an explosive new report that reveals the extensive influence of corporate cash in U.S. elections through third-party groups that do not have to disclose their donors. The report published by The Guardian is based on 1,500 leaked court documents from an investigation by Wisconsin prosecutors into possible illegal fundraising by Governor Scott Walker for the third-party group Wisconsin Club for Growth, a 501(c)(4) organization. Prosecutors gathered hundreds of email messages that show exchanges between Walker, his top aides, conservative lobbyists and leading Republican figures such as Karl Rove. Now-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump also appears in the files from when he met with Walker and then donated $15,000 to the Wisconsin Club for Growth.
But last July, a conservative majority of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court halted the prosecutors’ investigation before any charges were filed. They said prosecutors had misread campaign finance law and that their targets were, “wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.” The justices also ordered that all evidence from the investigation should be destroyed. But at least one copy survived and was leaked to The Guardian.
report: “Scott Walker was under pressure. It was September 2011, and earlier that year the first-term governor had turned himself into the poster boy of hardline Republican politics by passing the notorious anti-union measure Act 10, stripping public sector unions of collective bargaining rights.
“Now he was under attack himself, pursued by progressive groups who planned revenge by forcing him into a recall election. His job was on the line.
“He asked his main fundraiser, Kate Doner, to write him a briefing note on how they could raise enough money to win the election. At 6.39am on a Wednesday, she fired off an email to Walker and his top advisers flagged ‘red’.
“’Gentlemen,’ she began. ‘Here are my quick thoughts on raising money for Walker’s possible recall efforts.’
“Her advice was bold and to the point. ‘Corporations,’ she said. ‘Go heavy after them to give.’ She continued: ‘Take Koch’s money. Get on a plane to Vegas and sit down with Sheldon Adelson. Ask for $1m now.’
“Her advice must have hit a sweet spot, because money was soon pouring in from big corporations and mega-wealthy individuals from across the nation. A few months after the memo, Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate who Forbes estimates has a personal fortune of $26bn, was to wire a donation of $200,000 for the cause.
“Adelson’s generosity, like that of most of the other major donors solicited by Walker and crew, was made out not to the governor’s own personal campaign committee but to a third-party group that did not have to disclose its donors. In the world of campaign finance, the group was known as a ‘dark money’ organisation, as it was the recipient of a secret flow of funds that the public knew nothing about.
Ed Pilkington talking:
what we think we saw in these 1,500 pages of documents that we received is not only a very intense story about Wisconsin, which is a noble state with a very long tradition of very progressive politics, that has become, I think, a kind of ground zero of the battles, partisan battles, between left and right, ever since Scott Walker became governor in early 2011 and introduced this union-bashing law, Act 10, but it also tells us—and this is what we tried to focus on at The Guardian—it tells us a much wider picture of what’s happening right across the nation, which is all about, I think, the atmosphere and the environment created by Citizens United, the Supreme Court ruling of 2010, in which it seems to be that politicians, senior politicians around the country, are interpreting the ruling almost as anything goes. They’re entitled now to do pretty much anything. They can attract millions of dollars of funding from the top billionaires right across the country. They can channel it through these dark money groups, which do not—have no limits on how much they can collect, do not disclose their donations to the public, and go that way in order to—what the prosecutors alleged in Wisconsin—to circumvent campaign finance law to the detriment of the public, because the public doesn’t know that this stuff is going on.
– these justices in Wisconsin decided there was no crime here that needed to be a prosecuted, but also that they, one, ordered the destruction of the documents, and, two, that some of these very justices had been re-elected as a result of dark money contributions to them.
once one delves into the documents and into the story, you find yourself going into a sort of vortex of ever-tightening circles, where everyone seems to be talking to everybody else. And again, we saw that as a sort of metaphor for what’s happening across the country.
We focused on one justice of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court called David Prosser, who has in fact just retired, but he was re-elected in 2011. And he himself drew upon the support of millions of dollars of corporate money, pushed through exactly the same third-party groups that then went on, at the same time, to help Republican senators, and then Scott Walker himself, go through their recall elections.
Now, the John Doe investigation that created all this evidence, that is the documents we received, was looking into exactly those groups, right? The Supreme Court of Wisconsin ordered the documents in which this material is contained to be destroyed. And yet, in the documents is evidence that the same groups were supporting one of those justices on the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in his own re-election. So, as I say, you find yourself going in ever-tighter circles, and you kind of wonder: You know, where is the sort of openness? Where is the transparency? Where is the being honest with the Wisconsin public about what is going on here?
at the heart of most campaign finance law is the fear that unless you protect—unless there is some degree of regulation, there could be quid pro quo, literally, this for that, or you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. And in the documents, there is some suggestion that at least even the appearance of quid pro quo could be there. And the Supreme Court of the United States has made it clear very many times that even appearance of quid pro quo must be avoided.
Now, in the documents is evidence that Scott Walker, in his own recall election in 2012, went after and encouraged donations from Harold Simmons. He was a very wealthy billionaire, right-wing funder. He bankrolled the Swift Boat smear campaign against John Kerry in the 2004 election. There is evidence of Walker’s campaign committee discussing the need to go after Harold Simmons, get money from him. And sure enough, three separate checks amounting to $750,000 did arrive in 2011 and 2012 at exactly the same time of the recall elections. They went through a third-party dark money group called Wisconsin Club for Growth that did not disclose those donations. And, in fact, the donations were never known until we received these leaked documents. At exactly the same time frame, the Republican-controlled Legislature in Wisconsin made several attempts to change the law to make it almost impossible for victims of lead paint poisoning to sue for compensation. Harold Simmons owned a company called NL Industries, historically National Lead Industries. They were one of the biggest manufacturers of lead paint until lead paint was banned in 1978. And if the law had not been stopped by the federal courts, as it was, the law—the legal changes that the Republicans made in the Legislature, it would have been virtually impossible for children damaged by lead paint—as you know, it affects developmental—the development of children. The level of toxin in their blood was something like 50 times greater than the water—those damaged by the water in Flint, Michigan. And the changes the Republicans made would have made it virtually impossible for those children to sue for compensation for the very serious injuries they received.
Harold Simmons owned a company called NL Industries, historically National Lead Industries. They were one of the biggest manufacturers of lead paint until lead paint was banned in 1978. And if the law had not been stopped by the federal courts, as it was, the law—the legal changes that the Republicans made in the Legislature, it would have been virtually impossible for children damaged by lead paint—as you know, it affects developmental—the development of children. The level of toxin in their blood was something like 50 times greater than the water—those damaged by the water in Flint, Michigan. And the changes the Republicans made would have made it virtually impossible for those children to sue for compensation for the very serious injuries they received.
– recall campaign and the money that Walker was appealing for.
Even the Democratic senators fled to Illinois, if you remember, for several days. And we all remember those heady events. Scott Walker put a bomb under Wisconsin in Act 10, and it turned it, as I said earlier, into this sort of ground zero of partisan politics in the country. And in the fallout from that, he was—he and his—six of his senator colleagues from the Republican Party were put through recall elections.
At that point, it kind of went dark for the public of Wisconsin, and they couldn’t follow what happened next, which was that Scott Walker’s campaign committee got together major fundraisers, political organizers, and they started fanning out across the country. Literally, Scott Walker himself made several trips down to Texas to call on oil money. He went over to New York. He did a journey one memorable day down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, where he went to spend 45 minutes with Donald Trump. And he went to Morgan Stanley and a big law firm. And in every occasion, you see him going to visit these major billionaire donors, and a few days or weeks later, checks starting to arrive, not to his own campaign committee, but largely to the coffers of this third-party group, Wisconsin Club for Growth.
And I should say, if people are interested enough in what is a fiendishly complicated world, I have to warn you, of campaign finance in America—which is, I think, part of the problem—they can themselves go in and read all of these documents. We have lightly redacted them for personal information, but, otherwise, they’re on our website. You can go in, and you can absolutely make your own conclusions from this. And you may think it’s great, you may think it’s awful, but you can do it for yourself.
Specifically, Scott Walker went across to New York in early, I think it was, 2012. He did this tour down Fifth Avenue. The documents show a sort of calendar of his day. We have no transcript of the discussion between them, but he did spend 45 minutes—it was in his schedule—with Donald Trump in his Fifth Avenue headquarters. On that very same day, Donald Trump wrote a check for $15,000. We have the check from the documents. We post—they are among the documents you can see in the database. And, you know, in the subject line, it was made out to Wisconsin Club for Growth.
– on April 3rd, 2012, he wrote a check for $15,000, not to Walker’s campaign fund, but to the Wisconsin Club for Growth.
it underlines what an extraordinary presidential election we’re going through. On the one hand, you had Bernie Sanders; on the other hand, you had Donald Trump—two complete opposites politically, saying exactly the same thing, that the political system is broken, that billionaires and corporations have politicians in their pocket. In the case of Donald Trump, he said it personally; he had politicians in his own pocket. And I think that speaks to something that is of increasing concern to voters, and explains the anger that voters have, that they feel their vote is—counts less than the money that is being contributed to politicians.
John Nichols talking:
It’s been big news in Wisconsin—front page of the newspapers, on radio. It’s funny. As I was driving to the studio this morning, it was the lead story on public radio. And so, this is being discussed a great deal.
But we do—I would suggest that Wisconsin is like the rest of the country in this regard, and it is a challenging situation, because the lines have been drawn so hard and so deeply that instead of what you would have seen maybe 20, 30 years ago, when you had a revelation of this sort, where everybody is shocked and horrified and says, “Well we’ve got to do something about this,” you have Democratic legislators calling for investigations, you have public interest groups calling for investigations. You have Republican legislators kind of jumping into process and saying, “Well, you know, how did The Guardian—what’s The Guardian got here? How did this happen?” And this—one thing to remember is that the John Doe investigations—a couple of them have been going on for a long time in Wisconsin—there have been a lot of leaks. Clearly, what The Guardian has now is the biggest leak and the most detailed one, but there have been a lot over the years. And so, I think that you’re seeing individuals and groups kind of go to their camp, go to their side, and fight this out.
And remember that Governor Walker has survived revelations of this sort before. And weirdly enough, that’s where you begin to see the intercept. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign said back in 2012, or revealed back in 2012, when it analyzed all the money that the governor had, as well as many of the groups that helped him in that campaign or were sympathetic to him in that recall campaign, that he had roughly, in the final fight there, a two-to-one advantage financially. He literally was able to overwhelm the process with money. And at the heart of this, we now know more about where the money came from and how it was raised, but the reality of the money is still there, that great mass of money.
And so, in Wisconsin, one of the real challenges now is this question. In a state that is essentially under one-party rule, where you now have evidence of a governor flying around the country, collecting money from billionaires and corporate interests to protect himself, you have evidence of his legislative allies literally acting in the way that those interests and those allies would prefer, and then you have a court, a state Supreme Court, on which people who clearly should have recused themselves from these cases are not only voting on these cases, but actually writing decisions. I think an awfully lot of Wisconsinites are horrified, but also uncertain about how this thing gets fixed in this state. And so, I think that’s why there’s an awful lot of interest in the U.S. Supreme Court examination of these issues.
the court is missing a member, so you’ve got a closer split on it than you historically have. And you should always be careful about trying to read the minds of members of the U.S. Supreme Court. However, one thing that’s interesting here, and I don’t think it’s discussed enough, when the United States Supreme Court did the Citizens United ruling—which I’ve been very, very critical of for a long time; in fact, Bob McChesney and I wrote a book about it called Dollarocracy, where we examine a lot of these issues—one of the interesting things in the Citizens United ruling is that the court said that transparency, knowing how the money is raised and who is raising it and who it’s coming from, was a vital part of guarding against the legitimate concerns of citizens about corruption and about the danger of allowing corporations and wealthy individuals to be so dominant in our politics. So this court, even conservative members of it, have acknowledged the necessity of transparency, of knowing what’s going on and, obviously, of maintaining campaign finance laws that were on the books, that are, in many cases, still on the books. So, one would hope that the United States Supreme Court would recognize the need to step in on this, if only to clarify their own statements of the past about the absolute necessity of transparency.
____
Ed Pilkington
chief reporter for The Guardian US.
John Nichols
political writer for The Nation.
— source democracynow.org