This post was co-published with PBS' Frontline.
The boxes landed in the office of Montana investigators in March 2011.
Found
in a meth house in Colorado, they were somewhat of a mystery, holding
files on 23 conservative candidates in state races in Montana. They were
filled with candidate surveys and mailers that said they were paid for
by campaigns, and fliers and bank records from outside spending groups.
One folder was labeled "Montana $ Bomb."
The documents pointed to
one outside group pulling the candidates' strings: a social welfare
nonprofit called Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP.
Altogether,
the records added up to possible illegal "coordination" between the
nonprofit and candidates for office in 2008 and 2010, said a Montana
investigator and a former Federal Election Commission chairman who
reviewed the material. Outside groups are allowed to spend money on
political campaigns, but not to coordinate with candidates.
"My
opinion, for what it's worth, is that WTP was running a lot of these
campaigns," said investigator Julie Steab of the Montana Commissioner of
Political Practices, who initially received the boxes from Colorado.
The boxes were examined by
Frontline and ProPublica as part of an investigation into the growing influence on elections of
dark money groups,
tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do
not have to identify their donors. The documents offer a rare glimpse
into the world of dark money, showing how Western Tradition Partnership
appealed to donors, interacted with candidates and helped shape their
election efforts.
Though WTP's spending has been at the state
level, it's best-known nationally for bringing a lawsuit that
successfully challenged
Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's
landmark Citizens United decision to all states.
The
tax code allows nonprofits like WTP to engage in some political
activity, but they are supposed to have social welfare as their primary
purpose. As reported previously by ProPublica and Frontline, when WTP
applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, it
told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections — even though it already had.
The group is now locked in an ongoing dispute with Montana authorities, who ruled in
October 2010 that
the nonprofit should have registered as a political committee and
should have to disclose its donors. WTP sued. A hearing is set for
March.
In the meantime, the group has changed its name to American
Tradition Partnership, reflecting its larger ambitions. This month, it
sent Montana voters a mailer in the form of a newspaper called the
Montana Statesman that claimed to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source."
The front page accused the Democratic gubernatorial candidate of being soft on sex offenders.
Donny
Ferguson, American Tradition Partnership's spokesman and executive
director, did not specifically address the documents found in Colorado
or allegations of coordination made against WTP.
"American
Tradition Partnership always obeys every letter of every applicable
law," he wrote in an emailed response to questions. "ATP does not, and
never will, endorse candidates or urge voters to vote for or against
candidates. ... These false allegations are old hat."
On its
website,
the group says its primary purpose is issue advocacy and combating
radical environmentalists, whom it sometimes calls "gang green." It
describes itself as a grassroots group backed by a broad membership of
small donors.
When asked about the documents found in Colorado, Jim Brown, a lawyer for the group, said he was unfamiliar with them.
After
being shown some of the documents by Frontline, Brown, in a follow-up
email, said his review indicated that they appeared to belong to a
company called Direct Mail. Direct Mail and Communications is a print
shop in Livingston, Mont., run by a one-time key player in WTP and his
wife.
Brown urged Frontline to turn over the documents. "If the
documents are purported to be what you say they are, then you may
knowingly be in possession of stolen property," Brown wrote.
The
records are in the hands of the Montana Commissioner of Political
Practices, which considers them public and reviewable upon request.
* * *
In
the anything-goes world of modern campaign finance, outside groups face
one major restriction: They are not allowed to coordinate with
candidates. That's because contributions to candidates and parties are
still capped to limit donors' direct influence, while contributions to
outside groups are unlimited.
The Federal Election Commission has a
three-pronged test for
proving coordination: Did an outside group pay for ads, phone calls or
mailers? Did these materials tell people to vote for or against a
candidate, or praise or criticize a candidate in the weeks before an
election? Finally, did the candidate, or a representative, agree to the
expenditure?
Many concerns have been raised about
coordination in this election because of close ties between outside groups and campaigns. Super PACs supporting
President Barack Obama and Republican nominee
Mitt Romney are run by their former staffers. Super PACs and campaigns have used the
same consultants, who insist in interviews that they have firewalls.
Proving
coordination is extremely difficult, however. Since 2007, the FEC has
investigated 64 complaints of coordination, but found against candidates
and groups only three times, fining them a total of $107,000, a review
of FEC enforcement actions shows.
Montana, which has similar rules, also receives few complaints about such activity, Steab said.
The boxes from Colorado contained a mixture of documents from candidates and outside groups.
Folders
labeled with the names of Montana candidates held drafts and final
letters of support signed by candidates' wives and drafts and final
copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns. The folders
often appeared to have had an accounting of what had been sent and paid
for scrawled on the front.
Several folders included copies of the
signatures of candidates and their wives. "Use this one," someone wrote
in red pen next to a
cut-out rectangle on a page with five signatures from one candidate.
Steab, the Montana investigator, said she believed these cut-out signatures were then affixed to fliers from the candidates.
Besides
material from the campaigns, the boxes also contained mailers on 2008
and 2010 races in Colorado and Montana from Western Tradition
Partnership and six other groups. There were bank statements for several
groups, including the
Coalition for Energy and the Environment, the
Alliance of Montana Taxpayers and the
Conservative Victory Fund.
In all the documents, one name repeatedly popped up: Christian LeFer. Even though two
Montana Republican politicians founded WTP, investigators determined that LeFer was the man behind the scenes.
LeFer, who is described as WTP's director of strategic programming in
memos in
2009, said in
an email that
the documents "appear to be stolen property" and that, as he'd had no
access to them, he couldn't respond to most of ProPublica's questions,
"which seem to be based on an erroneous and fanciful interpretation of
what they mean."
LeFer did not address whether WTP had coordinated
with candidates. Although former employees and candidates said LeFer
helped his wife run Direct Mail and Communications — the printing
company that Brown, the lawyer, suggested was the owner of the boxes of
documents found in Colorado — LeFer said he did not "run or direct the
activities" there.
Direct Mail listed its
principal office address in Montana filings as being the same
Colorado address WTP initially used.
Two outside groups with documents in the boxes — the
Montana Committee to Protect the Unborn and
Montana Citizens for Right to Work — listed their addresses on bank statements as the same
post-office box in Livingston used by LeFer and Direct Mail. LeFer was also the executive director of
Montana Citizens for Right to Work, an anti-union group.
Former state Rep. Ed Butcher said LeFer and Western Tradition Partnership aided candidates with no experience.
"They'll
come in, if candidates want some help, they'll come in and help them,"
said Butcher, who described LeFer as "a Karl Rove type political
strategist" who "stays in the background."
Butcher's file in the Colorado boxes was labeled
"Butcher Primary '08 mail samples." It
included an email from LeFer to Butcher with a survey about unions.
There was a campaign donation form, and drafts of fliers and a letter
from Butcher's campaign.
A "wife questionnaire" for Butcher's wife
Pam said she met her husband "on a blind date arranged by his buddy
that neither of us wanted." The questionnaire listed her children's
names and that she had been taking care of her disabled mother for five
years.
A letter on pink paper from
Pam Butcher was
in a file marked "wife letters." The letter, which contained much of
the information in the questionnaire, was marked as being paid for by
Butcher's campaign.
Butcher said his wife might have run her
letter past LeFer. "He may have asked, 'Do you need any help?' and she
said, 'Yeah, I need to get this family letter out,'" said Butcher, who
won the Republican primary in 2008 by
20 votes.
A folder for another successful candidate,
Mike Miller,
included a fax cover sheet from Miller to LeFer, forwarding Miller's
filled-out Montana candidate surveys for two outside groups, the
National Gun Owners Alliance and the National League of Taxpayers. It
also held a candidate survey asking Miller if he had any research about
his opponent, including "any recent scandals."
Miller confirmed to Frontline that LeFer was an unpaid adviser on his campaign, but would not elaborate further.
Trevor
Potter, a former federal election commissioner who now runs the
Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that advocates for more
restrictions on money in politics, reviewed the documents found in the
boxes.
"This is the sort of information that is, in fact, campaign
strategy, campaign plans that candidates cannot share with an outside
group without making it coordinated," Potter said.
"You need to
know more, but certainly if I were back in my FEC days as a
commissioner, I would say we had grounds to proceed with an
investigation and put people under oath and show them these documents,
and ask where they came from and where they were."
* * *
After the 2008 election, Montana started investigating whether WTP should have disclosed its donors.
The
inquiry progressed slowly until 2010, when a former WTP contractor
handed over internal fundraising records, saying she was worried about
what the group was doing.
The documents showed that the group
raised money specifically by telling people and corporations that they
could give unlimited amounts in secret.
"The only thing we plan on
reporting is our success to contributors like you who can see the
benefits of a program like this," said one document,
a 2010 election briefing to read to potential donors. "You can just sit back on election night and see what a difference you've made."
A
target list of
potential donors included an executive at a talc mine, the Montana
representative of an international mining group and a Colorado executive
for a global gold-mining company.
One note about a potential
donor advised: "Married rich, hard to get a hold of. Have a beer with
him." Another said: "Owns big ranch, signed a hit piece I wrote on cty
cmms'r last year (don't mention), should give $$ $10,000 ask."
Other notes suggested that solicitors "See Christian" or "Talk to Christian," apparently references to LeFer.
The documents cited the group's success in 2008, saying in a confidential grassroots membership
development proposal that 28 Montana state legislators "rode into office in 100% support of WTP's responsible development agenda."
By 2010, the partnership was active in state races in Montana and Colorado.
That
October, Montana authorities said Western Tradition Partnership had
violated campaign-finance law and should be fined. They said the group's
purpose in 2008 was "not to discuss issues, but to directly influence
candidate elections through surreptitious means."
The
Montana investigation also
said the evidence was overwhelming that WTP had established the
Coalition for Energy and the Environment, known as CEE, as a "sham
organization" to act as a front for expenditures actually made by WTP.
But
the investigation also found that "sufficient evidence has not been
disclosed to establish coordination between WTP/CEE and any candidate.
Concern and healthy skepticism is warranted, however."
That was before the boxes from Colorado turned up.
A convicted felon named Mark Siebel said he stumbled on them inside a known meth house near Denver at some point in late 2010.
It's
not clear how they got there. Siebel said a friend found them in a
stolen car. After reading through some of the documents, he reached out
to people he thought might be interested in them — primarily Colorado
candidates attacked by Western Tradition Partnership. A lawyer married
to one of the candidates shipped the boxes off to Montana investigators.
By
that time, however, the Montana probe into the group's activities in
the 2008 election was over. Steab also said that there was no way to
determine for certain where the documents were from and who owned them.
There was no whistleblower, and no information about how the records
ended up in Colorado.
Despite this, Steab said, she found the documents very telling.
"It
looks to me that there was a lot of coordination — but I don't know
that it's coordination that everyone is aware of in all cases," she
said. She said she spoke to one candidate who told her he was upset
about all the negative mailers against his opponent.
This year,
American Tradition Partnership is as active as ever. It's suing to try
to overturn contribution limits in Montana, so far
unsuccessfully.
The group sent out mailers attacking candidates before the June primary
in Montana, reporting none of them to the state as political
expenditures. It later put out
a press release saying that 12 of the 14 candidates it backed had won.
For
the general election, the group appears to be targeting Montana's
attorney general, Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor.
As attorney general, Bullock fought the partnership's lawsuits against
the state, including the one that ended up in the Supreme Court.
The first issue of the partnership's Montana Statesman newspaper, dated Oct. 7, which a
group press release said was sent to 180,000 voters, featured four photographs on the
front page:
Three of registered sex offenders, and one of Bullock, accusing him of
allowing one in four sex offenders to go unregistered. "Bullock admits
failure," the headline announced. A full-page ad accused Bullock of
taking illegal corporate contributions and of "criminal hypocrisy."
The Statesman's editor and publisher is none other than
Ferguson,
the partnership's executive director, described as an "award-winning
newspaper veteran" who has been "commended by other newspapers for his
'honest, intelligent and issue-oriented' approach."
Ferguson didn't respond to a question about his journalism credentials.
"Conservative
group American Tradition Partnership now one of nation's biggest media
outlets," said a press release on the group's
website, adding that the newspaper would publish "several" editions through Election Day and into 2013.
