Brian Dickerson

Editorial Page Editor

Candidates come and go, but the wealthy donors who finance their campaigns have become a permanent feature of Michigan’s dysfunctional politics, unrestrained by term limits or effective constraints on what they spend to keep sympathetic elected leaders in office.

Most of the time, they exert their influence in secret, abetted by a small army of lawyers and political consultants whose only purpose is to make sure Michigan voters never learn who the donors are or what they seek in exchange for their campaign dollars.

Every TV viewer has seen this army’s work in the so-called independent ad campaigns that bloom across their screens like black mold every election year.

“Thank Judge Melissa Trueheart for standing up to polluters and drug dealers,” the ads suggest, or “Call Sen. John Doe and tell him what you think about his bill to protect child predators.”

If the lawyers and consultants have done their job, there’s no way for viewers to learn that the anonymous party extolling Judge Trueheart’s virtues happens to be the defendant in a high-stakes lawsuit pending before her, or that the real beef with Doe is the senator’s opposition to generous tax breaks for pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Michigan’s toothless campaign-finance law makes it easy to conceal the donors' identity. As long as an ad refrains from explicitly encouraging voters to support or oppose a specific candidate, its sponsors have no obligation to identify themselves or their real interest in the candidates their ads are so transparently engineered to help.

A flagrant foul

So back in 2014, when a shadowy nonprofit group calling itself the Michigan Jobs and Labor Foundation (MJLF) began airing TV spots eliciting support for Republican state Senate candidates Dale Zorn and Kenneth Horn, Michigan’s Democratic Party realized the foundation had slipped up, and demanded that Secretary of State Ruth Johnson enforce the law that requires full disclosure of political expenditures explicitly aimed at electing a specific candidate.

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The Democrats filed their formal complaint with the state Bureau of Elections that Johnson oversees in September 2014. Five months later — four months after Zorn and Horn won their closely contested state Senate races — Melissa Malerman, one of the bureau’s election law specialists, informed MJLF’s lawyers that their client had likely violated Michigan campaign finance law and said the state would attempt to “facilitate an informal resolution” of the Democrats’ complaint.

Then, crickets.

In January 2016, more than 14 months after MJLF broke the law, the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a nonpartisan watchdog group, filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking documents related to the complaint against MJLF.

The state Bureau of Elections never sent the documents it promised Craig Mauger, the MCFN's executive director. But late last month, it quietly posted a 111-page record of its lackadaisical efforts to resolve the matter.

Democrats wanted Johnson’s office to recognize that MJLF had essentially made a direct contribution to Horn and Zorn’s campaigns and require the so-called independent nonprofit educational organization to disclose the identity of its donors, just as a political action committee would be required to.

Instead, the correspondence posted on the SOS website indicates, the MJLF retroactively created a new PAC and decreed that it, not the foundation itself, had paid for the pro-Horn and Zorn TV campaign. That, and a $2,500 fine for filing the paperwork after the fact, seem to have concluded the matter.

A legal fiction

Mauger explains the sleight-of-hand concisely: “The foundation (MJLF) was allowed to create a Super PAC in 2015 and pretend that the Super PAC, which didn’t really exist in 2014, paid for the ads in the fall of 2014,” Mauger says.

“And where did the money come from?" he continues. "Well, of course it came from a $17,696 donation from the nonprofit Michigan Jobs and Labor Foundation.”

Yeah, you may be saying, but who gave the foundation the money that eventually made its way to the Horn and Zorn ads?



And that, under Michigan law, remains none of your business.

Late last week, I called Johnson’s office to ask if the Secretary of State hadn’t essentially allowed the nonprofit MJLF to violate state campaign finance law with impunity and then cover its tracks with a legal fiction.

Johnson’s spokesman, Fred Woodhams, acknowledged that efforts to rectify the violation have been slow, but he insisted that the Bureau of Elections' efforts to broker an informal resolution are continuing.

“The matter is still open," Woodhams said, “and we haven’t given any final word.”

An embarrassing coincidence

There’s one more curious footnote to this protracted affair.

On October 22, 2014 — three weeks after Democrats filed their formal complaint about MJLF’s campaign spending violations with Johnson’s Bureau of Elections — the MJLF donated $150,000 to the Republican State Leadership Committee, a Washington, D.C.-based Super PAC that supports GOP candidates for statewide political office throughout the U.S.

On Oct. 23 — the day after it received MJLF’s donation — the Republican State Leadership Committee sent Johnson’s campaign a check for $5,000.

Coincidence? Probably. Johnson precisely is the sort of candidate that the RSLC exists to help, in any election year.

But the unfortunate timing makes the contribution look like another one of the petty, duplicitous and entirely lawful cash laundering schemes on which Michigan’s thoroughly corrupt campaign finance system is built.

And if Johnson wants to be remembered as anything more than another in a long series of candidates who has benefited from dark money political groups and helped protect their donors’ anonymity, she ought to spend the final years of her tenure lobbying for a campaign finance law that is more than a cruel joke on the voters she serves.

Contact Brian Dickerson: bdickerson@freepress.com