By Bonnie Tenneriello

Dec. 20— Documents just released by the Federal Election Commission show that Attorney General John Ashcroft engaged in serious campaign finance violations during his 2000 Senate campaign.

Ashcroft participated in a patently phony deal that allowed a political action committee he founded and controlled to transfer a highly valuable mailing list to his campaign committee. The donation of the list — which cost more than $1.7 million to create — flaunts campaign contribution limits.

Yet a divided FEC just winked at the arrangement, slapped the committees with a small penalty, and let Ashcroft himself off scot-free. This leaves it up to the federal courts to force the FEC to do its job, and the Justice Department should also appoint a special prosecutor to conduct a criminal inquiry.

Acting on a complaint filed by the National Voting Rights Institute, the Alliance for Democracy, Common Cause and two Missouri voters, the FEC conducted an investigation which reveals that Ashcroft’s campaign committee and Spirit of America PAC (SOA), founded and controlled by Ashcroft, constructed a fig leaf of a contract to cloak their illegal transaction. Under the agreement, SOA gave Ashcroft exclusive rights to the list in exchange for the use of his name or likeness. In other words, Ashcroft gets the mailing list, and the PAC he formed gets to use his name or image — which the PAC had already been using for free for more than six months.

The FEC’s legal staff flatly rejected the idea that this was an exchange of equal value. Commissioner Ellen Weintraub wrote, “Not only was it not commercially reasonable, it appears to have been virtually unprecedented in the annals of political fundraising.” Yet Ashcroft himself signed off on this unusual agreement, along with then-executive director of Spirit of America Jack Oliver. The arrangement was so odd that Garrett Lott, the treasurer of both committees, had to assure the mailing list company that Ashcroft personally approved of the transfer of rental receipts from SOA to his campaign, and that the mailing list company would be “held harmless” for any claims of illegality.

To buy that the transaction was legal, you also have to buy that SOA gave the list to Ashcroft, rather than to his campaign committee, and then Ashcroft turned around and donated it to the campaign committee himself. As the FEC’s General Counsel’s report observes, the two committees were both controlled by Ashcroft, Lott and Oliver. And as the three dissenting Commissioners note, if Ashcroft really held the list as a personal asset, it should have been disclosed in his United States Senate Public Financial Disclosure Reports.

The two committees created their agreement because they knew that a direct gift of the list from SOA to Ashcroft’s campaign violated federal laws limiting such donations to $10,000 per election cycle; the law treats mailing lists as an in-kind contribution equivalent to cash. Yet the FEC, divided on party lines, closed its eyes to the arrangement, despite the analysis of its own legal counsel. Rather than punish the list transfer, the agency just fined the two committees for the transfer of income generated from the rental of the list — and the penalty, at $37,000, is only a fraction of the minimal estimate of rental income —$112,000. The agency does not appear to have even interviewed Ashcroft himself, much less attempted to hold him accountable.

The FEC’s action came only after a federal lawsuit in which the Alliance and the voters who filed the original complaint with the agency in March 2001 sued it one year later for failing to act on their allegations. That litigation over the FEC’s unlawful delay continues. Now that the agency has turned a blind eye to the core of the complaint, a new lawsuit is coming, which will argue that the penalty is so grossly inadequate as to constitute an effective dismissal of the case. Under law, parties to an FEC complaint can sue when the agency wrongfully dismisses a case. In addition, the complainants will ask the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor to pursue a criminal investigation.

Bonnie Tenneriello is an attorney with the National Voting Rights Institute, a Boston-based public interest law firm specializing in campaign finance reform.

Source: TomPaine.com

Washington, DC, Dec. 23— All images of gay gatherings at national sites, including the Millennium March on the Washington Mall have been ordered removed from videotapes that have been shown at the Lincoln Memorial since 1995 according to a civil service group.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) says that the directive came from National Parks Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy. Murphy is said to have been concerned about pictures in the video that showed same-sex couples kissing and holding hands after conservative groups complained.

The Millennium March held in 2000 to bring attention to LGBT civil rights issues drew tens of thousands of gays and their supporters to the mall for one of the biggest demonstrations since the civil rights and anti-war marches of the 1960s.

Also ordered cut from the tape were scenes of abortion rights demonstrations at the memorial, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations “because it implies that Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion rights as well as feminism.”

In their place, the Park Service is inserting scenes of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial in what Murphy calls a “more balanced” version.

“The Park Service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. “The Bush Administration appears to be sponsoring a program of Faith-Based Parks.”

Last July, Murphy ordered the Grand Canyon National Park to return three bronze plaques bearing biblical verses to public viewing areas on the Canyon’s South Rim. Murphy overruled the park superintendent who had directed the plaques’ removal based on legal advice from the Interior Department that the religious displays violated the First Amendment.

This fall, the Park Service also approved a creationist text, “Grand Canyon: A Different View” for sale in park bookstores and museums. The book by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon is really only a few thousand years old, developing on a biblical rather than an evolutionary time scale. At the same time, Park Service leadership has blocked publication of guidance for park rangers and other interpretative staff that labeled creationism as lacking any scientific basis.

The Park Service is also engaged in an extended legal battle to continue displaying an eight-foot-tall cross, planted atop a 30-foot-high rock outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve in California. PEER Board Member and former-Park Service manager Frank Buono filed suit to force removal of the cross. That suit is now pending before the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Source: 365Gay.com