The Stench from PEW (vidoetape exposes phony buzz created for McCain-Feingold CFR) - New York Post, Editorial, March 21, 2005 - posted to Free Republic, March 21 2005, by Liz:
A former program officer for Pew, Sean Treglia, was caught on videotape bragging about how the foundation worked behind the scenes to create the false impression that there was a "mass movement" afoot clamoring for campaign-finance reform...
Pew did this in the run-up to the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — a.k.a. McCain-Feingold — by spreading around more than $40 million to grass-roots front groups like Common Cause, the Campaign Finance Institute and the inaptly named Center for Public Integrity...
Several other major liberal foundations — including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation and George Soros' Open Society Institute — colluded with Pew to give $123 million between 1994 and 2004 to promote the regulation of political speech.
But Pew's role in the effort seems to have been particularly insidious.
"Having been on the Hill, I knew that . . . if Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless. It'd be 20 million bucks thrown down the drain," Treglia says at one point in the tape.
"So, in order, in essence, to convey the impression that this was something coming naturally from outside the Beltway, I felt it was best that Pew stay in the background."
"By law, the grantees always have to disclose. But I always encouraged the grantees never to mention Pew," Treglia says. "Did we push the envelope? Yeah. Were we encouraged internally to push the envelope? Yeah . . . We stayed within the letter, if not the spirit, of the law."
bttt