Creepy Butlers
"Would you like a judge with your tax cut today, sir?"
Today, the Freakshow takes you into a greasy tent flying the banner of Citizens United. An organization, needless to say, that has very little to do with citizens and almost nothing to do with uniting anyone except the one percent.
Citizens United is now shorthand for a Supreme Court decision, in its favor, 13 years ago that legalized the tsunami of “dark money” on the verge of demolishing what is left of American democracy. Anonymous donor cash buys people and policies that a majority of voters do not support. It seats militant and activist rightwing federal judges, elects fringe-y state legislators and kooky Congresspeople and hoary long-bought U.S. Senators, and puts in place, through the law, radically regressive policies - banning books, Stone Age health care for women, halting efforts to contain climate change, giving polluters their right to pollute, and moving universal suffrage back toward landed white males.
Many strange creatures are inside this dark little tent. Let’s have a look at one of them.
Every billionaire needs a consigliere, a major domo, an I-gotta-guy. And every billionaire’s movement needs a tool like David Bossie, the guy who nominally led Citizens United when it became a byword for the invisible hand of the one percent.
A college dropout and volunteer firefighter turned conservative dirty trickster, Bossie is the political equivalent of the creepy butler stock horror movie character. Think Lurch in the Addams Family, Chris Elliott and his misshapen hand as Hanson in Scary Movie 2. Or, any of the great twisted Igors in the Frankenstein movies.
Bossie got his start in the 1990s, cage-fighting the Clintons. He spent months in mid-90s Arkansas, sweating in county courthouses hunting for documents that would bring down Clinton. When he had collected a U-Haul van worth of documents about a failed real estate investment involving a $300,000 loan, Bossie brought his boxes to Washington and shared them with reporters who felt compelled to pore over the fine print of contracts written in Flippin, Arkansas.
The documents revealed the outline of a petty backcountry scam that the Clintons fell prey to, and which was, in comparison to Donald Trump’s lifetime of shady business practices, the scandal equivalent of a pillow fight next to Hiroshima.
Before he joined up with Citizens United, Bossie earned his chops in Washington doing ratfuck ops like selectively editing transcripts of a jailhouse conversation Clintonworld character Webster Hubbell had with his wife, and harassing the family of a women who had committed suicide (Bossie was promoting he idea that she killed herself over an affair with Clinton). According to a CBS news report at the time, Bossie and a cohort trailed the woman’s mother to an Army hospital in Augusta, Ga., where her husband was being treated for a stroke. "Here the two men burst into the sick man's room," The CBS report stated, ”and began questioning the shaken mother about her daughter's suicide."
For his work on those ops, a Republican Congressional committee he worked for was shamed into booting him out of his staff job, but he was soon rewarded with the leadership of Citizens United. Citizens United was formed in 1988 by a west coast winger named Floyd Brown, who ran a branch of the conservative college students organization Young American Foundation - YAF. Brown also helped craft and disseminate the “swift boat” operation that targeted John Kerry’s military record with lies, and produced the openly racist Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. He’s apparently still on the mortal coil, but hasn’t been heard from much since he released an advertisement asserting that Obama was registered as a Muslim student in Indonesia, and that he had attended an Indonesian madrassa.
In 2010, Bossie entered Trumpworld, the natural habitat for a guy Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove wrote “looks a little like an overdressed Saturday night wrestler -- ‘The Destroyer’ perhaps.”
Bossie first met Trump via desiccated casino magnate and multiply-accused sexual harasser of hotel housekeepers, Steve Wynn, while organizing an annual charity golf tournament (see last week’s Sand Pit issue for more on the role of corrupt golf in this crowd) at a Trump club. Bossie eventually introduced Trump to Steve Bannon and Corey Lewandowski, two of many proto-fascists who became prominent and wealthy by association with his campaign and presidency.
Bossie thrived in Trumpworld, serving as advisor and campaign manager, but had a bumpy ride. In 2017, TFG sacked him for using the Trump brand to collect millions in donations of $200 or less from elderly middle class MAGAs. His “Presidential Coalition” used pictures of Bossie with Trump and promised gulls that their money would go toward electing conservatives to state and local offices. In 2017, reporters found IRS records showing Bossie only used $425.442 of the $15.4 million collected over two years, while spending excess funds to pay his salary and buy up copies of his and Lewandowski’s book “Let Trump Be Trump,” The Big Guy was reportedly “apoplectic” but not over the scam, over the fact that he wasn’t cut in. An anonymous Trump insider told Politico: “This literally came from the top,” because Trump “was pissed that this was the equivalent of taking from him.”
He was brought back in from the cold in January 2020, to fight Trump’s first impeachment. His experience as a House investigator during the Clinton impeachment process was suddenly an indispensable qualification. “There’s a handful of people in Washington, D.C. who know what the impeachment process is like,” lobbyist Bryan Lanza, who worked for Bossie at Citizens United before joining the Trump campaign in 2016, told Politico. “Dave Bossie not only knows the impeachment process he knows how to fight the impeachment process and that’s what makes him a valuable asset to President Trump.”
To be fair, Mr. Bossie is not the only creepy butler in the American Freakshow. Their number is legion, especially in the U.S. Senate, but also in law firms and academia (see the emails between mega donor Barre Seid and the deans and professors at George Mason’s “Antonin Scalia Law School” for a sense of the boot-licking style). These managers, toadies, lint-brushers and door-holders live by and for the one percent. Their motto is the phrase uttered with such a perfect mix of sheepishness and pride by Succession’s Tom Wambsgans: “I am here to serve.”
The creepiest creepy butler serving the oligarchy in Washington, is of course, anti-abortion fanatic and court-packer Leonard Leo. Last week, the government watchdog group Accountable.US released research showing how dark money has enabled Sovereign Knight of the Military Order of Malta Leo to corrupt the Supreme Court - a panel Accountable.US now calls “the Leo Court.” He and his henchmen are actively influencing nearly the entire docket right now, according to the group.
Leo has a lot of dark money to pay for this operation. Historic amounts. The largest tranche landed on hum in 2021, a record $1.6 billion in a secret donation from a Chicago electronics magnate. We only know about it because someone anonymously tipped reporters a year later. (I covered the procurement and implications of this pile in a previous issue of Freakshow, Money, Money, Money, and in a long investigative piece published in The New Republic this month.
Leo is steering the incoming secret cash toward many things - including elections, lower court judges, stopping “woke” and corporate ESG - but also to a legion of other creepy butlers, right wing lawyers who get paid a lot more than Mr. Bossie did when he was sweating it out in Flippin, Arkansas. These men craft fringe legal theories in support of outrageously anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic claims that that would have been laughed out of U.S. courts a decade ago.
They submit these arguments in the form of amicus curiae briefs to the nine members of the court, six of whom can be relied upon to use them to craft decisions advancing radically regressive policy objectives that voters oppose.
Among the cases where these creepy butlers are at work right now:
Moore v. Harper. This case asks the Supreme Court to endorse the fringe “independent state legislature theory,” that would give gerrymandered state legislatures the power to assign electoral votes — thereby disenfranchising voters.
303 Creative LLC v Elenis: Lawyers financed by the Leo operations (calling themselves Alliance Defending Freedom”) are working to overturn Colorado’s anti-discrimination law involving LGBTQ people.
(Note: whenever you see the words “freedom” or “liberty” on an organization’s title in or around politics it’s time to grab the bullshit detector and examine the funding sources. More often than not, it will be pouring in from parties that want to effect the exact opposite.)
Dark money is also financing 17 Republican Attorneys General in a flinty assault on President Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan. The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), has scarfed up more $13 million from Leo since 2016. One of Leo’s dark money partners is a law partner at one of the firms representing the plaintiffs in an other case fighting debt forgiveness.
Anonymously funded Leo-connected lawyers and friends have also been behind a successful campaign in the courts to undo decades of progress made with the Clean Water Act.
Alex Aronson, former chief counsel to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who has worked to fight the dark money effects of the Citizens United ruling, told journalists last week the research proves that Leo has been “coordinating secret amicus campaigns to bring extreme legal positions to the court under cover of secrecy - pushing extreme policy goals that they cannot accomplish through the democratic process.
Tiffany Muller, president of End Citizens United, also on the call with reporters, said dark money from “special interest donors .. has already tilted the the scales of justice” producing a situation in which the law is now “a commodity that can be bought and sold."
Congress has yet to act on two proposals that aim to ameliorate the situation: The supreme court ethics and transparency act and the DISCLOSE Act.
Meanwhile, the judiciary has hammered more nails into democracy’s coffin. In a case challenging California’s spending disclosure requirements, Americans for Prosperity v Bonta, the six righties on the Supreme Court in 2021 created a new constitutional right to shield donors from the public’s knowledge. Cynically, they used a 1950s decision in a case the NAACP brought against the state of Alabama, offering “associational anonymity” to protect civil rights workers in the south from being stalked or murdered by racists, to create a right for billionaires and corporations to hide their donations.
“Expanding that to Charles Koch puts down a foothold for a very scary dark money protection,” Aronson said.
The justices in the majority in the Citizens United ruling couched their rationale that it wouldn’t increase corruption in the stated assumption that the donors would be transparent. But in the years since, “there has been a war on disclosure,” said Accountable.US director Herrig. The Federal Election Commission and the IRS, charged with logging their names, have been chipped away, gutted, mired in political stalemates. “This agenda is not an agenda they could get done at the ballot box. It is an extremely unpopular agenda. So instead of operating transparently, they benefit from operating behind the scenes. ”
Researchers and journalists are losing the hide and seek game. “We are at a disadvantage,” Herrig said. “We are not going to know 2023 donations until at least the end of 2024. We are working backwards.”
Indeed.
Related reading:
Bossie and Trump
Citizens United explained :
Citizens United challenged longstanding campaign finance rules after the FEC stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton too close to the presidential primaries. A 5–4 majority of the Supreme Court overturned 100 years of law, siding with Citizens United, ruling that corporations and other outside groups can spend unlimited money on elections. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates the First Amendment right to free speech. By one vote the court ruled that “independent political spending” did not lead to corruption, provided it was not coordinated with a candidate’s campaign. Anonymous donor money soon exploded into American politics. Dark money donors managed to put $5 million into races in 2006, but last year $1 billion in dark money was blown on just a few crucial Senate races.
Tom Wambsgans uttering the creepy butler motto
Accountability US full report.
Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta
Steve Wynn’s sexual harassment habit.
"Citizens United" is one of those names, we find out, that turned out to be deceptive ... or maybe just incomplete. It ought to have been "Citizens United for Nefarious Purposes," or maybe "Rich Right Wingers Screwing With Laws and Elections." I remember the selling point that "corporations were people" struck me as ridiculous. This time the con was the sin of omission: "Corporations are *hundreds* of people -- or even thousands. I don't know who they thought they were kidding. The fix was in, however, from the time SCOTUS started to be manipulated by the Supreme Court Historical Society. Membership was not 10 bucks. Let us just say it was beaucoup d'argent ... enough to let rich people with undemocratic opinions spew them at the Justices at dinner parties ... as their newfound friends. For all we know, the "influencers" may have even bought their new friends' aged mothers houses. Nah, that would be too brazen.
Absolutely essential detailed history of the grubby underbelly of money in our politics. This is why I subscribe to Nina, and so should you if you haven't already.