BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

(Photo: Colin Brown)Despite raising $13 million dollars, the organization called The National Draft Ben Carson for President “isn’t affiliated with Ben Carson and the small percentage of money it spent on independent expenditures didn’t go to him” More than a few right-wing PACS make “large payments to vendors who were owned by people who worked for the PAC,” and contribute little to causes and candidates it professes to be raising money for.

Those are a few of the revelations a researcher uncovered after he was hired by John Hawkins to investigate how a number of conservative organizations were spending the millions of dollars in donations they raised from their supporters.

John Hawkins is profoundly conservative. His right-wing credentials are impeccable. He runs a website called Right Wing News, which posts stories from a who’s who of conservative columnists and bloggers. He has authored numerous liberal-bashing articles including: “5 Reasons Liberals Hate Soldiers Like Chris Kyle,” “15 Statistics That Destroy Liberal Narratives,” “Refuting 7 Lies Liberals Have Told Millennials About Conservatives,” and “On Behalf of the Patriarchy, Liberal Feminists Can Kiss Off.”

While recognizing that “Reports about sleazy activities by conservative groups have not exactly been in short supply over the last couple of years, … pop[ing] up in the Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Washington Post, the Politico and at the Daily Caller among other outlets,” many conservatives were pre-disposed to write them off as liberal “hit pieces,” Hawkins wrote in a February 20 Right Wing News piece headlined, “50 Million Down The Tubes: How 17 Conservative PACs Are Spending Their Money.”

Hawkins had hired Jay Batman, described by Hawkins as "an experienced researcher," to dig into the issue. Batman produced "an in-depth 170-page report on 21 big name conservative groups [later reduced to 17] ... focus[ing] on big name organizations along with other groups that had been targeted in reports by other media outlets."

Hawkins pointed out that doing the research wasn't an easy task: "Very few people are capable of adequately researching this information, some of these groups are quite adept at hiding what they're doing and there are gaps in the law that potentially allow for some very shady activities to occur under the radar."

Hawkins and company found that ten of the PACs it investigated "spent $54,318,498 and only paid out $3,621,896 to help get Republicans elected."

Organizations covered by the report include: Tea Party Army; Republicans for Immigration Reform; The National Draft Ben Carson for President; Tea Part Express/Our Country Deserves Better PAC; Americans for Legal Immigration; Madison Project, Inc.; SarahPAC; One Nation PAC; Teaparty.net Leadership Fund; Tea Party Patriots; Senate Conservatives; Americans for Prosperity; FreedomWorks for America Super PAC; Black Conservatives Fund; American Crossroads; Republican Main Street Partnership; Club for Growth Action.

Hawkins provided the nuts and bolts of how these scams unfold:

"Let's say Ronald Reagan is still alive and someone starts the Re-Elect Ronald Reagan To A Third Term PAC. Because people love Reagan, let's suppose that conservative donors pony up $500,000 to help the organization. However, the donors don't know that Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the PAC. Furthermore, the real goal of the PAC is to line the pockets of its owner, not to help Ronald Reagan. So, the PAC sets up two vendors, both controlled by the PAC owner: Scam Vendor #1 and Scam Vendor #2. Let's assume it costs $50,000 to raise the half million the PAC takes in. Then, the PAC sends $100,000 to the first company and $100,000 to the second company to 'promote Ronald Reagan for President.' Each of the companies then goes out and spends $1,000 on fliers. The 'independent expenditures' that show up on the FEC report? They're at 40%. That's because the FEC doesn't require vendors to disclose how much of the money they receive is eaten up as overhead. The dubious net benefit that Ronald Reagan receives from an organization that raised $500,000 on his name? It's $2,000. On the other hand, the net profit for the PAC owner is $448,000. Is that legal? The short answer is, 'It's a bit of a grey area, but, yes, it is legal.'"

How can that be? Well, election law is complex, onerous and difficult to follow, but after setting a few clear boundaries, it gives groups a wide latitude in how they spend their money. Additionally, there is also very little public oversight for these groups because figuring out how these groups are spending their money is far too complex for the average person. Moreover, few conservative media outlets are willing to report on what's going on for obvious reasons. For example, my partner, who helped put this together, once worked for two of the groups that were investigated — Tea Party Express and TheTeaParty.net. She also had business dealings with The Tea Party Army, among others. I've worked with theTeaParty.net and have friends, acquaintances and people I've cooperated with on various projects at a number of these PACs. Are they going to be happy with us if they lose donors because a report comes out showing that they could have done a better job of spending their money? Probably not. These kind of connections understandably discourage a lot of conservative journalists from digging too deeply into these organizations out of fear they'll find something that will hurt their friends or sources. On top of all that, it's always possible that a report like this can turn people off to donating to grassroots groups altogether. While that's certainly not what we want to happen, when you start to realize that the bottom 10 performing PACs we researched spent $54,318,498 overall and only paid out $3,621,896 to candidates, that risk is worth taking given how much damage is already being done to the conservative movement.

Of particular interest is Hawkins description of the way PACS move money around, often making "large payments to vendors who were owned by people who worked for the PAC."

He added: "On a personal note, even though I had heard a lot of anecdotal stories and had read what other news organizations had to say, I have to admit that I was shocked by how bad the numbers are for many of these groups. One of the things I realized while I was putting this report together is that perhaps the biggest reason grassroots candidates have been having trouble breaking through in recent years is because such a large percentage of the money that was intended for them is being siphoned off to vendors, wasted, and just plain old pocketed by people in these PACs."

In an e-mail exchange, Hawkins told me that "The bottom ten organizations that we hammered obviously haven't been thrilled with it, but none of them has an effective response; so they've mostly stayed quiet. Still, one of the groups offered my partner Tiffiny Ruegner a job -- which she, of course, declined. Another group protested privately to me that it may have blown through north of ten million dollars, but it had 'trained' lots of volunteers, which I didn't find to be a very convincing argument.

"A friend told me that when she contacted someone at another organization to ask her about the report, she tried to play it off as a hit piece designed to cut off conservative groups at the knees, but she was unable to give any defense for the numbers the organization put up. There was also a large staff walk-out at one of the PACs we profiled, although it's impossible to know how much of a role the report played in that, if any."

Asked whether the report might change things, Hawkins thought that it would, but that "it's hard to say how much." Hawkins pointed out that "Because the report got so much play, the conservative media is aware there's a problem and these PACs now know they're being watched and evaluated on their performance for the first time. Additionally, that report isn't going away. It's going to come up again and again over the next couple of years as other journalists cover the issue."

In "Fifty Million Down The Tubes," Hawkins recommended that "donors should be asking ... how much of their money actually made it into these races where it was desperately needed." That is a question that goes beyond partisanship. Liberal donors should be asking the same thing about organizations they support.