In the years since he left office, former President George W. Bush has mostly stayed out of the public eye, happier to talk about what he’d do with a canvas than what the U.S. should do in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has been more than willing to voice his displeasure with the Obama administration’s handling of challenges abroad. In 2009, not even a year into President Obama tenure, Dick Cheney accused him of “dithering” over sending more troops to Afghanistan, saying Obama “seems afraid” to make a decision. In 2012, Cheney called Obama “one of our weakest presidents.”

And he’s back now — along with his daughter Liz and a host of other former Bush hands — to herald the “collapse of the Obama doctrine.”

This time, though, he’s planted himself on the scene in a more permanent way. Dick and Liz Cheney announced in June the creation of a new 501(c)(4) social welfare group aimed at “reversing” president Obama’s foreign policy agenda.

This new group, called the Alliance for a Strong America, is the latest in a long line of sometimes controversial nonprofits run by the Cheneys.

Alliance for a Strong America

According to a press release, the Alliance for a Strong America “will advocate for a restoration of American strength and power.” In a video accompanying the release, the former veep laments that “the policies of the last six years have left America diminished and weakened. Our enemies no longer fear us. Our allies no longer trust us.”

Standing with her father, Liz Cheney — herself a former high-level State Department official and, more recently, failed Senate candidate in Wyoming — warns that “America’s security depends upon our ability to reverse President Obama’s policies.”

It’s still unclear how exactly ASA will carry out its mission and, in particular, whether that will include running ads aimed at influencing the outcomes of elections. The primary purpose of social welfare groups like ASA — which don’t have to disclose their donors to the public — is not supposed to be political. However, several court decisions and disarray at the IRS have created openings for these groups to pour unprecedented amounts of money into elections without telling voters who is funding the advocacy.

Whatever uncertainty there is about how the Cheneys will deploy ASA, though, the family has years of experience using 501(c)(4)s as megaphones.

Alliance, Beta Version

In 2009, Cheney joined Iraq War proponent Bill Kristol and Debra Burlingame — the sister of an American Airlines pilot who was killed in the 9/11 attacks — to form a group called Keep America Safe.

That group’s mission was substantively identical to what the Alliance now aims to accomplish. For example, Dick Cheney’s statement about keeping the trust of U.S. allies is essentially the same as the wording in Keep America Safe’s proclamation that “the world is a safer place when America is trusted by our allies and feared and respected by our enemies.” The world painted by both groups is a “dangerous” one where “threats to America’s national security are on the rise,” and we must continue to fight “for a strong American military.”

Keep America Safe’s ads criticizing Obama’s foreign policy agenda bore many of the hallmarks of political attack ads: dramatic music, quotes taken out of context, and a call for viewers to “tell” a politician to pursue a certain policy.

At times, the hawkish, unapologetic tone of the group’s videos raised hackles on both the left and the right. When the group released a video that seemed to question the trustworthiness of Justice Department lawyers who had defended detainees at Guantanamo Bay, a letter signed by a “Who’s Who of former Republican administration officials and conservative legal figures” called the ad “a shameful series of attacks.”

Keep America Safe never hired employees, nor did it ever have more than three volunteers in a given fiscal year. The only address it lists is the same Washington, D.C., UPS Store used by other politically active nonprofits, like the shape-shifting liberal 501(c)(4) Citizens for Strength & Security.

Compared to many organizations, Keep America Safe was also operated on the cheap. In its banner year, 2010, it raised just over half a million dollars and spent, by its own account, $354,111 of that on “communications, media, and ads.” The group also claimed more than $227,000 in political expenditures that year, which went towards organizing “a grassroots program that supported certain candidates who held strong beliefs towards the safety of the USA.”

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Keep America Safe could still have a big impact, though. That’s because its main public faces have been frequent media guests and, in some cases, paid contributors at major media outlets. Both Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, for example, have been Fox News contributors over the years, and Debra Burlingame has been a regular guest. The group’s Youtube feed consists almost entirely of their TV appearances.

It’s not clear whether Keep America Safe is still around — it hasn’t filed an official termination with the IRS — but its website and Twitter feed mysteriously disappeared at the same time Liz embarked on a campaign to unseat Wyoming GOP Senator Mike Enzi; she wlthdrew under a hail of criticism for trying to unseat a popular Republican lawmaker.

Mary Has a Little Network

While Liz Cheney and her father have focused primarily on the terrorist threat, Liz’s sister Mary has been building a network of nonprofits with a more domestic focus.

In 2010, Mary Cheney and and two other republican consultants, Barry Bennett and Kara Ahern, started two politically active nonprofits in the office of their consulting firm, BKM Strategies: The Alliance for Freedom and the Alliance for America’s Future.

Cheney and Ahern both have extensive campaign experience, particularly in the Bush years; Ahern, in fact, was an aide to Dick Cheney when he was No. 2 in the White House. But Bennett has made a name for himself managing and consulting for outside groups that are supposed to operate independently from the candidates themselves.

In the late 1990s, he was involved in a scheme to use a nonprofit called the Coalition for Our Children’s Future to channel funds from another nonprofit that Democratic Senate campaign finance investigators believed was funded by Charles and David Koch, into politically charged ads. The money that COCF received from EET was spent on thinly veiled political “issue ads” against 11 Democrats running for state and federal office.

In the post-Citizens United world, Bennett expanded his expertise. During the 2012 elections, Bennett — who had consulted for the pro-Rick Perry super PAC Make Us Great Again — gained notoriety as the producer of the “King of Bain” documentary that was run by the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future and is credited in part for Gingrich’s win in the South Carolina primary.

Nearly 20 years after Bennett’s COCF operation, the use of daisy chains of politically active nonprofits to spend large amounts of undisclosed, “dark” money in elections around the country has become a hallmark of the Koch political network. For their part, Bennett and Cheney have been involved in a smaller network that nevertheless has at least one connection to the Kochs.

Both the Alliance for Freedom and the Alliance for America’s Future were founded in 2010. They both list BKM’s office as their address, and both have BKM staff on their board (Mary Cheney is only on the board of Alliance for Freedom). The two groups are so similar that the wording of their mission statements and program services, described to the IRS in their Form 990s, are identical.

The two groups also shared funds. In their first year of operation, Alliance for Freedom spent 98.8 percent of its overall expenditures on a $4 million grant to the Alliance for America’s Future. The grant made up more than half of AAF’s revenues that year.

Bolstered by the funds it got from Alliance for Freedom, AAF engaged heavily in political activity. It spent more than $700,000 advocating for and against candidates for federal office, and on the state level, AAF ran hundreds of ads in Nevada supporting Brian Sandoval for governor. State election officials demanded that the group register as a PAC — meaning that AAF would have to disclose its donors. AAF refused, so the case went to court.

In the years that followed, Nevada courts rejected AAF’s arguments that the “issue ads” it made didn’t constitute direct advocacy and that it couldn’t be considered a PAC because it had only spent a small percentage of its funds on the Nevada ads. In a settlement reached this year, AAF was required to to register as a political committee in Nevada and disclose the donors that funded its 2010 spending in the state. But in a final twist, the only donor it revealed was another nondisclosing 501(c)(4) linked to the Republican Governors Association.

Since 2010, the pair of BKM 501(c)(4)s has become a trio. The new group — which lists a member of Barry Bennett’s family, Brett Bennett, on its board — is a voter registration effort originally called Faith & Duty Coalition, later changed to Rise Up & Register. Though fundraising has slowed over the years, the three groups have received a combined $1 million from one source: another 501(c)(4) called the Founding Fund, linked to a former Koch Industries senior development associate turned consultant, Frank Sadler. Like the BKM groups, the Founding Fund is run out of Sadler’s offices at Cove Strategies.

The Founding Fund was apparently not the only donor to Alliance for America’s Future in 2012. According to its 2012 filing, a single (undisclosed) donor provided the entirety of its $1.6 million in revenues. That same year, AAF paid an even $1.6 million to BKM Strategies for “consulting” and “vendor payments for grassroots issue adv[cacy]” for something called the “Coal Project Program.”

The future is bright for the whole gang. Frank Sadler has since gone into business with Mary Cheney, Barry Bennett and other GOP operatives — including the head of fellow Founding Fund grant recipient Americans for Job Security’s Stephen Demaura — to form a polling firm called Vox Populi Polling.



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