Party strategists funnel donations from nonprofits into attack ads, records show

While President Obama and other Democrats have excoriated Republican “front groups” for using secret money to pay for attack ads, the party’s political committees have begun doing something similar: collecting cash from outside nonprofit groups that don’t disclose their contributors and using the money to pay for negative campaign commercials, campaign records show.

One group, Patriot Majority PAC — a Democratic political committee that has run a hard-hitting $1.7 million attack ad campaign against Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate for Harry Reid’s Senate seat in Nevada — has gotten one of its largest donations, $250,000, from a left-leaning nonprofit that doesn’t release the names of any of its contributors, the records show.

Another newly formed political committee, America’s Families First Action Fund, which is running negative commercials against Republicans in House races across the country, recently got $1 million from a closely related nonprofit affiliate, the records show. Both organizations were set up over the summer by Democratic strategists, who emphasized in a memo to donors that contributions to the nonprofit could be kept anonymous.

These operations illustrate how Democrats have belatedly tried to mimic some of the same GOP money-raising tactics they have sharply criticized, exploiting a controversial Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that allows unlimited contribution to political committees from corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals. These donations can be kept concealed from the public if made to outside nonprofits, which can either run campaign ads directly or — as the Democratic groups are doing — make contributions to other political committees that run ads on their own.

“It’s opened this huge loophole (where) you can launder money though these groups that don’t disclose and get it into the campaign,” said Bill Allison, editorial director of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending. “We’ve seen this happening on both sides of the aisle.”

The activities of Patriot Majority PAC are especially noteworthy because they have been focused almost entirely on Nevada, where Reid, the Senate majority leader, is locked in a tight re-election battle with Angle, a Tea Party favorite. When President Obama campaigned in Nevada on behalf of Reid recently, he made the issue of “secret” campaign cash one of his principal themes.

Oct 31, 2010
By Michael Isikoff
MSNBC
Read more at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39918524/ns/politics-decision_2010/

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment