Well isn’t this interesting. The activist group started by George Soros and former Clinton Administration officials to ensure that George Bush went down in defeat in 2004 has been fined by the Federal Election Committee. The large fine, $775,000, is the 3rd largest in the Committee’s 33 year history. First a little history lesson from my series on The Shadow Party:
To the extent that the Shadow Party can be said to have an official launch date, 17 July 2003 probably fits the bill. On that day, a team of political strategists, wealthy donors, left-wing labor leaders and other Democrat activists gathered at George Soros’ Southhampton estate called El Mirador, on Long Island. Aside from Soros, the most noteworthy attendee was Morton H. Halperin, whom Soros had hired the previous year to head the Washington office of his Open Society Institute.
It was at this meeting that Soros laid out his plan to defeat George Bush in the coming election. No one has published a full list of attendees at the meeting but partial lists are available in accounts that appeared in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. These include an impressive array of former Clinton administration officials, among them Halperin, who – despite his disloyalty as a Pentagon official during the Vietnam War (or mor likely because of it) served eight years under Clinton: first as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and finally as Director of Policy Planning for the Clinton State Department.
The guests at Soros’ estate also included Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta; Jeremy Rosner, former special advisor to Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright; Robert Boorstin, a former advisor to Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin; and Steven Rosenthal, a left-wing union leader who served the Clinton White House as an advisor on union affairs to Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and Ellen Malcolm, found and president of Emily’s list…
[…["by morning," reports Cummings, "the outlines of a new organization began to emerge, and Mr. Soros pledged 10 million to get it started." The name of that organization was America Coming Together (ACT) – a grassroots activist group designed to coordinate the Shadow Party’s get out the vote drive. ACT would dispatch thousands of activists – some paid, some volunteers – to knock on doors and work phone banks, combining the manpower of left-wing unions, environmentalists, abortion-rights activists and minority race warriors from civil rights organization.
And now they have to pay three quarters of a million bucks because of their illegal fundraising activities. Surprised?
The Federal Election Commission has fined one of the last cycle’s biggest liberal political action committees $775,000 for using unregulated soft money to boost John Kerry and other Democratic candidates during the 2004 elections.
While this group folded in 2005 do not think for one minute that they just went away. These same people are starting up more liberal PAC’s to ensure that Hillary gets into the White House. Campaign finance laws be damned.
Hopefully it works as well for them this time as it did in 2004.
One other thing. Did anyone notice this news headlining the nightly news? Splashed across headlines?
Didn’t think so.
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“Did anyone notice this news headlining the nightly news? Splashed across headlines?”
Nope! The “news” media are too busy snickering about Senator Craig. To rephrase what I said in another thread: what’s more important? A pervy Senator or a corrupt cabal perverting our politics?
I don’t recall the MSM mentioning when the GOP 527s were fine.
Group Fined by F.E.C. for Campaign Violations – New York Times: “arlier this year, a conservative group, the Progress for America Voter Fund, paid a $750,000 fine for accepting donations that violated federal restrictions. That penalty was also a tiny fraction of the millions the fund had raised and spent during the 2004 elections.”
In fact, the list of large FEC fines looks pretty bi-partisan, to me…
FEC Selected list of cases In Which the Civil Penalties Are $50,000 or Greater Made Public Between 1980 — Present
But yes, this time the libs are at fault…
“While this group folded in 2005 do not think for one minute that they just went away.”
Do you want them passed away?