In 1996, Bill Clinton cleaned Dole’s clock in the presidential race. But, against all the odds, despite the crushing Democratic victory at the top of the ticket, Republicans under Gingrich kept control of the House.
Gingrich could thank the Coalition for Our Children’s Future.
What was a bit odd about this group is that they didn’t seem to give a shit about children. They were a tax-exempt “social welfare” organization. However, they weren’t a charity raising funds for school lunches. The committee spent millions, but not one dime of it for anything to do with any children at all.
They did spend money on advertisements. The ads ran in seeming coordination with Citizens for Reform, whatever the hell that is, and Citizens United, a group that refused to identify any of the citizens who had united.
Every ad was a vicious attack on twenty-nine vulnerable Democrats running for Congress, all broadcast in the week or so before the election. They spent millions when a million bucks dropped into a campaign was atomic. For example, one ad linked a Democrat with a “child molester.” Another told Montana voters that the Native American (and Democratic) candidate for the US Congress, Bill Yellowtail, was a “convicted felon” and a “wife-beater.”
And in Kansas, voters were asked by fake “pollsters” if they would still vote for Democrat Jill Docking for the US Senate if they knew she was Jewish.
The Democrats, stunned by this attack from a secret source, had no time to respond to this bombardment of slanderous feces. The result was the upset defeat of at least a dozen Democrats, some by just two hundred votes, including Yellowtail and the “Jewess” Docking.
The Coalition for Our Children’s Future was triumphant. What that meant for children’s future was that Congress took a hatchet to food stamps for poor kids. You could say that the Committee for Our Children’s Future and its cousin organizations changed forever the political face of our nation.
So, we’re back to Butch’s question to Sundance, “Who are these guys?”
The answer: Triad.
The director of Children’s Future swore to congressional investigators that he was forced to sign over $700,000 in blank checks from an anonymous donor. Children’s Future had signed confidentiality agreements with the donor.
It was Triad, a consulting firm named after the secret Chinese money-laundering gangs, which had channeled the anonymous millions into Children’s Future and its affiliates. If Children’s was, in fact, not a real charity, nor Triad a “consulting” firm, but a money-laundering service for campaign spending by wealthy donors and corporations, then the list of felony crimes committed would make the Cosa Nostra blush.
There was more funny-money bending that campaign. In 1996, Citizens United took in donations from wealthy conservatives and sent them out, in the same amount and same day, to candidates who’d already received the legal maximum from their donors. It seemed a screamingly obvious route around campaign donation limits. But Citizens’ lawyer said the payments’ sums and timing were just a “coincidence.”
Republican Senator Fred Thompson was chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, which investigates corruption. Thompson thought of himself as a real crime-fighter, a tough federal prosecutor (though his biggest wins as an attorney were on the TV show Law & Order). He was truly upset that Citizens United, Children’s Future, and all these front groups had stonewalled his requests for information. Nevertheless, on the evidence he could gather, he wrote a red-hot report that whoever was behind the money flow was guilty-guilty-guilty of:
“disingenuous incorporation as a for-profit business and the establishment of sham nonprofit corporations. This secretiveness undermines our system of campaign-finance laws. . . . Triad is important not just for the ways it bent or broke existing laws, but for the pattern it has established for future groups, which will take comfort in Triad’s successful defiance of this Committee.”
Thompson then marched onto thin ice, laying out the circumstantial evidence that the money from Citizens United was a front for illegal excess contributions by ultraright billionaire Foster Friess—and, more threatening to the GOP, that Triad was an illegal conduit for money from Koch Industries.
(Footnote: Want to play with a full deck? The Joker’s Wild, tarot cards by Greg Palast. With billionaires and their politicians drawn by Bob Grossman. Visit www.BallotBandits.org.)
Remember, these are the Olden Days before Citizens United. In the brave new post–Citizens world, Friess could openly give millions to a single candidate, the $2,000 limit be damned. (And he did. Friess blessed ex-Senator Rick Santorum in 2012 with millions to run for president and against condoms.)
But back in 1996, it was a crime for corporations to give money to political campaigns: a breakin’-rocks-on-a-chain-gang, go-to-jail felony crime. So was excess or hidden giving to campaigns. Thompson was in the mood to let the Democrats draft subpoenas, compel testimony from the Kochs, and force the brothers to divulge their records. Wow.
I was intrigued by Thompson’s burst of crazy-ass moral outrage and made a few discreet calls to a pro inside the committee operation.
Here’s what I got: Nixon’s chief of staff once called Senator Thompson “dumb as hell.” Clearly, Thompson didn’t understand the play, the GOP game plan. He’d been elected senator from Tennessee on the strength of his pretend “admiral’s” rank in the film The Hunt for Red October. Thompson didn’t need his party’s fat cats, so he didn’t care about the GOP’s desperate need to cover up Citizens United’s sleazy-squeazy or Koch’s hot-money injections. The Republican leadership would set him straight. They took away his ability to issue subpoenas, but let him keep the perks of chairmanship, which included schtupping the Senate Republican’s comely blonde legal counsel.
Republican leader Senator Trent Lott did the honors of putting a hammerlock on pretend lawman Thompson.
On December 31, 1998, Senator Thompson’s Governmental Affairs Committee shut down its investigation into campaign finance shenanigans without having brought in key witnesses, failing even to subpoena key documents.
But why would the Democrats go along with letting the GOP’s sugar-daddies off stone-free?
What the hell happened?
The answer, I was told: Riady.