Countdown

The Buying of the President 2004

Acknowledgements

Watch what they do, not what they say.

These simple words have been the modus operandi for us here at the Center for Public Integrity since we opened our doors back in May 1990. It’s not that we don’t care what public officials say — of course we do — or that we are cynical enough to believe that no one in politics is capable of a thoughtful, sincere, and, yes, truthful and accurate, utterance. Of course they are. But in a highly politicized, polarized city dominated by spin, truth becomes more elusive every day and mere words can sound hollow and divorced from real events. The old saw, “Actions speak louder than words” has real meaning for us and for investigative journalists everywhere.

Over the years, we have investigated the powerful and produced more than 225 reports and 11 books; our work has been honored a total of 15 times by both the Society of Professional Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors. The Center is nonprofit and nonpartisan: we are not selling anything, we don’t lobby for or against legislation, and we alienate both political parties equally with our research. Therefore we harbor no illusions about being invited to dinner at anyone’s White House anytime soon. We also don’t have to worry — thank God — about Nielsen ratings or finding people to cry on camera. We have internal deadlines, yes, but generally we operate without the usual daily time or space limitations — certainly when compared to most newsrooms. What we write is more substantive than most journalism, and more interesting than most political science. We are, in other words, researchers who recognize the enormous responsibility we bear to balance fairness and the right to privacy with the broad public interest and the public’s right to know. We are ever mindful of a quote from Albert Einstein that is on our office wall: “The right to search for truth implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.”

That’s why, in late 1995, when we learned that the Clinton White House was rewarding major donors to the Democratic Party with overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom, and later obtained secret “usher records” that listed every guest for an entire year, we cross-checked the list against Federal Election Commission campaign contribution records and then published an investigative report, Fat Cat Hotel, listing those lucky 75 men and women, each of whom we had contacted by phone or letter. The Clinton White House was silent, and the Democratic Party spokeswoman called our report “ridiculous.” Subsequent internal White House records that were released the following year confirmed everything we had written and more — the personal, enthusiastic approval of the president of the United States. The Center received SPJ’s Sigma Delta Chi “Public Service in Newsletter Journalism” award for the report.

In early 2003, we obtained a copy of secret draft legislation for the Domestic Security Enhancement Act that the Bush administration had quietly prepared as a bold, comprehensive sequel to the USA PATRIOT Act, giving the government broad, sweeping new powers to increase domestic intelligence-gathering, surveillance, and law enforcement prerogatives and simultaneously decrease judicial review and public access to information. We also learned that this major, historic “Patriot II” legislation had been written without consulting or informing Republican or Democratic leaders in Congress, who actually had never heard of it, much less read it. As a result, the Center for Public Integrity took the unprecedented (for us) step of posting the entire 120-page bill on our website. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s aides had tried to talk us out of posting it and, having failed, unpersuasively downplayed the document to reporters as an “early discussion draft.” Nearly every major print media outlet in the nation — and many around the world — covered it, and more than 325,000 “unique visitors” came to our site in the first week alone.

We wrote The Buying of the President, published in 1996, The Buying of the President 2000, and now The Buying of the President 2004, because we believed that Americans have a right to know who’s behind our presidential candidates, the real price of power, and the alliances that have been made. This kind of information is not in TV commercials or on candidates’ websites, and is present only in sporadic bits and pieces, if at all, in the news media. It was amazing to us, then and now, that prior to 1996, no one had ever written an investigative book about the major presidential candidates and their parties, published before the first votes are cast in the primaries and caucuses.

There is good news and bad news about investigating major presidential candidates and their parties in three straight elections. The good news is that we know what to look for and have developed and executed an unprecedented, elaborate methodology. The bad news is that all of the political “players” would rather personally fight in Iraq than talk to anyone from the Center for Public Integrity. Despite repeated requests, via telephone, e-mail, and letter, over many months, none of the major presidential candidates in this book would subject themselves to our probing questions about the grubby matter of their political survival and who has made it possible. For the first time, the political party chairmen also declined to speak with us. And the congressional leadership was also mum, despite our requests — Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, House speaker Dennis Hastert, and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, to name a few.

We do appreciate the time and big-picture insights about the state of democracy that former President Jimmy Carter, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain, former Senate majority leader and GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, Senator Russell Feingold, representatives John Lewis, Jim Leach, Marcy Kaptur, and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney shared with us. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donahue, who has spoken with us in the past, declined our request for an interview.

Over the course of a year, 50 researchers, writers, and editors investigated the candidates and the political parties, contacting or interviewing more than 600 people and systematically gathering hundreds of thousands of federal and state records and secondary source material. As part of the Center’s exhaustive, “leave-no-stone-unturned” approach, we examined the biographical history of each of the candidates. We sifted through thousands of documents and articles to trace each politician from childhood to power. We delved into their education, their professional lives, and sometimes even their military service.

From these materials, we created and updated comprehensive one-of-a-kind databases. To discern their personal financial holdings we culled all available financial disclosure statements and created a database that detailed every cent owned by each politician, along with their incomes. Only by knowing each candidate’s financial holdings could we analyze potential conflicts of interest.

The next step was to collect every available contribution record for each politician during his or her entire government career. To reach this goal, Center data analysts spent months gathering and coding donations made on the federal level going back to 1978. To truly examine the financial histories at play, researchers compiled additional documents including state campaign contribution records and the underreported contributions of soft money going to candidate committees through the 527 system. The result was a truly unprecedented database containing 1,834,513 campaign finance records of the presidential candidates that allowed us to convert federal, state, and soft-money records into single lists, ranking each candidate’s top career donors.

In addition to campaign contributions, researchers followed the money trail to analyze candidates’ campaign expenditure records and look for the connections between politicians and interested parties. We checked documents detailing any all-expense-paid trips or use of corporate jets by the candidates, as well as any federal election law “matters under review” by the Federal Election Commission. We also systematically compared past and current congressional staff listings with lobbying records to identify postemployment, “revolving-door” practices. Center researchers studied federal and state lobbying records, legislative voting records, and sometimes committee hearing records to explore what legislative favors had been granted to large campaign donors. In addition, we examined and analyzed litigation and legal records, as well as Securities and Exchange Commission annual reports, proxies, and other company-related documents involving many of the candidates and political parties.

The Center filed the most Freedom of Information Act requests on a single investigative project in its nearly 14-year history, requesting all correspondence for the last six years between those seeking the White House and more than 100 federal agencies. Many of the more than 10,000 documents that the Center received have shown servicing-the-donor connections between these candidates and their largest contributors.

In addition to The Buying of the President 2004, the Center has created a special website, which can also be linked from the Center’s homepage (http://www.publicintegrity.org), offering continuing investigative coverage of the presidential election, including short candidate biographies and periodic new campaign developments. The site also features a “document warehouse,” which includes the candidates’ most recent financial disclosure forms, trip reports, IRS 527 reports, databases of assets, and links to their campaign contribution reports, websites, and political action committees.

Recall that in the summer of 2002, in the midst of the media frenzy over the epidemic of corporate irresponsibility, the Center for Public Integrity was the only organization anywhere that posted internal Harken Energy documents regarding the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation of George W. Bush and the company; in fact, we ended up putting up almost a thousand pages on our website. We have also gathered tantalizing documents about specific candidates that we will make available on the Web.

Regrettably, we once again made the painful choice to use up our valuable “word count” space for this manuscript with narrative about the candidates and parties, saving details such as our source notes for The Buying of the President 2004 for our website.

Obviously, the preparation of this book was a massive operation. The 50 members of the investigative team are listed in the front of the book, and brief biographies of many are listed on the Center’s website. I gratefully acknowledge the devoted efforts of each and every person. It is a truly inspiring and humbling experience to be around so much dedication and talent, day after day. I must single out a few of the stars of this show.

Bill Allison is the managing editor of the Center, editorially responsible for everything we produce. Co-author and project manager of The Cheating of America in 2001 and senior editor for The Buying of the President 2000, he has phenomenal, boundless talent. Consider that in the seven months prior to completion of this manuscript, besides this massive undertaking, the Center produced 30 news-making investigative reports on topics ranging from global water privatization to the Patriot II legislation, from media ownership and regulatory conflicts of interest to prosecutorial misconduct. No one else produces original investigative reporting of such range and quality, weekly, along with a 120,000-word book.

He couldn’t have done it without the Center’s superb new deputy managing editor, Teo Furtado, whose editing skills, exuberance and first-rate professionalism are infectious. Allison and Furtado are easily the best one-two editor combination we’ve ever had here at the Center. Research Editor Peter Smith coordinated the mind-numbing fact checking, and production editor M. Asif Ismail helps keep the trains running on time.

But the real force-of-nature, day-to-day leader was Center veteran Alex Knott, the project manager for The Buying of the President 2004. Thanks to Alex, we had an intricately systematic methodology the likes of which I have never seen on a Center project, with checklists of every conceivable investigative document that ought to be pulled, and two- to three-page progress memos at each weekly meeting he chaired for more than six months. He kept us on track, to the minute.

Special thanks to senior writers Alex Knott, Robert Moore, and Alan Green, all three of whom have won national journalism awards for their Center work in recent years. I am especially grateful to Alan, who kindly agreed to come back and help us out, writing three fine chapters. Ben Coates, M. Asif Ismail, Laura Peterson, and Brooke Williams each wrote a chapter, and performed exceptionally well under enormous pressure.

As you might expect, our methodology is data-intensive, and we were extraordinarily fortunate to have Aron Pilhofer and Derek Willis as the project database editors. How they balanced the sheer volume of what was required for this project with their other Center work will always confound me. Web Developer Han Nguyen makes the Center’s award-winning website sparkle.

Ben Coates, a Stanford grad bound for the Columbia University Ph.D. program in history, was a star both as senior researcher working with Alan Green and as writer of a chapter himself. Former Daytona-Beach News-Journal reporter Daniel Lathrop contributed great research and worked the phones as hard as anyone. Soles Fellow Adam Mayle, who co-authored the Patriot II report, wrote 10,000 words worth of candidate biographies for the Center’s special website tied to The Buying of the President 2004.

Adam was one of what we internally referred to as “The Fantastic Four,” my phenomenal team of researchers, led by respected Center veteran and former Soles Fellow, the brilliant and personable Katy Lewis, who, sad to say, is going off to law school at the University of North Carolina. Besides a heavy research load, Aubrey Bruggeman had the unenviable task of requesting interviews with people who didn’t want to be interviewed, almost daily, which she handled with grace and aplomb. Rounding out the “Fantastic Four,” intern Mark Reading-Smith helped us get to the finish line in his memorable summer stint with us.

We are especially grateful to veteran award-winning investigative journalist Steve Singer, who lives in Austin, for providing useful information to us about George W. Bush’s record as governor.

Special thanks to Professor Wendell Cochran of American University in Washington, whose 23 journalism graduate students assisted in the research as part of his class.

To them and to the entire “BOP” team, I am deeply appreciative.

We would have neither a team nor a Center for Public Integrity without philanthropic support. Our development director Barbara Schecter and her fine staff of Sugesh Panicker and Julie Mañes do a magnificent job. I am very grateful to the Victor Elmaleh Foundation, Henry and Edith Everett, the Popplestone Foundation, and the Hafif Family Foundation for specifically supporting this book. We also want to acknowledge the other funders ($10,000 and over) who provide the much needed general operating support for the Center for Public Integrity: the Area Foundation, the Around Foundation, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Everett Philanthropic Fund, the Ford Foundation, the David B. Gold Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Arthur D. Lipson, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the S. R. Mott Charitable Trust, a Rockefeller family member, the Park Foundation Inc., the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Foundation, the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation, the Scherman Foundation, and the Streisand Foundation. The Center for Public Integrity is fortunate to have many other funders who provide support for specific projects in addition to thousands of members who contribute annually.

I want to thank our literary agent, Esther Newberg, of International Creative Management (ICM) in New York, for her wonderful efforts on our behalf. And, as always, we are indebted to our indefatigable and always reliable libel lawyer Marc Miller, who has been vetting our copy since day one.

It is difficult to imagine an executive director of an organization having a more supportive or encouraging board of directors and advisory board, and I want to acknowledge their important leadership of the Center for Public Integrity, led by cofounder and chair Charles Filler. Aided by the remarkable generosity of the MacArthur Foundation, our biggest single benefactor, the Center has made very exciting, recent strides toward long-term security and institutionalization.

This book is dedicated to my daughter, Cassie, who was present at the creation of the Center for Public Integrity, from its first office in our house when she was 10 years old, to the first P.O. box, to all three downtown Washington offices, and who even attended a few of the earliest news conferences. She, more than anyone else, endured those difficult years of my travel and 80-hour weeks and, through it all, could not have been more supportive.

Finally, I am truly blessed to be surrounded by so many splendid people who have done so much to enable me to do this strange work. But, in addition to Cassie, no one has been more caring, long-suffering, or just plain wonderful than my mother, Dorothy Lewis; my wife, Pamela Gilbert; and my son, Gabriel Gilbert Lewis.

Charles Lewis
September 2003
Washington, D.C.