Newly released emails and audio recordings show top officials from the National Right to Work Committee, a politically active nonprofit that is strongly opposed to labor unions, were extensively involved with a massive off-the-books mass mailing operation for state candidates in 2010. The activities directly contradict statements made to the Internal Revenue Service and may have involved violations of state law. At the center of the emails and audio recordings is a top aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) who was formerly a registered lobbyist for National Right to Work.

In November, OpenSecrets.org reported that a former NRTWC political operative, Dennis Fusaro, had sent a letter to the organization’s board of directors charging that the organization had broken state laws and falsely reported to the IRS that it had not participated in political activities. Fusaro has since released a flood of evidence that appears to back up those claims.

National Right to Work is a 501(c)(4), a so-called social welfare organization that is allowed to lobby and to be politically active, as long as politics isn’t a majority of the group’s work. But that activity must be disclosed on the group’s annual 990 tax forms, which must list the total amount spent on politics. In 2010, and in years since, NRTWC has said it engaged in no political activity and has failed to report any political spending. An affiliated group, Mid-America Right to Work, which operated in Iowa, Indiana and other states, also reported no political activity.

The emails and recordings released this week, though, as well as interviews with some of the candidates involved with the mail program, reveal a great deal of direct political activity involving employees of NRTWC’s operations across the country.

Fusaro In Iowa

One of the strongest pieces of evidence is a recorded phone conversation in which Fusaro and then-NRTWC vice-president Doug Stafford discussed the details of the Right To Work effort in Iowa in September 2010. At the time, Stafford was also a paid political consultant to Rand Paul in his campaign for Kentucky’s open Senate seat. Following the election Stafford became Paul’s chief of staff, and last spring took over operations of Reinventing A New Direction PAC (RAND PAC), Paul’s leadership PAC and base of operations should he decide on a 2016 presidential run.

At the start of the conversation, first posted by conservative blogger Lee Stranahan, Stafford explained to Fusaro that he had shifted a mail printing operation — complete with high-speed printers that he said could run 100,000 pieces of mail in the final weeks before the election — to Indiana. That operation was to be headed by Dimitri Kesari, NRTWC’s director of government affairs. Fusaro and Kesari had feuded, but Stafford wanted Fusaro to understand that the operation was moved because Kesari was needed in Indiana — not as a punishment.

“I fully trust you to handle Iowa,” Stafford told Fusaro. “I hope you will call me on a regular basis and let me know what you need. You will not need to report to Dimitri on the inner workings of the races in Iowa or anything like that. So, let’s have a lot more direct contact on that.”

As the conversation progressed, Stafford and Fusaro discussed Right To Work’s effort in Iowa. The first step was to send surveys to candidates asking their opinions on Right To Work issues, and then sending mailers to voters on how various candidates responded. That type of issue advocacy is permissible for a 501(c)(4) organization and needn’t be reported as political activity, according to several attorneys consulted by OpenSecrets Blog.

However, the next step, as described by Fusaro and Stafford in the conversation, quickly veered into political territory — a “mail program” involving candidate cooperation.

“Part three is candidate mail — selling these candidates in our target districts the mail because we believe this mail program is effective, and can make or break the difference” Fusaro said. “Even in a great year, it can be the difference between a close defeat and a close victory.”

“Absolutely,” Stafford replied. “You can point out the number of candidates who won or lost by 100 votes last time, and do you want to be one of those guys or not?”

Stafford also filled Fusaro in on the number of candidates Right to Work would target in Iowas with its mail program.

LISTEN:

Fusaro briefed Stafford on the status of candidates in the program.

“We’ve got a whole list of people in various stages — some people we’ve got copy, and we need to get them the copy, to get that first candidate approval, others we’ve got the approval, we’re pretty much ready to go to print, but we’re waiting the details of getting them to write the postage check,” Fusaro said.

“Fine, we’re ahead of the game, to a certain extent,” Stafford replied. “I’d like to have everyone’s approval and rolling, but ideally you send the first candidate letter out in 10 days anyway.”

Stafford then instructed Fusaro on what he needed to send to Kesari in the Indiana print shop.

“What if the candidate A says I want to mail all the independents and Republicans, and he’s approved the copy? What do we have to get to Indiana to get that mail out?” Fusaro asked.

“The data and the letter,” Stafford told him. “As soon as you know that’s going to happen … Get the production sheet and the letter and when it needs to be sent. They’ll get it done.”

On Monday, Stranahan posted another leaked email, this one from a NRTWC staffer named Jared Gamble (who passed away last summer) to several operatives, including Fusaro and Kesari, in which he laid out which forms need to be filled out by anyone wanting candidate mail to be sent. In another, also posted by Stranahan, Gamble said he was waiting for “the mail to start pouring in … maybe more candidates have signed onto intros, wife letters, etc.”

Stafford declined to comment for this story, and the National Right to Work Committee did not respond to requests for comment.

Wife letters

Stranahan also posted an email from another NRTWC staffer with drafts of 13 of those so-called “wife letters” — letters written in the name of a candidate’s spouse or child, with personal appeals to vote for them.

Ten of the letters included pertained to Iowa state legislative candidates. The tone of all the letters was intensely personal, frequently describing how the spouse met the candidate and fell in love. Another letter, written in the name of Shawnee Sorenson, the wife of Kent Sorenson — who successfully ran for Iowa Senate in 2010 — expressed outrage at Sorenson’s opponent for publicizing that the couple had filed for bankruptcy.

The level of detailed personal information would have required close involvement with the candidates. OpenSecrets Blog attempted to contact all 10 candidates and ask who wrote the letters. Of those that responded, several said they cooperated with either NRTWC or individuals who are included on internal NRTWC emails about the mail program, while one claimed his wife had written the letter.

“The letter from my wife was written by my wife. I know that the NWRTC encouraged us, but she wrote it,” Mark Chelgren, an Iowa state senator, first elected in 2010, told OpenSecrets Blog, adding that he thought his campaign had sent it out, not any one else.

Stephen Burgmeier, an Iowa House candidate who lost in 2010, confirmed involvement by Right To Work staff.

“My wife and a staffer sat down and penned the letter,” he told OpenSecrets Blog, and said the organization had paid for it, but that was reported on his campaign finance filings as an in-kind contribution.

According to his campaign filings from that election, he reported an in-kind contribution of $1,372.80 from Fusaro, personally, for postage and mailing of a letter. A second in-kind contribution of $61.40 to the Iowans for Right to Work political action committee for reproduction was also reported.

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Nora Dirkx, the wife of Daniel Dirkx, another House candidate who lost in 2010, told OpenSecrets.org that she had worked with a man named Aaron Dorr, the head of Iowa Gun Owners, a group that worked closely with National Right to Work Committee, on the letter. Dorr is included on numerous emails to and from the mail operation in Indiana.

“They put together a whole bunch of letters after interviewing us and finding out what we stood for and stuff,” Nora Dirkx said. “I just spoke with an interviewer and they wrote it out and I had to tweak it and say I liked it or didn’t like it.”

One candidate who did win and is still in office, state Rep. Kim Pearson, referred OpenSecrets Blog’s questions about the draft letter bearing her name to her attorney, and hung up. The attorney is unavailable until Jan. 31.

Sorenson, who resigned from office last fall after an Iowa Senate Ethics investigation into whether he accepted money from the Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul presidential campaigns to endorse them, also refused to speak to OpenSecrets.

But this morning, an email about Sorenson’s “wife letter” appeared on Stranhan’s blog, shedding light on what may have happened.

The email, written by Dorr and sent to the “NRTWIowa” Google group, complains that an early draft of Sorenson’s letter had the wrong city and state.

“Kent begged us to print his materials here because he was nervous that it was going to be screwed up,” Dorr writes. “I assured him that it would be taken care of. What the heck am I supposed to tell him? You could have called if you didn’t know his address.”

What’s not yet clear is whether all of the wife letters were mailed, and if so, whether the candidates involved paid the postage and printing costs.

Consequences

Marcus Owens, the former head of the Internal Revenue Service’s Tax Exempt division and an attorney with Caplin Drysdale in Washington, D.C., said there is no question — that is direct political activity.

“If the (c)(4) (non-profit) put it’s money into it, either by employing the writer who wrote the letters, or paid for any of the various things that would be necessary to do that — whatever is necessary to get the project going and then presumably print and distribute the letters — all that would be political activity,” Owens said. “Even if the candidate reimbursed them.”

Donald Tobin, a professor at the Ohio State University’s Moritz School of Law, who specializes in politically active nonprofits agreed.

“It means there’s really no way to claim that’s not political activity,” Tobin said. “It’s intervention in a political campaign. I don’t see how it’s not. It seems to be clearly political type activity designed to influence an election.”

Although there were several different legal organizations in the mix — NRTWC and Iowa Right to Work (which is incorporated as Mid-America Right To Work), Tobin said that any direction from the national group on this type of activity would make it responsible to disclose political activity on its 990 form.

“If the Iowa organization is a tool of the national organization, it doesn’t matter if they’re separate legal entities,” Tobin said. “Is Iowa doing this at the bidding of the national organization or not?”

Tobin said he did not know of a specific case precedent that would show how failure to properly disclose political activity on the 990 would be handled by the IRS, but said it could be serious if it can be shown that the misrepresentation was a lie and not an oversight.

“If, in fact, someone purposefully lied, that’s a real serious offense,” he said. “But it’s hard to prove someone lied.”

Owens, however, said he believed a case involving the 501(c)(3) organization that manages the college football Fiesta Bowl game might be an analogous example. That group denied participating in political activity but did in fact lobby and did operate an illegal straw donor scheme.

“The organization made political campaign expenditures, reported no disclosure on the 990 and that was enough for an indictment and guilty pleas,” Owens told OpenSecrets Blog.

“Based on what I’ve seen here, this activity is clearly attributable to the (c)(4) and the staff was not under the impression that something else was going on — that these were benign nonpartisan letters. They were intended to drive voters to particular candidates and coordinated with the campaigns,” Owens said. “Bottom line: people have gone to jail for precisely the facts that you are describing.”

National Operation?

The emails and “wife letters” released by Fusaro and posted to Stranahan’s website also strongly suggest that the National Right to Work campaign in Iowa was actually a national operation. They also show behavior consistent with what’s described in one of the most controversial “dark money” stories since Citizens United — the case of Western Tradition Partnership.

Following the 2010 election, a box of documents was found in a meth house in Colorado that appeared to include drafts of “wife letters” and other mailing materials that were connected to a Montana group called Western Tradition Partnership. That group, a 501(c)(4) organization, got involved with Montana campaigns, targeting certain races with floods of last minute “wife letters” and provocative attack mailers and postcards.

The head of WTP was a political operative named Christian LeFer. As it turns out, LeFer was also employed by National Right To Work. In an email posted by Stranahan, apparently from Gamble, LeFer is listed as a lobbyist for NRTWC. Gamble urges recipients of the email never to refer to him as part of an Right To Work program — and places Stafford, Kesari and National Right To Work Committee president Mark Mix in the same category.

Additionally, some of the draft letters from Iowa bear a strong resemblance to letters that were sent in Montana by LeFer’s group.

For example, a 2010 “wife letter” sent in the name of Joanne Miller, the wife of Mike Miller, a candidate for Montana’s House of Representatives, reads:

The draft of the “wife letter” for Chelgren in Iowa has a similar promise:

As does the draft of the “wife letter” for Chad Steenhoek:

A final hint at how large the operation really was comes from the audio recording of Fusaro and Stafford. In it, Stafford told Fusaro what a small cog in the total print shop operation Iowa’s letters would be:

— Robbie Feinberg contributed reporting to this post.



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