Fox News picks up the Treglia tape story here.

They don’t credit me anywhere, but you can watch the video online.

And now, more to the point regarding that Campaign Legal Center item — meant, I suppose, to put the money spent by the campaign-finance-reform lobby in some kind of context — here are some more relevant figures.

The CLC may think that all of the money spent on the 2004 election is somehow a relevant figure, but I’d say let’s look at the CFR lobby versus other special-interest groups.

And, to do so, we have figures from another member of the CFR lobby (remember, I’ve never questioned the accuracy of any of these groups, just connected the dots between them and their liberal foundation backers) the Center for Responsive Politics.

So, here’s what some major industries gave in campaign contributions from 1990-2004:

Lawyers and Law Firms: $652 million
Securities and Investments: $390 million
Insurance: $234 million
Oil & Gas: $180 million
Public Sector Unions: $143 million
Pharmaceuticals/Health Products: $119 million
Education: $96 million

Now, it’s not exactly apples to apples. The CFR money was spent on think tanks and lawyers, and the industry contributions were, well, contributions.

But these industry contribution totals encompass two full election cycles (1990 and 1992) more than the Political Money Line total (which counts from 1994 to 2004).

The $132 million spent by the CFR lobby in 10 years is right up there with any of these other industries’ spending over 14 years.

Political Money Line has on its main page news on a new grant for “Money in Politics”:

The Ford Foundation website states that it has given a $300,000 grant in 2005 to the Center for Responsive Politics for “General support for nonpartisan research and public education on the role of money in politics.”

As always, there’s nothing devious or wrong about these grants. The point is that the media and lawmakers should be paying close attention to just who funds the campaign-finance-reform lobby. And the media should at least be asking what it is that these liberal foundations want.

Is it clean politics for its own sake, or is it in service of a larger agenda?

I also want to make something very clear: The Political Money Line report on the “Campaign Finance Lobby” is likely to come under intense attack. The scrutiny should be welcomed by people on both sides.

But let’s not have any misrepresentations of how this report is put together. What the PML folks did was look at a very opaque sector: foundations. The foundations are not required by law to make public very much about the money they give away, nor are the non-profits who take the money required to make public very much about what they receive — especially as regards the purpose of a grant.

The PML report is, in effect, limited by how transparent the groups in question have chosen to be. Its technical notes show how it was put together:

Background Notes and Explanations:

Year of Grant –In most cases the dates of grants are as stated by the grant making foundation. These may not always match with the Fiscal Year date of the recipients.

Not all grants made in 2004 have been made public. Some foundations have issued press announcements of grants and they have been included. No I.R.S. Form 990 financial reports for 2004 are available yet.

Attempts were made to have organizations receiving grants make public their complete Form 990s for the years 1994-2004. Many organizations did make available for review complete copies of their Form 990s for the last several years, but most did not have earlier years’ reports readily available. In several instances, reform organizations refused to make available the donor portion of their filings.

Financial Revenue - The Financial Revenue amounts were taken from “Line 12 Total Revenue” of the Form 990 filed with I.R.S. If Form 990EZ was filed, “Line 9 Total Revenue” was used. If a 990 form for a year was not available, revenue figures were taken from the next year’s 990 filing, “Part IV A Line 23,” for earlier years.

Lobbying Expenditures – The Lobbying Expenditure figures were taken from the 990 Form filed by 501c3 organizations, or from the Lobby Expenditure reports filed by 501c4 organizations with the U.S. Senate/U.S. House of Representatives. If the Form 990 or the Lobbying Expenditure report was not available for a year, expenditure figures were taken from the next year’s filing, reporting earlier year expenditures.

Purpose – The Purpose of a grant was taken from material of the grant making foundation. Those grants that appear to be related to federal or national level activities have been included.

In some cases, especially for grants in the 1994-1999 period, the purpose of the grant was taken from the Foundations Grant Index for that year published by the Foundation Center.

Grants in General
In 1997 and afterwards there was a large increase in grants for work at the state level on campaign finance. Many of the foundations that gave grants for work at the federal level also gave to state level activities. It is recognized that organizations often run programs that impact both federal and state goals, and in some cases it is often hard to determine the real purpose of a grant. For this study, we have tried to include only the clearly federal level activity grants.

In some cases, major grants have been made to organizations for “general support.” If the grant maker was a major supporter of campaign finance reform efforts, we included the “general support” grant as a campaign finance reform grant.

In some cases, major supporters of campaign finance reform provided grants to start up organizations that might provide help the national effort and these grants have been included. However, if the group later directed activities primarily to state level activities, its’ later grants were not included.

It is recognized that some grants to membership organizations for campaign finance reform efforts may have also benefited the organization’s own membership or institutional building. Since the primary goal of the grant was campaign finance reform the grant was included if an allocation could not be made between functions.

It is recognized that there are many other donors to the organizations we have listed. We had made a serious attempt to identify as many donors as possible, given the reluctance of some reform organizations to provide information. Of the donors we found, we have listed only those grants and donors that we feel we part of the larger federal effort for campaign finance reform.

News Media Exemption
No effort was made to calculate the value of editorials by media corporations supporting campaign finance reform although they were a major factor in trying to influence Congress.

Disclosure Note
An editor of PoliticalMoneyLine was a database and research trainer for some of the reporter training sessions funded by grants mentioned in this study. In 1997, while he was executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, he also solicited research grants from some of the major foundations mentioned in this study.

Ongoing Research
The staff of PoliticalMoneyLine will continue its research in this area and from time to time update the database with new grants, any corrections, deletions, or additions. New information should be emailed to kcooper@trkcinc.com.

It should also be noted that in cases where the purpose of a grant to a non-profit was unknown (and thus might have been for a purpose unrelated to money in politics), the PML report makes that fact exceedingly clear.

The fact that the database PML has put together may be updated as new data become available is not an indication of a lack of precision. It is an indication that PML is being precise in the extreme — showing readers exactly where there are gaps in the data. Gaps that PML is looking to fill in.

Have I ever mentioned that people at The Weekly Standard are particularly good looking?

And intrepid.

OK, maybe that’s a little over the top.

But don’t miss Bob Bauer, a (Democratic) campaign-finance lawyer, following the money behind speech-regulation pushers down in North Carolina:

How is campaign finance reform made? The Treglia remarks, reported by Ryan Sager in the New York Post, suggest that reform proponents understand that they cannot ride the waves of a “mass movement.” Treglia described a strategy of pursuing “expansive” reform incrementally, edging closer, law by law and ruling by ruling, to the more broadly regulated political process for which there is not, yet, popular support or demand. Leading this advance are the tax-exempt organizations of various kinds committed to reform, which ceaselessly lobby each incremental step while drawing on the intellectual capital of experts and the financial capital of supportive foundations.

A case study of this strategy is the reform community’s support for the State of North Carolina’s position in North Carolina Right to Life, Inc. v. Leake. North Carolina is defending a statute that limits contributions to “independent” political committees—committees that raise and spend their funds to influence elections but without coordinating their activities with a candidate or party.

…

The reform groups argue … that independent committees “play a significant and effective role in influencing elections.”

…

What is of larger interest is the operation here of the reform machinery as it works the already assembled pieces of regulation into a more “expansive” program. This project requires a continuous presence on the Hill and in the Courts, a stable of experts, fresh data and studies, and, of course, funding. In the North Carolina case, we have Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center calling on Tom Mann who cites to a study sponsored by the Campaign Finance Institute.

And if the Court checks the web for information about the Institute, it will find that it is a “non-partisan, non-profit institute” that has “received generous support” from, among others, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation, the Open Society Institute and, yes, Pew Charitable Trusts.

(Emphasis mine.)

As always from Bauer, a tour de force (read the whole thing for the specifics of the case). For people who care about the noose tightening around the First Amendment, Bauer’s Web site is must reading.

So, remember: This is a lobby, not a movement.

It is a network. Everything’s connected.

Show us the money!

Bill Allison responds in the comments to the post below:

Ryan,

We responded largely because you and others were inaccurately claiming that the Center for Public Integrity is not independent, that we lobby, or that we try to hoodwink public officials. We don’t do any of that, and we felt the need to set the record straight.

In our view, Kent Cooper’s study is flawed because he claims that we have gotten money to push campaign finance reform, whereas the purpose of our grants is to do things like code hundreds of thousands of public records, put them in a database and post them on our Web site so anyone can use them. The amount of money we’ve gotten to push campaign finance reform is $0. And what’s worse is that Kent knows this.

I also note that you haven’t told your readers that I invited you down to the Center’s offices in Washington, D.C., to review our records. I also sent you documentation showing that some of the grants Kent listed are inaccurate — I never said that I was sending you every inaccuracy, but rather said I was tired of looking and that if you wanted more examples of how wildly wrong PoliticalMoneyLine was, you’d have to come down to D.C. and look through the records yourself.

Incidentally, and just an aside — are public schools much worse today than they were when I was a kid? While you may think that reporting on conflict diamonds and international arms smugglers is lobbying for campaign finance reform (as our International Consortium does) I trust that some people who visit your blog have better reading comprehension skills.

In any case, if you recall, I sent you some documentation to prove our statement that Kent’s study was inaccurate; I pointed out several hundred thousand dollars worth of inaccuracies from a single funder. Now, maybe PoliticalMoneyLine is only slightly wrong, or maybe they’re off by much more — the point is you don’t know and it’s smarmy of you to imply the contrary, or to say that even if your source was off by 50 percent or more, it’s okay to use him. I know that you don’t have a great deal of experience, but maybe one of your editors at the Post can explain this to you: When someone points out an inaccuracy in material you relied on, the proper thing to do is to withhold further comment until you have all the facts, and not to insist that the faulty information you have is still accurate. And, FYI, you’re not the first journo to be hoodwinked by a source, so don’t feel too terrible about it.

And while we’re on the subject of accuracy, perhaps in your next post you could supply some evidence (you know, documents, and the like) to your readers to back up your contention that the Center is a “supposedly independent pro-reform group.” You can’t, because it’s simply not true.

Finally, since you’re such a fan of transparency, why haven’t you answered any of the questions I posed to you in the last email I sent you? Just answer these: Was your initial column on this subject your idea, or was it something assigned to you? Are you a subscriber to PoliticalMoneyLine (cost: about $1200 a year)? If not, how did you get the study you relied on? Did someone send you the information and ask you to write about it?

If you made the pitch, do you have any documentation to back it up? Emails between you and your editor? Do you have credit card receipts showing your subscription to PoliticalMoneyLine? Does the Post subscribe and, if so, is there a research librarian or editor there who can tell us that you have access to the service?

Let’s not forget — when you write for TechCentralStation, you’re writing for a news outlet published by a lobbying firm. (It’s nice to see that you have enough of an ethical sense to consider that a dig–I wasn’t sure you’d regard it as such when I wrote it.) Given that, I think a little disclosure from you would be in order here, don’t you? Or is it your position that disclosure is fine for a nonpartisan group with a 15-year track record, dozens of national journalism awards, and the respect of your peers at the New York Post, but the august and well-respected Ryan Sager writing for a lobbying firm is entirely above suspicion?

I do agree with one thing you said — it’s a mystery to me too why I thought responding to you was worth the effort. Live and learn, I guess.

Best regards,

Bill

Needless to say, a journalist has no responsibility to reveal sources — but I’m glad he’s so interested in how The Post found out about this.

Furthermore, no one has been “hoodwinked” by Political Money Line. They made very clear that they were assuming ALL grants from the eight major foundations they identified were assumed to be related to campaign-finance reform — an assumption the grantees could clear up if they wished to provide full information on the grants’ purposes. A lot of the grantees seem to have provided PML with full information, and for them every grant is accounted for in the PML report. Center for Public Integrity did not do this, so there are still blanks to be filled in.

Kent Cooper has said he’s willing to update his online database as new information becomes available — so there’s no inaccuracy here, there’s incomplete disclosure from groups such as CPI, which is still being cleared up.

I’m traveling today, so that’s it for now.

The Washington Times weighs in:

Make no mistake: Pew and other liberal foundations successfully avoided any transparency in their financial dealings with propaganda organizations like National Public Radio (NPR) and the American Prospect (a left-wing magazine). Their funding of campaign-finance “reform” groups like Democracy 21, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Center for Public Integrity and People for the American Way also managed to avoid exposure.

…

In reality, on the road to campaign-finance “reform,” there were two indispensable men, neither of whom was Mr. Treglia and both of whom were presidents. Through his pervasively corrupt 1996 re-election campaign, which attracted hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal contributions from the likes of Chinese military intelligence and Indonesian gardeners named Wiriadinata, Bill Clinton did his part for reform. Even first lady Hillary Clinton received money from Johnny Chung, who got his money from the Chinese. The second indispensable man was George W. Bush, who actually broke a campaign promise by signing the free-speech-stifling McCain-Feingold bill in his first term.

And the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Pew did not hide the fact it was supporting the ultimately successful attempt to limit free speech to a whisper before elections. But Mr. Treglia said Pew did everything it legally could to hide the $40.1 million donated to front groups.

Congress must demand that Pew’s tax-exempt status be revoked for engaging in politics. And it must repeal this abomination to free speech. Otherwise, Congress cannot credibly claim it was conned if it continues acting like a co-conspirator.

These guys know how to party.

I would ask Rick Hasen and anyone else saying that “we all already knew” about what Sean Treglia said in his speech last year: Are these the words of a man who thinks what he revealed is “much ado about nothing”?

Statment from Sean Treglia

“I apologize to The Pew Charitable Trusts and all the grantees who worked with me that my statements have caused so much confusion. The remarks being highlighted by some media are a small portion of a much larger panel presentation to top tier journalists on the history of philanthropy in the United States. I might be guilty of being hasty and choosing confusing language in my speech in an attempt to excite the crowd; me delivering a bad speech at a conference however is a far cry from Pew purposely trying to deceive. At no time in my experience with the Trusts did anyone attempt to hide, deceive or lie and I am surprised and saddened that my presentation has led some people to draw that conclusion.”

And I repeat: Nothing was out of context. Watch the tape. Please.

Also, Hasen’s point about The Post inadvertently, “without recognizing the irony, [making] the case for strong disclosure laws and perhaps limits on contributions in some circumstances” is facile.

First of all, I’m not opposed to disclosure — though I think there’s a principled case against it.

And second, no one’s saying that the liberal foundations in question shouldn’t be able to do whatever the hell they want with their money.

My argument relates to the hypocrisy of a movement for “open government” doing the best it can within the law to remain opaque. And my argument is about a docile press that doesn’t give a damn about anyone else’s free-speech rights so long as it enjoys a “media exemption.”

I’ll be perfectly clear: I’m deliberately turning the campaign-finance-reform lobby’s obsession with money on its head.

That’s the whole point: to show that it is just another lobby.

If Hasen is conceding that — which I think his response does in spades — then the anti-reform forces have already won this battle.

Quite a shift in the terms of the debate since Thursday, don’t you think?

The one question that seems open, to me, is to what extent Congress was fooled by Pew’s efforts. Certainly the main proponents of campaign-finance reform knew exactly what was going on.

But reluctant members who eventually signed on, it seems to me, probably were taken in by the edifice that is the CFR “movement.”

Otherwise, how could they have been pressured into voting for McCain-Feingold — unless it was just sold to them as an incumbent-protection measure, or a way to get one over on the opposing party (each side believing it would benefit them disproportionately).

As Juan Non-Volokh puts it: “If there was not a widespread perception that there was grass-roots support for campaign finance reform, then the charge that incumbent politicians supported ‘reform’ out of self-interest is that much stronger.”

Over on his MSNBC blog, Glenn Reynolds has a post up on campaign-finance reform.

Here’s a bit:

Some years ago, people became worried that secret payments of money might distort the political process on behalf of shadowy, unacknowledged interests. The result was campaign finance “reform,” which was supposed to ensure fairness and transparency.

Instead, it has caused confusion — and an environment in which pornography actually enjoys more First Amendment protection than political speech. I’ve got nothing against porn, but that seems just wrong, somehow.

The issue has gotten more attention lately, as the Federal Election Commission has started to look at regulating the Internet. At last weekend’s Politics Online conference at George Washington University, I gave a joint keynote speech with Federal Election Commission chair Scott Thomas. You can read the transcript (and see video) of his speech here. Thomas’s speech was meant to be reassuring, but I didn’t find it so.

The rest is here.

On The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, John Fund follows up on my column revealing the giant con that is campaign-finance reform:

If a political gaffe consists of inadvertently revealing the truth, then Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Philadelphia-based Pew Charitable Trusts, has just ripped the curtain off of the “good government” groups that foisted the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill on the country in 2002…

In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. “The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress],” Mr. Treglia says in his talk. “The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform.”…

Reporters are used to attempts to hoodwink officials into thinking an issue is genuinely popular, and they frequently expose them. But when “good government” groups like the Center for Public Integrity engage in the same tactics, journalists usually ignore it. Perhaps that’s because Washington media types overwhelmingly wanted McCain-Feingold to pass.

It will be interesting to see if, in light of Mr. Treglia’s comments, reporters continue to do so. The tape of his remarks, which Post editorial writer Ryan Sager unearthed, could provide material for a dozen stories on how campaign finance reform was really passed.

Well, as they say, read the whole thing.

But I do want to emphasize the last point I’m quoting from Fund: There are dozens of stories — literally dozens — to be done on this scam. It is massive in terms of its scope — especially in terms of who is implicated.

Let’s just say it is next to impossible that straight-talker John McCain didn’t know exactly what was going on.

Will anyone call him on it?

Will The New York Times touch this story with a ten-foot poll?

They have a responsibility to.