The Center for Public Integrity

Want VIP access for Sen. Marco Rubio's speech at this year's annual Conservative Political Action Conference?

A new contest by Rubio's leadership PAC is offering one lucky winner the opportunity to fly to Washington, D.C., for the high-profile conference, along with VIP seats and a backstage photograph with Florida's junior senator.

While the contest's fine print indicates no donation to Reclaim America PAC is required for a chance to win a trip to CPAC in March, raffles such as this are a popular way for politicians to raise money from small-dollar contributors.

Both President Barack Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, conducted numerous contests throughout the 2012 presidential campaign.

Rubio's leadership PAC, Reclaim America PAC, has raised more than $8 million since it was launched in August 2011, according to Federal Election Commission filings. That money cannot be used to fund Rubio's own campaign efforts, but can be doled out to support fellow conservative politicians or used to pay for travel, political consulting fees, polling and the like.

Rubio, a Cuban-American and GOP rising star, was last year discussed as a possible Romney running mate. This year, he's taken a lead on immigration reform legislation in the U.S. Senate, and many wonder if he'll seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson isn't just interested in political giving.

Since 2007, the casino mogul has given into the hundreds of millions of dollars to pro-Israel causes through a Massachusetts-based foundation he and his wife operate, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of Internal Revenue Service filings.

The top recipient of tax-exempt gifts by the Adelson Family Foundation is by far a foundation called Birthright Israel. It has received $123 million from Adelson since 2007, IRS filings indicate.

Birthright offers free 10-day trips to Israel to Jews between age 18 and 26. The goal of the trips, according to Birthright, is to “send tens of thousands of young Jewish adults from all over the world to Israel as a gift” and is made possible through a “unique partnership” between the government of Israel and private philanthropists.

Foremost among those philanthropists is Adelson, whose support accounts for fully 40 percent of the money raised by the Birthright Foundation since 2007.

In 2008, Adelson’s $27.5 million gift to Birthright constituted 57 percent of all money raised by the organization. His patronage accounted for 19 percent of the group's revenue in 2011, the most recent year IRS records are available.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is heading to Washington, D.C., to score what could be hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars waiting for him at the palatial home of one of the nation's leading lobbyists — BGR Group Chairman Ed Rogers. 

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell will serve as the ceremonial host of the Christie fundraiser, which is slated to take place on Thursday, Feb. 28, according to an invitation obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Individuals must donate $3,800 to attend, the invitation states. Political action committees and corporations are also allowed to donate up to $3,800 for the governor's re-election efforts, although New Jersey law prohibits entities in certain regulated industries — such as casinos, financial institutions, insurance companies and utilities — from contributing.

Rogers in 2012 personally registered to lobby for numerous corporations and special interests, including Affiliated Computer Services, pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline, defense contractor Raytheon, energy giant Southern Co., Xerox and the governments of Kurdistan, Kazakhstan and India.  

If President Barack Obama wants to better fund education, he might start by making good on the $13,515 his campaign owes Virginia State University, or pay the campaign's $5,575 bill to the public school system of Springfield, Ohio.

Homeland security? The St. Cloud State University Public Safety Department could probably use $785 due to it from Obama for America.

And an investment in domestic energy could certainly come in the form of Obama erasing $512 worth of red ink with Nebraska's Omaha Public Power District.

These are just a few of the more curious liabilities the Obama campaign carried with it into 2013, according to documents filed last week with Federal Election Commission. In all, the Obama campaign has nearly $5.9 million in debt yet to clear.

To be sure, it's hardly uncommon for presidential candidates of yore to owe vendors money.

Some, like Democrat Hillary Clinton, spent years paying off campaign debt before closing shop. Others, from Republican Rudy Giuliani to Democrat John Edwards, simply let it ride, offering no indication that they'll ever clear their accounts. 

They typically owe money to big-time, if pedestrian political players: lawyers, consultants, advertising firms, travel providers and such. Most of Obama's creditors also fit these categories. 

But that doesn't mean little guys are immune from wondering when would-be leaders of the free world intend to settle up.

Consider Republican Newt Gingrich's committee.

Americans for Prosperity, the conservative nonprofit founded with support from billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, is out with a new ad accusing President Barack Obama of "hypocrisy."

The reason? Obama's campaign committee is transforming itself into a nonprofit, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code. The designation allows groups to lobby and advocate for both issues and candidates without revealing the names of their funders, so long as influencing elections is not their primary purpose.

But what the new Americans for Prosperity ad doesn't say is that Obama's new nonprofit, called Organizing for Action, plans on disclosing its donors, while Americans for Prosperity does not.

Politico has reported that the nascent pro-Obama nonprofit has reached out to companies such as Lockheed Martin, Citi and Duke Energy for financial support. Bob Bauer, the lawyer for Organizing for Action, has said the group will voluntarily report its funders and be "completely devoted" to issue advocacy, not electoral politics.

The exact nature and degree of this disclosure is not yet clear. When the Obama campaign voluntarily disclosed the names of its bundlers, for example, it simply provided a list of names and broad ranges, with a top range of "more than $500,000," even though many bundlers raised millions of dollars, according to documents obtained by the New York Times.

With Election 2012 behind us, and Elections 2014 and 2016 still a long way off, you may be wondering what is left to say about money in politics. Consider the Source reporters Dave Levinthal and Michael Beckel will answer that, and any other campaign finance-related questions you may have in a live chat February 4, at 1:00pm ET. In the meantime, please feel free to leave your question in the comments section below, and visit Dave and Michael's new money-in-politics blog, Primary Source.

As calls mount for Hillary Clinton to consider a presidential bid in 2016, the newly retired secretary of state tonight quietly disbanded her 2008 campaign organization, Hillary Clinton for President, new documents filed with the Federal Election Commission indicate.

The committee termination filing follows Clinton recently paying off her final 2008 presidential campaign debts — in part with some help from President Barack Obama, the renting of supporters' personal information and a bit of gimmickry.

Clinton's campaign debt at one point exceeded $20 million, but by December, she had cleared her final obligations and actually ran a small surplus going into 2013, according to Hillary Clinton for President's year-end campaign finance report, while it released late last month.

Even into January, the committee continued earning income from renting the personal information of its supporters to a political consulting firm, New York-based Lake Group Media, according to its termination filing.

Hillary Clinton for President on Jan. 31 transferred much of its surplus — $102,797 — to Friends of Hillary, the still-technically-active campaign committee Clinton used while she served in the U.S. Senate, documents show.

A weekend revamp of the U.S. Senate Lobbying Disclose Act database has caused previosly active hyperlinks to hundreds of thousands of lobbying disclosure documents to stop functioning.

Users attempting to access old versions of federal lobbying documents, such as client registrations and quarterly disclosures, receive an error message that reads, "We're sorry, that filing cannot be displayed."

Most notably affected are third-party watchdog websites such as OpenSecrets.org that compile and analyze lobbying data and, at the moment, still link to old versions of primary source lobbying documents.  

Most lobbying documents appear to be displaying correctly when searching directly through the U.S. Senate database. 

A Senate Office of Public Records office wasn't immediately available for comment, although a staffer not authorized to speak on the record confirmed that the office has switched from using PDF documents to documents formatted in HTML. The goal is to make the display of lobbying disclosure information more complete and consistent — sometimes a problem with previous documents, the staffer said.

The Senate's IT staff is looking into how to best address the linking issue and is in contact with organizations that still link to the old versions of Senate lobbying documents, the staffer said. They hope to resolve the issue quickly.

In the meantime, the staffer added that anyone wanting to view lobbying documents should for now search through the Senate's website.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns paid a hefty price Sunday to air an advertisement during the Super Bowl that specifically targeted a Washington, D.C., audience.

The nonprofit, headed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Tom Menino, paid $100,000 to run the spot on CBS affiliate WUSA-TV, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of documents filed by the station to comply with Federal Communications Commission requirements.

Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told the Center for Public Integrity that his organization targeted Washington's media market because "that's where the people who make decisions are."

The new ad featured a montage of children set to the song "America, the Beautiful," along with 1999 congressional testimony by Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association's current executive vice president and CEO.

"The NRA once supported background checks," the child narrating the ad says, before a clip plays of LaPierre saying that "mandatory, instant criminal background checks for every sale at every gun show" are "reasonable." The NRA has since reversed its stance on that proposal.

While drug manufacturing giant Pfizer's animal health spinoff was making headlines Friday for a blockbuster initial public stock offering, it was quietly entering the political arena, too.

Zoetis Inc., which specializes in health products for pets and livestock, has created a political action committee it's calling the Zoetis Good Government Fund, according to organizational documents filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Meredith K. Lesher, an attorney at the Williams & Jensen law firm whose election experience includes working for Secretary of State John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, is serving as the PAC's treasurer, its filing indicates.

Zoetis Good Government Fund's federal filing states it's affiliated with the Pfizer PAC, which ranks among the most active PACs in the nation.