In the News

Journal Editorial Report (Fox News): School Board Revolt Gains Steam

[Ed. note: Full segment begins at 18:35. Our lawsuit against the Pennsbury School Board’s censorship of critics, and the preliminary injunction recently granted by a federal court begins at 22:35.]

The Courts

New York Times: Esper Claims Defense Dept. Is Improperly Blocking Parts of His Memoir

By Maggie Haberman

Former Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper on Sunday sued the agency he once led, accusing officials at the Pentagon of improperly blocking significant portions of an upcoming memoir about his tumultuous tenure under President Donald J. Trump.

The allegations by Mr. Esper, whom Mr. Trump fired shortly after losing his re-election bid last November, are laid out in a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C.

“Significant text is being improperly withheld from publication in Secretary Esper’s manuscript under the guise of classification,” the suit said. “The withheld text is crucial to telling important stories discussed in the manuscript.”

Mr. Esper said in a statement that his goal with the book, titled “A Sacred Oath,” which is expected to be published in May, was to give the public “a full and unvarnished accounting of our nation’s history, especially the more difficult periods.”

He added: “I am more than disappointed the current administration is infringing on my First Amendment constitutional rights. And it is with regret that legal recourse is the only path now available for me to tell my full story to the American people.”

MLive: Michigan GOP asks court to bar Whitmer from sending excess donations to Democrats

By Lauren Gibbons

Michigan Republicans are asking a federal court to stop Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s campaign from disbursing excess contributions collected while the governor was facing recall efforts to recipients other than the original donor.

In a federal court filing, Michigan Republican Party Chair Ron Weiser asked the court for a temporary restraining order barring the governor’s campaign from distributing those excess contributions to the Michigan Democratic Party or other groups. The party is not opposed to the campaign refunding the excess donations to the original donor, according to the filing.

“Once transferred, those funds would be forever intermingled with the Democratic Party’s regular coffers or used by dark money groups to generate headlines and goodwill for the Governor, forever cementing her and her allies use of these unconstitutionally obtained funds to benefit her re-election effort,” the filing reads.

The latest filing is part of an ongoing lawsuit against the Secretary of State over the contributions, which Republicans have called “excessive.” The Whitmer campaign has intervened.

As part of that lawsuit, a legal filing on behalf of the Secretary of State’s office said the department had interpreted the Michigan Campaign Finance Act “to require that any contributions collected by an office holder in excess of MCFA limits for purposes of opposing a recall must be returned or disgorged (for example, donated to a party or charity) if a recall election is not called.”

Candidates and Campaigns

Dan Abrams Live: Has money lost its influence in elections?

Do campaign funds still decide elections? University of Rochester professor David Primo breaks down the latest trends. [Segment begins at 30:40.]

Sludge: Code for Democracy Debuts New Tool to Track Money in Politics

By David Moore

Sludge is excited to share a new platform for searching and tracking money-in-politics information created by the nonprofit organization Code for Democracy (CFD). Check out the tool here.

Our two-person newsroom has worked with CFD’s tech & data lab over the past few months to help them develop features that will enable more campaign finance watchdogs to follow the money. With this free and open-source platform, people can design and save custom queries, create email alerts for when queries have new results, build data visualizations, download spreadsheets, and more. The results should be more investigative news stories and research reports connecting the dots between money moving and policy outcomes.

First, I wanted to highlight the data that the CFD tool brings together, for the first time in one place:

• Federal contribution data from the FEC 
• Lobbying disclosures from House and Senate portals
• Lobbyist contributions data from the House
• Nonprofit information from the IRS
• Facebook ad information from the Facebook library
• News coverage and tweets from other sources 

The Facebook ad info is especially unique in being made accessible in bulk; see our recent story on dark money groups’ Facebook spending for how this can be used in reporting. To make this info easier to re-use, the CFD tool makes this available via an open API.

Fundraising

New York Times: That ‘Team Beto’ Fund-Raising Email? It Might Not Be From Beto.

By Shane Goldmacher

Welcome to the sometimes-sketchy world of online campaign fund-raising, where misdirection and misleading everyday Americans — often older Americans — to maximize clicks and cash is increasingly a dark art form.

Imitating others and mimicking official correspondence with postage-paid mailers is an age-old trick that marketers have used since long before the internet. The tactic has been adapted and updated for the digital era — and appears to be accelerating in prevalence in the political sphere…

In some cases, established organizations are simply capitalizing on the day’s big news or the politician of the moment to gin up excitement among their own supporters with some verbal sleight-of-hand. In others, political action committees with anodyne names are raising funds in the name of a popular politician that they have no affiliation with at all. Mr. Pennington described such groups as “leeches” and “scam PACs.”

Where the money goes from there can be murky, though big payments to the operatives and consulting firms that operate those PACs have drawn increasing scrutiny from political colleagues, regulators and law enforcement alike.

Some of these operations are legal, sometimes burying the requisite disclaimers in the fine print. Others may not be.

Online Speech Platforms

The Verge: Twitter introduces aliases for contributors to its Birdwatch moderation program

By Kim Lyons

Twitter is introducing aliases for participants in its Birdwatch moderation tool so they don’t have to include their usernames in notes they leave on others’ tweets, the company announced in a blog post Monday. The social media platform launched the pilot of Birdwatch in January as a way to crowdsource fact-checking on tweets that might contain misleading or inaccurate information. But the company said contributors in the pilot Birdwatch program “overwhelmingly voiced a preference for contributing under aliases. This preference was strongest for women and Black contributors.”

Twitter said its research shows that aliases have the potential to reduce bias by putting the focus not on the author of a Birdwatch note but on the note’s content. It also found that aliases may help to “reduce polarization by helping people feel comfortable crossing partisan lines.”

Independent Groups

Axios: Ohio GOP candidates push super PAC bounds

By Lachlan Markay

Republican candidates in one of the nation’s most hotly contested Senate races are pushing the bounds of high-dollar politicking, an Axios examination shows.

Why it matters: Anti-corruption rules bar candidates from coordinating with supportive super PACs. In Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, huge amounts of money are pouring in, and operatives are finding creative ways to leverage it without breaking federal law.

The States

Maine Public: A clean elections advocacy group sues Portland for the second time

By Robbie Feinberg

A fair elections group has filed a second lawsuit against the city of Portland over a proposed ballot question that would create a publicly-funded campaign finance system for local elections.

The latest lawsuit comes two years after the group Fair Elections Portland gathered more than 6,800 signatures on the referendum. But the city declined to add it to the ballot, saying that the issue would require a significant revision to a charter, and would need to go through a charter commission instead.

Fair Elections Portland sued the city over that decision. The Maine Supreme Court sent the case back to the Council this year and asked for a more substantial findings of fact behind the issue. which they finalized last month…

City spokesperson Jessica Grondin described the second lawsuit as unnecessary and a “regrettable waste of time” given that the city currently has a charter commission.

“And they’re considering a number of different proposed changes. Including the proposal initiated by Fair Elections Portland,” Grondin said. “So that is the process that’s underway right now. And the voters will soon get to vote on that.”

Insider NJ: Need for Broader Disclosure Law More Urgent Than Ever As Independent Spending Soars to New Record

By Jeffrey Brindle

By October 29, 2021, three days before election day, almost $40 million had been spent by independent groups in the gubernatorial primary and general elections, with $26 million, or 63 percent, spent on the general election alone.

Following a trend that began a little more than a decade ago, this spending by independent, so-called “Hidden Money” groups, is a new high. The total may even be larger once more reports become available in coming weeks.

While independent spending has become a major force in New Jersey elections, the state’s disclosure law for those groups is notoriously weak…

[F]ormer Governor Kean is correct that the public has a right to know who is behind this immense spending, which has come to dominate New Jersey elections.

While independent groups were spending tens of millions on the gubernatorial contest, political parties were again left in the dust…

Along with a better disclosure law, the Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) has proposed reforms that would strengthen accountable political parties and bring parity between them and independent groups.

Those recommendations include: removing parties from Pay-to-Play, including special interest PACs under Pay-to-Play, requiring contractor donations to independent groups to be disclosed, allow parties to participate in gubernatorial elections, increase contribution limits applicable to parties, allow county parties to give to each other, and a personal recommendation, provide tax credits for contributions to parties.

New York Daily News: NYC campaign finance allegations still nag Councilman Francisco Moya as Council speaker race heats up

By Michael Gartland

As Councilman Francisco Moya vies to become the next Council Speaker, he’ll also have to contend with lingering allegations he ran afoul of campaign finance rules when he first ran for Council back in 2017…

The campaign finance allegations against Moya got put on hold last Thursday when the city’s Campaign Finance Board publicly considered its multiyear audit of Moya’s 2017 run — and its inquiry will likely extend into at least mid-December and possibly through January when the Council is set to vote on who its next speaker will be.

At issue is whether Moya, a state Assembly member in 2017, used his state campaign account to benefit his Council run in order to sidestep spending limits set by the city’s stricter campaign finance system.