The Center for Public Integrity

As Mark Twain once put it, "A truth is not hard to kill and a lie told well is immortal."

In the 21st century in the United States of America, it is still astonishingly easy to assassinate a political opponent's character, with little or no accountability or basis in fact. It is hardly new to politics anywhere that money and the messages it buys often create devastating perceptions. But such smear tactics are more serious and offensive when they benefit major "mainstream" candidates seeking the Presidency, are utilized anonymously by mysterious, outside organizations and they occur in the wake of recent, historic, campaign finance reform and new political disclosure requirements.

Good morning. Please allow me to spend a couple of moments talking about the Center for Public Integrity. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that does investigative reporting and research on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. Since 1990 the Center has produced more than 250 investigative reports and 12 books and in the past seven years has been honored 21 times by the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and other respected organizations. Called "the center for campaign scoops" by the New Yorker magazine, the Center won the Sigma Delta Chi Public Service award for breaking the Clinton White House "Lincoln Bedroom" scandal in 1996, and The Buying of the President 2000 first disclosed that Enron was candidate Bush's top career patron.

The Center is funded by foundations and individuals and the sale of our publications. We do not accept advertising or contributions from companies, labor unions or governments. We do not take positions or lobby on specific policy or legislative matters. The names of our major donors and other information about the Center are available on our award-winning Web site, www.publicintegrity.org. We gratefully acknowledge the support for this project from the Victor Elmaleh Foundation, Edith and Henry Everett and the Popplestone Foundation.

Enron Corp., the Houston-based energy firm that touched off a financial, legal and political scandal when it declared bankruptcy in December 2001, remains the top career patron of President George W. Bush, whose prolific fundraising in 2003 shattered all previous records for candidates. Enron's employees and political action committee have given more than $600,000 to Bush over the course of his political career, according to a new Center for Public Integrity book, The Buying of the President 2004 (HarperCollins).

In 2003, executives of the reorganized Enron—including Joseph W. Sutton, the company's chairman—continued to contribute to the Bush campaign.

Bush has already raised more money than any other candidate in history in the year before the election, a whopping $85.2 million. That comes in the context of what has already been a record primary season for candidate fundraising. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean opted out of the public financing system, which limits what candidates can spend in the primaries, citing the need to challenge Bush's prodigious fundraising as his reason; Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry followed suit, relying on his personal wealth to fuel his campaign. Late entrant Wesley Clark touted the more than $10 million his campaign raised in its first full quarter of fundraising, and even dark horse candidate Dennis Kucinich touted his larger-than-expected campaign coffers on his Web site.

On May 30, 1997, Dick Cheney dispatched a two-page letter to Vice President Al Gore in hopes of staving off new federal regulations that presumably would prove both cumbersome and costly to Halliburton Company, the global oil-field services firm that Cheney had run since 1995.

The letter was obtained exclusively by the Center for Public Integrity through a recent Freedom of Information Act request.

At issue was a proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency, announced some six months earlier, designed to make national air-quality standards more stringent. "We are now hoping to hear from a wide range of the American people," EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner declared upon announcing the proposal, "from scientists and environmentalists to industry experts, small business owners, doctors and parents, to receive the broadest possible public comment and input on this important issue."

Browner got her wish, and then some: both EPA and Gore's office were besieged with comments, with environmentalists and health-care advocates generally lending their support to the proposal and business interests, worried about increased costs for compliance, insisting that the revised standards were not only based on questionable science, but they offered uncertain health benefits and would cause the sort of economic harm that could ripple throughout society.

The Center for Public Integrity publishes this Web site as a public service and it is a companion to a forthcoming book to be released before the presidential primary season. Over the course of a year, 50 researchers, writers and editors investigated the candidates and the political parties, contacting or interviewing more than 600 people and systematically gathering hundreds of thousands of federal and state records and secondary source material. As part of the Center for Public Integrity's exhaustive, "leave-no-stone-unturned" approach, we examined the biographical history of each of the candidates.

From these materials, we created and updated comprehensive one-of-a-kind databases. To discern their personal financial holdings we culled all available financial disclosure statements and created a database that detailed every cent owned by each politician, along with their incomes. Only by knowing each candidate's financial holdings could we analyze potential conflicts of interest.

The next step was to collect every available contribution record for each politician during his or her entire government career. To reach this goal, Center data analysts spent months gathering and coding donations made on the federal level going back to 1978. To truly examine the financial histories at play, researchers compiled additional documents including state campaign contribution records and the under-reported contributions of soft money going to candidate committees through the 527 system. The result was a truly unprecedented database containing 1,834,513 campaign finance records of the presidential candidates that allowed us to convert federal, state and soft money records into single lists, ranking each candidate's top career donors.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry has chosen a fellow member of the Senate and former primary rival John Edwards as his running mate. The Center for Public Integrity profiled Edwards in our New York Times bestselling book, The Buying of the President 2004, an excerpt of which runs below. The Center has also posted a list of Edwards' top career donors, information from his personal financial disclosures, financial reports filed by his various campaign committees with the FEC and by his 527 committee with the Internal Revenue Service, and a profile of the candidate.

John Kerry has made campaign finance reform an issue ever since he first ran for the Senate in 1984. In fact, the Massachusetts Democrat has been such an ardent and outspoken critic of political action committees that he has refused to accept donations from such organizations during all four of his senatorial campaigns.

But the man who has repeatedly decried the influence of PACs on the nation's political system nevertheless began his quest for the presidency by forming one. In December 2001, as a prelude to his presidential run, Kerry created a federal PAC and a non-federal 527 Committee, both named the Citizen Soldier Fund. A number of influential members of Congress, including most of the presidential candidates, have such PACs, commonly known as "leadership committees." Politicians use the leadership committees to win political support by distributing money among various party organizations and candidates across the country. They also use PAC resources to foot travel bills.

Kerry's PAC raised roughly $1 million through the end of 2002 and disbursed nearly all of it. At the time it was formed, the Citizen Soldiers Fund's non-federal account could theoretically have accepted any amount from a donor. But Kerry, perhaps as a concession to the reform constituency of which he was a part, said the fund would not take donations of more than $10,000 from one individual or organization in any year. Just before the McCain-Feingold legislation was to take effect consigning soft money—at least some types of it—to history, the senator couldn't resist one last grab at the political money that he voted to ban. By the end of October, the self-imposed cap was gone.