More on Florida, 2000

This is long and confusing and there will be very few that care... just like they want it.
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Supreme plot
Palm Beach County commissioner faces stiff fine over illegal fund-raising effort to oust three state justices

July 09, 2003 By: Dan Christensen

In a case with national political implications, the Florida Elections Commission has ruled that Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty violated state campaign finance rules in working to oust three Florida Supreme Court justices. It will decide next month whether to impose up to $450,000 in fines against her.

On May 21, the FEC voted 7-0 to adopt an administrative law judge’s findings that McCarty violated state election laws in the collection, expenditure and reporting of tens of thousands in political action committee (PAC) funds.

The commission will determine any fine and finalize a final written order in the case at its next meeting Aug. 13-14 in Tallahassee. She has the right to contest the final order before a state appellate court.

But state administrative law judge Harry L. Hooper, who presided over McCarty’s hearing in February on the campaign finance charges, concluded on May 1 that the former Palm Beach County Republican Party chairwoman was little more than a front for a Washington, D.C.-based campaign against the justices, which was organized during the 2000 presidential election recount battle.

That campaign, Judge Hooper found, was orchestrated by Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican lobbyist and political operative who has said he worked for President Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era re-election committee and served as a campaign strategist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Stone, who owns a $2.2 million bayfront mansion in Surfside, received $1.8 million from the Miami-Dade County Commission last year for political work he did for the county.

During McCarty’s two-day hearing, the FEC’s lawyer argued that Stone and McCarty established the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary to pressure the state Supreme Court to rule in favor of then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in his ballot recount battle with Al Gore. McCarty testified that the committee began to take shape six to nine days after the Nov. 7 election. The Florida Supreme Court was first asked by Gore to order hand recounts in the decisive Florida race on Nov. 15.

“This was an attempt to let the justices know, who were going to eventually decide the presidential election, that they were going to be watched,” commission assistant counsel Eric M. Lipman said in his opening arguments. “And it was an attempt to influence what they were going to do.”

According to Judge Hooper’s 36-page order, Stone, through his Washington, D.C.-based firm Ikon Public Affairs, was the real agent behind the campaign in late 2000 and 2001 to defeat the Florida justices in the 2002 merit retention election. But who, if anyone, was paying Stone and giving him orders remains unclear.

A complaint was not filed against Stone and no charges were filed against him. He never was questioned or offered testimony because neither the FEC nor McCarty was able to locate him to serve him with a subpoena. State investigators also did not pursue a number of leads that might have shed light on Stone’s role. Craig Snyder, Stone’s partner in Ikon Public Affairs, was never questioned either.

Thus, many mysteries remain about the short, strident, and secret life of the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary. In particular, the state hasn’t determined the source of the $150,000 that paid for the direct mail fund-raising campaign targeting the justices, or the additional $50,000 that was paid by the committee for unexplained reasons.

At the hearing, McCarty, 48, who was reelected to her fourth term on the county commission in November, testified that she was “played by Stone.” She admitted “stupid mistakes” and called herself a “victim.” In an earlier deposition, she called the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary “a scam,” according to a transcript.

Neither McCarty nor her Tallahassee attorney Mark Herron, returned calls seeking comment.

According to FEC records, Stone told a state investigator in May of last year that he knew nothing about the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary — a claim that McCarty and other former committee officials strongly contest.

In a brief phone interview with the Daily Business Review last week, Stone indicated that he knew the FEC was bringing a case against McCarty but didn’t know McCarty and the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary had been found in violation of state campaign finance laws. “We’ll have to litigate it and they’ll have to justify it. I’ve got nothing further to say about it,” Stone said before hanging up.

The attorney representing Ikon Public Affairs, Stone and Snyder is Miami lawyer Kendall Coffey, a former U.S. attorney who served as a lead attorney for the Gore-Lieberman campaign during the presidential recount battle. According to a Dec. 9 letter in the FEC case file, Coffey said he was retained by Stone and Snyder because they thought they “may become witnesses” in the McCarty proceedings.

Coffey told the Daily Business Review that his clients would not discuss the matter. “Because neither Ikon nor its professionals are a party to the administrative proceedings [against McCarty], it would not be appropriate for us to comment,” he said.

The FEC also declined to comment.

‘Mad as hell’

McCarty’s lawbreaking — including findings that she certified the accuracy of a campaign treasurer’s report that was “incorrect, false, or incomplete,” accepted excessive contributions and displayed a “reckless disregard” for state election laws — stemmed from her chairmanship of the now-defunct Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary.

The PAC, which began operating in late November 2000 but wasn’t legally established until early January 2001, targeted Justices Harry Lee Anstead, Charles T. Wells, and Justice Leander J. Shaw for defeat in the 2002 merit retention elections. McCarty’s highly publicized “mad as hell” letter, mailed to as many as 350,000 conservatives in early December 2000, sought to raise $4.5 million to unseat them.

Florida election records show that hundreds of people responded to the solicitation letter, which raised a total of about $220,000. That sum included a mysterious $150,000 loan whose origin still hasn’t been determined. The contribution limit to state election PACs in Florida is $500.

Despite the aborted campaign against them, Wells and Anstead both won their retention elections; Anstead is now chief justice. Shaw stepped down this past January because he faced mandatory retirement at age 70.

Through a spokesman, Anstead, Wells, and Shaw declined to comment. But former Florida Supreme Court Justice Major B. Harding, who retired last August, said he doesn’t recall being aware of the Committee To Take Back Our Judiciary at the time of the legal battle over the election recount.

“We just knew that there were a lot of people that were upset with the court,” said Harding, a registered independent who this month became a shareholder at Ausley & McMullen in Tallahassee. “There was no mood of intimidation, just a concern that the issues presented be fairly considered and ultimately ruled on.”

Mocked McCarty’s defense

The commission found that McCarty falsely certified the accuracy of a campaign disclosure report, and that she and the committee accepted excessive contributions, incurred expenses illegally and made an unauthorized expenditure to fund the fundraising letter.

According to state law, the FEC can impose civil penalties up to three times the amounts involved in a violation. The potential $450,000 fine McCarty faces is tied to the $150,000 loan.

She is personally liable, and was questioned about her assets and ability to pay during the hearing.

The nine-member FEC commission consists of five Republicans and four Democrats appointed by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, based on recommendations from legislative leaders.

The FEC ruling was based on findings and recommendations from an administrative law judge who presided over a two-day hearing that took place in February in West Palm Beach and Tallahassee. In his May 1 order, Judge Hooper issued findings that McCarty had committed willful violations of state election law, including signing and certifying as accurate a campaign treasurer’s report she knew nothing about.

Hooper’s 36-page order found that McCarty knowingly violated Section 106.07(5) of the Florida Statutes governing the preparation of campaign treasurer reports, and that she wrongly relied on “Mr. Stone’s operatives to accurately prepare the report.”

“Despite warnings on the face of the document she signed, she nevertheless made no attempt to determine if the report she submitted was correct,” the order reads. The warning says it is a first-degree misdemeanor to falsify a public record in Florida. No criminal charge has been brought against McCarty.

Nevertheless, Hooper recommended to the FEC that it dismiss the case against both McCarty and the committee. McCarty, he wrote, hadn’t broken the law because a 1999 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida had struck down the state’s regulation of PACs as unconstitutionally overbroad. The FEC subsequently rejected Hooper’s legal interpretation on this issue as well as his recommendation to dismiss the case.

At the hearing, FEC counsel Lipman mocked McCarty’s claim that she was duped by Stone. He called that “the Sergeant Schultz defense,” after the character on the old “Hogan’s Heroes” TV show. “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing. … And nothing could be further from the truth,” Lipman said, according to a hearing transcript.

Stone recruited her

The investigation of McCarty and the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary started with a June 2001 complaint sworn out by Andy Martin, a Palm Beach County political activist and perennial Republican candidate for office who currently is running for the U.S. Senate.

Following the probe by elections commission staff, an order of probable cause was filed with the commission last August. The charges included one count of willfully certifying to the correctness of a campaign treasurer’s report that is incorrect, false or incomplete; one count of violating a statute that prohibits an officer or agent of a political committee from incurring a campaign expense without enough money on deposit to pay for those expenses; nine counts of accepting campaign contributions over the $500 limit; one count of failing to report a contribution and a count that makes it illegal to make or authorize a prohibited expenditure.

At her hearing, McCarty testified she was drafted into the presidential recount battle on the morning after the Nov. 7 election meltdown in Florida. Top Republicans recruited her to oversee the ballot recount in Palm Beach County, home of the notorious butterfly ballot that confused many voters. Members of the Bush-Cheney campaign “took up residence in my office,” she said.

The recount controversy landed before the Florida Supreme Court the week after the election when Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the Florida co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to grant the request of the Gore-Lieberman campaign for a recount. On Nov. 21, the state Supreme Court unanimously decided to give Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties more time to finish hand recounts sought by Gore.

McCarty testified that between Nov. 13 and Nov. 16, Stone called her at her home. “He explained to me that people were very, very upset with the way the Florida Supreme Court was conducting itself, and that in Florida we have a merit retention system.”

A few weeks later, on Dec. 8, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, ordered the then-stalled recount to resume and be extended statewide. Four days after that, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore, effectively shut down the recount, prompting Gore to concede the election to Bush.

McCarty testified she previously had met Stone at a campaign fund-raiser for Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and that they had worked together briefly when she considered running for Congress in the late 1990s. So, when Stone told her he was forming a committee “for the purposes of taking action against the Florida Supreme Court” — which is what Judge Hooper subsequently found — she decided to go along.

Dianne Thorne of Miami Beach, who became the committee’s treasurer, testified in a deposition that Stone asked for her help in setting up the committee’s clerical operation. Thorne said Stone had contacted her because she used to date his son. The committee listed as its business address a box at a USA Pack & Post on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.

On Thanksgiving Day 2000, according to McCarty’s testimony, Stone faxed her the text of a fund-raising letter to which she’d agreed to lend her name. Later, McCarty said, Stone and his associates arranged to file all the necessary paperwork to create the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary. The FEC investigators found that the papers sent to the Florida Department of Elections to establish the committee were sent from the Washington office of Ikon Public Affairs, according to documents in the FEC’s case file.

McCarty testified that the original version of the fund-raising letter she was asked to review did not target specific Florida Supreme Court justices. But the final version that went out the first week of December did. She said she didn’t approve it, but acknowledged she didn’t object either. “I just decided that I would be held accountable for something that I agreed to get into,” she said. “And wherever it took me, I would just be the one to take the lumps.”

Who fronted the money?

McCarty’s “Dear Friend” letter was shrill. “Were you as outraged by the Florida Supreme Court’s efforts to highjack [sic] the presidency for Al Gore as I was?” the letter asked. “It was an outrageous, arrogant power-grab by a left-wing court which is stuck in the liberal 60s… We must raise at least $4.5 million by the ‘Vote No’ campaign to organize Florida voters to reject the retention of these three liberal Supreme Court justices.”

The direct mail fund-raising campaign cost $150,000. According to Judge Hooper, Stone came up with the money that committee campaign records later listed as a “loan” from an Alexandria, Va.-based firm called Creative Marketing. The mailing address reported by the committee for Creative Marketing was the same as that of the Stone Group, a fund-raising and marketing firm owned by Roger Stone’s ex-wife, conservative Republican activist Ann Stone. Investigators could find no company by the name of Creative Marketing.

McCarty said Roger Stone told her he and his partner, Craig Snyder, would be personally responsible for repaying the $150,000 that funded the “Dear Friend” mass mailing.

State investigators did not subpoena bank records that possibly could have identified the source of the $150,000.

There were also questions about who the money went to. Judge Hooper found that Roger Stone “or his organization” actually paid the $150,000 not to Creative Marketing but to a Virginia company called Unique Graphics and Design, which, according to Virginia state corporate records, had as its principals Ann Stone and Lora Lynn Jones. The committee subsequently paid Unique Graphics an additional $50,000 in May 2001 for purposes that remain unclear.

Last November, Lora Lynn Jones testified in a deposition that it was Roger Stone who hired Unique Graphics for the Florida work, gave her “marching orders,” and was responsible for paying the tab for the fund-raising letter. Jones said she asked for and received the entire $150,000 payment by wire, in advance, because Stone had “burned” her once before on a job.

Neither Hooper nor the FEC determined why the committee listed Creative Marketing rather than Unique Graphics as the recipient of the payments. In another anomaly, a Daily Business Review examination of Virginia state corporate records found that Unique Graphics was not a legal entity when the two payments of $150,000 and $50,000 were made and received. The company’s charter was terminated in 1994, and the firm was purged from the state’s records in 1999.

And despite state records showing that Ann Stone was a principal of Unique Graphics, Jones said she was the sole owner and employee. She also said, however, that she was a longtime employee of the Stone Group.

Neither Ann Stone nor Jones returned calls seeking comment.

Lobbied for Miami-Dade

Stone’s service as a Republican Party political operative dates back to his work on President Nixon’s notorious CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The Watergate break-in was traced to CREEP, though Stone was not implicated in the scandal.

More recently, Stone has worked on high-profile Florida issues. Last year, his lobbying firm, Ikon Public Affairs, was paid $1.8 million by Miami-Dade County to defeat a statewide referendum on a constitutional amendment that county leaders feared would erode local autonomy by allowing the Legislature to propose changes in the county’s home rule charter. The referendum failed.

The County Commission waived routine bid procedures to give the lobbying contract to Ikon. In 1996, Stone helped Florida sugar growers defeat a statewide ballot initiative that would have imposed a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to restore the Everglades. Recently, Stone, 50, incorporated a Miami Beach company called Fairbanks LLC with his wife, Nydia.

Stone previously has gotten into trouble for activities that bear some resemblance to the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary events. In 2000, the New York State Temporary Lobbying Commission fined Donald Trump’s Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc., the Institute for Law and Society and Stone, their lobbyist, $250,000 as part of a settlement that ended an investigation into unreported lobbying expenses.

The lobbying campaign sought to scuttle legislation permitting the Mohawk Indians to build a casino that would have competed against Trump’s Atlantic City casinos.

A lobbying commission investigation found that the direct mail campaign sponsored by the purportedly public-minded Institute for Law and Society was actually orchestrated by Trump and Stone, with the true source of funding hidden from the state’s voters. As part of the settlement, Stone and Trump publicly apologized for misleading the public “concerning the production and funding of the lobbying effort.”

Fort Lauderdale attorney Mitchell Berger, a major fund-raiser for the Gore-Lieberman campaign who was part of Gore’s recount legal team, said the activities of the Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary should be investigated further.

“There were a lot of things that happened at the time that went unreported and that for the sake of history and for the sake of understanding how our government worked need to be looked at,” said Berger, chairman of Berger Singerman.

“To threaten members of the judiciary with removal at the time cases are pending is not the way our founding persons intended our democracy to function.”

 

Here's the link...

http://www.dailybusinessreview.com/news.html?news_id=27057

 

By the way, this is interesting if you've never seen it before...

These are some of the folk who staged a riot at the Miami canvassing board and shut down the recount. Most of them are present or past employees of Congressional Republicans. The "riot" was led by Rep. John Sweeney of upstate NY.