Dark Money

by Jane Mayer

  “create a movement”: Amanda Fallin, Rachel Grana, and Stanton Glantz, “To Quarterback Behind the Scenes, Third-Party Efforts: The Tobacco Industry and the Tea Party,” Tobacco Control, Feb. 2013.

  it had mocked Al Gore’s environmental jeremiad: Antonio Regalado and Dionne Searcey, “Where Did That Video Spoofing Gore’s Film Come From?,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 3, 2006.

  Pretty soon: David Kirkpatrick, “Groups Back Health Reform, but Seek Cover,” New York Times, Sept. 11, 2009.

  “This year has been really”: Dan Eggen, “How Interest Groups Behind Health-Care Legislation Are Financed Is Often Unclear,” Washington Post, Jan. 7, 2010.

  “public education programs”: Ken Vogel, “Tea Party’s Growing Money Problem,” Politico, Aug. 9, 2010.

  “We met for 20 or 30 years”: Bill Wilson and Roy Wenzl, “The Kochs Quest to Save America,” Wichita Eagle, Oct. 3, 2012.

  Not only had he been invited: Mark Holden, the general counsel to Koch Industries, described Noble as “an independent contractor” and “a consultant” to the company, in an interview with Kenneth Vogel, Big Money, 201.

  “pack the hall”: Lee Fang, “Right-Wing Harassment Strategy Against Dems Detailed in Memo,” ThinkProgress, July 31, 2009.

  “We packed these town halls”: Johnson, “Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems Fits.”

  “couldn’t have done it”: Grover Norquist, interview with author.

  “I thought on health care”: One of the few in the media to question whether the Tea Party protests were, as he put it, “orchestrations of incivility” rather than a brand-new widespread movement was Rick Perlstein, who warned in an essay in The Washington Post, “Conservatives have become adept at playing the media for suckers.” He argued that “the tree of crazy,” as he called the far-right protesters, was ever present in American politics, but in the past a more robust press corps, as well as more responsible conservatives, such as William F. Buckley, had “unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse ‘extremist’—out of bounds.” See Rick Perlstein, “Birthers, Health Care Hecklers, and the Rise of Right-Wing Rage,” Washington Post, Aug. 16, 2009.

  “wasn’t really tracking”: David Axelrod, interview with author.

  When fewer than sixty-five thousand: Some dispute the crowd estimate.

  Membership in the Liberty League: See Kevin Drum, “Old Whine in New Bottles,” Mother Jones, Sept./Oct. 2010.

  330,000 activists: Devin Burghart, “View from the Top: Report on Six National Tea Party Organizations,” in Steep: The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party, ed. Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost (University of California Press, 2012).

  It was hard not to notice: Lee Fang first noted the similarity between the pageantry at the Defending the American Dream Summit and that at presidential nominating conventions. Fang, Machine, 121.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE FOSSILS

  “The change wrought”: National Security Strategy, Washington, D.C. (Office of the President of the United States, 2010), 8, 47.

  “we face risks”: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Climate Science Panel, “What We Know,” 2014.

  Mann wasn’t particularly political: Mann told Neela Banerjee, “I started out as a scientist who didn’t think there was much of a role to play in public policy.” Banerjee, “The Most Hated Climate Scientist in the US Fights Back,” Yale Alumni Magazine, March/April 2013.

  “What we didn’t take into account”: Michael Mann, interview with author.

  “it’s like the switch from whale oil”: Ibid.

  He owned, by one count: Fisher, “Fuel’s Paradise.”

  Only the U.S. government: Neela Banerjee, “In Climate Politics, Texas Aims to Be the Anti-California,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 7, 2010.

  “unleash what became known”: Daniel Yergin, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, 2011), 328–29.

  The Kochs, too: For more on the Kochs’ fracking investments, see Brad Johnson, “How the Kochs Are Fracking America,” ThinkProgress, March 2, 2012.

  If the world were to stay: See “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012. He explains that scientists believe the earth can tolerate the burning of roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide by mid-century, but that informed estimates place the currently untapped carbon reserves at 2,795 gigatons.

  As early as 1913: The history of the oil depletion allowance is described in Robert Bryce, Cronies (PublicAffairs, 2004).

  As Robert Caro recounts: “A new source of political money, potentially vast, had been tapped,” Caro writes, “and Lyndon Johnson had been put in charge of it.” Robert Caro, The Path to Power (Vintage Books, 1990), 637.

  “the deep-tissue insecurity”: Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (Penguin, 2009), 204.

  “the restoration of the supremacy”: Ibid., 138.

  Cullen’s political ambitions: Ibid., 220, bases his assertion that Cullen was the largest contributor in 1952 on research by the University of North Carolina professor Alexander Heard.

  “to succeed in politics”: Ibid., 210.

  What he discovered: Fighting the science of climate change was not the only issue these groups and candidates focused on, but it was the single issue they all had in common.

  His research showed: The Kochs outspent ExxonMobil in their funding of nonprofit groups, not politicians.

  “kingpin of climate science denial”: See “Koch Industries, Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine,” Greenpeace, March 2010.

  “campaign to manipulate”: Robert J. Brulle, “Institutionalizing Delay: Foundation Funding and the Creation of U.S. Climate Change Counter-movement Organizations,” Climate Change 122, no. 4 (Feb. 2014): 681–94.

  Between 1999 and 2015: Whitney Ball died in August 2015, and in a tribute that appeared in National Review, James Piereson wrote that from its founding in 1999 DonorsTrust had given away $750 million. DonorsTrust announced that Lawson Bader, CEO of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who had been vice president of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, would succeed her.

  “We just have this great big unknown”: Andy Kroll, “Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement,” Mother Jones, Feb. 5, 2013.

  “There’s a better scientific consensus”: As quoted by Ross Gelbspan, “Snowed,” Mother Jones, May/June 2005, and requoted by Michaels, Doubt Is Their Product, 197.

  the plan was the brainchild: Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2006), 83.

  “central cog”: “Global Warming Deniers Well Funded,” Newsweek, Aug. 12, 2007.

  Leading the charge: Fred Seitz had previously distributed $45 million from R. J. Reynolds to scientists willing to defend tobacco. Fred Singer had attacked the EPA’s assertion that secondhand smoke was a health hazard. The financing for Singer’s work was a grant from the Tobacco Institute, a group supported by cigarette companies. The money was filtered, though, through a nonprofit organization called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Singer’s work on secondhand smoke took place during the 1990s. Tax records show that between 1988 and 2002, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution received $1,723,900 from the Bradley, Olin, Scaife, Philip M. McKenna, and Claude R. Lambe Foundations.

  “yet, for years the press”: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 9.

  As late as 2003: Poll numbers attributed to Theda Skocpol, Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight Against Global Warming (Harvard University, Jan. 2013).

  It quickly drew criticism: Dr. Steven C. Amstrup, chief scientist with Polar Bears International and a U.S. Geological Survey polar bear project leader for thirty years, explained that estimates of the size of the polar bear population in past decades were nothing more than guesses, but their grim future was a certainty if nothing was done to preserve
their habitat, which he said was undeniably “disappearing due to global warming.” Further, in 2008 polar bears became the first vertebrate species listed under the Endangered Species Act as threatened by global warming. See also Michael Muskal, “40% Decline in Polar Bears in Alaska, Western Canada Heightens Concern,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 21, 2014.

  “There are more polar bears”: Ed Crane, interview with author. For more on the polar bear controversy, see “Koch Industries, Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine.”

  Without disclosing it: See Justin Gillis and John Schwartz, “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher,” New York Times, Feb. 22, 2015.

  Yet from that moment on: Mann and his co-authors had been openly cautious about their findings, noting that because there were no temperature records kept a thousand years ago, they had been forced to use “proxy” methods, which included less than optimal techniques such as studying ice cores and tree rings.

  Koch Industries’ political action committee: Between 2005 and 2008, KochPAC made federal contributions totaling $4.3 million, in comparison with ExxonMobil’s $1.6 million, according to FEC reports.

  The company’s expenditures: Koch Industries spent $857,000 on lobbying in 2004, which grew to $20 million by 2008, according to the Center for Public Integrity. See John Aloysius Farrell, “Koch’s Web of Influence,” Center for Public Integrity, April 6, 2011.

  As the Harvard political scientist: Skocpol, Naming the Problem.

  At the time, Morano was working: When he promoted the “Swift Boat” story questioning John Kerry’s Vietnam War record, Morano worked as a reporter for Cybercast News Service, a project of the Media Research Center, which the Scaife family foundations funded, among others.

  “You’ve got to name names”: See Robert Kenner’s 2014 documentary film, Merchants of Doubt.

  “We had a lot of fun”: Ibid.

  “the ‘climate con’ ”: Banerjee, “Most Hated Climate Scientist in the US Fights Back.”

  “State political veterans”: Tom Hamburger, “A Coal-Fired Crusade Helped Bring Bush a Crucial Victory,” Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2001.

  “case study in managing”: Barton Gellman, Angler (Penguin, 2008), 84.

  Cheney used his influence: The Los Angeles Times broke the story of Cheney’s influence on the fracking exemption, noting that his former company Halliburton had interests in fracking. Tom Hamburger and Alan Miller, “Halliburton’s Interests Assisted by White House,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 14, 2004.

  In all, the Bush energy act: The subsidies were tallied by Public Citizen, “The Best Energy Bill Corporations Could Buy,” Aug. 8, 2005.

  41 percent of the American public: Gallup poll; see Skocpol, Naming the Problem, 72. Gore’s acclaim is described in Eric Pooley, The Climate War (Hachette Books, 2010).

  “Climate denial got disseminated”: Skocpol, Naming the Problem, 83.

  the climate problem was real: McCain made these comments in the second presidential debate; see Pooley, Climate War, 297.

  leases on over a million acres: Steve Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, “The Biggest Foreign Lease Holder in Canada’s Oil Sands Isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch Brothers,” Washington Post, March 20, 2014.

  Koch Industries alone: The 300 million tons of carbon dioxide figure comes from Brad Johnson, “Koch Industries, the 100-Million Ton Carbon Gorilla,” ThinkProgress, Jan. 30, 2011, and is cited in Fang, Machine, 114.

  “The Earth will be able”: Goldman, “Billionaire’s Party.”

  Rather than fighting global warming: For an excellent report on Koch Industries’ lobbying, see Farrell, “Koch’s Web of Influence.”

  “The Obama budget proposes”: Fang, Machine, 115.

  “I rode more hot-air balloons”: Jim Rutenberg, “How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties,” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 2014.

  Reams of faxes arrived: Kate Sheppard, “Forged Climate Bill Letters Spark Uproar over ‘Astroturfing,’ ” Grist, Aug. 4, 2009.

  Later one of the disruptive members: See Fang, Machine, 176.

  Mike Castle: Pooley, Climate War, 406.

  “go ask the unicorns”: Ibid., 393.

  The process wasn’t pretty: For an authoritative account of the cap-and-trade fight in the House, see ibid.

  Quietly funding it: See Steven Mufson, “New Groups Revive the Debate over Climate Change,” Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2009.

  As soon as Obama’s EPA: For more on the dispute, and a statement by John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’s state climatologist, see David Doniger, “Going Rogue on Endangerment,” Switchboard (blog), Feb. 20, 2010.

  One posted a report: Marc Sheppard, “UN Climate Reports: They Lie,” American Thinker, Oct. 5, 2009.

  “A miracle has happened”: The Web site on which the contrarian wrote was Climate Audit.

  “The blue dress moment”: Chris Horner, “The Blue Dress Moment May Have Arrived,” National Review, Nov. 19, 2009.

  “a crucial tipping point”: Tim Phillips was speaking about the Climategate leaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 26, 2010, as reported by Brad Johnson, Climate Progress, Nov. 27, 2010. Phillips did all he could to exploit the situation, staging an Americans for Prosperity protest in Copenhagen outside the United Nations conference on climate change, where he declared, “We’re a grassroots organization…I think it’s unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families…want to send unemployment rates in the United States to twenty percent.” See Mayer, “Covert Operations.”

  The facts, when fully understood: Neela Banerjee provides a very clear and detailed analysis of the leaked e-mails in her profile of Mann, “Most Hated Climate Scientist in the US Fights Back.”

  As Mann recounts in his book: Mann writes that the Southeastern Legal Foundation demanded information from the National Science Foundation about its grants to him and his colleagues at Penn State. The Landmark Legal Foundation, he writes, sued to obtain personal e-mails he sent to colleagues at other schools who had collaborated on his hockey stick research. Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press, 2012), 229.

  “a vicious S.O.B.”: Vogel and McCalmont, “Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck Sell Endorsements to Conservative Groups”; John Goodman, “Talk Radio Reacts to Politico on Cain; Mark Levin Criticizes Ken Vogel,” Examiner, Nov. 2, 2011.

  “I don’t know why”: “Levin to Female Caller: ‘I Don’t Know Why Your Husband Doesn’t Put a Gun to His Temple,’ ” Media Matters, May 22, 2009.

  “and the other advocates”: Mark Levin, Liberty and Tyranny (Threshold, 2010), 133.

  Almost half of those polled: Cited in Kate Sheppard, “Climategate: What Really Happened?,” Mother Jones, April 21, 2011.

  “I have come to conclude”: Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns,” New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010.

  “Gridlock is the greatest friend”: Kenner, Merchants of Doubt.

  “The influence of special interests”: Lizza, “As the World Burns.”

  CHAPTER NINE: MONEY IS SPEECH

  One associate said: A social acquaintance of David Koch’s, interview with author.

  “difficult to see”: Richard Posner, “Unlimited Campaign Spending—A Good Thing?,” The Becker-Posner Blog, April 8, 2012.

  “it gave rich people”: Jeffrey Toobin, “Republicans United on Climate Change,” New Yorker, June 10, 2014. Also see his “Money Unlimited,” New Yorker, May 21, 2012.

  In a growing backlash: See Elizabeth F. Ralph, “The Big Donor: A Short History,” Politico, June 2014.

  After news of their involvement: Dale Russakoff and Juan Williams, “Rearranging ‘Amway Event’ for Reagan,” Washington Post, Jan. 22, 1984.

  “They’re not a business”: “Soft Soap and Hard Sell,” Forbes, Sept. 15, 1975.

  In 1980, Richard DeVos: In “Rearranging ‘Amway Event’ for Reagan,” Russakoff and Williams write that “DeVos, former finance chairman of the Republican N
ational Committee, gave $70,575 in independent expenditures; Van Andel, former chairman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, chipped in $68,433.”

  By 1981, their titles: Ibid.

  DeVos, the son of a poor: See Andy Kroll’s excellent piece on the DeVos family, “Meet the New Kochs: The DeVos Clan’s Plan to Defund the Left,” Mother Jones, Jan./Feb. 2014.

  The scandal exploded: Kitty McKinsey and Paul Magnusson, “Amway’s Plot to Bilk Canada of Millions,” Detroit Free Press, Aug. 22, 1982.

  In 1989, Amway paid: Ruth Marcus, “Amway Says It Was Unnamed Donor to Help Broadcast GOP Convention,” Washington Post, July 26, 1996.

  “We were losing”: Russakoff and Williams, “Rearranging ‘Amway Event’ for Reagan.”

  The DeVos family nonetheless: For statistics on the DeVos’s spending, see Kroll, “Meet the New Kochs.”

  “There’s not a Republican president”: Ibid.

  “a little-known club”: David Kirkpatrick, “Club of the Most Powerful Gathers in Strictest Privacy,” New York Times, Aug. 28, 2004.

  “the doers”: On March 22, 2005, Paul Weyrich said on C-SPAN (http://​www.​c-span.​org/​video/​transcript/​?id=7958) that the Council for National Policy, “in the words of Rich DeVos, brings together the doers with the donors.”

  Her father, Edgar: Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books, 2007), 78.

  “the world’s most powerful”: Erik Prince, a swashbuckling former navy SEAL officer, soon ran into professional legal trouble. He eventually moved abroad and changed the company’s name to escape its reputation as an international outlaw after its guards were charged with murder for gunning down seventeen civilians during the Iraq War.

  “a spending edge”: John David Dyche, Republican Leader: A Political Biography (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009).

  “Money, money, money”: John Cheves, “Senator’s Pet Issue: Money and the Power It Buys,” Lexington Herald-Leader, Oct. 15, 2006.

  “If we stop this thing”: Michael Lewis, “The Subversive,” New York Times Magazine, May 25, 1997.