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Tag Archive: Investigations

Gabrielle Giffords leaves Congress with a big war chest

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Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., may be taking her name off her congressional office and the 2012 ballot, but that doesn't mean she can't be a player in a state that will be one of the top political battlegrounds this year.

The congresswoman's announcement that she will be giving up her House seat this week to focus on her recovery from a gunshot wound leaves her sitting on an impressive campaign fund, which she can save to relaunch her political career or bestow on other candidates and campaigns, a traditional way for politicians to stockpile goodwill.

Giffords, a ...

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No restriction on how Pro-Perry super PAC can spend funds

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry's decision to drop his bid for the GOP presidential nomination Thursday raises a tantalizing question: What will happen to the big-spending super PAC that dropped close to $4 million backing his campaign?

Make Us Great Again, the super PAC set up by Perry’s former chief of staff Mike Toomey has yet to file a financial disclosure with the Federal Election Commission, but based on its spending, it appears to be the biggest of the super PACs left orphaned so far by the winnowing of the Republican presidential field. The uncertainty over its fate underscores ...

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Super PAC profile: Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart ‘not coordinating’

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In what may be one of the most pointed political jokes since Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal, Stephen Colbert's satirical mystery tour has arrived in South Carolina.

As of Wednesday, the political action committee that the comedian founded amid much fanfare last year had spent $65,000 buying time in Charleston, S.C. to air a series of ads: one attacking Republicans who benefit from super PAC spending in general; another attacking Mitt Romney in particular, and a third suggesting that a vote for the now-non-candidate Herman Cain is a vote for faux-candidate Colbert. 

Earlier TV ad campaigns by ...

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Regulators lobbied by industry testify on Volcker rule

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Federal regulators have had at least 89 meetings with outside groups, most of them big banking interests, about the controversial "Volcker rule," the provision in the Dodd-Frank financial law that prohibits banks from making bets with their own money. The effort to curb the practice, widely held to be a contributor to the 2008 financial meltdown, was the subject of a hearing in Congress today.

Representatives of the same agencies that met with these outside interests testified that the Volcker rule would be difficult to implement. "One of the more difficult tasks in implementing the statutory prohibitions is distinguishing between ...

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Super PAC profile: Pro-Ron Paul group has corporate address

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Heading into the South Carolina primary, Santa Rita super PAC had created seven ads that appear on its YouTube channel. According to FEC records the PAC spent $317,500 producing ads and buying time on 14 channels for a promised 11-day ad blitz before Palmetto State voters head to the polls Saturday.

The president and treasurer of Santa Rita PAC is a Donald Huffines, the co-owner of Huffines Communities, a Texas-based real estate development company. Though the PAC is being run out of the same Dallas office suite as Huffines Communities, it is not registered as a corporate PAC and ...

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Super PAC profile: 1911 United—a new kind of committee?

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Although one of its founders is a longtime D.C. political insider found by an independent probe last year to have wasted D.C. taxpayers’ money, the pro-Obama super PAC 1911 United claims to have a more populist bent than other independent committees that have sprung up in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling.

The super PAC plans to focus on seven swing states with high African-American populations and will spend its resources on voter mobilization and training, as well as something more common to independent-expenditure-only committees: advertising.

The group will set itself apart in three ...

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Bain Capital tops list of Romney’s career political supporters

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Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Mitt Romney has touted as the source of his business acumen and one of his opponents for the Republican nomination has labeled "vultures" is the largest source of political money for the former Massachusetts governor over the course of his career.

Current and former executives and family members of Bain Capital have contributed more than $2.7 million to Romney's federal and state campaigns, federal and state leadership PACs, the Restore Our Future super PAC that supports Romney, and his gubernatorial inauguration fundraising committee.

Sunlight analyzed federal campaign finance data from the ...

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Data lacking on private student loans

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With student debt rising to a projected $1 trillion and concerns rising in the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond about the bursting of the student loan bubble, the new federal consumer protection agency has set a Tuesday deadline for the public to send in data and stories about the rapidly expanding private student loan market—loans students are getting from banks and, increasingly, by for-profit universities such as Corinthian Colleges and DeVry University.

“The private student loan market is one of the least understood credit markets,” wrote Rick Hackett, a staffer for the  Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in ...

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Super PAC profile: Citizens for a Working America flies under the radar

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Citizens for Working America is not the biggest or the most influential of the super PACs, but it may provide one of the clearest illustrations of how hard it is to track the shadowy organizations that have sprung up to influence elections in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United decision.

The group first surfaced in 2010, when it became one of the big spenders in a successful GOP campaign to unseat House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt from a seat that the South Carolina Democrat occupied for 28 years. 

In July, when the PAC, filed its ...

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As campaigns head south, super PACs dominate the airwaves

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As the Republican presidential race turns south, the key players to watch appear to be not the candidates emerging from Tuesday's New Hampshire primary but the super PACs who are supporting or opposing them.

In South Carolina, where the next votes will be cast in a Jan. 21 primary, local political observers and television executives tell Sunlight that the new political entities—most of which have yet to disclose any sources of their funding—are dominating the airwaves, far outspending the candidates. In Florida, which holds its primary on Jan. 31, a super PAC backing New Hampshire winner Mitt ...

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