently, ever wrote about Treglia's remarks) on just
how Pew and other left-wing foundations plotted to create a fake grassroots
movement to hoodwink Congress.
"I'm going to tell you a story that
I've never told any reporter," Treglia says on the tape. "Now
that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform,
I can tell this story."
That story in brief:
Charged with promoting campaign-finance
reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged
strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2)
pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation
money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound
the table for reform.
"The target audience for all this
activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100
in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression
that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in
academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups,
in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."
It's a stark admission, but perhaps Treglia
should be thanked for his candor.
(Treglia, contacted by The Post yesterday,
was singing a different tune about Pew, saying it would be "incorrect
to suggest that the organization would attempt to deceive or mislead about
its funding efforts." Pew's president, Rebecca Rimel, calls the charge
"false" in a written statement.)
Treglia's revelations help put in context
a report just out from a group called Political Money Line, "Campaign
Finance Lobby: 1994-2004," which follows the money behind campaign-finance
reform.
That cash, it turns out, was the one thing
about the "movement" that was masssive: From 1994 to 2004, almost
$140 million was spent to lobby for changes to our country's campaign-finance
laws.
But this money didn't come from little
old ladies making do with cat food so they could send a $20 check to Common
Cause. The vast majority of this money — $123 million, 88 percent
of the total — came from just eight liberal foundations.
These foundations were: the Pew Charitable
Trusts ($40.1 million), the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy ($17.6
million), the Carnegie Corporation of New York ($14.1 million), the Joyce
Foundation ($13.5 million), George Soros' Open Society Institute ($12.6
million), the Jerome Kohlberg Trust ($11.3 million), the Ford Foundation
($8.8 million) and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($5.2
million).
Not exactly all household names, but the
left-wing groups that these foundations support may be more familiar:
the Earth Action Network, the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, People
for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, the Public Citizen Foundation,
the Feminist Majority Foundation . . .
What did this liberal foundation crowd
buy with its $123 million?
For starters, a stable of supposedly independent
pro-reform groups, with Orwellian names you may have heard in the press:
the Center for Public Integrity, the William J. Brennan Center for Justice,
Democracy 21 and so on.
Plus, favorable press coverage. Here, the
story — as laid out in the Political Money Line report — gets
really ugly. Some highlights:
- In September of 2000, less than two years before the passage of McCain-Feingold,
the liberal magazine The American Prospect put out a special issue devoted
to campaign-finance reform. With incredible hypocrisy, the magazine
failed to tell its readers that the "Checkbook Democracy"
issue was paid for with a $132,000 check from the Carnegie Corporation
— which, again, has spent $14 million promoting the regulation
of political speech in the last decade.
- Since 1994, National Public Radio has accepted more than $1.2 million
from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance reform for items
such as (to quote the official disclosure statements) "news coverage
of financial influence in political decision-making." About $400,000
of that directly funded a program called, "Money, Power and Influence."
NPR claims that there has never been
any contact between the funders and the reporters. NPR also claims that
some of the $1.2 million went to non-campaign-finance-related coverage.
But at least $860,000 can be tied directly to coverage of money in politics.
- Lastly, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation accepted
$935,000 between 1995 and 2001 from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance
reform for things like a "training initiative to help television,
radio and print journalists provide better news coverage of the influence
of private money on electoral, legislative and regulatory processes."
The president of RTNDF, Barbara Cochran, assured me that "We did
not receive money to promote campaign-finance reform." Cochran also
made clear that RTNDF does not provide news coverage, it only trains journalists.
But she wouldn't provide The Post with any of the training materials it
produced with the foundation money.
The press as a whole, of course, wasn't
bought off. But most journalists were either too ill-informed or too unconcerned
to figure out the fraud.
Back to the videotape, where an unidentified
(but apparently sympathetic) individual asks Treglia: "What would
have happened had a major news organization gotten a hold of this at the
wrong time?"
"We had a scare," Treglia says.
"As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will
stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column.
And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were
feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew
had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt
to hoodwink Congress."
"But you know what the good news is
from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists
didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was
a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going
to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."
Treglia's right. While he admits Pew specifically
instructed groups receiving its grants "never to mention Pew,"
all these connections were disclosed (as legally required) in various
tax forms and annual reports. "If any reporter wanted to know, they
could have sat down and connected the dots," he said. "But they
didn't."
So shame on Pew for undertaking a sustained
campaign to mislead the public and Congress. And shame on all of the journalists
who let them slide.
Above all else, looking ahead: Shame on
any news organization that lets the campaign-finance-reform lobby keep
on portraying itself as a "movement" now that the facts have
come out.
Now we'll see if sunlight is indeed the
best disinfectant.
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT FROM "COVERING PHILANTHROPY AND NONPROFITS
BEYOND 9/11"
March 16, 2005 -- The following is a partial
transcript of remarks made by Sean P. Treglia, a former program officer
for Pew Charitable Trusts, at the University of Southern California's
Annenberg School for Communication on March 12, 2004, at a conference
titled, "Covering Philanthropy and Nonprofits Beyond 9/11."
The transcript is from a video of the event
obtained by The Post. Treglia is describing Pew's strategy to promote
campaign-finance reform from the mid-1990s until the passage of the Bipartisan
Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Treglia: The strategy was designed not
to hide Pew's involvement ... but most of Pew's funding, Pew takes front
and center ... you always see sort of Pew's name ... This strategy, I
advised Pew that Pew should be in the background. And by law, the grantees
always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to
mention Pew...
I'm going to tell you a story that I've
never told any reporter. And now that I'm several months away from Pew
and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story...
The role of money ... was eroding trust
that elections were fair. And so there was this undercurrent of distrust
of the electoral process and ultimately of democracy. And so I believed
that in order to begin to address that distrust we had to somehow take
the unaccountable money out of the system or make it more transparent
and more accountable...
So, when I started to survey the landscape,
I saw an advocacy community bent on a comprehensive fix: full public financing
reform. I knew, having worked on the Hill, and having run several campaigns,
Congress wasn't going to vote for a full public-financing bill, and frankly
no one in America was going to support a full public-financing bill. It's
welfare for politicians.
There were the same old advocacy groups
... who were calling for reform, and they had lost legitimacy inside Washington
because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if
they didn't vote for reform...
We wanted to expand the voices calling
for reform to include the business community, to include minority organizations
and to include religious groups, to counter the Christian Coalition. The
target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington. The
idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That
everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community,
in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking
about reform...
Over seven years, I spent about $30 million
of Pew money on this effort. And the money led directly to key elements
of the McCain-Feingold legislation: the ban on soft-money, the issue-advocacy
provision, the better disclosure and the stand-by-your-ad...
We funded the business community, minority
groups, religious groups.
Treglia on the Supreme Court's decision
upholding BCRA:
Treglia: If you look at the Supreme Court
decision, you will see that almost half of the footnotes relied on by
the Supreme Court in upholding the law are research funded by the Pew
Charitable Trusts.
A reporter questions Treglia on whether
it is hypocritical for campaign-finance proponents to obscure their role
in supporting legislation:
Treglia: The reality is we did everything
by the letter of the law. All our grantees disclosed that they were Pew
grantees. We disclosed on our 990s and on our annual reports that we gave
to all these people. We just never released press releases saying that
we were funding these grants at the time...
If any reporter wanted to know, they could
have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't...
Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we
encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah ... We stayed within
the letter, if not the spirit of the law.
Treglia says more about the Pew campaign-finance
reform strategy:
Treglia: Having been on the Hill I knew
that ... if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless.
It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain. So, in order, in essence,
to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from
outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background...
It wasn't stealth ... All you had to do
was go to the grantee's Web site, and look at the funders, and you'd see
Pew.
An audience member asks Treglia what would
have happened had the press caught on to Pew's involvement in lobbying
for campaign-finance legislation before the passage of BCRA:
Treglia: We had a scare. As the debate
was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across
a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of
his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information.
And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role
in this, that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress. But you
know what the good news is from my perspective? Journalists didn't care.
They didn't know what to make of it. They didn't care. They don't know
about the sector, so no one followed up on the story. And so there was
a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going
to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up.
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