Help Wanted - The National Conservative Campaign Fund

[mikelewis]

The National Conservative Campaign Fund is linked to this election by way of Frank J. Donatelli. His wife Rebecca Donatelli owns an Internet strategy shop with a person named Mike Connell. Together they own New Media Communications and Govtechsolutions. New Media Communications ran the Internet Campaign for the Republican party in Ohio. They are currently running the campaign for Blackwell. The remarkable thing about New Media is the fact that every candidate that used this firm won thier race. They have a record of 17 for 17. Here is the original thread.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=201647&mesg_id=201647&page=

I was hoping to get a bio on the members of this fund. A few names I know but most, I do not. Could I get some help fleshing out a picture of who these people are?

Here are the names I recognize:
Angela “Bay” Buchanan {Pat's sister}
Ann Coulter
G. Gordon Liddy
Armstrong Williams




http://www.nccfpac.com/index.html

Here's the members lists

Edwin Meese, III., Honorary Chairman
Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Honorary Vice Chairman

Officers
Thomas L. Phillips, Chairman
D. Jeffrey Hollingsworth, Executive Director
Michelle Easton, Secretary
P. Jay Carven, Treasurer
Marjory G. Ross, Assistant Treasurer

Directors
Joseph A. Cannon, T. Kenneth Cribb, Carol G. Dawson, Frank J. Donatelli, Becky Norton Dunlop, Thomas A. Fuentes, J.A. “Jay” Parker, Ronald E. Robinson, Randal C. Teague

National Advisory Board
Jack Abramoff, George A. Alcorn, Sr., Gary Aldrich, L. Brent Bozell III, Floyd Brown, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Ronald F. Docksai, Alan Dye, Rich Eichler, Tony Fabrizio, George Gilder, Michale P. Gorman, Patrick Gorman, C. Boyden Gray, Phil Hixon, Donald P. Hodel, Terrence P. Jeffrey, John Lenczowski, G. Gordon Liddy, James C. Miller III, Brad O’Leary, Randall Phillips, Fred Potter, Roger Ream, Ralph Reed, Jr., Alfred S. Regnery, William Bradford Reynolds, Ellen Saurbrey, Bret Schundler, Frank Shakespeare, Howard Segermark, John K. Singlaub, Mark Skousen, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Faith Ryan Whittlesey, Armstrong Williams

[Goldeneye]

1. Edwinn Meese:

Edwin Meese III (born December 2, 1931) served as the seventy-fifth Attorney General of the United States (1985 - 1988).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Meese


The Scouting Legal Defense Fund

The Scouting Legal Defense Fund was created to protect Scouting through legal action and public education. The Fund is chaired by former United States Attorney General Edwin Meese who is assisted by a distinguished National Advisory Board

The Scouting Legal Defense Fund is a project of the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) which is dedicated to defending all of the rights in the Constitution. In this respect, it differs significantly from organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which defends only some constitutional rights and even then only as they interpret them.

http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/wolves/meese.htm

[mikelewis]

2. He was implicated in the Promis Scandal

http://geocities.com/Area51/9357/inslaw.html

"The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese's business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election"


"The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS. High government officials were involved, the report states. ... (S)everal individuals testified under oath that Inslaw's PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives."

[mikelewis]

4. Directly involved in Iran-Contra

This guy reminds me of Gonzalez...
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_31.htm

"Attorney General Edwin Meese III became directly involved in the Reagan Administration's secret plan to sell weapons to Iran in January 1986, when he was asked for a legal opinion to support the plan.1 When the secret arms sales became exposed in November 1986, raising questions of legality and prompting congressional and public scrutiny, Meese became the point man for the Reagan Administration's effort, in Meese's words, ``to limit the damage.''"

Meese began with an attempt to justify legally President Reagan's failure to notify Congress of the arms sales for more than a year. His efforts led to a November 21-24 fact-finding investigation focused on the President's involvement in the November 1985 HAWK missile shipment to Iran.

The Select Iran/contra Committees criticized Meese for departing from ``standard investigative techniques'' in his fact-finding mission because he failed to protect National Security Council documents, many of which were altered or destroyed as he conducted one-on-one interviews with senior Administration officials without taking notes.3 The Select Committees also faulted Meese for ``incorrectly'' stating in his November 25, 1986, press conference, at which he disclosed the Iran/contra diversion, that President Reagan did not learn of the 1985 shipment until February 1986. The Select Committees viewed this as an isolated error. It was not.

Meese was conducting the November 21-24 investigation as ``counselor'' and ``friend'' to the President, not as the nation's chief law enforcement officer. Independent Counsel concluded that he was not so much searching for the truth about the November 1985 HAWK shipment, as he was building a case of deniability for his client-in-fact, President Reagan. By this time, Meese knew that the 1985 HAWK transaction, in which the National Security Council staff and the Central Intelligence Agency were directly involved without a presidential covert-action Finding authorizing their involvement, raised serious legal questions. The President was potentially exposed to charges of illegal conduct if he was knowledgeable of the shipment and had not reported it to Congress, under the requirements of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) and in the absence of a Finding. But Meese apparently never questioned the President himself about whether he approved or knew about the November 1985 HAWK shipment. When Meese got answers in his inquiry that did not support his defense of the President, he apparently ignored them, as he did with Secretary of State George P. Shultz's revelation on November 22 that the President had told him that he had known of the HAWK shipment in advance.

[mikelewis]

5. I bet he was pissed at Kerry for Iran/Contra

http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/000945.shtml

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) charged yesterday that Attorney General Edwin Meese III and the Justice Department have shunted aside allegations of illegal transactions involving the rebels in Nicaragua for months and cannot be trusted to conduct a thorough inquiry into the secret money transfers disclosed this week.

"It's like having the fox guard the chicken coop," Kerry said at a Capitol Hill news conference. "Attorney General Meese and others involved in the formulation of this policy, part of the overall politics of the White House, cannot be the ones to clear the air, no matter what their good intent and good will."

Kerry, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he has been conducting an investigation of "the network set up and operated by Oliver North from the National Security Council for almost a year now."

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Ouch!!!

[mikelewis]

8. He is also listed as a PNAC Contributor or Member

http://beyondcomfortablynumb.blogspot.com/2005/01/pnac-members-summer-2003.html

[quispquake]

10. Does anyone remember the "Experts Agree: Meese Is a Pig" Posters?

A bunch of punks plastered these HUGE signs all over DC back in '87 (and I mean ALL OVER...you couldn't turn around without seeing one). One of the best acts of protest I've ever seen...

[GregD]

3. Liddy: the original neo-con

and head of the watergate crew.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy

[mikelewis]

6. This guys a lunatic

http://www.rotten.com/library/bio/misc/g-gordon-liddy/

Liddy's world view is probably best explained by some of the colorful anecdotes he likes to share. At parties, Liddy was known to hold his hand over a candle flame until it burned, in order to demonstrate the merits of willpower, explaining that "the trick is not to mind the pain." Liddy was once afflicted with a fear of rats, so he caught, cooked and ate a rat, just to get over it.

/////////////////
After a few years exploiting his notoriety for TV game show appearances and guest starring roles on programs like "Miami Vice," Liddy took the perhaps inevitable career course laid out before him, and became a syndicated radio talk show host, where he famously dished out advice to would-be nut jobs seeking to protect their constitutional rights. The most infamous of these incidents was a 1994 show in which he advised a caller worried about jack-booted ATF agents kicking in his door: "They've got a big target on there: ATF. Don't shoot at that because they've got a vest on underneath that. Head shot, head shots." He also suggested that groin shots were a good backup plan.


///////////////////////////////
Although he's now well into his 70s, you couldn't tell from looking at him. Liddy credits this suspiciously Faustian longevity to some "scientifically formulated" amino acid supplement that he shills from his Web site, dangling the prospect we could be receiving his thoughtful political insights and his helpful tips on killing federal law enforcement agents for years to come. If the prospect makes you a little uncomfortable, just remember, the trick is not to mind the pain...

[mikelewis]

7. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick - Honorary Vice Chairman - PNAC

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/kirkpatrick/kirkpatrick.php

Highlights & Quotes

Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan administration, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. She has worked for a long line of hardline advocacy groups reaching back to the early 1970s, including the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, the Committee on the Present Danger, Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World, and the notorious Cuban American National Fund, which was founded by fanatic anti-Castro Cuban émigré Jorge Mas Canosa. More recently, Kirkpatrick has supported the work of William Kristol's Project for the New American Century, William Bennett's Empower America, and the Likudnik Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

During the heyday of the Cold War in the 1980s, while the United States was busy rolling back leftist revolutions (and propping up right wing client governments) throughout the Americas, Kirkpatrick became notorious for her efforts to distinguish between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes. She argued that "rightist authoritarian regimes can be transformed peacefully into democracies, but totalitarian Marxist ones cannot. They can be changed only by aiding armed opponents of communism. In the final analysis these enemies of freedom can only be deterred from greater aggression . . . by the military capacities of the United States." (9)

Kirkpatrick's work at the American Enterprise Institute has focused on national security, the United Nations, Europe, Latin America, and the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Her books include The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State, Legitimacy and Force, The Reagan Phenomenon, Dictatorships and Double Standards, Dismantling the Parties, Reflections on Party Reform an Party Decomposition, The New Presidential Elite, Political Woman, and Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study of Peronist Argentina


Institutional Affiliations

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies: Member, Board of Directors (1)
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: Member, Board of Advisors (2)
Freedom House: Member, Executive Committee and Board of Directors (3)
Ethics and Public Policy Center: Chair and Member, Board of Directors (3)
Empower America: Co-Founder and Member, Board of Directors (3)
International Republican Institute: Member, Board of Directors (3)
Henry M. Jackson Foundation: Member, Board of Governors (3)
UN Watch: Member, Board of Directors (3)
American Alternative Foundation: Member, Board of Directors (3)
Institute of American Universities, Aix en Provence, France: Trustee (3)
Council on Foreign Relations: Member (3)
Center for a Free Cuba: Member, Board of Directors (3)
National Committee on American Foreign Policy: Member, Board of Advisors (4)
New Atlantic Initiative (American Enterprise Institute): Member International Advisory Board (5)


Project for the New American Century: Signed several PNAC advocacy letters (13)


U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon: Golden Circle supporter (14)
Nicaraguan Freedom Fund: Vice president (6)
Committee for the Free World: Member, Board of Directors (7)
Cuban American National Fund: Member, advisory committee (8)
Coalition for a Democratic Majority: Member (9)
Social Democrats-USA: Member (10)
American Security Council: Active participant (11)
Committee on the Present Danger: Member (12)
Government Posts/Panels/Commissions

U.S. Representative to the UN Human Rights Commission (2003) (3)
Secretary of Defense Commission on Fail Safe and Risk Reduction: Chairperson (1991-1992) (2)
Defense Policy Review Board: Member (1985-1993) (2)
President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board: Member (1985-1990) (2)
U.S. Representative to the United Nations (1981-85) (3)
National Security Council: Member during Reagan administration (3)
Education

Columbia University: Ph.D., Political Science (3)
Institute de Science Politique in Paris: French Government Fellow (3)
Columbia University: M.A., Political Science (3)
Barnard College: A.B. (1, 3)

[insane_cratic_gal]

9. Jack . Abramoff

One of the 100,000 donation club to Bush. Lobbyist lawyer (on the National Advisory Board) Cassidy & Associates out of DC


Jack Abramoff’s long GOP career includes stints chairing the College Republican National Committee, sitting on the Republican National Committee and heading Reagan lobby group Citizens for America (see David Carmen). This orthodox Jew helped build the political power of the Christian Coalition and Pioneer Ralph Reed. He ostensibly founded the International Freedom Foundation (IFF) in 1985. But South Africa’s truth commission revealed in 1995 that the apartheid regime helped launch the IFF, paying it $1.5 million a year to burnish its pariah image and to smear Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. After lending apartheid a happy face, Abramoff became a film producer. Working with IFF supporter Duncan Sellars, Abramoff produced Red Scorpion, the 1995 flick about ethnic-cleansing Aryans. Red Scorpion debuted at the time of the GOP’s takeover of Congress and Abramoff became a lobbyist at Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas, hitting the jackpot pushing Indian casinos. After he and several partners bought riverboat gambling company SunCruz Casinos in 2000, two of the partners began to feud. SunCruz went bankrupt after partner Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis got run off the road and shot to death in 2001 in a rumored mob hit. Abramoff is active with several other Pioneers in the K Street Project, in which GOP lobbyists harness their clout and that of their clients to advance the GOP’s agenda. Abramoff lobbies for clients that others would refuse. He helped the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands kill a 1998 bill to revoke its exemption from U.S. minimum wage laws. For $100,000 a month, Abramoff helped block legislation to help women who make “Made-in-USA” garments for $3 an hour. Abramoff compared the proposed Mariana reforms to Nazi laws that restricted the movement of Jews. Bringing some old clients when he switched firms in 2001, Abramoff helped make Greenberg Traurig the nation’s No. 5 grossing lobby firm in 2002. Greenberg Traurig (see James Miller) quickly capitalized on the September 11th attacks, creating a “Government Contracts and Homeland Security Team.” Abramoff’s 2002 clients included aviation-security firm ICTS International and the General Council for Islamic Banks. Corporate-fraud giant Tyco was an early 2003 Abramoff client. But Abramoff found his biggest fortune in Indian tribes. Law enforcement officials met in 2003 to discuss a Coushatta Tribe audit that found that in one year $18 million from tribal social-service accounts went to lawyers and lobbyists. Greenberg Traurig pocketed almost $3 million of this, with $14 million going to Capitol Campaign Strategies, which reporters could not locate, and something called American International Center, which was traced to Abramoff associate Michael Scanlon, an ex-aide to Tom DeLay. The Washington Postreported in 2004 that three tribes, the Coushattas, the Saginaw Chippewas and the Agua Caliente paid a staggering $45 million over the past three years to Abramoff and Scanlon. As the U.S. Senate launched a probe of these huge tribal fees, Greenberg Traurig fired Abramoff in 2004, saying that he engaged in “personal transactions” that were “unacceptable to the firm.” These transaction turned out to be $10 million in kickbacks that Abramoff secretly took from Scanlon without telling the the tribes or his firm. Abramoff then became a consultant at the Cassidy & Associates lobby shop (see Mary Kate Johnson

[insane_cratic_gal]

11. Ralph Reed Jr

part of the 100,000 donation club to Bush INC also Miller thought I have nothing on him. (these 3 guys listed were all at the same party of Elite. Bushinites.

Ralph Reed directed the College Republican National Committee in the early 1980s and was youth co-chair of President Reagan’s reelection campaign. When televangelist Pat Robertson converted the remains of his own 1988 presidential campaign into the fundamentalist Christian Coalition, Reed became its first staff member, building it into a major political force. Reed left the Coalition in 1997 to found Century Strategies, his political consulting and lobby firm. Reed reportedly made a good first impression on George W. Bush in 1995, when he advised the Texas governor not to talk about abortion unless someone else brings it up. Bush later invited Reed to a sleepover in the Governor’s Mansion. Reed was an early advisor to Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, with his firm billing the campaign more than $141,000. His firm issued an apology in early 2000 after the New York Times reported that Microsoft (see John Connors and John Kelly), which was fighting a federal anti-trust lawsuit, quietly hired Century to recruit Bush loyalists to send him letters supporting Microsoft. The Times reported in 2002 that Bush strategist and Enron stockholder Karl Rove recommended Reed’s lobby services to Enron (see Ken Lay) in 1997, when then-Governor Bush was considering a presidential run. Enron paid Reed’s firm $300,000 before it collapsed. The Federal Election Commission later rejected a complaint by the conservative Judicial Watch that alleged that these Enron payments served as a stealth conduit for the Bush campaign to buy Reed’s backing. An Enron spokesman later said the company hired Reed to conduct a covert letter writing campaign—a la Microsoft—to promote electricity deregulation in Pennsylvania. Another influential lobbyist on this issue was then-Governor Bush, who called his Pennsylvania counterpart--Pioneer Tom Ridge--on Enron’s behalf. In a memo seeking more business in October 2000, Reed shared his lobbying philosophy, writing Enron that, “it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard—and by whom.” Reed won a tough campaign of his own in 2001 to chair the Georgia Republican Party. With multiple visits from President Bush and a massive get-out-the-vote push, Reed helped Sonny Perdue (see Eric Tanenblatt) defeat Democratic incumbent Governor Roy Barnes in 2002. As chair of the Southeast region of Bush’s reelection campaign, Reed is pushing a similar organizational drive in the region’s chief campaign battleground--Florida. Reed is co-chair of Stand for Israel, which brings together evangelical Christians in support of the Jewish state.