Andy Kroll

Reporter

Andy Kroll is Mother Jones' Dark Money reporter. He is based in the DC bureau. His work has also appeared at the Wall Street Journal, the Detroit News, Salon, and TomDispatch.com, where he's an associate editor. He can be reached at akroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. He tweets at @AndrewKroll.

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At CPAC 2013, FreedomWorks Is Nowhere to Be Found

—By Andy Kroll

| Fri Mar. 15, 2013 12:26 PM PDT

FreedomWorks CEO Matt Kibbe speaking at CPAC 2012.

As it does every year, the conservative movement has turned out en masse for the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC, an annual Washington confab. Everyone's here: activists, operatives, Rand Paulites, politicians, Mitt Romney, think tank wonks, big-wig donors, fundraisers courting the big-wig donors, and so on. But there's one big name glaringly absent from the CPAC schedule: FreedomWorks.

FreedomWorks, in case you slept through the summer of 2010, is the liberty-loving, ostensibly grassroots outfit that fueled the tea party movement and helped elect a class of uncompromising, hard-line conservative politicians such as Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). FreedomWorks has been a fixture at past CPACs: the group sponsored panel discussions and happy hours and film screenings, its staffers weighed in on "new media activism" and a constitutional amendment curbing government spending. In 2012, Kibbe spoke at CPAC's main stage.

Yet FreedomWorks is nowhere to be found at CPAC 2013, housed this year at the spacious Gaylord Convention Center at Maryland's National Harbor. No staffers are scheduled to speak. No events bear FreedomWorks' name as sponsor. FreedomWorks doesn't even have a booth in the vast exhibition hall here (nearly everyone else does, from the NRA and Citizens United to the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and the author of the book WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again). FreedomWorks' lively Twitter account is silent on the matter of the conservative movement's biggest event.

CPAC 2013 comes at a rough moment for FreedomWorks. As Mother Jones has reported, FreedomWorks' board of directors is divided over the direction of the organization, a conflict that burst into public view after ex-chairman Dick Armey resigned from the group last year. Several board members support Kibbe and vice president Adam Brandon, while others were Armey loyalists who believe that Kibbe used FreedomWorks resources for his own personal gain. For months, private investigators have been interviewing FreedomWorks employees and digging through the group's financial records at the behest of board members C. Boyden Gray and James Burnley. That investigation is ongoing, creating a tense atmosphere in the FreedomWorks offices. And the group's headaches got worse when my colleague David Corn revealed that FreedomWorks staffers had made a video depicting an intern wearing a fake panda suit pretending to give oral sex to someone posing as Hillary Clinton.

That turmoil may explain the group's absence at CPAC. I sent an email to Jackie Bodnar, FreedomWorks' spokeswoman, asking why FreedomWorks was MIA. She has yet to write back.

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Will Big Donors Get Special Access to Obama? Group Still Won't Say

—By Andy Kroll

| Wed Mar. 13, 2013 1:38 PM PDT

Organizing for Action, the pro-Obama nonprofit hoping to raise $50 million to mobilize Democratic supporters around the president's agenda, kicked off its "Founder's Summit" on Tuesday morning at the tony St. Regis Hotel near the White House. But as ex-Obama aides David Plouffe, Jim Messina, and others spoke of the need for volunteers and donors outside Washington to pressure Congress into action on gun control, immigration, and climate change, OFA itself is still dogged by reports that big donors to the group will gain special access to the president.

At the OFA summit, spokeswoman Katie Hogan said little to satisfy the group's critics. Hogan stressed that OFA's fundraising plans were still in flux, and she couldn't say definitively what the group's interactions with the Obama administration would look like or how the organization would evolve going forward. "I don't have a crystal ball," she told reporters before event began.

She did say that OFA's board meetings will be closed to the public or press. The group's main board of directors will reportedly include ex-Obama officials such as Messina, Plouffe, and former deputy campaign director Stephanie Cutter. However, it is OFA's "advisory board" that has drawn much of the criticism. That board, according to the New York Times, will consist of supporters who've donated or raised $500,000 or more, and who will receive quarterly meetings with the president.

Both the White House and Jim Messina have dismissed the notion that OFA is selling access, but neither have refuted the Times story. Reformers have blasted OFA for appearing to sell access to the president, and some have called on Obama to demand that OFA be shut down.

On Wednesday evening, Obama is scheduled to speak to the 50 or 60 volunteers, donors, and other supporters who are in DC for the OFA summit. That event will be open only to small pool of reporters assigned to follow the president, and most of the summit is closed to reporters and the public. It's a safe bet, though, that near the top of the organizers' agenda is a plan to raise $50 million to back Obama's second-term agenda. As Bloomberg reported, some big Democratic givers are still worn out from the campaign, when they were pressed to give time and again. OFA's tallest hurdle going forward may be donor fatigue.

In his own remarks, Plouffe offered an indirect rebuke to OFA's critics. "Just the notion that there's millions of Americans that want to be part of these debates that they've been closed off to in Washington, that in my mind is reason enough to march forward," he said. "This is something that should be celebrated, not criticized."

The White House Is for Sale Under Barack Obama, Too

Obama joins a long line of presidents to offer exclusive access for big bucks.

—By Andy Kroll

| Tue Mar. 12, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

On Wednesday night, at the swanky St. Regis Hotel three blocks north of the White House, President Barack Obama will schmooze with his biggest donors and most avid grassroots supporters at a "founder's summit" for Organizing for Action, the controversial pro-Obama nonprofit group. OFA will use the email lists, social networks, and cutting-edge technologies honed during Obama's reelection campaign to try to galvanize Americans in support of the president's second-term agenda.

[Read the full article]

Photo credits: Jackson, Wikimedia Commons; Harding, Wikimedia Commons; Johnson, Wikimedia Commons; Nixon, Wikimedia Commons; Carter, Wikimedia Commons; George HW Bush, Che qingjiu/Imaginechina/ZUMA Press; Clinton, Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com; George W. Bush, Globe Photos/ZUMAPRESS.com.

GOP Senator: This Obama-Congress Lovefest Must Stop

—By Andy Kroll

| Mon Mar. 11, 2013 8:34 AM PDT

Here's a theory about Washington you won't hear very often.

On NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) decried the level of dysfunction in the House and Senate, between the Democratic and Republican parties, between Congress and the White House, and so forth. What's the news? you might ask. Unlike most people, Coburn blames Washington dysfunction on too much compromise. "Members of Congress and the administration agree on too much," he said.

Here's the full quote:

"Washington is dysfunctional, but it's dysfunctional in a dysfunctional way. Members of Congress and the administration agree on too much. We agree on spending money we don't have. We agree on not over-sighting the programs that should be over-sighted. We agree on continuing to spend money on programs that don't work or are ineffective. Basically we agree on too much."

Here's the video of Coburn's comment:

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Now, this is not to say Coburn is wrong on highlighting the government waste out there. He and his staff are among the best sleuths of nonsensical government spending (a 100-year starship program? A study to see if men look taller holding a pistol versus a caulk gun?). But on the issue of D.C. dysfunction, Coburn may be just a bit out of synch with the public.

Organizing for Action, Obama's Big-Money Muscle, Will Reject Corporate and Foreign Money

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Mar. 7, 2013 12:52 PM PST

OFA director Jim Messina.

Liberals agree: Organizing for Action, the pro-Obama nonprofit formed out of the president's reelection campaign, has an admirable goal—helping Obama enact his second-term agenda, which includes gun-control measures, immigration reform, and new action on climate change. OFA's problem, in their eyes, is how it plans to meet that goal.

Early news stories revealed that OFA planned to raise $50 million, much of it in big donations, from individuals, corporations, and unions. OFA would also disclose the names of its donors and fundraisers quarterly but without saying precisely how much they'd chipped in. In response, liberal campaign finance groups howled; one, Common Cause, publicly urged Obama to shut down OFA.

OFA has heard the complaints. Today, in a CNN.com op-ed, OFA director Jim Messina laid out the case for OFA and clarified that the group would not accept any money from corporations, foreign sources, or federally-registered lobbyists. OFA will also disclose, every four months, the exact amount given by every donor who chips in more than $250.

That's more than previously expected of OFA, and the group's critics are encouraged by Messina's pledge. Common Cause president Bob Edgar praised the move, but added OFA should go even further by putting a cap on how much a single donor can give and throwing its organizing muscle behind new campaign finance regulations. "That means getting behind legislation like the DISCLOSE Act, supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and rein in runaway political spending, and developing a new, small-donor public funding system that lets candidates break their dependence on big money," Edgar said in a statement sent to reporters.

OFA, as Politico's Ken Vogel points out, has already benefited from in-kind corporate support. January's "Road Ahead" conference, where OFA was first unveiled to a hand-picked group of big-wig Democratic fundraisers, was sponsored by a group called Business Forward, which receives money from Microsoft, Walmart, and other corporations.

OFA's ban on lobbyist money may be hard to enforce. President Obama imposed a similar ban on donations from lobbyists for his reelection campaign, yet the New York Times reported in October 2011 that the campaign's corps of elite fundraisers included at least 15 people involved in lobbying. Those fundraisers were not federally registered lobbyists, but fit the description of your typical Washington lobbyist. One such fundraiser, Sally Susman, raised more than $500,000 and at the same time ran Pfizer's lobbying office; another, David Cohen, ran Comcast's lobbying shop.

Messina also used his CNN op-ed to take a stab at addressing one of the biggest criticisms of OFA: that it was a vehicle for selling access to the president. One report said that donors and fundraisers who ponied up $500,000 or more would get quarterly meetings with Obama. In his op-ed, Messina writes, "Whether you're a volunteer or a donor, we can't and we won't guarantee access to any government officials." But he adds: "Just as the president and administration officials deliver updates on the legislative process to Americans and organizations across the ideological spectrum, there may be occasions when members of Organizing for Action are included in those updates."

That's hardly a full-throated rebuttal.