Days before Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s June 2012 recall election, two TV ads ran on stations statewide. Paid for by a group called the Coalition for American Values (CAV), the ads attacked the very notion of holding a recall election (even though it’s in the state constitution) and featured supposed Wisconsin citizens speaking out against the recall. “I didn’t vote for Scott Walker, but I’m definitely against the recall,” one man says. In another ad, the narrator says, “Recall isn’t the Wisconsin way…End the recall madness. Vote for Scott Walker June 5th.”
CAV put $400,000 behind those ads, which stoked a sense of unease about the recall among Wisconsin voters. Walker coasted to a seven-point victory. Exit polls strongly suggested that CAV’s ads played a part in the governor’s win. Yet the mystery surrounding the Coalition for American Values persisted. The group never disclosed how much it spent, how much it raised, or who funded it.
Until now. As first reported by the left-leaning Center for Media and Democracy, new tax filings reveal that the main source of CAV’s funding was the Center to Protect Patient Rights, an Arizona nonprofit that gave CAV $510,000 in 2012. CPPR is a linchpin in a network of nonprofit groups Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists, use to shuffle money around the country while keeping donors anonymous. California’s Fair Political Practices Commission identified the group as “the key nonprofit in the Koch Brothers’ dark money network of nonprofit corporations,” and hit the group and a related nonprofit with a $1 million fine for failing to disclose donations made during the 2012 election season. All told, CPPR doled out $156 million in dark money in 2011 and 2012, a sizable chunk of the $407 million moved by the Kochs’ network of nonprofit groups.
Run by a onetime Koch operative named Sean Noble, CPPR is expected to play less of a role in the Koch network going forward. The California investigation—which revealed the identities of hundreds of previously secret donors and private marketing material used by Republican operatives—brought unwanted scrutiny to the Kochs and their conservative and libertarian allies. An October 2012 Huffington Post story reported that Noble, the former “the wizard behind the screen” for the Kochs, had fallen out of favor. “Noble has had his wings clipped,” one Republican operative told HuffPost.
The Center for Media and Democracy says it has filed a formal complaint with Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board alleging that the Coalition for American Values violated state campaign finance laws by not disclosing its CPPR funding. A message left at the phone number listed on CAV’s website was not returned.
