IRS

Wall Street Journal: Protecting Nonprofit Donors

By Editorial Board

At a Tuesday Senate Appropriations hearing, Montana Republican Steve Daines asked Acting IRS Commissioner David Kautter whether the agency is considering the necessity of IRS 990 Schedule B. These are the forms that nonprofits must supply to the IRS listing donors who contribute more than $5,000. Schedule Bs are supposed to remain confidential, but AGs in New York and California have sought to require nonprofits to file them at the state level. Many Democrats see the form as a gift-wrapped list of donors to target, and a way to chill donations to conservative nonprofits…

Mr. Kautter acknowledged that he was “actively involved” along with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin at offering more donor protection. “I think for many organizations there frankly isn’t a requirement,” he said. “We don’t need that information to administer the tax laws in a fair and equitable way.”

Nonprofits would still be required to keep their donor details, and if the IRS or other authorities had valid reason to suspect fraud they could demand to see the records. But requiring nonprofits to provide names each year to partisan AGs or tax bureaucrats is an invitation to repeat the scandal of the Obama years when Lois Lerner and the IRS targeted conservative nonprofits. The sooner the end of Schedule B, the fewer assaults on free political speech.

Internet Speech Regulation

Washington Post: Who’s behind those political ads on Facebook? Now, you can find out.

By Tony Romm

Starting Thursday on Facebook, political ads will include a marker at the top indicating who has paid for it. Clicking on the label will bring users to a new repository of all political ads that have run on the site, along with information about the people who saw it, like their age and location. The new rules cover ads about political candidates as well as hot-button policy issues…

Twitter, meanwhile, said Thursday that it soon would require political advertisers to prove their identity before promoting tweets on the platform. In a blog post, the company said it also plans to label political ads “in the near future,” a promise it first made in October. Twitter said it is developing a separate policy for “issue ads,” …

Earlier this month, [Google] said it would begin verifying the identities of advertisers at the end of May, with a fuller database and report on political ads still to come.

By implementing these changes on their own, Facebook, Google and Twitter are trying to stave off tough new regulation from Washington, where lawmakers long have argued that the tech industry hasn’t done enough to police the content that appears online…

Facebook acknowledged in a blog post that “news coverage of elections and important issues is distinct from advocacy or electoral ads, even if those news stories receive paid distribution on Facebook.” It said it would work with “news partners” to “help differentiate between news and non-news content.”

Huffington Post: Facebook Election Commission Launches New Rules To Govern U.S. Election Disclosure

By Paul Blumenthal

While Facebook’s moves are supported by advocates of online political advertising disclosure, the new policy also highlights how the failure of elected officials and regulatory agencies to impose actual disclosure rules through the democratic process is enabling the private sector to assert its authority over the conduct of U.S. elections…

In some cases, that may result in stronger disclosure requirements than Congress or the FEC would mandate, as seen with Facebook’s broad issue-advertising disclosure approach. In other cases, though, the lack of public enforcement will likely result in worse outcomes. Indeed, that is also the case with Facebook, which launched a searchable archive of political ads that is only accessible if you have a Facebook account. This means a person must submit to Facebook’s terms and conditions, including the collection of personal data, if they want to learn about the election ads purchased by U.S. politicians…

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a lead sponsor of the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill to officially mandate online ad disclosure, praised Facebook’s decision in a tweet but noted the underlying problems of industry self-regulation.

“Big step in the right direction – and I’m glad Facebook followed through on my recommendations to improve upon earlier proposals,” Warner tweeted Thursday. “I’ll be pushing other companies to follow suit. But until we pass the #HonestAds Act, there’ll still be a patchwork of disclosure across social media.”

Congress

Just Security: Cohen’s Slush Fund is Not Business as Usual-But Business as Usual Needs to Change

By Alex Tausanovitch and Diana Pilipenko

Fortunately, there are numerous, commonsense reforms that Congress can enact to fix many of the problems associated with the current era of corruption. A good first step would be to increase transparency-for contributions, corporate LLCs, lobbyists, and foreign agents.

Several bills pending in Congress would help to expose the owners of shadowy corporations like Cohen’s “Essential Consultants, LLC,” and make it harder for them to obscure illegal or unethical activity. Other pending proposals would close gaping loopholes in laws that require lobbyists and foreign agents to file public reports, and that require campaign-related spending to be disclosed…

Congress should take aggressive action to fix the broken campaign finance system and to get its own house in order. A couple weeks ago, former Congressman Mick Mulvaney, now in charge of both the White House’s budget office and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, stated that, as a congressman, he only met with lobbyists who contributed to his campaign…

Earlier this week, Democrats in Congress announced “A Better Deal for Our Democracy,” a far-reaching package of voting, ethics, and campaign finance reforms that would represent the biggest crackdown on corruption in over a generation-and includes a proposal to curb shadow lobbying.

If ever there was a moment to rethink the role of money and influence in politics, and how it corrupts our institutions, this is it.

Free Speech

The Atlantic: ‘Maybe You Shouldn’t Be in the Country’

By David A. Graham

President Trump, who has portrayed himself as a defender of free speech and foe of political correctness, told Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade in an interview aired Thursday that NFL players should be barred from the field-and should perhaps even leave the U.S.-if they seek to protest.

“You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing,” Trump said in the interview. “You shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

Trump was commenting on a new NFL policy, unveiled Wednesday, to handle players who have kneeled, sat, or raised a fist in protest during the playing of the national anthem before football games…

Trump has claimed that religious people are not free to speak their minds (including saying “Merry Christmas”), and he decried efforts to prevent speakers like the conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from addressing students at the University of California, Berkeley. Yet at the same time, the president is infuriated by athletes, most of them black, who are protesting to bring attention to racial injustice. He seeks to dictate their behavior, and he has argued repeatedly that they should lose their livelihoods.

Trump has also in the past suggested that people should have their citizenship stripped for burning the American flag, which the Supreme Court has deemed protected speech.

FEC

Center for Responsive Politics: FEC rejects proposal to consider new rules on foreign spending in US elections

By Jordan Muller

The motion, which was proposed by Vice Chair Ellen Weintraub, would have begun the process of potentially implementing new FEC rules intended to discourage foreign spending in U.S. elections. Among those possible new rules was a requirement that super PACs and other groups state they did not use money from foreign sources in U.S. elections….

Foreign spending in elections is illegal, but Weintraub expressed concern about the possibility of foreign groups using dark money to tip the scales in the 2018 midterms…

Hunter and Petersen both said they wanted to wait until additional information about foreign election influence is revealed before voting on the proposal. Petersen said he could support the rulemaking in the future, but he would not vote for the proposal before the intelligence committee and other groups finish their investigations…

The FEC has already taken some bipartisan steps to curb foreign influence in U.S. elections, Petersen said. He cited a plan passed by the FEC in March to implement stricter disclosure requirements for political ads on internet platforms like Facebook.

The federal government has also indicted foreign individuals and companies alleged to have violated laws prohibiting foreign interference in elections, he added.

NPR: Federal Election Commission Can’t Decide If Russian Interference Violated Law

By Peter Overby

The four commissioners on Thursday deadlocked, again, on proposals to consider new rules, for example, for foreign-influenced U.S. corporations and for politically active entities that don’t disclose their donors…

Weintraub invoked an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee to argue her own agency should do more. Committee chair Richard Burr, R-N.C., said last week, “There is no doubt that Russia undertook an unprecedented effort” in the elections. Ranking Democrat Mark Warner, R-Va., said “we have to do a better job” of protecting U.S. elections from foreign interference.

Republican Commissioner Matthew Petersen agreed the Russian interference is “an issue we all take very seriously.” But he noted that the Facebook ads dealt mainly with social issues, not the elections, and thus lay outside the FEC’s regulatory reach…

He said he looked forward to the findings of the Senate intelligence committee and other investigators, “to see to what extent the efforts to interfere involve matters within our jurisdiction.”

He said he believes that extent is small, but if the findings change his understanding, “I think that I would have to reconsider what my past positions have been.”

Lobbying

National Law Journal: Justice Dept. Plans to Open Up About Its Views on Foreign Agent Lobbying Registration

By C. Ryan Barber

The U.S. Department of Justice is planning to publish once-confidential guidance memos that address disclosure of U.S. lobbying work for foreign companies and governments, shedding light on a federal law that has found new prominence as part of the special counsel’s case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

At least one law firm, Covington & Burling, said it had received a letter from the Justice Department announcing the plan to post online advisory opinions issued since January 2010. The advisory opinions reflect the Justice Department’s interpretation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which in certain instances requires lobby shops and other firms to reveal their advocacy for a foreign entity…

The small circle of Washington lawyers who specialize in foreign lobbying has long protested that the Justice Department would not more widely share advisory memos. Some lawyers have complained that the Justice Department’s issuance of guidance documents only to the party that sought the opinion was effectively creating “secret law.”

For years, lawyers with FARA expertise would treat advisory opinions somewhat like baseball cards, privately exchanging pearls of wisdom from their respective collections as a matter of professional courtesy. The public release of the advisory opinions “will eliminate the tradition of samizdat in FARA practice,” Kelner said in an interview, using the Soviet-era term for the clandestine copying and sharing of literature banned by the state.

The Media 

Reason: Richard Nixon Probably Would Not Have Been Saved by Fox News

By Matt Welch

“Fox News might save Trump from another Watergate,” posited Vox last week. “Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74,” Geraldo Rivera told Sean Hannity on the latter’s radio show in February.

At best, these counterfactuals do not take into consideration the ways that the more tightly regulated media landscape of the early 1970s played directly into Nixon’s dirty hands. At worst, they morph into calls for reviving the Fairness Doctrine and strengthening Public Interest requirements-constitutionally questionable regulatory tools that Nixon enjoyed, Trump envies, and too many in the media pine for…

The doctrine was a blunt instrument for powerful political interests to scare stations away from broadcasting anything that might trigger a demand for an opposing response. As economist Thomas Winslow Hazlett wrote in Reason earlier this year, “The goal was not to get on the radio but to tax political dissent, getting opposing views off. The cynical campaign worked, and then some. Broadcast radio and television devoted almost no valuable time to public affairs; unorthodox beliefs scrambled and hid.” …

Not only did the Fairness Doctrine dissuade broadcasters from tackling politics, its kissing cousin, the Equal Time Rule, drove license-holders still further away from the business of putting pols under the bright lights…

Faced with a news-baiting president they may well hate more than Nixon, many journalists and commentators are advocating a curious solution: Give the federal government he sits atop more discretionary power over the media business.

Candidates and Campaigns

Las Vegas Review-Journal: Dems say work by Dean Heller’s son violates campaign law

By Ramona Giwargis

Heller’s race is the most closely watched Senate contest this year. He admitted to receiving “a cheap discount” from Harris Heller for creating content for his campaign, including photos, videos and social media posts. The campaign paid Heller’s son’s production company, Heller Enterprises, $52,500 for its services since 2016.

The campaign paid another digital advertising firm more than $50,000 for ads in a single month.

If the price of the services from Heller Enterprises was reduced, federal election law requires it must be reported as an in-kind contribution. Heller’s campaign failed to do so.

And because Heller Enterprises is a limited liability corporation, accepting in-kind donations from it could be illegal because federal candidates are prohibited from accepting corporate contributions.

Heller spokesman Keith Schipper said Thursday that the younger Heller’s work does not count as an in-kind donation because Heller Enterprises was fully paid for its part-time services…

The state Democratic Party on Thursday filed a new complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It marks the sixth complaint lodged by Democrats against Heller.