First this: From the NYP: THE STENCH FROM PEW
nypost.com
Reports in The Post last week con cerning the political activities of the supposedly above-the-fray Pew Charitable Trusts were, in a word, shocking.
A former program officer for Pew, Sean Treglia, was caught on videotape bragging about how the foundation worked behind the scenes to create the false impression that there was a "mass movement" afoot clamoring for campaign-finance reform.
The intent: to hoodwink Congress.
It worked.
Pew did this in the run-up to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — a.k.a. McCain-Feingold — by spreading around more than $40 million to grass-roots front groups like Common Cause, the Campaign Finance Institute and the inaptly named Center for Public Integrity.
Pew wasn't alone in its efforts.
Several other major liberal foundations — including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute — colluded with Pew to give $123 million between 1994 and 2004 to promote the regulation of political speech.
But Pew's role in the effort seems to have been particularly insidious.
"Having been on the Hill, I knew that . . . if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain," Treglia says at one point in the tape.
"So, in order, in essence, to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background."
"By law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew," Treglia says. "Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah . . . We stayed within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law."
We'd be loathe to accept Treglia's word that Pew stayed even within the letter of the law here — foundations, after all, have tax-exempt status and are forbidden by law to lobby Congress. But Pew's violation of the spirit of the law alone is reason enough for the IRS, or even Congress, to look into this matter.
Pew has issued a statement saying: "Any assertion that we tried to hide our support of campaign-finance-reform grantees is false."
Its president, Rebecca Rimel, says that all of the grantees were disclosed on the appropriate tax forms.
We'll take her word on that. But then, nobody has claimed otherwise.
What Treglia admitted to was an attempt to deceive Congress and the public within the limits of the law — quite a stunning bit of hypocrisy from a foundation ostensibly in favor of clean and transparent government.
Pew — not to put too fine a point on it — has some explaining to do.
And so do the politicians — such as Sen. John McCain, Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep. Chris Shays and Rep. Marty Meehan — whose speech-regulation schemes directly benefited from this scam.
So, what did they know?
When did they know it?
It's time to find out. |
