Adelson Wants to Keep Campaign Donations Secret
Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire gambling maven who contributed more than $20 million to the pro-Gingrich Super PAC, plans to give more money to Republican PACs during this election cycle. After that, he says, he’s going to start contributing to groups that don’t have to disclose where the money came from. Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun reports:
I asked Adelson during the brief interview if he was going to start donating to American Crossroads or its nonprofit adjunct, Crossroads GPS, and he smiled and declined to answer. But a few minutes later, he expressed gushing admiration for Karl Rove, who helped found the groups, and I pressed him again.
“I’m going to give one more small donation – you might not think it’s that small – to a SuperPAC and then if I give it will be to a c4,” a reference to 501c4 nonprofits, which are tax-exempt and also exempt from disclosures. I opined that surely meant Crossroads, which would allow him to indirectly help Mitt Romney and Sen. Dean Heller, who is running against Rep. Shelley Berkley. Berkley used to work for Adelson, but they had a falling out in the mid-1990s and he surely would love to see her lose.
“Do you know how many c4s there are?” Adelson retorted, as if to try to indicate he had more choices than Crossroads. Indeed. But I can’t think of too many that will influence who controls the White House and the U.S. Senate. And did he telegraph where his money is going with the Rove comments? I think so…
Adelson said he believed the media’s inevitable use of the phrase “casino mogul” whenever his donations became public “is not helpful to the person.”
This is why I said when the Citizens United decision came down that companies were not going to start spending money on directly supporting candidates, as that ruling allowed them to do. They don’t want their name on them. They’d much rather give the money to a third party group — Americans for Fluffy Kittens and Kindly Grandmothers — that doesn’t have to disclose where it came from. No politician wants to have commercials on their behalf that say “This ad paid for by BP or Dow Chemical.”
Interestingly, Adelson also told Ralston that he is opposed to legalizing online gaming, which puts him at odds with nearly everyone else in the casino business today (it is a myth that the brick and mortar casinos want to prevent online gambling from being made legal because they want to avoid the competition; in fact, they want in on it).
fredricmartin:
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:23 am
Yeah: about online poker. I played frequently in college, and made good/food money too. I’d have much rather slapped my cash down at a site with a brick and mortar address instead of getting a “my web ATM” account and routing shit behind “7 proxies”, with a chance that the Feds would just LOLSEIZED anytIme they wantEd.
baal:
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:31 am
Yes, Mr. Adelson, that’s exactly why we want to know who is giving politicians money.
inre:
Even if we grant Adelson a legit interest in hiding, do we really want non-US interests funding candidates (of any or no party) via the same donor hiding schemes?
Michael Heath:
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:35 am
Ed writes:
IIRC, the more provocative assertion you made after the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling was that you didn’t think this ruling would have much of an impact on electoral politics. I would be interested in your weighing in on whether you think your prediction remains defensible.
Some help requested, are the so-called Super PACS allowed to hide their donors? I skimmed through some Wikipedia records and could find no mention on whether they could or couldn’t. As I’m sure everyone is aware, there are some super-PACs which are specifically tied to people running for office, e.g., Romney’s Restore our Future. So of course we should be concerned about who is funding certain politicians so we can predict which positions these politicians will take if they win. And even if they don’t win, following such money trails still serves to reveal who is influencing certain political parties.
eric:
May 2nd, 2012 at 11:54 am
The corporations also directly benefit from anonymous donations, because it allows them to play both sides without being seen to do that. Give a million to each candidate, and you are guaranteed to have leverage over that district’s congresscritter regardless of which party wins.
iainr:
May 2nd, 2012 at 12:12 pm
The bricks and mortar casinos wanted on line gambling to be illegal just long enough for the established players like Stars to hoist themselves on their own petards, just like they did, neatly avoiding the problem of having to actually compete with them.
I fully expect to see it legalised now, but with the big non-US sites remaining excluded from the US market….
yoav:
May 2nd, 2012 at 2:19 pm
While Adelson don’t want his contribution public I’m sure that he will make sure that the candidates themselves know exactly where the money is coming from, and are appropriately grateful when dealing with policies that may impact Adelson’s profits.
Marcus Ranum:
May 2nd, 2012 at 3:15 pm
I flushed that much money down the toilet, I’d be embarrassed, too. And I wouldn’t want anyone to know who’d clogged the drain…
inflection:
May 2nd, 2012 at 3:28 pm
I’ve had a thought about these organizations, but I’m not sure where to take it.
Basically, it’s trivially obvious to any observer that, say, Restoring Our Future is the Romney PAC, technicalities of coordination aside. Romney knows who donated to it and the donors know he knows. These “issue ads” run by groups that claim to be “social welfare” organizations are equally obviously political ads for or against a particular candidate. So why not use the “I know it when I see it” test in deciding what code these groups have to pay taxes and report donors under?
If you don’t want to give the IRS the authority to say “no you’re not a tax-exempt organization, you’re in politics” on its own, run it by a jury of 12. If you show a couple of ads to 12 random citizens of a state and it’s obvious enough that you can get them to unanimously say, “yeah, that’s a political ad” — just give them the question of fact, not the administrative penalties that would accrue — then the agencies involved are empowered to treat the organization as it is.
Of course, you could still run in to problems of the partisan veto, where some good old boys get shown an ad their guy’s PAC ran and say it’s politics-free so that their guy can get away with it. But at least the possibility might make a few of the more blatant offenders think twice.
Chris from Europe:
May 2nd, 2012 at 7:52 pm
@Michael Heath
You need another corporation to hide the donations.
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/398531/september-29-2011/colbert-super-pac—trevor-potter—stephen-s-shell-corporation
If I don’t miss something, this could have been largely fixed by Congress.