Who says Americans for Prosperity didn’t file a report? You can find it on the PDC website in less than a minute.
OLYMPIA, Jan. 14.—Have you heard the one about the nasty right-wing organization that sent out thousands of fliers attacking Democrats on the eve of the election – but didn’t file campaign finance reports?
Around the Capitol, seems like everyone has.
Americans for Prosperity was really a gift from heaven for Democrats in the last election – a campaign finance case that offered them the chance to say both sides played dirty. Right now some of the biggest players in Democratic politics are embroiled in one of the smelliest campaign-violation cases in state history, in which a left-wing consulting firm designed a phony Republican campaign that deliberately hoodwinked voters and changed the outcome of an Everett Senate race. Now that firm, Moxie Media, faces prosecution from the state attorney general’s office for failing to disclose that it was backed by the state’s labor unions and trial lawyers.
But if a right-wing outfit played just as dirty, what happened in the 38th District doesn’t look quite so bad.
That’s the argument that’s been made by the state Democratic party, by Democratic leaders on the Senate floor, and by members of a legislative committee that Thursday considered a bill aimed at clamping down on deceptive campaign practices.
They are grilling members of the state Public Disclosure Commission, demanding action, wondering what’s taking so long, and doing everything short of setting up the guillotine in the Capitol-building parking lot. But there’s just one problem. There may not have been a violation at all. Or if there was one, it may be a minor goof, involving paperwork that was filed a few days late.
Maybe we don’t want to sharpen the blade just yet.
Public Disclosure Commission Faces Pressure
Right now the Public Disclosure Commission, the state’s campaign watchdog agency, is investigating complaints from the Sierra Club and the state Democratic Party that Americans for Progress failed to register as a political action committee. If it’s true, that means it failed to properly report all the money it spent on campaign mailers in a dozen legislative races last year.
Some say it’s a case that might dwarf the Moxie Media debacle, involving secret contributions of as much as a half-million dollars – but no one has presented any hard evidence for it. Yet the political pressure for punishment appears intense. On the Senate floor last Monday, Democratic leaders beat back an attempt to deny a seat to Nick Harper, the beneficiary of Moxie Media’s help, and they all but declared Americans for Prosperity guilty as charged.
Said Senate Floor Leader Tracy Eide, D-Kent, “There were several PACs that committed violations in the last campaign, and no one condones them, either. The Americans for Prosperity, for example. I’ve got a list here. In the sixth district, in the 41st District, in the 45th District, in the 47th District, and ladies and gentlemen, in my district they never filed a PDC report at all, and we still don’t know how much they spent against us.”
In the Senate Government Operations Committee Thursday, PDC officials faced sharp questioning from state Sen. Maralyn Chase, D-Shoreline. How come the investigation of Americans for Prosperity seems to be dragging on? “My phone in my office is being inundated with calls about the many cases that we all know were out there that were comparable to Moxie Media,” she said. “And they want to know why we’re not getting the same fast action on investigating these other cases as we have with Moxie Media.”
The agency’s interim director, Doug Ellis, was left to say that sometimes investigations take a while when lawyers get involved – but he couldn’t comment on a specific case.
May Not be Any Dirt
The problem could be the agency is having a hard time finding dirt. While it’s possible that the agency’s investigators will uncover something unexpected, the public record indicates that the group may have played things pretty much according to Hoyle.
For one thing, it really did file a report.
It shows the group spent the grand total of $30,815 on mailers in the 2010 races. It also shows who wrote the checks.
The report has been on the PDC website since early November. And while the site is a little hard to navigate, if you know where to look it doesn’t take long. A first attempt by Washington State Wire Thursday evening took 73 seconds.
“Apparently people didn’t have 73 seconds to find out what was going on,” said Kirby Wilbur, the group’s chairman. “They’re pretty busy down in Olympia.”
A second attempt took 58 seconds.
A Matter of ‘Political Education’
Wilbur, known best for his years as a conservative talk-radio host on Seattle’s once-dominant KVI, is stepping down as chairman of the Washington state chapter of the organization this weekend to make a bid for state Republican chairman. He said the Democrats needed a scapegoat and it probably made sense that they would go after his group. Last year, he said proudly, President Obama mentioned the national organization 17 times – and not in a flattering way.
In this state, he said the group was careful to make sure that it conformed with the state’s intricate campaign laws. It didn’t register as a political action committee because it wasn’t one. It didn’t endorse candidates.
Take a close look at those campaign mailers, he said. They don’t urge a vote one way or the other. Instead, they fall under the kind of political speech that is known as political education. They outline how Democratic candidates voted on key issues, like the repeal of Initiative 960 last year, which allowed passage of an $800 million tax increase.
And each one of them ends with a line like this one – from the flier that went out in King County’s 45th District:
“Call Sen. Eric Oemig and tell him you are tired of him ignoring the will of the people, raising taxes and irresponsibly spending our money!”
Then it gave his office number.
If there was any question who was behind it, the words “Americans for Prosperity” were spelled out in capital letters.
Different Reporting Requirements
It might seem like hair-splitting to anyone outside the political world, but the courts treat issue advertising differently than they do ordinary political ads, and it is a commonly accepted distinction. AFP’s lawyers looked carefully at Washington state law and concluded that as long as the chapter stuck to political education it could be considered a grass-roots lobbying organization, Wilbur said.
Grass-roots groups face different reporting requirements than political action committees that are directly involved in campaigns. And so the group filed a grass-roots committee report, not a PAC report.
More stringent reporting requirements kick in if a grass-roots group spends more than $5,000 in a specific legislative district, Wilbur said, so the group made sure it kept spending to no more than $3,500 in each district.
But he admits to one possible goof. Grass-roots groups are supposed to file a report within 30 days of spending money, he said. The mailers went out the first week of October – according to the Sierra Club complaint, they went out as early as October 2.
Assuming that’s correct, and if you back it up a couple of days for postage and printing costs, you get a reporting deadline sometime around the last couple of days of October. At the very latest, the Sunday before the election. Wilbur’s group filed on Nov. 10.
So maybe Americans for Prosperity was a few days late. So are a lot of other groups, every election, Wilbur said. You can’t compare that to Moxie Media.
No Intent to Deceive
“There could be a technical problem with the dates, but there was never any question about where the money came from,” he said.
The big thing is that there was never any intent to deceive, he said.
In political circles, the line is that Americans for Prosperity never filed a report – and that just isn’t true.
The complaints filed with the Public Disclosure Commission were a little more accurate. In a letter to the PDC, state Democratic chairman Dwight Pelz acknowledged that the group filed a report.
But he urged the commission to see the AFP’s mailers in an unprecedented way. They went out before the election, in districts where Democrats were in trouble. Therefore they ought to be considered campaign advertising, and the grass-roots registration ought to be thrown out. “If they were attempting to influence the public on policy, doing so solely in the tightest Senate swing districts in the state just weeks just weeks before the election is highly unlikely,” he wrote. “There is no grey area here, AFPWA is a political committee.”
It’s a novel argument that would force the PDC to adopt a entirely new definition of issue advertising. But if it takes that much of a stretch to find Americans for Prosperity guilty, Wilbur maintains, maybe you ought to think twice about the charge.
“My personal opinion is that Moxie Media screwed up big-time, creating phony PACs with phony names to win the election in the 38th District. [The Democrats] needed a bad guy. So every time we say Moxie Media, they say AFP.”
What the Fuss is All About
Here’s one of the mailers everybody’s talking about. You’ll notice it doesn’t urge a vote for or against a candidate. And it doesn’t exactly hide the sponsorship, either. Those are capital letters.
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