Dark Money

by Jane Mayer

  Chris Horner, a conservative climate contrarian working at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, another pro-corporate think tank subsidized by oil and other fossil fuel fortunes, including the Kochs’, declared, “The blue dress moment may have arrived.” But instead of using Monica Lewinsky’s telltale garment to impeach Bill Clinton, they would use the words of the world’s leading climate scientists to impeach the climate change movement. If edited down and taken out of context, their exchanges could be made to appear to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming was real.

  Dubbing the alleged scandal Climategate, they went into overdrive. The web of organizations, funded in part by the Kochs, pounced on the hacked e-mails. Cato scholars were particularly energetic in promoting the story. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar alone gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. The story soon spread from obviously slanted venues to the pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, adding mainstream credence. Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, jumped on the hacked e-mails, describing them to a gathering of conservative bloggers at the Heritage Foundation as “a crucial tipping point” and adding, “If we win the science argument, I think it’s game, set, and match for them.”

  Eventually, seven independent inquiries exonerated the climate scientists, finding nothing in the e-mails to discredit their work or the larger consensus on global warming. In the meantime, though, Michael Mann’s life, along with the environmental movement, was plunged into turmoil.

  Mann was among the scientists most roiled by the mysterious hacking incident. Four words in the purloined e-mails were seized upon as evidence that he was a fraud. In describing his research, his colleagues had praised his use of a “trick” that had helped him “hide the decline.” Mann’s detractors leaped to the conclusion that these words proved that his research was just a “trick” to fool the public and that he had deliberately hidden an actual “decline” in twentieth-century temperatures in order to fake evidence of global warming.

  The facts, when fully understood, were very different. It was a British colleague, not Mann, who had written the ostensibly damning words, and when examined in context, they were utterly mundane. The “trick” referred to was just a clever technique Mann had devised in order to provide a backup data set. The “decline” in question was a reference to a decline in available information from certain kinds of tree rings after 1961, which had made it hard to have a consistent set of data. Another scientist, not Mann, had found an alternative source of data to compensate for this problem, which was what was meant by “hide the decline.” The only genuinely negative disclosure from the e-mails was that Mann and the other climatologists had agreed among themselves to withhold, rather than share, their research with some of their critics, whom they disparaged. Given the harassment they had been subjected to, their reasoning was understandable, but it violated the customary transparency expected within the scientific community. Other than that, the “Climategate” scandal was, in other words, not one.

  It took no time, nevertheless, for the hacked e-mails to spur a witch hunt. Within days, Inhofe and other Republicans in Congress who were recipients of Koch campaign donations demanded an investigation into Mann. They sent threatening letters to Penn State, where he was by then a tenured professor. Later, Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, a graduate of the George Mason School of Law, would also subpoena Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia, demanding all records relating to his decade-old academic research, regardless of libertarians’ professed concerns about government intrusion. Eventually, Virginia’s Supreme Court dismissed its own attorney general’s case “with prejudice,” finding he had misread the law.

  By New Year’s Eve 2009, Mann was feeling under attack from all sides. Conservative talk radio hosts lambasted him regularly. Contrarian Web sites were lit up with blog posts detailing his iniquity. A self-described former CIA officer contacted colleagues in Mann’s department offering a $10,000 reward to any who would provide dirt on him, “confidentiality assured.” Soon after, Mann asserts, a think tank called the National Center for Public Policy Research led a campaign to get Mann’s National Science Foundation grants revoked. As Mann recounts in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, two conservative nonprofit law firms, the Southeastern Legal Foundation and the Landmark Legal Foundation, brought legal actions aimed at him. The think tank and the two law firms were funded by combinations of the same small constellation of family fortunes through their private charitable foundations. Omnipresent were Bradley, Olin, and Scaife.

  Charles Koch’s foundation also was engaged in piling on. It helped subsidize the Landmark Legal Foundation. The Kochs evidently admired Landmark’s president, Mark Levin, a longtime associate of the former attorney general Edwin Meese III. In 2010, Americans for Prosperity hired Levin to promote it on his nationally syndicated talk radio show, thereby copying the deal that FreedomWorks had struck with Glenn Beck. Levin was a curious choice of spokesman for the buttoned-down, erudite Koch brothers. His style was incendiary, even rude. He later called Kenneth Vogel, the Politico reporter who broke the news of the deal with Americans for Prosperity, “a vicious S.O.B.” and told a female caller, “I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the Hell out of here!” His attacks on Obama’s policies were similarly heated, particularly regarding climate change. He said Mann “and the other advocates of man-made global warming” did not “know how to conduct a correct statistical analysis” and accused “enviro-statists” of inventing global warming in order to justify a tyrannical government takeover. Their “pursuit,” he claimed, “after all, is power, not truth.”

  An especially grave attack on Mann’s livelihood was launched, meanwhile, by yet another group, the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The self-described think tank belonged to a national web of similar conservative organizations known as the State Policy Network. Much of Commonwealth’s financial support came through DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, making it impossible to identify the individual backers. But because it was based in Scaife’s home state, Commonwealth had particularly deep ties to his family foundations. Michael Gleba, the chair of Commonwealth’s board of directors, was also the president of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and treasurer of Scaife’s Carthage Foundation and a trustee of both. This arrangement gave Commonwealth unusual clout, particularly over Pennsylvania’s state legislature.

  The Pennsylvania think tank waged a campaign to get Mann fired and successfully lobbied Republican allies in the legislature to threaten to withhold Penn State’s funding until the university took “appropriate action” against Mann. With the public university’s finances held hostage, it agreed to investigate Mann. Meanwhile, the think tank ran a campaign of attack ads against him in the university’s daily newspaper, as well as helping to organize an anti-Mann campus protest.

  “It was nerve-racking to be under that pressure at Penn State,” recalls Mann. “There were these nebulous accusations based on stolen e-mails. Ordinarily, it would have been clear there were no grounds for investigation. But it was promoted by the Commonwealth Foundation, which seems to almost have a stranglehold on Republicans in the state legislature. I knew I had done nothing wrong, but there was this uncertain future hanging over me. There was so much political pressure being brought to bear on Penn State I wasn’t sure if they’d cave.”

  In the meantime, death threats began appearing in Mann’s inbox. “I tried to shield my family as much as I could,” he says. But this became impossible when one day he opened a suspicious-looking letter without thinking, only to have it release a cloud of white powder into his office. Fearing anthrax, he called the campus police. Soon the FBI quarantined his office behind crime tape, disrupting the whole department. The powder turned out to be harmless, but, Mann recalls, “it was a spectacle. There was
a point where I had the hotline number for the chief of police on our fridge, in case my wife saw anything unusual. It felt like there was a very calibrated campaign of vilification to the extent where the crazies might go after us.”

  It was particularly disturbing to Mann that there appeared to be overlap between hard-core climate change deniers and Second Amendment enthusiasts, whipped up, he came to believe, by “cynical special interests.” Mann says, “The disaffected, the people who have trouble putting dinner on the table, were being misled into believing that action on climate change meant that ‘They’ want to take away your freedom and probably your guns, too. There was a very skillful campaign to indoctrinate them,” he said. “We’ve seen Second Amendment enthusiasts take action against abortion doctors. There’s an attempt to paint us as villains in the same way.”

  He was not alone in receiving death threats. Several climatologists, he said, including Phil Jones, director of the hacked Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain, felt compelled to hire personal bodyguards. “Luckily,” Mann relates, both the Penn State investigations—which the legislature required to be done a second time in greater depth—and another one by the inspector general of the National Science Foundation, essentially the highest scientific body in the United States, exonerated Mann. “It lasted two years. It came out well. But two years is a long time,” he says. “I never imagined I’d be at the center of some contentious debate. It’s not why you study what I did. What worries me,” he adds, “is that this circus-like atmosphere may have scared off many young scientists. It actually has a chilling effect. It prevents scientists from participating in the public discourse, because they fear they, or their department head, will be threatened.”

  By the time Mann’s scientific research was upheld, underscoring his integrity as well as the genuine danger posed by climate change, it hardly mattered. By then, the percentage of Americans who believed the world was warming had dropped a precipitous fourteen points from 2008. Almost half of those polled by Gallup in 2010—48 percent—believed that fears of global warming were “generally exaggerated,” the highest numbers since the polling firm first posed the question more than a decade before. Watching from afar, Mann could see no cause for the United States to move in the opposite direction from science other than money. “In the scientific community, the degree of confidence in climate change is rising,” he said. “In the public, it’s either steady or falling. There’s a divergence. That wedge is what the industry has bought.”

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  Although the cap-and-trade bill moved to the Senate, it was already dead. At first, Lindsey Graham, the independent-minded Republican from South Carolina, took a courageous leadership role in the fight, offering to co-sponsor the legislation with the Democrat John Kerry and the Independent Joe Lieberman after declaring, to the surprise and delight of environmentalists, “I have come to conclude that greenhouse gases and carbon pollution” are “not a good thing.”

  Graham, however, feared pressure from his right flank. He warned the Democrats that they had to move fast, before Fox News caught wind of the process. As he feared, in April 2010, Fox News attacked him for backing a “gas tax.” A vitriolic Tea Party activist immediately held a press conference in his home state denouncing him as “gay,” and a political front group called American Solutions launched a negative campaign against him for his climate stance in South Carolina. American Solutions, it later turned out, was funded by huge fossil fuel and other corporate interests, many of whom were in the Koch fold. Among them were Larry Nichols of Devon Energy, Dick Farmer of Cintas, Stan Hubbard of Hubbard Broadcasting, and Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Within days of the drubbing, Graham withdrew from the process. Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader from Nevada, dealt the final blow to the cap-and-trade bill. Facing a tough reelection himself and worried about making Democrats walk the plank for the bill, he refused after Graham backed out to bring the legislation to the Senate floor for a vote.

  Opponents of climate change reform got their wish. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has, because that’s all you really want,” Morano later acknowledged. “There’s no legislation we’re championing. We’re the negative force. We are just trying to stop stuff.”

  Asked why the climate legislation failed, Al Gore told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “The influence of special interests is now at an extremely unhealthy level. It’s at a point,” he said, “where it’s virtually impossible for participants in the current political system to enact any significant change without first seeking and gaining permission from the largest commercial interests who are most affected by the proposed change.”

  As the first legislation aimed at addressing climate change sputtered out, the Massey mine in West Virginia collapsed in a methane explosion, killing twenty-nine miners. Soon after, a leak from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico triggered the largest accidental oil spill in history, killing and causing birth defects in record numbers of marine animals. A grand jury would charge the owner of the Upper Big Branch mine with criminally conspiring to evade safety regulations, while a federal judge would find the oil rig’s principal owner, British Petroleum, guilty of gross negligence and reckless conduct.

  Meanwhile, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was already above the level that scientists said risked causing runaway global warming. Obama acknowledged at this point that he knew “the votes may not be there right now,” but, he vowed, “I intend to find them in the coming months.” The conservative money machine, however, was already far ahead of him on an audacious new plan to try to ensure that he would never succeed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Money Is Speech: The Long Road to Citizens United

  On May 17, 2010, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire loped to the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David Koch was being honored for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees. A longtime admirer of classical ballet, he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season and had given many millions before that. As Koch received a token award, he was flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, the socialite Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and the political scion Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought in 1995 and then sold eleven years later for $32 million, having found it too small.

  The gala marked the official arrival of Koch as one of New York’s most prominent philanthropists. At the age of seventy, he was recognized for an impressive history of giving. In 2008, he donated $100 million to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bore his name. He had given $20 million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing was named for him. That spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he pledged at least $10 million for their renovation. He was a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and served on the board of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than $40 million, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

  One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. In New York philanthropic circles, though, David Koch was a celebrity in his own right. With the help of a bevy of public relations advisers, he had sculpted an impressive public image. One associate said Koch had confided that he gave away approximately 40 percent of his income each year, which he estimated at about $1 billion. This of course left him with an annual income of some $600 million and considerably helped ease his tax burden, but he enjoyed the role, a family member said, in part because it bought him respecta
bility. There was another side to his spending, however, that was then still largely secret. While David was happy to put his name on some of the country’s most esteemed and beloved cultural and scientific institutions and to take a public bow at the ballet, his family’s prodigious political spending was a much more private affair.

  It would in fact take years before the faint outlines of the Kochs’ massive political machinations began to surface through required public tax filings, and the full story may never be known. But a decision by the Supreme Court four months earlier in a case that began over a dispute about a right-wing attack on Hillary Clinton had already launched the family’s covert spending into a new, more electorally ambitious phase. At the moment that David Koch took the stage in New York, operatives working for his brother and himself were quietly converting thirty years’ worth of ideological institution building into a machine that would resemble, and rival, those of the two major political parties. Rather than representing broad-based support, however, theirs was financed by a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families in America, who could now, should they wish, spend their entire fortunes influencing the country’s politics.

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  On January 21, 2010, the Court announced its 5–4 decision in the Citizens United case, overturning a century of restrictions banning corporations and unions from spending all they wanted to elect candidates. The Court held that so long as businesses and unions didn’t just hand their money to the candidates, which could be corrupt, but instead gave it to outside groups that were supporting or opposing the candidates and were technically independent of the campaigns, they could spend unlimited amounts to promote whatever candidates they chose. To reach the verdict, the Court accepted the argument that corporations had the same rights to free speech as citizens.

  The ruling paved the way for a related decision by an appeals court in a case called SpeechNow, which soon after overturned limits on how much money individuals could give to outside groups too. Previously, contributions to political action committees, or PACs, had been capped at $5,000 per person per year. But now the court found that there could be no donation limits so long as there was no coordination with the candidates’ campaigns. Soon, the groups set up to take the unlimited contributions were dubbed super PACs for their augmented new powers.