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David Bossie

David N. Bossie is the president of Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation, two conservative political organizations in Washington, D.C. A former chief investigator for the Republican members of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Bossie has authored several books that are critical of Democratic candidates and policies.

Sara Fritz interviewed Bossie on March 22, 2007.

Please tell us a little bit about your background.

[I] had very little interest in politics as an average teenager. But it was in 1984. So I had lived through the late ’70s and early ’80s at that point. Those were my formative years. My formative years were standing in gas lines with my parents, being able to only take one car, depending on the license plate number, to the gas station to get gas. And if we were in a really big emergency, it was my job to go out to the driveway to switch license plates on the car to make sure we had gas in the car.

Always resourceful.

Yes. I had the screwdriver. I remember that vividly, and wondering why is this going on? And then in the early 1980s, the first four years of the Reagan administration, I saw that the malaise that we had been in, and kind of the “morning again” attitude that came with President Reagan’s administration, his presidency, what he brought, what he thought, his philosophy in life and in the world. And that he made such bold statements like, “The final chapters of the Cold War are even now being written,” while it was still exploding around the world. And he was an optimist who said: “They have a fundamental problem in their system. The Soviet Union is destined for the ash heap of history.”

And so in 1984 — my birthday is November 1, and the election in 1984 was November 4. So, I literally was able to vote by three days. And I went to register to vote. I drove to the voter registrar’s office and I got a form to register to vote. The woman who handed me the form — it’s a little card, name, address, whatever, but there is a box that says [to] fill in your party affiliation. And I didn’t fill it in because I didn’t know what party I wanted to be. I handed it back to her.

She does her little review before she can take it, or stamp it, or what have you. And she said, “Oh, you are required here in Montgomery County, Maryland, to put a party affiliation.” I said: “I don’t know what party I want to be affiliated with. I just want to be whatever Ronald Reagan is, so tell me what that is and I’ll put that in there.” And she says: “Well, I am an independent voter registrar. I can’t advise you.” I am a 17-year-old kid, and she says, “I can’t advise you, but here, son, is the front page of The Washington Post.” And so you can figure it out for yourself.

So I go and I take the paper sheepishly. And I go and I sit down in a chair. I look at the front page and basically it says, in the article right there, that President Reagan and his administration are going to be working with his party, or his Republicans. And so I figured it out after reading a very small amount into the first article or two that I looked at. I went back and I put an “R” in the box. And that’s how I got involved in politics. That’s how I got involved as a Republican. That’s how I became active in presidential politics, because I went and I did that.

I got involved and I volunteered on the Reagan campaign. I went right from there to the Reagan headquarters where I met, the first day, Dr. Al Bullock. And Dr. Al Bullock even then was kind of an old curmudgeon. He was a neat, philosophical guy who just lived and breathed Ronald Reagan. He was a dentist in Montgomery County. He was on the Republican Central Committee. Both parties have a central committee. And he was on there. And so I got involved with the Reagan campaign where he was the chairman. And he was a mentor for many conservatives.

In that campaign I got to meet Don Devine, who was [director of the Office of Personnel Management] in the Reagan administration. And I got to meet Linda Chavez [staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and later White House director of public liaison]. And I got to meet people, as a 17-year-old working on the campaign, going to be 18 three days before the general election. And it was “wow.” It was really “wow.” And it was just such an amazing thing. I just got so energized and so excited about being a young person with so many opportunities ahead, with so many things that I saw as so exciting. I literally got heavily involved. I worked on Linda Chavez’s Senate race in ’86. And I worked in 1987 and 1988 on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign, where I was the national youth director. And I headed up, basically, their 18- to 30-year-old segment where I was out and about, around the country, organizing college campuses and young Republicans. 

It was fun, three campaigns in a row, back to back to back. And then I went and I worked for Morton Blackwell at The Leadership Institute, where I then got to teach. I was still a young guy, obviously. But after I ran a presidential campaign’s youth operation, and I ran a Senate campaign’s youth operation, Linda Chavez’s, I actually had more experience than most twentysomethings. Morton had me doing these programs — if you know Morton Blackwell, he is the Republican national committeeman in Virginia. He has been kind of an architect of the rules at the convention, the platform committee, and those types of things. And I just got to do that. And it was inspiring. I got to go around the country and continue to do the things that I was doing. And then along came Bill Clinton. And, in 1992, I was the political director for a fledgling organization that was only a few years old called Citizens United.

I always thought you were the founder of this organization.

No.

This existed before.

From ’88, yeah.

And who was running it before you got here?

Floyd Brown. Floyd hired me late ’91. And I started.

Floyd did the Willie Horton ad. Did he do it from this organization?

No. This organization didn’t exist. He started Citizens United after he did an independent expenditure in ’88. And then the campaign ended and he started this organization. So it had nothing to do with Citizens United. Citizens United did not exist. I always get blamed for the Willie Horton ad. 

Hey, you’ve got enough on your head.

But in 1988, I was 23 years old. I was not creating the greatest 30-second TV commercial of all time when I was 23. It just didn’t happen. 

You can take credit for it.

Yeah. I get blamed for it all of the time even though it is one of the most effective political ads to ever be produced. And I didn’t do it. So in ’92, to be perfectly honest, we were looking for that silver bullet, that 30-second spot, whether it was the tank commercial, or the Willie Horton commercial, or the Boston Harbor environmentalist stuff. There were some amazing commercials throughout that campaign.

There wasn’t just one, but it was a lot of commercials that were those silver bullets that did Dukakis in. Our job, as researchers and political people, is to go and make sure that the candidates are fully vetted. Just like reporters. I mean that’s the job. And that’s what we did. In ’92 it wasn’t as pervasive as it is today, so it wasn’t new, but it wasn’t like it is today where everybody has an oppo [opposition research] team. And everybody spends huge amounts of resources and everything. Back then it was just like me and . . .

Clips.

Yeah. It was no computers, no Drudge Report, no Internet, no nothing. It was just whatever you could piece together from contacts.

I used to be the recipient of books, occasionally, briefing books. I mean they were pretty shabby, some of them.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Nothing that I produced?

Oh, no.

You couldn’t have defined it as shabby.

No. It was just mostly clips.

Yeah. And so in ’92 we were doing extensive research on Bill Clinton prior to and after he won the nomination. And so we were very much into the research business at that time. I spent months in Arkansas, back then.

You hooked up with Cliff Jackson, did you?

Yeah. Cliff Jackson was the [lawyer]. Yeah, I met him. But he didn’t do anything with us. I mean, Cliff was a nice guy [and] treated us very well in the sense of pushing me in the right direction.

He was kind of the fount of anti-Clinton stuff.

Clinton people, yeah. But I’ll be honest with you: Sheffield Nelson was the guy who really was the director.

Oh, right. I had forgotten about him.

He was the guy in Arkansas that if you were going to put your feet on the ground in Arkansas, any reporter will tell you: If you are a reporter worth your salt, you had a cup of coffee with Sheffield. Because Sheffield ran against [Clinton]. Sheffield was the most knowledgeable person about Bill Clinton in Arkansas. He had been his opponent in 1990. And therefore, who else knows more about the guy than the guy who ran against him two years earlier? It was a natural thing.

Sheffield, obviously, was very helpful to every reporter that came to town and every Republican, and, to be perfectly honest, probably some of the Democrats that wanted to do oppo on Clinton as well. I suspect he probably fielded calls from Al Gore’s campaign and many others. But Sheffield was very helpful to us. So when we were doing our research and looking for that 30-second TV commercial, we didn’t find one. I mean, we found the Gennifer Flowers stuff. And we tried to make the most of his voting record and the one-party system and how he did everything. But there was no one thing that the American people were going to go, “Eh, not so good.”

So we wrote a book called Slick Willie: Why America Cannot Trust Bill Clinton. And it was really the first political biography that was mass-produced. TV commercials were still new. But we were out there with a book. And people were like, “Wow, a book.” Nowadays they are pumping them out in places. But back then it was new. And that’s the one thing that we always took pride in was using new technology, new avenues to present ideas, whether they are on a candidate or not, but to use new technology to bring ideas to the American people in a mass way. And so that book was quite popular. And then, of course, he won.

And you stayed in the business.

Yeah. Well, from that campaign I basically got to meet the people who knew Bill Clinton the best. And from that, the next year I got calls from Arkansas saying: “Hey, there was this real-estate deal and this bank guy, and we don’t know anything, I don’t know what it was about, but it involved Bill Clinton. And the guy who was his partner wants to talk to you. Would you do it?” I was like, “Sure, have the guy call.” Because that’s just like you do, back in your days as a daily beat reporter.

We were writing a monthly newsletter called Clinton Watch at the time. And we were basically covering, in the first part of his administration, the transition. So we were identifying his key cabinet positions and his administration officials, and educating people. Because nobody knew, at that time, Web Hubbell, or Harold Ickes, or Mickey Kantor — the lower-level, not just necessarily the top-level, but the medium-level as well — who Ira Magaziner and these guys were, as they were coming into power. So we wrote a monthly newsletter that basically did that. And it was very successful. And it was from writing those articles that I got that call. And I said, “Sure. Have the guy call me.” And literally an hour later David Hale called me. And I don’t know who that is at that point. And he tells me this fabulous, unbelievable tale, really.

Which remains unbelievable today.

Yeah. Well, some people will say that it is unbelievable. And I said: “Well, do you have any proof? Do you have any documents? Do you have the records?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Can I come down and see them?” And he said, “Yes.” So literally I went a day, or two, a week later, whatever it was, down to Arkansas. Randy Coleman, his lawyer, presented this case at like his kitchen table or something. And that’s when I started to really figure out, wow, there is really something to Madison Guaranty, and Whitewater, and Castle Grande, and all of these things. And there is a morass of corruption that may have been going on and maybe we missed it during the campaign cycle. And boy, then the Rose Law Firm was involved in the whole thing. Holy cow. Jeff Gerth was the only one that picked it up. And by the way, he has a book coming out, I guess, this fall — On Hillary. Yeah, I guess it’s him and somebody else, him and a colleague [Don Van Natta, Jr.] from The [New York] Times. Gosh, I forget who it is. Anyway, they teamed up and they are doing a big book on Hillary, which is interesting that there is a market, considering how many books are out there on the Clintons.

Well, it’s amazing how much has been forgotten.

Well, that’s right. And that’s one of the things.

I know you haven’t forgotten.

I’ll get to it. But anyway, I spent my time down in Arkansas again. All of a sudden, he’s president. But I am down there doing research again and getting original documents, and so I come back here and I am like, “Man, we have got to make sure people know about this,” because, and to be perfectly honest, everybody up here in Washington is going really crazy about Hillary’s health-care proposal at that time. And being a political guy, I am thinking to myself, “Well, sometimes the best way to stop something is to change topics.” And I said to myself, “Well, maybe if we could put a big story on the front page, it gets the White House off their game of pushing forward this big socialized-medicine plan.”

I had no idea, really, where it would go. And so you are making calculations. You are making political decisions and you don’t know if it’s a two-day story. Literally, you don’t know if it’s a couple-of-days-story, and it goes by. But maybe you put them off their game a little bit so you can rally some people around the health-care issue to defeat it. Because that was the goal: to defeat her health-care plan. And who knew that it would just continue to sprout more avenues and more avenues and more avenues that we would continue to go down. So I started it as a way to defeat her in her health-care plan.  Little did I know that it would end up with Robert Fiske being appointed as a special counsel.

And then, of course, from that would come Ken Starr, when they reinstituted the independent counsel statute. Because, at that time, the independent counsel statute had lapsed. And then Fiske was appointed by Reno. And then the three reinstituted the independent counsel statute. So a three-judge panel put Starr in.

Did you ever, at that time, do any advertising? Or did you ever use this information in any video or anything?

Yes. Gosh, it’s been so many years. The timing of it, I don’t recall specifically.

I mean, you leaked some of it.

Oh my God, yeah.

We know that.

What we did was, in the early portion, before I went to the Senate side, before I was the political and communications director for Citizens United, I was meeting with reporters, and briefing reporters, and giving documents. The FBI would come by our office and get material from us, what we considered important documents, which ended up being important documents. That would have been in the ’94 cycle, basically. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know if we did any mass-media television commercials or anything like that. I know we did stuff in the ’92 cycle as far as campaign commercials and stuff, independent expenditure.

But it basically had kind of a life of its own by that time?

Yeah. And ’94, by the campaigns, we didn’t have to do [much]. We knew it was hard work. But yeah, it had a life of its own at that point.

And Citizens United [was], at that point, what kind of an organization?

Still the same it is today, which is a 501(c)(4). And so then in ’95, I left Citizens United and went to work on the Whitewater committee. I think that’s where we first met. And then I was there until it ended, some point in late ’96. And then I went over to the House side. And I was the chief investigator for Dan Burton [the Republican from Indiana who chaired the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight], which kind of came out of the Whitewater case. It was all of the Riadys [James and Mochtar Riady of the Lippo Group, an Indonesian conglomerate], and the Hubbell payoffs, and all of that kind of stuff.

But you still maintained some relationship with this organization, didn’t you?

No, no, no. I mean, I was, obviously, a former employee. Trust me, the Senate Democrats tried to make it an issue, Carol Moseley Braun and others. Chris Dodd and those guys always tried to make an issue of what I was doing. But I wasn’t, no.

When you came back here, it was after you left Burton’s office.

That is correct, yeah.

And what was the situation here at that point? Was Floyd still running it?

He was, but he had moved to the West Coast. So I was basically here with a very small staff, and Floyd was out west. And then Floyd actually took a job at Young Americans Foundation. He basically went there to run the Reagan Ranch.

Does he still do that?

He does work with Young Americans Foundation still, yes. But the point is that I basically came back as a vice president for a short period. And then Floyd decided to leave. And the board made me president, which I still am today. And we have grown.

Hugely.

Yeah, enormously.

Now, you do a fair amount of direct mail, right?

Yeah. I mean, obviously we have to . . .

But you get some big contributions as well? I couldn’t find any big contributions.

No, we are a $50-average-gift organization. We have hundreds of thousands . . .

You have got a fabulous list. I called it up on some website.

Yeah. I don’t know where you would find that stuff, but we are very proud of what we have done. I have got to tell you, I mean, it’s because of the work we do. Conservative activists, and therefore donors, and/or potential donors to us, they look at the impact you have. They look at what you are doing, what you say you are going to do, and what you do.

I have looked at your website, and you talk about issues. But do these people know that you are out there looking at negative stuff for Democrats? I am asking why they contribute, really.

They contribute because over the last several years, since I have taken over, we have written some really, I think, really good books. In 2000, I did the book on Gore. In 2004, did a book on Kerry, did a book on intelligence failure, and on Bill Clinton and his administration. We write a lot of policy papers and investigative reports that come out periodically. We just had one come out on John McCain, in which we took the bark right off of him. So, yes, we are a conservative group. So, yes, the perception is that we go after only Democrats, and liberals for that matter. But in essence, I am an equal-opportunity guy in the sense that John McCain is not a conservative. I do not want him to be my standard-bearer.

I read somewhere you were recorded as saying you were going to go after McCain and [Rudy] Giuliani. Have you done anything on Giuliani?

Not yet.

But you will? So far with McCain it’s just a paper?

Correct.

What are you doing with that paper?

We have distributed it widely. It’s gotten a lot of press coverage, Good Morning America.

Is it on your website?

We have it up on our website. We have distributed it widely, mailed it, handed it out. It was a very widely read document at CPAC [Conservative Political Action Committee], which was a couple of weeks ago. 

Good Morning America covered it. David Gregory covered it on NBC News. [Robert] Novak wrote about it in his Thursday Washington Post column. It got a lot of coverage, a lot of coverage. And we are really happy about that. What we do with Rudy Giuliani is yet to be seen. But it’s coming. It’s in the works.

Can’t you even give me a hint?

It will be similar. The opening salvo will be similar. To be perfectly honest, McCain is fading. In my opinion, McCain is fading. So I don’t know if I will do anything else besides the paper. There may not be a need.

You seem to be relishing Giuliani. But obviously that’s a fresh project.

Yeah. I mean, look, we are going to do a paper on him. We are going to see where it goes, what he is doing, how strong he really is, whether other candidates get in the race. I think Giuliani could fade if other candidates get in the race.

You are not going after Romney?

He’s on my list.

Really? Who can you support?

If it had to be among the three of them, which it’s not, so I am going to say if it had to be between the three of them, I would have trouble. It’s not between the three of them, and potentially there are other candidates.

If [Newt] Gingrich got in, would that be your man? He does not strike me as your kind of guy.

I like the [former] speaker because he’s an idea guy. He’s a brilliant idea man. He really comes up with solutions and attacks problems in a way that people don’t do. And this town needs a guy like him. It’s one of the reasons that Denny Hastert was such a failure as speaker. And I think maybe if you did research, you saw that I came out in a . . .

You seemed somewhat critical.

I was very critical of Denny Hastert’s handling of the [Mark] Foley scandal. I thought it was reprehensible. I thought it was shameful what he did, what he didn’t do. And it comes from my days of him being on the committee, of me seeing how he and his staff worked minute to minute. I didn’t just see him once in a blue moon. I didn’t just meet him once. I knew him. I know him. I mean, I took the criticism of him seriously because I felt that it was warranted. And we, as conservatives and as Republicans, we hold ourselves to a higher standard. And therefore you can’t just look the other way when there is a potential predator walking the halls of Congress. Unacceptable.

So, Fred Thompson is the other one. I think Senator Thompson may get in the race.

And you are going to do something on him?

No. I think he would be an exciting guy.

I like him because he likes baseball.

He loves baseball.

I used to sit behind him at the games all of the time.

Oh, you had good seats. He has good seats. Yeah, he is a really, really interesting and neat guy. He is a big thinker. And he is somebody who I think I could support. He and Gingrich are my two favorites, and somebody who I would be interested in if they get in the race. They are not in the race, so it’s kind of hard to talk about.

You now have a proliferation of organizations. You don’t just have a 501(c)(4). You have a 527, right?

Yeah, we have three groups. Well, we have four. We have a 501(c)(4), which is Citizens United, which has been around since 1988.

And you file as a PAC with that?

No. It’s a (c)(4). We have an affiliated PAC. I am calling it four different groups. We have Citizens United Political Victory Fund, which is our PAC.

That’s what I saw the contributions to.

Right, right, right. Which is doing very well.

It had a very nice list, it seemed to me.

Yeah. So we are doing well because we are doing the things that people want us to be doing. Then we have Citizens United Foundation, which is our 501(c)(3). And that’s been around since 1992. So all of those three groups have been around for a long time. So when you say there is a proliferation, three out of our four groups have been around almost 20 years. We are going to celebrate 20 years in a year and a half. So we have been around a long time; 2008 is around the corner and we’ll turn 20. We started our 527 about a year and a half ago because of Congress and McCain-Feingold changing the rules. You have to adopt, and adapt, and overcome, and then use those new areas.

Now how do the tasks break down among these things?

It gets complicated. It’s hard. When I wake up in the morning and I say in my head, “Hey, I want to do this project,” the first thing I do is go talk to my chief counsel and say: “Hey, I want to do ‘x.’ How should we do it? Who? Under what group?” It’s complicated. You have to have a chief counsel, literally, on staff. You have to have lawyers on staff to make sure you don’t make a mistake, even if you don’t mean to. You know what I mean? I mean, it’s not like you are trying to get around rules or anything. You have to have somebody who knows the FEC [Federal Election Commission] law inside and out.

It’s crazy. It’s a crazy system.

It’s horrible. It’s a complete infringement on anyone’s free speech. I mean on small, medium, large political organizations, it’s an infringement. But if I get upset over what the school board is teaching my kids in school, and I go and I print 501 flyers instead of 499, you have got to file some form with somebody in the county and the state. And if you don’t, you could be fined. There are incredible infringements on people’s First Amendment rights of free speech. And we take that very seriously. We were one of the groups that went to the Supreme Court against McCain-Feingold. That’s our 501(c)(4) and (c)(3), where we are signers of the case, all the way to the Supreme Court.

Actually this week, Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation are filing an amicus brief in the Wisconsin right-to-life case, which is not a right to life. It’s not an abortion issue; it’s an FEC issue. So Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation are filing an amicus brief.

So you really do a lot of stuff.

Yeah, we do a lot of different things. So those are the four of us.

The clips you do — you have done some videos?

We don’t do videos. I make full-length feature documentaries.

And who does that?

Citizens United and Citizens United Foundation, usually. We now have Citizens United Productions, which is our production entity, which is not a separate organization, but it’s what we call our production arm. Our film Celsius 41.11; the subtitle is The Temperature At Which The Brain Begins To Die. And Celsius 41.11 is 106.5 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s medically when, if you have a fever, that’s when your brain literally begins to get so overheated. And that was where I came up with the title about Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. They are so enraged, their hatred just boiled over. And they weren’t thinking straight, seeing straight, and seeing the facts. And they didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

So that was where my title came from, that these guys were just out to lunch. But we made a film. And it had Fred Barnes, and Charles Krauthammer, and Fred Thompson, and lots of great people. Michael Medved [a conservative talk-show host and movie critic] and really great people helped me make a film in ’04. I had never made a film before. But I saw the impact that Michael Moore had, and I disagree with him on his policy and on his positions. But I respected the impact that he had. People were saying: “Oh, he won’t have a big [impact]; it won’t be a big deal. Don’t worry about it.” But it was a big deal. And it was such a big deal that his television commercials for his film, in my opinion, were the most impactful ads of the cycle. But they were ads for his film, not for a candidate.

So I filed an FEC complaint against him. Because McCain-Feingold says, “You cannot show any candidate’s face or use their voice in any TV commercial 30 days before a primary, 60 days before a general.” Well, Michael Moore was.

And did they adjudicate it?

They pulled the ads. Because the FEC said, “We’ll have to look at it.” And then they went to them and said, “What are your intentions?” And then they pulled. 

You must have wished you’d thought of it.

I respect what they did. But we also were thinking outside the box. It was pretty weak. So we filed an FEC [complaint]. But the FEC should never have had, and I don’t believe they do have, jurisdiction over what Michael Moore does as a filmmaker. They should never be able to infringe on his free speech to advertise a film. I just think that it’s outrageous.

But you asked them to do it.

Yeah, but if I had to follow the rules, he has got to follow the same rules. Nobody should be playing by different rules. The rules are wrong; that was my point. The rules that the FEC had are wrong. Michael Moore shouldn’t have to abide by them, as a filmmaker making a political film. That’s the bedrock principle of this country. The Founding Fathers, I mean, you don’t want to make it cheesy, but there were guys who literally printed a pamphlet. That’s what they used to do back then. Some guy would just sit there and run a one-page flyer off. And you became the press.

Michael Moore, I disagree with him. Ideologically, we are opposite. But he should have the right to do what he did. We shouldn’t have been told we couldn’t do it. He shouldn’t be told he couldn’t do it. So anyway, we were educated about the power and impact of film. Citizens United Productions didn’t exist then. We didn’t know if we were going to make another one. We just said, “Oh.”

Who were the people really doing the creative work?

I hired some people in L.A. to do it with me: Lionel Chetwynd, who was an Academy Award-nominated writer, director; Ted Steinberg, who is an Emmy Award-nominated guy. Both of those guys basically worked on the film for me, as professional filmmakers.

Then you did one called Border War. Now that was a different thing, wasn’t it?

Yeah. So, we did Celsius 41.11, and that was a Citizens United film, solely by that. Not by the foundation, because it was a political film. And we did it simply under the (c)(4). And we really didn’t know if we would make more films. It was just a fact: We made a film. We didn’t have a crystal ball to say, “Well, we are now going to make more.” But we saw the impact of this film. We saw the reaction that our film got and the importance and the potential that it had. And our film had a very small window of life. We didn’t start making our film until his [Moore’s] came out. His came out in July. So we didn’t have a lot of time.

We made a film in very short order. And we sat back and we said, “My goodness, this is really new.” As I said earlier, we prided ourselves on using these new mediums, these new vehicles to deliver political messages. And it was exciting. And we said: “My goodness, look at the impact that he had. Look at the response film, even though it was made in 10 weeks. And it only had, really, a shelf life of four weeks or five weeks. Let’s see what we can do down the road.” So, we made a film with Ron Silver, Hollywood actor, been on The West Wing. You would know him if you saw him.
He and I wanted to make a film on the United Nations. So we made a film called Broken Promises: The UN at 60, where we did a critical analysis of the corruption, the oil-for-food, the failure to deliver the humanitarian relief, the fundamental flaws of the development of the U.N. from having the Chinese, and the Soviet Union at the time, as one of the five permanent members. They may have been our allies during World War II, which is what made the U.N. But they, from that moment on, became our adversaries. And so, all of a sudden, you had an organization that was developed, fundamentally, from something that wasn’t going to work.

So we made a film in ’05 called Broken Promises and Ron Silver was in it. We had Donald Trump. We had George Mitchell. We had Romeo Dallaire, who was the Canadian general who oversaw the U.N. mission in [Rwanda] where a million Tutsis were murdered by machete. We had some amazing human-interest stories. We shot in Israel and in Bosnia, and just did a really great big production. But we were getting better at it. Boy oh boy, it was really interesting, and how neat this was that we could do it. And the difference was, with Celsius we made it in Los Angeles, with Broken Promises we made it here in Washington. And so, we decided, my goodness, now that we know how to do it, we can do it much more efficiently if we do it here.

And then in ’06 we made Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration, with Congressman J.D. Hayworth and with a member of the border patrol where we were embedded on the border. Our camera teams were embedded on the border — very, very exciting segments of the film, chasing on foot, in cars, helicopters, really some dramatic stuff. It was much more like a Cops episode than a documentary. And so, we did that film. Actually, Broken Promises won a Houston Film Festival award. Border War has now won two awards and is now being accepted into different film festivals, actually, our first big independent film festival, the Palm Beach Film Festival, which is an international film festival. It is one of the biggest in the country, in three weeks. And Border War was accepted there, which is a very kind of prestigious thing for us.

They all tend to be liberal film festivals. It told us about the quality of our film.

That’s interesting. You are really a ringer in this crowd, huh?

Well, yeah, I mean, distribution-wise, we learned how to distribute our films differently as well. With Border War, Genius Films, which is owned by the Weinsteins — the guys who did Fahrenheit and the guys who do all of these left-wing movies — is who bought our distribution of Border War. So what it told me was they think there is a market out there. But also, it’s a quality film. We shot it in high-definition. We had an original score by an Academy Award-nominated composer. So we are always, now, stepping up. We had never done it before. So every film we are making, we try to step up the production value, the visual and the audio.

And you get involved in this yourself?

Oh, yeah. I do it all, everything. I mean, I don’t know how to work the machine. But it’s my decision of what film we are going to make, to what the content will be, the discussion, what the arguments are, and who we interview, who makes it in the film. I mean, those are all of the things that I determine.

Are these still being funded by your organization? Or are they beginning to earn a little bit of money?

We probably net a little bit of revenue now. Not a lot. The key for us, as a nonprofit, is that we want to be able to make the money back to make the next film. So if we can continue, my goodness, if we could break even, what an important thing.

So you have seen people out there doing documentaries, particularly on the left, and decided that . . .

This has got to be something that we, as conservatives, can’t ignore: the power of film. And really, to benefit the conservative movement.

What other things do you see going on out there by independent groups, 527s, or whatever, that you think are good? Obviously you have some competitors in this field now.

I wish I was better at the Internet stuff. I don’t even know what stuff means, really.

You haven’t gone that route?

Well, we do. I mean, we do have an Internet presence. We have websites for our organizations. We have websites for our films. We have a big e-mail list, so we e-mail folks about stuff. But we don’t do a tremendous amount of fundraising online.

There are not a lot of bloggers and stuff like that?

Yeah. I mean, we do a little blogging. But to be perfectly honest, I haven’t bought into the whole blogging thing yet. My staff gets mad at me because I am not cutting-edge enough on the blog.

You saw this guy from the Obama campaign who took a swipe at Hillary.

Wow.

You must have admired that.

I mean, I think it was a brilliant commercial. As brilliant as the production of the commercial was, it was as dumb as the guy could be that he was working for a group that was associated with the Obama campaign. It’s just, that’s how connections are made. They are always going to find out.

Although, I thought maybe they just decided to do it so they could . . . I mean that he was expendable. 

Yeah. I mean, clearly it wasn’t one dude. Let me tell you, that was a big production. One guy didn’t just sit down and do that. There had to be writers, directors, editors, a music guy. 

He said, “I’ll take the fall for it”?

Yeah. I mean, if somebody had said, “It was my idea, and I’ll take it in the chops,” I mean, that’s brilliant. So as we make films, we continue to do TV commercials. We do have another film that just came out called ACLU at War With America, which outlines, basically, what we consider how the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] can basically defend terrorism, defend pedophiles, and defend all of these issues that are reprehensible. So I understand what they do. But we wanted to make sure we educated the American people. So those are our four films that we have produced in the last two years, which is a lot. And now we have other films that we are working on. We are working on the documentary on Hillary Clinton, which will be out at the end of this year.

I read somewhere you were doing that with Dick Morris.

That is correct. I mean, he’s in the film. It’s not really like he’s sitting around writing or anything. But he’s going to be in it. It’s exciting.

It’s going to be a good film. I mean, we are still trying to figure out, get our arms around it, and put it together. But we are actively working on it. And it’s a great project. And then, of course, we have done a multitude of TV commercials over the last few years, [including] two with Fred Thompson, which are up on our website. [We did them] back several years ago when the war started, where we were talking about supporting the war on terror. We did one against John Kerry in the ’04 cycle, which won a Polly Award. So, we get to continue to do good stuff.

We did one in ’06 called “Wire Tap,” which was a spot where you had two male Muslim voices talking off camera as they are on the phone, basically. And the English subtitles are on the screen, where it talks about these two guys planning a terrorist attack. And then all of a sudden the phone line goes dead. And it says, “This wiretap was interrupted by a Democrat-controlled Congress.” If the Democrats take control of the Congress, they are going to stop the wiretapping that is currently going on to save American lives, basically. We have a transcript. It’s online. And you can listen to it and all. But it was a very effective television commercial.

Did you buy time and put it on?

Yeah. We spent a couple hundred thousand on it.

So this is the way you are headed at this point, a lot more films?

Well, it’s a natural progression. I mean, we are always doing different things. We are constantly putting out policy papers and investigative reports. 

How many people do you have on your staff here?

About a dozen — enough.

And you own this building. And you are buying another one?

Well, we are trying to buy next door, but who knows? You know how that goes. I mean, we are trying to build. We have built a solid base from which we operate. And therefore we have a lot of supporters around the country. We have a lot of operations that we are doing in the sense of new papers that have been filed, new movies that are going to come out. TV commercials are easy, so we are always thinking of a spot to do here or there.

Who does your direct mail?

I have a couple of different companies that do it.

Who are they?

HSP Direct and Precision Marketing. And they are, in my opinion, two of the best, most creative, just really great people to work with.

Do you share your mailing list with other groups? I mean, do you sell it?

We don’t sell it. I mean, just like the RNC, and the [National Republican] Senatorial Committee, and the NRA, and MoveOn.org, in order to grow your list you have to put it on the market. If you don’t put yours on the market, other people aren’t going to rent you their lists. And that’s the only way, because there are only so many liberals and so many conservatives in America. So people want to be active, you know what I mean? I mean, there are 300 million people in America. But there are only hundreds of thousands, or maybe a million or two, who are active donors.

And they will give repeatedly to different things?

Well, they will give to things they think are important and can have impact. And that’s what I pride myself on. When I say I am going to do something, I do it. And I follow through. And they see the product. They see a DVD.

You don’t the same old stuff all the time?

No, no, no. We are always growing, and expanding, and trying.

It’s kind of more exciting, I would imagine.

We try. I mean, that’s right.

As I recall, your purpose statement says “supporting Bush policies.” What do you do without George Bush?

Well, we have a project under Citizens United that is called Citizens United for the Bush Agenda, where we are able to support his war on terror. And then, of course, other issues are like his tax cuts and other things. But we don’t agree with everything he does.

But what I am asking is, when he goes away, does that hurt your fundraising?

No. No, not at all. Look, we were around a long time before he existed. We are not beholden to him or anyone. We existed for the entire Clinton years. We didn’t go away when he went away. We were writing direct mail saying, well, let’s stop him on these different things.

In fact, having Democrats in charge of Congress could be of some use to you.

It could be. There is definitely an upside to that.

You criticized the system. Obviously, it really is pretty rotten, [a] lousy, kind of complicated thing. What would you do?

Oh gosh, that’s a great question. I would try to lower the barriers for entry, first of all, where I would make it a much more appealing process for people on the local, state, and federal level to be involved in politics. Because it’s crazy to say, “Here is a set of rules for a governor’s race.” And there aren’t any rules. And then, “Here is a set of rules for congressional races.” And it’s more difficult than running an obstacle course. I mean it’s a triathlon. You know what I mean?

And a governor can have much more power. And you can have much more influence. And it controls so much more as the governor than as one of 435 members of Congress. And so the rules are, I mean, clearly one is state and is federal races. But then you have to say, “Well, then those are state problems.” And yes, they are. But I believe that the federal system puts such a burden on people. If you want to say the county council in whatever county you live in is wrong to do this, whatever the “this” is — whether it’s raising taxes, teaching some curriculum in the school you disagree with, or whatever the case might be, and if you live in Vermont, impeaching the president, it could be anything. In order to try to stop that or promote that, which you could be on either side of any of those issues, you have to, literally, be worried about taking part in the process. And if you don’t worry, you are going to be in trouble.

Because they set a system up that they want to catch people. That’s what their goal is. And so they have entire groups of people on a state level and on a federal level that are just there to watch. And if somebody puts a flyer out or if somebody goes above a threshold of what you can spend, because some guy in some suit somewhere in some office decided, “Yeah, $2,500 is a good number.” But that $2,500 was good in 1980. But in 2007, is that a good number anymore? You can spend $2,500 to pay your lawyer to look at your documents to make sure you are not breaking the law. And then you have gone above spending. It’s crazy.

They are creating traps and barriers for people. And then the filing aspect, you have to hire professional accountants. And then have lawyers review those things. So in order to say, “I want to influence a school board, or a county council, or a piece of legislation that impacts student loans,” you have to raise so much more money just to pay the professionals to make sure you don’t get in trouble.
You may not do it because it’s such a barrier from even entering.

One of the solutions that’s been proposed is just pure transparency.

I love that idea.

Would that hurt your contributions if some people were identified?

I don’t worry about those things. I follow the rules that they have in place every day. So I will follow today’s rules today. And if they create some bunch of rules next year, I will adapt to follow those rules. Will it affect how I operate and all that? I doubt it. I really do. We have a tremendous group of people that support us, a wide, deep, group of people. That’s the one thing about us.

Nice to have small contributors. Do you do any Internet fundraising?

As I said earlier, we do it. We don’t do it well.

It’s cheaper.

It’s hard. It’s cheaper, but if you are trying to reach the 18- to 35- to maybe even 40 crowd, on the Internet you get a lot of $10 donations. You can. But if you are trying to reach people that can write $25, $50, and $100 checks, okay. Because it’s impossible to run an organization on a $10 average gift. 

Your contributors are on the upper-end of the age group, right?

I don’t know. We don’t know what our average age is.

I would think that sovereignty would be an issue for people in the senior [category].

But it’s not just seniors. It’s people with disposable income. People who don’t have to say: “I’ve got to be able to put my kids through school. And the college tuitions are upon me.” It’s people who are in their late 50s and 60s, and even later in life, who have the ability to say: “You know what? This is important. And I am an empty-nester. And I don’t have those types of things.”

I’m 41. I have three kids. I am not writing too many hundred-dollar checks. I wouldn’t do it. And if my wife did it, she wouldn’t do it either. You know what I mean? You have to have priorities. And those stages in life, your priorities change.

And so yes, our group, as most — Heritage Foundation and lots of liberal groups, too — it tends to be those people who are in their 50s, 60s, and even 70s who want to support it. And to be perfectly honest, today in the war on terror, the World War II-era vets are so enraged by how America has not had to make sacrifices. Back when they were teenagers and in their 20s, when they were kids, their parents sacrificed, and they sacrificed. And you turned your lights off, and Rosie the Riveter, and all of those things. They remember that. And they don’t see America having to do that today. And they worry that we are not taking the war seriously.

I have one more question. Time magazine this week has a picture of Reagan on the cover with a tear coming down his eye. And it’s basically that the conservatives, the Reagan movement is dead. I am curious how you respond to that.

It’s certainly not dead. Ronald Reagan’s conservative vision is alive and well. People in Washington in positions of power have lost their way. And by losing Congress, it gives us the ability to replenish those people and find people that hold true to the Reagan ideals, to the Reagan conservative values, to commonsense conservatism that made America so great and really can re-energize the base.

So you see this as a time for realigning back to . . .

Absolutely. This is a great time to be a conservative leader, because we are in a position where there is somewhat of a vacuum. Having lost the House and the Senate, having clearly a White House that is somewhat ineffective for conservative messages, I think that is a very important position for us to be in. And that’s why we say we are going to take the fight to them. We say: “We are a Ronald Reagan conservative organization. Support us.”

I forgot to ask you about Obama. Are you going to do something against him? Or is he too hard?

No. I think Hillary Clinton is going to do that. I think that the Clinton administration, the Clinton team is going to come at him. And he won’t be around to worry about.

So you think she is going to be the survivor?

She will be, yeah. April 15 is an important day. It’s not just tax day anymore. It’s the day that the true contenders and the pretenders are going to be seen for what they are.

And you also agree with those who say there are going to be a lot more negative ads this time around?

YouTube, the Internet — see, you could do a 30-second TV spot. Or now, you don’t even have to make it 30 seconds. It could be 20. It could be 40. You don’t have to sit in that arbitrary thing. And by the way, with McCain-Feingold, your 30-second spot now became a 26-second spot, because you now have to have the disclaimer in there, which eats up four seconds of your creative time. And it’s harder to deliver a message in 26 seconds than it was in 30. With that said, on the Internet you could put a hard-hitting TV spot that could be 20 seconds, could be 40, could be a minute, and then the press will pick it up. And so then you won’t have to buy time.

A lot of free media, yeah.

It’s called earned media.

Oh, yeah.

You earn it by creating a solid . . .

You have used that.

We have done that a lot. Yeah, we do that a lot. And then it’s harder to do.

You buy small, but your impact is big.

It’s big. And another reason is that our donors think that we get a bang for our buck with these guys as opposed to somebody else. I am very proud of that and being able to make the movies, do the TV commercials, do the books, the policy papers, and have a well-rounded, and not be beholden to anybody.

You are doing very well.

We try hard. We do.

I think you are having fun, too.

And I do enjoy it. It is a good time. I get to do things that I think are important and that are impactful. But at the same time, [my rule is] don’t take yourself or what you do too seriously, and enjoy it.