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Tag Archive: Investigations

Sunlight on super PACs

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It's a big day in politics: Voters in Florida are casting ballots in their hotly contested GOP presidential primary; voters in Oregon's 1st Congressional District are picking a replacement for ex-Rep. David Wu, a Democrat. Here in Washington, we'll be hovering over computer screens and hitting the refresh button in hopes of learning who is trying to influence those contests and beyond.

Tuesday is the deadline for committees active in the 2012 races for the White House, Senate and the U.S. House to file campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission showing receipts and expenditures ...

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Nine things you need to know about super PACs

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  1. What makes a super PAC super?

    Traditional political action committees are bound by a $5,000 annual limit on the size of contributions they can accept from individuals and are prohibited from accepting contributions from corporations and labor unions. A super PAC is freed from these restrictions under two conditions: The PAC must neither 1) give money directly to a candidate or other political committees that give directly to candidates, nor  2)  coordinate how it spends its money with a federal candidate. As long as those two conditions are met, a super PAC may accept donations directly from corporate or ...

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Super PACs: How we got here

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Nearly four decades ago, the delivery of a suitcase stuffed with $250,000 in cash to one of then-President Richard Nixon's top aides helped fuel the Watergate scandal and a complete overhaul of the laws regulating campaign finance. Voters in the 2012 election are likely to know less about who is trying to influence their decision than they have at any time since then. And, compared to the amounts of unregulated dollars flowing into campaigns, the stash of cash that former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans accepted during the 1972 presidential campaign seems like peanuts.

Here's a look at ...

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Evolution of money in politics

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Here is an interactive timeline of the events that shape money in politics. Click on the dots for more information.

Sources: Campaign Legal Center, Congressional Research Service, FEC, OYEZ, Sunlight reporting

You can embed this timeline on your site:

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Revolving door boosts private equity lobbying

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The Private Equity Growth Capital Council has a new president with Democratic credentials who has been through Washington's revolving door.

Steven Judge won the job after serving since last year as interim head of the trade group, which, among other things, lobbies against proposals to increase taxes on carried interest. Those proposals have gained steam in recent weeks because of revelations that carried interest enabled GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney to keep his tax rate lower than that paid by many Americans who made considerably less.

Before coming to the council, Judge worked for 14 years as the lead ...

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Super PACs have spent most on Florida ad buys, so far

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While the polls have constantly fluctuated in the last week before Tuesday's GOP presidential primary in Florida, one number has seen a steady rise: the campaign money being pumped into the Sunshine State. Helping to boost the total: The two super PACs supporting frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have spent more than $15 million in the state. That number makes 38 percent of all presidential super PAC spending that Sunlight is tracking.

About 66 percent of all super PAC spending in the races thus far has come from just two of super PACs, the pro-Romney Restore Our Future ...

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Gingrich super PAC super donor Sheldon Adelson has businesses under scrutiny by IRS, Justice

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Billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who have reportedly given a combined $10 million to Winning Our Future, the super PAC that supports and is run by former staffers of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, were drawn to him by a shared view of the importance of the U.S. relationship to Israel.

But a review of public records by Sunlight suggests that the couple, who appears to be the former House speaker's most generous political patrons pending the filing of Winning Our Future's first complete financial disclosures later this month with the Federal Election ...

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GOP lawmakers reopen fight over Keystone XL pipeline

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As House Republicans reopen efforts Wednesday to win approval for the Keystone XL energy project, new lobbying records filed over the weekend reveal a lopsided spending battle over the controversial proposed pipeline.

The Keystone pipeline has become an emblematic fight for those who see the pipeline as a North American job creator versus those who see it as an environmental disaster.

Environmentalists have applied political pressure through protest, but their lobbying expenditures on the pipeline have been dwarfed by those of their opponents. Three environmental groups that mention Keystone in their lobbying reports -- National Wildlife Federation, League of Conservation Voters ...

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Despite Fed’s steps toward transparency, much remains opaque

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In a bid to increase transparency, the Federal Reserve will for the first time make public the forecasts for benchmark interest rates that will inform discussions at tomorrow's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which sets monetary policy for the nation. But despite this action, there is still plenty of opacity in how the Fed conducts business.

For starters, the Fed delays release of the actual transcripts of these meetings for five years. While the FOMC releases minutes of these meetings three weeks after the fact, the most recent full transcript currently available is for December 12 ...

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PAC Profile: The Tea Party doesn’t need unlimited money to make a splash

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It's hard to believe given this year's headlines, but not all of the political action committees making an impact on this year's campaign are super PACs.

While most of the attention has focused on the entities that can accept and spend unlimited money, the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, a traditional political action committee that's abiding by federal limits on contributions and spending, got plenty of attention when it launched an ad blitz before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses that accused GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney of being a covert liberal.

Ryan Gill, the Campaign to ...

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