Veep office used as campaign HQ
Vendor who supplied donor call lists
says Gore tied up staff in fund-raising
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worldnetdaily.com
By Paul Sperry
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com
WASHINGTON -- Vice President Al Gore's staffers spent most of their time preparing donor call sheets for him and maintaining his political database, as well as coordinating fund-raising for several Senate Democrats, including California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, says the vendor who provided campaign services to Gore for 14 years.
One of the vendor's computer specialists who dealt directly with Gore's staffers estimates that fund-raising activities, which also included thanking donors attending White House coffees with Gore, consumed "about 85 percent" of their official time.
"A lot of the activities were also run out of his Senate chambers," said Pat Anderson, whose former firm, Public Office Corp., built Gore's donor database and supplied him with donor call sheets.
She says Gore shared the database with the Democratic National Committee. Gore's database is separate from the controversial WHODB (White House Office database) used by the president and first lady, and contains information on more than 100,000 donors cultivated from Gore's previous Senate and presidential campaigns.
Gore also was preoccupied with fund-raising, Anderson says.
When he wasn't dialing for dollars from the White House, he would do it from the road -- even while traveling on official business, Anderson said in an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily.
"His staff would call us just before he'd go on an official trip to New York or Chicago or L.A. and ask us to produce a list of top contributors in the area, so he could do some fund-raising while in those cities," said Anderson, a life-long Democrat, who lives in McLean, Va.
She says staffers in both Gore's White House and Senate offices spent an inordinate amount of time on fund-raising between 1993 and 1996, when Gore canceled his account with POC and took possession of the database.
"Based on our billing records and my knowledge, quite a number of his official staff hours were devoted to building his database for political fund-raising," Anderson said.
"I don't mean a half-hour here, and a half-hour there," she added. "I'm talking many hours a day."
Ellen Rowell, the POC employee who handled the Gore account and talked with the vice president's staff on a daily basis, said preparing call lists and updating the database was "about 85 percent of what they were doing in his office."
Rowell says she worked closely with Gore staffers Ellen Laughlin Ochs and Jeff Teague, a former DNC staffer, in the White House. They would routinely ask her to produce call sheets with the names, numbers and contribution histories of donors, categorized by size of donation or region.
"We'd send them over to his office for Gore to call," she said in a phone interview.
Rowell, who now works in Atlanta, says she doesn't remember if Gore used them to solicit hard money for the Clinton-Gore campaign or soft money for DNC party-building.
Gore has argued he only dialed for soft money from the White House, an activity that he claims isn't covered by the Hatch Act and therefore has "no controlling legal authority." He raised money by phone from the White House on at least 46 occasions.
Rowell says she also dealt regularly with Bill Mason, a former staffer in Gore's Senate chambers. Mason also spent long hours working on fund-raising matters for the vice president -- as well as for Democratic senators, she recalls.
"Bill Mason did little else than pay attention to this database," agreed Anderson.
Anderson says that as a Senate employee, Mason was not in a position to be coordinating fund-raising for the vice president or other politicians.
"He sat over there and basically raised money," she claimed. "He's not supposed to do that. He didn't do government business."
Attempts to reach Mason were unsuccessful. Calls to Ronna Freiberg, Gore's chief of staff for his Senate operations (the vice president is also president of the Senate), were not returned.
Mason and an unidentified DNC lawyer picked up magnetic tapes storing the entire database in December 1996, Rowell says.
"They came marching over to our office and demanded the whole thing on tape, and we gave it to them," Rowell said.
She's not sure if Mason loaded the tapes onto computers in Gore's Senate office.
"We gave them a copy, but we don't know what they did with it," Rowell said. "They became very secretive and hush-hush at that point."
"But they were a sneaky kind of bunch all along," she added, "always acting like something was going on."
If Gore installed the database on his Senate or White House computers, it belongs to the government and is no longer his personal property. Federal law prohibits sharing government property with the DNC or any other political organization.
Calls to Jim Kennedy, spokesman for the vice president's office, were not returned by deadline.
It's worth noting at this point that none of the e-mail generated from Gore's office has been electronically archived in a searchable format, as required by law, and at least 13 months of his e-mail is permanently lost. So any electronic messages between Gore's office and the DNC have not yet been fully reviewed by prosecutors investigating campaign-finance abuses by the 1996 Clinton-Gore reelection effort.
Anderson says Mason worked alongside Sue Landgarten, another staffer from Gore's White House office, in putting together donor lists for other Democrats.
An Oct. 31, 1994, memo from Anderson to former Gore chief of staff Jack Quinn details a request for computer-generated lists of donor names for delivery to several Democrats, including Sens. Feinstein and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, former Sen. Jim Sasser of Tennessee, Rep. Tom Lantos of California and Rep. David Bonior of Michigan.
The memo, a copy of which was obtained by WorldNetDaily, was prepared after Anderson met with Quinn in the White House on Oct. 21, 1994.
At the request of Gore's office, Anderson says she started sharing parts of the database with the DNC in 1995. Magnetic tapes were always "hand-delivered" to DNC operative Tony Wilson, she and Rowell recall.
The records in the database, stored on a VAX mainframe computer, include a donor's complete contribution history, various political interests, addresses, phone numbers and spouse, among other information.
Besides preparing call sheets, Gore used it to send donors thank-you notes for attending fund-raisers and White House coffees (Gore has attended at least 37), as well as Christmas cards from the Gore family.
The database also includes Asian-American donors. POC records show that Gore in 1994 sent a fund-raising letter to dozens of "Asian Business Leaders."
Anderson claims she was told by Gore's staff to destroy all of her documents. She refused and also still maintains a copy of Gore's database. She won't release its contents, however, because she says it would violate the privacy of the donors listed in it.
Anderson's firm, which she owned with her husband, former Rep. William Anderson, D-Tenn., billed the DNC an average of about $3,000 a month to maintain Gore's donor database, she says. The Andersons, who were friends with Gore's parents, had a falling out with the White House over a Federal Election Commission case involving the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign.
Gore's White House fund-raising activities didn't stop with dial-a-thons.
According to DNC donor Johnny Chung, Gore in 1995 solicited campaign contributions from him, DNC donor Charlie Trie and 25 other U.S. businessmen inside Gore's former office in the Old Executive Office Building. Gore also took dozens of photos with Chung and other donors in the White House. |
