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CRP: PMA Group, clients donated to 516 members of Congress
Lindsay Renick Mayer of the Center for Responsive Politics writes on OpenSecrets.org about PMA Group, the lobbying firm that specialized in defense appropriations and that is reportedly under investigation for campaign finance irregularities:
No matter how we slice and dice the data related to contributions from embattled lobbying firm PMA Group and its clients, Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, remains at or near the top of the recipient list, along with Reps. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) and Jim Moran (D-Va.). This week, though, we took yet another look at the contributions from the firm that specializes in securing federal earmarks for its clients, this time analyzing all donations from the firm and its clients back in time to all members of the 111th Congress, plus President Obama….
Since 1998, the firm and its clients have given $40.4 million total to the candidate committees and leadership PACs of 516 lawmakers–nearly every member of the current Congress–with Democrats collecting 58 percent of that. President Obama is high on the list, having collected $905,700 from the firm and its clients, ranking him fourth among all recipients after Murtha, Visclosky and Moran. One caveat about Obama’s total: Because presidential contenders raise so much more money than congressional candidates, they tend to rank highly on lists like this one. PMA represented some very large companies, whose employees supported Obama, but the lobbying firm’s own people gave him a total of $4,225 in the 2004 and 2008 cycles.
OpenSecrets.org also has a downloadable spreadsheet of contributions — available in the post. I know they looked at contributions to members;
I wonder if t* They also included Leadership PACs. I see a lot of PMA Group clients among the donors to Murtha’s leadership PAC.*Update: Massie Ritsch, CRP’s indispensable spokesperson, tells me they did include leadership PACs in the analysis — something I probably would have noticed if I’d had a full cup of coffee before posting this…
Oh, and don’t miss this Politico story on Murtha’s use of a university as a front group to funnel money to PMA Group clients — an awful lot of PMA Group clients are listed as partners of the Electro-Optics Alliance, a joint venture of Penn State University and the Office of Naval Research.
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Does Congress think Detroit is a good investment?
It appears that the auto bailout is stalled for now, as congressional leadership and the Bush administration have come to loggerheads over providing $25 to $50 billion in loans to General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Chrysler.
I found it interesting that, as of December 2007 (the most recent date for which disclosures are available), just 27 of the 535 members of Congress owned stock in at least one of the big three automakers, according to Open Secrets. They disclosed holdings worth between $755,000 and $1,866,000. Exclude Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., from the list (his wife is on GM’s payroll, and presumably the source of his $650,000 to $1.35 million in General Motors stock), and the numbers drop to a low range of $104,600 and a high range of $516,000–an average of between about $4,000 and $20,000.
By contrast, 90 members reported owning between $11.3 million and $32.8 million in stock from General Electric, which was the most popular investment.
It would appear that moving a bailout for Detroit, with the exception of Rep. Dingell, doesn’t represent much in the way of a conflict of interest for most members. The 12 members who invested in General Motors are here; the 18 who invested in Ford are here; and the 3 who invested in Chrysler are here. It will be interesting to see, in June 2009, how much those holdings changed over the course of 2008.
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North Carolina Businessman Pays for Campaign Ads
In late July this year, two North Carolina state legislators and a pharmaceutical industry executive set up a political non-profit to run ads focusing on the present financial crisis ahead of the November election. The nonprofit has spent more than $600,000 to produce the ads, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.
Real Time has been following various ads using our new “Follow the 527s” widget, available on the right side of the site.
The nonprofit, RightChange.com, Inc., was set up by a pair Republican lawmakers, state Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, Jr. and state Rep. Jeff Barnhart. At least $2.75 million of the money used to fund the ads comes from Fred Eshelman, a local entrepreneur and CEO of Pharmaceutical Product Development, a company based in Wilmington, N.C. Ernest Mario, who serves on the board of Pharmaceutical Product Development, contributed $1 million.
On Sept. 30, RightChange submitted documents to the FEC disclosing that Eshelman made donations to the nonprofit to pay for two ads, titled ‘Angry’ and ‘Fought Reform,’ which were paid for with the donations from Eshelman and Mario.
In addition to RightChange.com, the two North Carolina lawmakers have another connection to Eshelman and Mario. Last year, Hartsell sponsored state funding for a bio-tech research center jointly funded by taxpayer dollars and private businesses. The amount of public funding for the project, the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, N.C., became a contentious issue; the House proposed spending only $1 million. Ultimately, Hartsell’s measure, which called for $26 million for the campus, was approved in August 2007.
In April 2008, Eshelman’s company put out this press release saying that Pharmaceutical Product Development was opening an office at the Kannapolis facility which will bring jobs to the area by attracting researchers and bio-tech experts.
Hartsell and Barnhart started another nonprofit, Alliance for Tomorrow, to promote the research campus. According to news reports in the Charlotte Observer, the nonprofit does not disclose the identity of its donors. The group “achieved notoriety for advocating for the use of Tax Increment Financing,” — which earmarks property taxes for specific development projects — “and because its own source of funding is unknown,†the paper reported.
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Legislation Languishes in Congress as Miners Fight for their Benefits
Glen Charles, who had been a miner in West Virginia for 42 years, was diagnosed as having black lung, for which he received benefits under the Black Lung Act up to the time of his death in August 2005. Under federal law, surviving spouses of miners who die from the disease are eligible to continue receiving those benefits. But soon after Charles died, his checks stopped arriving, leaving Emma Charles, his 75-year-old widow, financially unstable.
She had to file a claim to continue receiving his benefits, which the Labor Department’s Office of Administrative Law Judges denied.
Under current law, survivors receive benefits only if it is proven that a miner died of complications related to black lung. In Charles’ case, the death certificate listed pneumoniae as the cause of death, due to complications from pneumoconiosis - the medical term for black lung - and two other ailments. However, an administrative law judge that ruled on his widow’s claim set aside the death certificate, and, in an August 2007 decision, concluded on the basis of expert witnesses who reviewed Charles’ medical records that his death was not due to black lung.
The following month, Emma Charles wrote to her congressional representative and senators explaining her situation. In a letter to Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W. Va., she noted that he had introduced legislation that would allow her to receive her husband’s black lung benefits, which has languished in the House Labor and Education Committee since February 2007. Similar bills have been introduced four times earlier but have always died in the House.
“I have the understanding that you are trying to get the legislature to pass a bill that whenever a coal miner pass away and had been drawing a monthly check the widow would automatically draw a check,” the letter reads. “Please hurry up and get that bill passed.”
Rahall has introduced the same legislation four times since 1999, but it has never made it to a hearing. This legislation is an amendment to the Black Lung Act “requiring eligible survivors of a miner determined to be eligible for black lung benefits to file a new claim or re-file or otherwise revalidates the miner’s claim,” according to the bill language.
The mine workers unions have also been pushing for this specific change and seem positive that the bill will pass in this legislative session. “Now with the Democrats in both the Houses, there is a real possibility that the bill passes and it has gotten additional importance in this session,” Grant Campbell, General Counsel for the United Mine Workers of America said.
But although unions and some coal country constituents are hopeful, congressional insiders think it’s unlikely that the bill will pass in this session.
According to a senior legislative aide in the education and labor committee, they have a “busy agenda” and there is no date set for a hearing of this bill as yet. It’s unlikely a date will be set.
Since the beginning of Sunlight’s congressional correspondence FOIA project, we have received scores of letters from black lung claimants, recipients and their survivors, seeking assistance from their elected representatives with their cases. These letters are generally written to members of Congress by constituents and are forwarded on to the Department of Labor’s Office of Administrative Law Judges to follow up on the specific queries constituents have written expressing concern with their benefit claims.
Charles’ widow was one such case Sunlight became aware of through our on-going FOIA project. We recently received, from the Office of Administrative Law Judges, correspondence covering the month of January 2008, which included 22 letters from constituents to various members of Congress seeking help with black lung claimes. Eleven of those were sent to Rahall.
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Oversight Committee Seeks for More Blackwater Documents
Rep. Henry Waxman’s oversight committee sent out letters today to the Department of Defense, the Department of State and to Blackwater CEO Erik Prince asking for various sets of documents regarding contracts going back to 2003.
Among other issues, the seven-page letter to Erik Prince raises questions about all the no-bid contracts Blackwater has been given and asks the company to hand in documents detailing the hourly billing information that Blackwater charges the State department.
In the letter to DoD the Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform touched upon an earlier letter from Mar. 31, 2007 in which he had asked for “all incident reports, investigative reports and all other documents relating to complaints or allegations of misconduct.” It’s not clear from the letter though whether the March letter was in reference to all
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Congressional Oversight of Blackwater Hampered by Lack of Documents
Nine months before Blackwater
One member who requested information to bring some oversight and accountability to the Blackwater found that neither the State Department nor the Defense Department complied with his request for documents.
On Jan. 29, 2007, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., wrote to the Secretary of Defense asking for all documents relating to Blackwater contracts. “The Congressman read news articles about Blackwater’s various missions for U.S. government agencies overseas which prompted him to contact the Defense Department,” Brian Alberts, a spokesman for Cohen, wrote via e-mail. “We also sent an identical letter to the State Department on the same day, but they never responded.”
In the weeks preceding Cohen’s inquiry, Blackwater was involved in a number of incidents that received press coverage; the most widely reported involved a Christmas Eve shooting by a Blackwater employee of an Iraqi security officer and a mid-January crash of a Blackwater helicopter. Blackwater was also in the news for other issues, including getting a contract to train military personnel in
Alberts was uncertain which story prompted Cohen’s inquiry.
Other members of Congress appear to have been prompted to seek information on Blackwater on behalf of constituents concerned about the company, logs of correspondence between members of Congress and the Defense Department show.
Our Freedom of Information Act requests for the letters themselves are still pending; Cohen’s office emailed us a Word document containing the text of his letter.
Three Months Later
The Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) replied to Cohen’s letter on April 24 — long after the Feb. 5 deadline Cohen set in his letter — and provided a list of Blackwater contracts, but none of the actual contract documents that Cohen had requested. That list was not comprehensive, but included only contracts administered by the OSD.
In its reply, OSD also informed Cohen that his letter was being treated as a FOIA request, which seems to be the accepted procedure for all requests even from Members of Congress. According to these Department of Justice guidelines, if a congressional request for oversight information from does not come from a committee or subcommittee chairman, it is to be treated as a regular FOIA request. As journalists can well attest, that means that very often members’ offices need to wait months before receiving any documents.
OSD’s response to Cohen further suggested that for the actual contract documents, the representative’s office would have to send out FOIA requests to agencies within Defense — the Army, Navy, Air Force, Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Special Operations Command, for example — directly. Alberts told us that Cohen’s office is planning on sending out FOIA requests to these departments for further information but has yet to do so.
As for the State Department, Cohen’s office has taken no action since sending out its initial request for information on Blackwater.
The limited information that Cohen’s office received shows that Blackwater does far more than provide bodyguards in
Since 2000, Blackwater
Constituent Claims about Blackwater
The other five letters were directed to the assistant secretary of Defense for legislative affairs; letters directed to this office are generally inquiries from constituents forwarded by members of Congress, according to Dave Martinez, a DoD Freedom of Information official. The subject of one such letter, sent in January to DoD from the office of Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., was “About Blackwater USA Contracts,” according the correspondence log.
Two other letters from constituents, forwarded to DoD by the office of Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in April have intriguing, if harsh, subject lines reading, “Blackwater is running around with military weapons doing military things they should be held accountable just like the agency” and “Stop Erik Price the founder of Blackwater”
The subject of a May letter sent by the office of Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W. Va., was “Concern regarding the actions of Lieutenant General Gary North in response to an attack by Blackwater USA,” most likely a reference to court martial proceedings held for two Air Force personnel who had an altercation with a Blackwater employee. All charges against the men were ultimately dropped; Lieutenant General Gary North was head of Central Command of the Air Force during the case.
The office of Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wis., sent a letter in May from a constituent “Concerned about tax dollars paying to fund private militia Blackwater,” according to the DoD correspondence log. Although Kohl’s office did not release the letter, they confirmed that it was from a constituent asking DoD to release information on “what services the federal government has paid Blackwater for and the amounts of the contracts,” Joe Bonfiglio, Kohl’s press secretary said.
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Department of Energy correspondence logs
This article in the Washington Post yesterday on the earmarking process cites letters sent to the Department of Energy written by members of Congress including Rep. Rahm Emanuel in support of projects at the Children’s
We recently received the correspondence logs from DOE and there were at least 15 similar letters. Although none of these seem to have actually secured the funding, we have found that writing in support of a specific project is not unique to just one lawmaker or only to the DOE either. For instance EPA’s correspondence list several organizations that have received backing from various lawmakers.
Other than letters asking for funding this set of DOE logs also list letters written by Rep. Henry Waxman, where he asks DOE to preserve any communications received from the White House officials using Republican National Committee or other nongovernmental e-mail accounts.
Another letter from Rep. Brad Miller, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight “requests information from the DOE regarding whether any similar meetings of employees occurred at which results of the past elections or political strategies for future elections were discussed…”
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Office of Administration not subject to FOIA
According to this AP article, the Justice Department is maintaining that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
The argument for this seems to be that the OA is not an “agency” as defined by FOIA. But in the past year, the Office of Administration has processed 65 FOIA requests, as AP reports. The OA also replied to one of our FOIA’s this year asking for correspondence logs, although a letter sent to us stated that “OA conducted a search and found no OA records responsive to your request.”
This Justice Department reply comes in response to the lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a D.C. watchdog group, (and a Sunlight grantee) after their FOIA request to find out about the five million missing e-mails was denied.
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Letters from Defense
We just received few of the letters we had requested from the Department of Defense from the January batch of correspondences. We received only a partial response to the FOIA where we had selected specific letters from the correspondence logs.
The other letters will come in if we manage to convince DoD that we are entitled to a fee waiver or shell out the money.
The letters we have are here. Most of them are about congressional travel requests that were made to the DOD. More interesting ones, including ones about whistleblower complaints and those related to contracts are being withheld for now.
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Congressional-DoD correspondence visualization
Why should the Sunlight Labs guys get all the fun? I loaded the subject lines of the correspondence logs referenced immediately below into Many Eyes, which our co-conspirator Josh Ruihley used to create our Earmarks Visualizations. So what words turn up most frequently in the subject lines of letters members write most frequently about to the Office of the Secretary of Defense? Al Qaeda? Military contracts? National Guard? Body Armor? See for yourself.
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