“Who Made Benghazi ‘Political’?”: Funny, Everyone Seems To Have Forgotten What Really Happened In 2012
If you’re outside that furious little circle of humans who believe Benghazi Is Worse Than Watergate, you may not fully understand why that circle is so furious. I didn’t for a long time, but I think I’ve cracked it. See, it’s not just that allegedly awful decisions were made on the ground. And it’s not even just that the administration supposedly lied in the aftermath to cover up its incompetence. No, the anger has a political end point, which is that this supposed cover-up sealed Barack Obama’s reelection over Mitt Romney and kept the rightful occupant from moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Summaries of the events on the right almost never fail to include language like this from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “The reasons Benghazi is important do not have to be rehearsed here. An American outpost, virtually undefended, was attacked by armed and organized al Qaeda-associated militants on the anniversary of 9/11 and four were left dead, including the U.S. ambassador. It happened eight weeks before the 2012 presidential election. From day one White House management and leadership focused on spin and an apparent fiction. Did they deliberately mislead and misdirect? Why was there no military response? Who is responsible?”
These questions are worth exploring. (Even I agree with that—and they have been, eight times by eight separate bodies.) But they have no real political punch without that one sentence in the middle there. Conservatives seem absolutely convinced that if not for the Obama “cover-up” on Benghazi, Romney would have won the election.
There’s one problem with that view: It’s ridiculous. Totally ahistorical. In fact, if you look back closely at how things unfolded in September and October 2012—and everyone seems to have forgotten—it was Romney, not Obama, who bungled Benghazi. It was clear at the time to a broad range of observers, not just liberals, that Romney really screwed the pooch on Benghazi, both when it first happened and then later in a debate.
Any memory of Romney’s initial reaction? He was in such a hurry to blame Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death on Obama that he rushed out a statement blaming the Obama administration for sympathizing “with those who waged the attacks” rather than the “American consulate worker” who died in Benghazi. You read that right—worker, singular. Romney was in such a hurry to get out a statement feeding right-wing paranoia about Obama’s anti-Americanism that it went out even before it was known that four Americans had died.
Romney was referring to a statement released by the American Embassy in Cairo, where the region’s rioting started that night, that criticized the now-famous video for fanning the flames. The statement wasn’t vetted in Washington, and so didn’t represent administration policy, but Romney jumped into the deep end and used it.
The next day, he was torn to pieces. In the old United States—yes, even during a presidential election—a tragedy like Benghazi would have halted campaigning for a day, and certainly, certainly everyone would have agreed that it would have been terribly unseemly for the challenger to politicize the event. But here came Romney: He didn’t even know how many bodies there were before he started trying to score political points off the deaths.
And most every news outlet took him to task. Read here for yourself a roundup of how his statement was playing in real time on September 13, 2012. Here’s the opening of a Bloomberg piece headlined “Romney Criticized for Handling of Libya Protests, Death”: “The attacks that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya became a flashpoint in the American presidential race, as Republican nominee Mitt Romney drew criticism from Democrats and Republicans for chastising President Barack Obama and his administration on their response.” Democrats and Republicans.
Romney policy director Lahnee Chen didn’t make things any better for his boss by saying the campaign went with the criticism because it fit the “narrative”: “We’ve had this consistent critique and narrative on Obama’s foreign policy, and we felt this was a situation that met our critique, that Obama really has been pretty weak in a number of ways on foreign policy.” A situation that met our critique. Before they really knew much of anything. Priceless.
At that point, Romney started backtracking a bit. But on the right the issue kept a-boiling, through Susan Rice’s appearance on the chat shows, until the second presidential debate, the foreign-policy debate. Romney was presented with a chance to re-handle Benghazi, and he screwed it up even worse. That was when Obama said, accurately, that he called the attack “an act of terror” the day after in the Rose Garden, and Romney countered, “I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” The transcript showed that Obama was right and Romney was wrong.
So Romney had a second shot at winning the Benghazi argument in real time, but all he managed to do was make it worse. It was crystal clear at the time that of all the issues of the campaign, he mishandled Benghazi the worst. (I’m not counting the 47 percent business here because that was a different kind of thing. It wasn’t a public policy “issue” that arose during the race.)
So let’s review. A tragic attack occurs. Before it’s even known how many people died or what on the earth are the reasons for the attack, the Republican standard-bearer breaks with all standards of decency and precedent and turns it into a political attack on the president—a presumptive and false one, just based on the paranoid right-wing idea that Obama is weak and somehow wants to cripple America. Then as now, most Americans weren’t buying it, and so Benghazi’s effect on the election, if any, was merely to show voters in the middle that the right was rabid about trying to “prove” that Obama refused to defend America, and it turned them off.
And now here we are, two years and eight investigations later, with Republicans acting shocked, shocked that there might have been anything political in the way the administration dealt with the attack and still carrying on in the same rabid vein. I obviously don’t know to a certainty that the new hearing won’t turn up something genuinely damaging, but unless it does, most Americans will react as they did then: Oh, Republicans doing more crazy shit.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 14, 2014
“Oh Please!”: Mitt Romney Pretends To Know Foreign Policy
Last May, Mitt Romney was reportedly “restless” and decided he would “re-emerge in ways that will “help shape national priorities.’” And the failed presidential candidate hasn’t stopped talking since.
One can only speculate as to why Romney refuses to quietly, graciously step aside, but it appears he takes a certain satisfaction from bashing the president who defeated him, as often as possible, on as many topics as possible.
Today, the former one-term governor with no foreign policy experience decided to try his hand at condemning President Obama’s policy towards Ukraine and Russia, writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed, complaining about “failed leadership.”
When protests in Ukraine grew and violence ensued, it was surely evident to people in the intelligence community – and to the White House – that President Putin might try to take advantage of the situation to capture Crimea, or more.
Wrong. U.S. intelligence officials didn’t think Putin would try to take Crimea. For that matter, Russian officials didn’t think so, either. It wasn’t a smart strategic move, which made it that much less predictable.
That was the time to talk with our global allies about punishments and sanctions, to secure their solidarity, and to communicate these to the Russian president. These steps, plus assurances that we would not exclude Russia from its base in Sevastopol or threaten its influence in Kiev, might have dissuaded him from invasion.
That’s wrong, too. Daniel Larison’s take rings true: “The U.S. was in no position to reassure Moscow that it would not lose influence in Kiev, since the Kremlin assumed that the U.S. and EU were actively seeking to reduce its influence by encouraging Yanukovych’s overthrow. Romney thinks that the U.S. could have headed off the crisis by threatening Russia with punishment for things it had not yet done, but that ignores [the fact] that Russia has behaved the way that it has because it already thought that Western interference in Ukraine was too great.”
The time for securing the status-of-forces signatures from leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan was before we announced in 2011 our troop-withdrawal timeline, not after it. In negotiations, you get something when the person across the table wants something from you, not after you have already given it away.
That’s wrong, too. Romney fails to acknowledge that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan were prepared to negotiate over a long-term U.S. troop presence beyond 2014 back in 2011. (He also fails to acknowledge that he personally endorsed a troop-withdrawal timeline in 2008 – three years before 2011.)
It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office.
That’s wrong, too. The Pew Research Global Attitudes Project documents countries that have a more favorable opinion of the United States now than when President Obama was first inaugurated, and more importantly, the same study shows an even larger list of countries that respect the U.S. more than when Bush/Cheney brought our international reputation down to alarming depths.
Taken together, Romney’s op-ed doesn’t amount to much. But what’s especially odd is that the failed candidate is even trying.
Foreign policy has never been a signature issue for the Massachusetts Republican, and when he tried to broach the subject, Romney generally failed. Indeed, looking back at 2012, let’s not forget that Romney’s own advisers said “they have engaged with him so little on issues of national security that they are uncertain what camp he would fall into, and are uncertain themselves about how he would govern.”
On the Middle East peace process, Romney said he intended to ”kick the ball down the field and hope” that someone else figures something out. His handling of the crisis in Libya “revealed him as completely craven.” On Iran, Romney and his aides couldn’t even agree on one policy position. On Afghanistan, Romney occasionally forgot about the war.
Remember the time Romney “fled down a hallway and escaped up an escalator” to avoid a reporter asking his position on the NATO mission in Libya? Or how about the time he said there are “insurgents” in Iran? Or when he flip-flopped on Iraq? Or when he looked ridiculous during the incident involving Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng?
Perhaps my personal favorite was when Romney tried to trash the New START nuclear treaty in an op-ed, but flubbed every relevant detail, prompting Fred Kaplan to respond, “In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and – let’s not mince words – thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty.”
Thomas Friedman noted shortly before the election, “For the first time in a long, long time, a Democrat is running for president and has the clear advantage on national security policy.” Part of this, the columnist argued, is that Mitt Romney acts “as if he learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes.”
So why is this guy writing WSJ op-eds as if he’s a credible voice on international affairs?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 19, 2014
“Lord Of The Flies”: Mitt Romney Would Like Your Attention Now
Dan Hicks once asked, “How can I miss you when you won’t go away?” I find myself having a similar thought about Mitt Romney.
Last May, the failed presidential candidate was reportedly “restless” and decided he would “re-emerge in ways that will “help shape national priorities.’”
As we discussed at the time, failed national candidates, unless they hold office and/or plan to run again, traditionally fade from public view, content with the knowledge that they had their say, made their pitch, and came up short.
But Romney has decided he wants to keep bashing the president who defeated him.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Thursday that President Barack Obama lost the confidence of the American people over broken health care promises.
Fox News host Megyn Kelly pointed out that Romney predicted during his 2012 campaign that Americans would be dropped from their insurance plans under Obamacare. “Do you believe the American people should trust this president?” she asked.
“Well, I think they’ve lost the confidence they had in him,” Romney replied.
First, if anyone should avoid the subject of honesty in the public discourse, it’s Mitt Romney. Ahem.
Second, if it seems as if Romney can’t stop talking, it’s because the former one-term governor keeps popping up – a lot.
He’s been praising Vladimir Putin. He’s still complaining about the debates he lost. He’s annoyed at how appealing the Affordable Care Act was to minority and low-income voters. He’s wistfully telling Fox News, “I wish I could go back and turn back the clock and take another try.”
Romney’s defending Chris Christie. He’s dancing. He’s weighing in on GOP primaries. He’s trying to advise members of Congress. He’s hosting retreats.
This was not the most predictable course for Romney. It seems like ages ago, but in the aftermath of the 2012 elections, the Republican candidate was not popular – with anyone. By the time he told donors that Americans had been bought off in 2012 with “big gifts” such as affordable health care and public education, Romney’s standing managed to deteriorate further.
By mid-November, Romney was something of a pariah, with a variety of Republican leaders eager to denounce him, his rhetoric, and his campaign style. Remember this?
Mitt Romney, who just two weeks ago was the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, seen by many as the all-but-elected president of the United States, has turned into a punching bag for fellow Republicans looking to distance themselves from his controversial “gifts” remark. […]
Whether it’s an instance of politicians smelling blood in the water as the party, following Romney’s defeat, finds itself without a figurehead, or genuine outrage, a number of Republicans have eagerly castigated their former nominee.
Josh Marshall said at the time the GOP pushback amounted to “Lord of the Flies” treatment, which seemed like an apt comparison.
And yet, here we are, and Romney’s still talking. Whether anyone is enjoying what they’re hearing is unclear.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 14, 2014
“We Are The 99%” But The 1% Buy Elections
As the “Occupy” protests spread across the country with the slogan “we are the ninety-nine percent,” two reports released this week demonstrate how the top one percent are playing an increasingly outsized role in American elections.
The New Yorker reports on a conservative multimillionaire’s successful efforts to buy North Carolina’s elections, and a report from campaign finance reform groups describe how an elite group of donors have laundered unlimited contributions to presidential campaigns. Much of this influence was made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s <a title="reference on Citizens United” href=”http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_United” target=”_self”>Citizens United decision, and anger over corporate influence in politics is helping fuel the populist uprisings in Manhattan, D.C., and around the country.
Dimestore Donor Dominates North Carolina Elections
James Arthur “Art” Pope, chairman and CEO of the Variety Wholesalers dimestore discount chain, has created a “singular influence machine” in North Carolina, using his family’s wealth to influence that state’s elections and promote right-wing ideology, according to a report by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker magazine.
“The Republican agenda in North Carolina is really Art Pope’s agenda. He sets it, he funds it, and he directs the efforts to achieve it. The candidates are just fronting for him. There are so many people in North Carolina beholden to Art Pope—it undermines the democratic process,” says Marc Farinella, a Democratic political consultant.
Like the Koch brothers (whom Meyer profiled in the New Yorker last year), Pope grew up wealthy, inherited his family dimestore business, and has spent massive amounts of money funding organizations and candidates opposing environmental regulations, taxes, minimum wage laws, unions, and campaign-spending limits. In addition to their sizable personal fortunes, the Kochs and Pope can spend millions in corporate funds because their companies are privately held. Pope regards Charles and David Koch as friends, and is one of the four directors of the Koch-funded-and-founded Americans for Prosperity, to which he has donated over $2 million.
John Snow, a centrist Democrat who was defeated by Art Pope-funded attacks after three terms in state Senate, told the New Yorker, “[i]t’s getting to the point where, in politics, money is the most important thing.” Snow was expected to easily win reelection, but his Tea Party-affiliated candidate with no experience had a seemingly endless flow of money. “A lot of it was from corporations and outside groups related to Art Pope. He was their sugar daddy.”
Chris Heagerty was another Democratic candidate defeated by a flood of Pope-connected money. One ad depicted Heagerty, who is caucasian but has dark hair and complexion, as Hispanic. “They slapped a sombrero on a photo of me, and wrote, ‘Mucho Taxo! Adios, Señor!’” Heagerty told the magazine. “If you put all of the Pope groups together, they and the North Carolina G.O.P. spent more to defeat me than the guy who actually won.” According to the article, he fell silent, then added, “For an individual to have so much power is frightening. The government of North Carolina is for sale.”
“We didn’t have that before 2010,” said Bob Phillips, head of Common Cause North Carolina. “Citizens United opened up the door. Now a candidate can literally be outspent by independent groups. We saw it in North Carolina, and a lot of the money was traced back to Art Pope.”
According to an analysis by the Institute for Southern Studies, Pope, his family, and their organizations targeted twenty-two legislative races and won eighteen. The wins placed both chambers of North Carolina’s General Assembly under Republican majorities for the first time since 1870. Three-quarters of “independent expenditures” in North Carolina’s 2010 state races — spending made independently of a candidate or their committee — came from accounts linked to Pope.
Wealthy Elites’ Influence on Elections Grows, Post Citizens United
In the post Citizens United era, the outsize influence of a small group of wealthy donors making “independent” expenditures is not limited to North Carolina, according to a report released this week by Democracy 21, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Center for Responsive Politics. A handful of elite donors are capitalizing on the lawless campaign finance environment to exceed federal candidate contribution limits. Individuals have spent as much as a million dollars supporting Mitt Romney’s bid for president, and two million to support President Obama’s reelection.
“Super PACs” emerged in the wake of the Citizens United decision, which struck down limits on corporate independent expenditures. Super PACs can now raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, and unions, and use it on political ads for or against federal candidates. They are not allowed to donate directly to candidates or coordinate with their campaigns.
In striking down corporate independent expenditure limits, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld limits on individual contributions to candidates reasoning that “the potential for quid pro quo corruption distinguished direct contributions to candidates from independent expenditures.” The majority opinion stated “[t]he absence of prearrangement and coordination of an expenditure with the candidate or his agent not only undermines the value of the expenditure to the candidate, but also alleviates the danger that expenditures will be given as a quid pro quo for improper commitments.”
The first presidential race after Citizens United, though, reveals that the distinction between direct campaign contributions and “independent” expenditures has been eliminated — and with it, the idea that corruption follows one but not the other.
In the second quarter of 2011, over 50 individuals donated the legal maximum to Romney’s campaign ($2,500), then made around $6.4 million in additional contributions to Romney’s “Restore Our Future” Super PAC. Almost half of these individuals gave between $100,000 and $500,000 to the Super PAC, and one person donated $1 million. These donations made up half of the “Restore Our Future” funds.
Nine individuals donated to both President Obama’s reelection campaign and his “Priorities USA Action” Super PAC. The nine donors collectively gave $2.6 million to Obama’s Super PAC, primarily from Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who donated $2 million, and Chicago media mogul Fred Eychaner, who gave $500,000.
“This analysis offers yet more proof that these candidate-specific Super PACs are nothing more than an end-run around existing contribution limits,” said Paul S. Ryan, FEC Program Director at the Campaign Legal Center. “The Super PACs are simply shadow candidate committees. Million-dollar contributions to the Super PACs pose just as big a threat of corruption as would million-dollar contributions directly to candidates.”
In addition to Super PAC spending, corporations and corporate executives can also launder campaign spending through non-profit “social welfare” groups organized under section 501(c) of the tax code. Non-profits are not required to disclose their donors, preventing the public from knowing the source of a particular message. Last week, certain business leaders denounced this secret spending, and Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center asked the Internal Revenue Service to investigate this alleged abuse of the tax code.
Ninety-Nine Percent: Money Out of Politics
The Citizens United decision affirmed that “money is speech,” and declared that spending limits violate the 1st Amendment rights of corporations and the uber-wealthy. As the 2012 presidential election heats up and election spending ramps up, corporations and the top 1% will speak louder than everyone else. The money that flows into the 2012 elections will come overwhelmingly from the top one percent — only a tiny sliver of Americans donate to political campaigns, and the bottom ninety-nine percent who can afford to contribute will have their dollars drowned out by the million-dollar contributions made possible by Citizens United.
And money matters. In modern elections, 9 out of 10 races are decided by who raises more campaign cash. Given this reality, it stretches the imagination to believe elected officials won’t be indebted to those deep-pocketed donors who help them get the edge over their opponent.
With average Americans — the ninety nine percent — sidelined by a political process and an economy that increasingly benefits only those at the top, they have taken to the streets. It is little wonder, then, that as the nascent Occupy protests grow and gain shape, at least one message is becoming clear: get corporate money out of politics.
By: Brendan Fischer, Center For Media and Democracy, October 7, 2011
Big Business Has Been Very, Very Good To Mitt Romney
As the noted philosopher and rock ‘n’ roll irritant David Lee Roth once said, “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a yacht big enough to pull up right alongside it.”
I often think of his sage words as I watch the early days of the 2012 political campaigns. For the phrase “buy you a yacht,” simply substitute “buy you an election.” Then behold the havoc wrought by Citizens United and other court decisions that have unleashed a mudslide of corporate cash into our electoral system, much of it anonymous, hurling the average citizen out of the democratic equation.
An estimated $40 million will be spent in those nine Wisconsin state Senate recall elections — most of it from outside, third-party interest groups and twice what was spent last year on all 116 of the state’s legislative races. Most believe President Obama will raise a billion dollars or even more for his reelection bid; enough, as NPR’s Peter Overby observed, to buy up all the TV ads on the Super Bowl — four times.
The Republican nominee may also raise and spend a billion. If it turns out to be former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, buying that electoral yacht will be a tad easier than for others. Back in 2007, the New York Times estimated his worth at nearly $350 million, and he plowed a reported $44.5 million of his own money into his 2008 presidential campaign.
Certainly, there has been a deep strain of noblesse oblige throughout the history of American governance, the wealthy feeling the urge (and having the disposable income and free time) to come to the aid of their country, both for good and ill. But with Romney, so much a complaisant creature of the corporate culture that dropped us into our current mess without a parachute, we have a tsunami-in-waiting.
As he scurries to the right, running away from his moderate record as Massachusetts governor (although there’s no escaping the irony of this week’s reports that the state’s upgrade to an AA rating from Standard & Poor’s during his tenure was achieved, in part, through tax hikes), it’s illuminating to remember not only how Romney amassed his personal fortune but also how the fundraising apparatus surrounding him probes for yet more ways to scam the system. Not content with the freewheeling liberties already granted by the courts, his money machine relentlessly pursues ever more insidious routes to the fattest wallets and checkbooks.
The opening chapters may be familiar to you. As a June 2007 article in the Times reported, Romney’s personal fortune was amassed from his leadership at the private equity firm Bain Capital. “Mr. Romney’s Bain career — a source of money and contacts that he has used to finance his Massachusetts campaigns and to leap ahead of his presidential rivals in early fund-raising … exposes him to criticism that he enriched himself excessively, sometimes by cutting jobs to increase profits.” The newspaper quoted Boston University business professor James E. Post: “Increasingly, this world of private equity looks like a world of robber barons, and Romney comes out of that world.”
A similar article that same month and year in the Boston Globe noted that Bain Capital specialized in leveraged buyouts and cited MIT Sloan School of Management professor Howard Anderson. Bain, he said, would do “everything they can” to increase the value of the companies it bought. “The promise [to investors] is to make as much money as possible. You don’t say we’re going to make as much money as possible without going offshore and laying off people.”
Stephen Colbert may have summed it up best:
“Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy. Which sounds bad, but don’t worry, almost no one worked there anymore.”
Another of the companies sucked into Bain’s gravitational pull was the medical testing firm Damon Corp. that, according to the Globe,
“later pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government of $25 million and paid a record $119 million fine.
“Romney sat on Damon’s board. During Romney’s tenure, Damon executives submitted bills to the government for millions of unnecessary blood tests. Romney and other board members were never implicated… But court records suggest that the Damon executives’ scheme continued throughout Bain’s ownership… Bain, meanwhile, tripled its investment. Romney personally reaped $473,000.”
But unlike the companies it bought, at Bain itself, even failure could be rewarded — even if your name was Mitt. Take a look at the sweetheart deal Romney got when he took over Bain Capital, a spinoff of consulting firm Bain & Company where he had been an executive. In an arrangement any start-up enterpriser would kill for, as per the Globe, founder Bill Bain guaranteed that if the Bain Capital experiment tanked, “Romney would get his old job and salary back, plus any raises handed out during his absence.” What’s more, if he proved unfit for the task, “Bain agreed to craft a cover story if necessary, promising to bring Romney back to the consulting firm and explain Romney’s return as a matter of his being more valuable to Bain as a consultant.”
Nice. No wonder Romney told an Iowa crowd this week that, “Corporations are people, my friend.” Like Garrett Morris’ Chico Escuela in the early days of “Saturday Night Live,” big business been berry berry good to him. Would that it had been berry berry good to the hundreds fired at companies taken over by Bain Capital.
Yes, corporate people power has served Romney well, especially when it comes to political fundraising. As Huffington Post reported this week, “According to disclosure reports filed at the end of July, 61 registered lobbyists and five lobbyist-linked political action committees contributed $137,650 to Romney’s campaign between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2011. The former Massachusetts governor raised more money from lobbyists during this period than all of his competitors combined … Craig Holman, legislative representative for the watchdog group Public Citizen, told HuffPost that Romney’s lead in lobbyist cash ‘strongly suggests that Romney is the favored candidate for wealthy special interest groups, especially K Street. They clearly think that they can get their foot in the door with Mitt Romney.’”
Then there’s this in the July 20 Washington Post:
“The largest corporate sources of money for Romney are mostly finance industry leaders, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America. Goldman Sachs employees have given nearly a quarter of a million dollars in contributions… The keys to his success appear to be large donors and contributors from the New York area. Nearly three-quarters of Romney’s money came from donors giving the maximum $2,500 contribution, and one in eight of Romney’s donors live in New York City and its suburbs.”
Of the $18 million raised by his campaign in the second quarter this year, one million came from a single trip to New York in May, including a University Club event crammed to its poshly appointed walls with banking executives.
So it’s not surprising that in the Romney camp, the creative accounting techniques perfected by Wall Street are a specialty. It was again The Boston Globe — which seems to have covered Romney’s political ambitions since they first danced in his head — that wrote back on April 15, “The former Massachusetts governor has become a master of a controversial but legal fund-raising technique that relies on a network of loosely regulated state political action committees to collect those funds.”
Example: Four members of the Marriott hotel family, close friends with the Romneys and fellow Mormons, wrote checks totaling $215,000 to Romney’s campaign, far more than an individual is allowed to give to federal political committees. According to the Globe:
“Romney, more fully exploiting the system he employed in the 2008 election cycle, got around those restrictions by taking in contributions through political committees set up under the rules of individual states. Most of the money was then transferred to Romney’s federal political action committee, Free and Strong America, and used to pay the salaries of top aides, political consultants, and traveling expenses.”
Consider, too, the super PAC Restore Our Future, supposedly independent, but run by former Romney political aides in support of their man’s candidacy. Restore Our Future raised $12.2 million in the first half of 2012. Under the new, relaxed rules it can raise unlimited funds but must disclose who contributes and cannot legally coordinate with the candidates themselves or the candidates’ official campaign committees. Of Restore Our Future’s 90 wealthy donors so far, the ubiquitous Marriotts among them, four gave a million dollars apiece. One was John Paulson, described by the website Politico as “a New York hedge fund billionaire who became famous for enriching himself by betting on the collapse of the housing industry.”
The other three allegedly are corporations but none of them conduct any real business. Two, Eli Publishing and something called F8 LLC, each list the same Provo, Utah, address as trusts set up by the families of two executives at the anti-aging product company Nu Skin Enterprises. Nu Skin founders and fellow Mormons Stephen Lund and Blake Roney were big contributors to Romney’s first White House campaign in 2008. (For what it’s worth, twice in the ’90s, Nu Skin was hauled before the Federal Trade Commission and paid a total of $2.5 million to settle allegations of unsubstantiated product claims.)
The other shell company, W Spann LLC, was even more mysterious. As first reported by Michael Isikoff of NBC News, it was dissolved only months after it was created, and just two weeks before Restore Our Future reported the company’s donation. As Isikoff wrote, “Campaign finance experts say the use of an opaque company like W Spann to donate large sums of money into a political campaign shows how post-Watergate disclosure laws are now being increasingly circumvented.”
After days of media demands and questions, the man behind W Spann finally came forward: Edward Conard, a retired managing director of — surprise — Bain Capital. But he only stepped up after the groups Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center requested investigations by the Justice Department and the Federal Elections Commission. He made his donation “after consulting prominent legal counsel regarding the transaction,” Conard said, “and based on my understanding that the contribution would comply with applicable laws.”
Phony businesses set up for the sole purpose of laundering campaign money and shielding who’s really behind massive contributions? The donors responsible for the dummy corporations all say they have nothing to hide. So why hide it? Maybe to keep their distance, because Restore Our Future could be planning attack ads on Republican rivals and President Obama that will be harsher and more truth bending than anything Romney and his nearest and dearest can officially support.
We need to discover this and other answers before the money machine completely supplants the voting machine, and any last chance to have our voices heard is permanently stilled by cold hard cash.
By: Michael Winship, Senior Writing Fellow, Demos, published in Salon, August 12, 2011
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