Pewgate: McCain-Feingold Lobbyists Bankrolled Fake Grassroots Movement

The Federal Election Commission is moving forward with plans to regulate political speech on the Internet. (See "The Coming Crackdown on Blogging" on CNETnews.com) Rightwing and leftwing bloggers alike have cried foul. No one seems to want political censorship on the Net. Yet we are getting it anyway. Why?

A videotape obtained by Ryan Sager of the New York Post provides a stunning answer to this question. It shows that the McCain-Feingold Act – which forms the legal basis for the FEC's current effort to muzzle bloggers – was pushed through Congress by fraudulent means.

In a March 17 article, Sager reveals that a group of non-profit foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts and George Soros' Open Society Institute, bankrolled an array of front groups whose purpose was to deceive Congress into thinking that millions of their constituents across America were clamoring for "campaign finance reform."

In fact, no one wanted "campaign finance reform" except for the very elites who perpetrated this fraud in the first place. Should the FEC succeed in curbing political speech on the Internet, the blame for this outrage can be laid directly at the feet of the Pew Charitable Trusts and its co-conspirators.

Fake Grassroots Movement

Sean P. Treglia, a former program officer of the Pew Charitable Trusts, claims that he masterminded the plan. In March of 2004, Treglia boasted of his achievement during a taped conference at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, where Treglia has served since September 2003 as "senior advisor for democracy initiatives," in which capacity he helps train journalists to cover – you guessed it – campaign finance issues.

Addressing an audience of journalists, academics and other experts, Treglia said, "I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter. Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story." (via New York Post)

According to Treglia, proponents of "campaign finance reform" faced a problem – Americans did not want the kind of "reform" they were proposing. The movement "had lost legitimacy inside Washington because they didn't have a constituency that would punish Congress if they didn't vote for reform," Treglia explained.

And so he devised a plan. Since the "reformers" had no constituency, they would simply create one – or rather, the illusion of one. They would use foundation money to buy "experts" and front groups across the nation, to generate outcries for "campaign finance reform." Some front groups were created from scratch. In other cases, existing non-profit groups were paid handsomely to climb on the "campaign finance reform" bandwagon.

Flush with foundation money, these front groups would beat their breasts unceasingly for "campaign finance reform," putting on an energetic show for a tiny audience of 100 Senators and 435 members of Congress. Says Treglia:

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington. The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot - that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

The Conspirators

The New York Post reports that, from 1994 to 2004, Pew and its allies dispensed $140 million to promote campaign finance "reform," of which 88 percent – a cool $123 million – came from just eight foundations, as follows:

Pew Charitable Trusts ---------------------- $40.1 million
Schumann Center
for Media and Democracy ------------------ $17.6 million
Carnegie Corporation of New York ------ $14.1 million
Joyce Foundation ---------------------------- $13.5 million
George Soros'
Open Society Institute ---------------------- $12.6 million
Jerome Kohlberg Trust ---------------------- $11.3 million
Ford Foundation ------------------------------- $8.8 million
John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation ------------------------ $5.2 million

Recipients of this money included the Center for Public Integrity: the William J. Brennan Center for Justice; Democracy 21 and many more. Leftwing media organizations such as National Public Radio and American Prospect magazine also received payment in exchange for pushing "campaign finance reform." For more information on Pewgate corruption in media, see "Pewgate: Leftwing Journalists on the Take."

Media Cover-up

It is not yet clear whether mainstream media recieved Pewgate payoffs as well. However, they needed no encouragement to support McCain-Feingold. Major news organizations were among the primary beneficiaries of the bill, which regulates the political speech of unions, non-media corporations and grassroots political groups, while granting a "press exemption" to major media corporations.

On the videotape, Treglia tells a revealing anecdote about media collusion in the Pewgate scam. He says:

"We had a scare. As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this - that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress.

"But you know what the good news is from my perspective? Journalists didn't care… So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."

See also, "John McCain Gets Soros Cash (by yours truly), John Fund's Wall Street Journal piece of March 21, "Astroturf Politics: How Liberal Foundations Fooled Congress into Passing McCain-Feingold," and "Pew Exposed" in today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.