Lack of transparency can be a good thing, declares the treasurer of “Ron Paul Volunteers,” a Miami-based Super PAC he recently established in hopes of raising “in the low six figures” to help support Paul bid in Florida's Jan. 31 presidential primary.
“I think to a certain extent we have an entrenched political establishment that for the most part has a clear punishment and reward system,” treasurer Hector Roos told Sunlight in an interview. “If you are going to put money out there against a candidate it might hurt you immediately in the public light or when it comes ...
Continue readingSuper PAC profile: Restore Our Future helped Romney and infuriated Gingrich
Arguably the most influential political advertisements so far of the 2012 cycle -- ads that helped topple Newt Gingrich from GOP presidential frontrunner to out-of-the-money finisher in Iowa on Tuesday -- were produced and purchased by a super PAC that purports to be making "independent expenditures" in the campaign but that has plenty of connections to Mitt Romney.
Restore our Future, a super PAC established and operated by a group of Romney's former staffers and supporters, spent $4.1 million before the Iowa caucus on an ad blitz aimed largely at Gingrich, the former House speaker who once appeared to be ...
Continue readingSuper PAC profile: Leaders for Families pushed Santorum’s Iowa surge
Rick Santorum's late surge in Iowa was aided by a lately formed Super PAC. Leaders for Families takes its name from the Family Leader, an umbrella name for a pair of nonprofit organizations that oppose Iowa's same sex marriage law. Chuck Hurley, the PAC's treasurer, is president of the Iowa Family Policy Center, the "education division" of Family Leader, and president of the Iowa Family PAC, a state-level committee affiliated with Family Leader.
Hurley endorsed Mike Huckabee in 2007. In an interview with the Iowa Independent in July of that year, Hurley said that Romney's ...
Continue readingPro-Gingrich group moves to delay revealing donors
Another leading presidential super PAC signaled Thursday that it plans to keep its donors' identities under wraps until Jan. 31, meaning voters in four crucial early contests will go to the polls without knowing who is behind two well-funded efforts to influence their decisions.
Winning Our Future, an outside group backing Newt Gingrich, notified the Federal Election Commission that it is changing its filing status to push back a deadline for making donations public by four weeks, copying a move made earlier this month by Restore Our Future, a group backing Mitt Romney, one of Gingrich's chief rivals for ...
Continue readingPresidential Super PAC disclosures may leave voters in the dark
When voters cast their ballots in January’s presidential nominating contests, they may not know the moneyed interests behind the attack ads run by shadowy outside groups trying to influence their votes, despite a Federal Election Commission deadline requiring many of them to disclose information next week.
Although FEC regulations suggest that groups making expenditures in New Hampshire’s Jan. 10 primary must file a pre-primary report on Dec. 29, it’s not clear how many of them will do so.
There are plenty of opportunities for these groups to avoid scrutiny until, in some cases, Jan. 31. The first ...
Continue readingFood and media companies donated generously to lawmakers opposing food marketing guidelines for kids
Last summer, a bipartisan group of House members from Pennsylvania wrote federal agencies complaining that proposed guidelines restricting the marketing of unhealthy food to children marked “an alarming regulatory overreach.” They emphasized their sugary roots in “the leading confectionary producing state in the nation.”
Indeed, Pennsylvania is home to the 117-year-old Hershey Company, maker of the ubiquitous Hershey’s kiss. But what the lawmakers from the Keystone State didn’t say was that they had other “constituents”—out-of-state campaign cash constituents, many of them Washington-based trade associations.
The massive lobbying push by food and media interests against the controversial guidelines ...
Continue readingSOPA revolvers: Sixteen former Judiciary staffers lobby on online copyright issues
As the House Judiciary Committee readies to consider a controversial bill that supporters say will crack down on websites pirating content, some interest groups may have a leg up on influencing the legislators.
That’s because 16 lobbyists, representing various companies and organizations favoring, opposing or watching the bill, used to work on the House panel. The committee plans to markup the measure tomorrow.
The bill, called the Stop Online Piracy Act, is hotly contested, dividing Hollywood, which wants tougher laws to protect copyrighted material, and Silicon Valley, which contends that SOPA would introduce new, uncertain liabilities for web companies ...
Continue readingCongress members owning TransCanada stock push to approve Keystone XL
Four members of Congress who have disclosed owning shares in Transcanada, the company trying to build the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, have pressed for the $7 billion project's approval.
The State Department took the lead in the approval process, and was supposed to rule last November on the project, which has been the subject of an intensive international lobbying campaign as well as a contentious split among supporters of President Barack Obama, who chose to delay a decision on authorizing construction until at least 2013.
While labor unions and energy companies support the project, environmentalists have objected to its ...
Continue readingMeetings missing from CFTC website
A week before Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commissioners unanimously approved new rules restricting how brokerage firms may invest customer funds, executives from Newedge, which had pushed against the rules along with the now bankrupt firm MF Global, attended several meetings with high ranking CFTC officials.
However, not all of these meetings were disclosed on the agency's official logs that track meetings of CFTC officials with outsiders on implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial law.
On November 28, the CEO and high level executives from Newedge, a global brokerage firm, attended two meetings at the CFTC, according to meeting log ...
Continue readingWho visited Jack Abramoff in Cumberland prison? We’ve FOIAed to find out
In his book Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth about Washington Corruption from America's Most Notorious Lobbyist, Jack Abramoff notes that while serving his sentence for mail fraud and conspiracy in a federal prison in Cumberland, Md., he was fortunate that "some intrepid public officials [made] the trek to Cumberland, including Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, his wife Rhonda, and their adorable triplets..."
In an interview with The Hill, Abramoff was cagey on the subject of whether other members of Congress made similar treks: "I'm not saying they have or they haven't," he told the publication, adding that Rohrabacher is ...
Continue reading
59063
