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DeLay, NRCC accuser owes them $20,000
By Alexander Bolton A conservative watchdog group that has accused House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) of illegal fundraising activities owes the committee as much as $20,000, according to documents obtained by The Hill. The group, Judicial Watch, announced a three-fold legal
action against DeLay and the NRCC Tuesday for allegedly “selling meetings with Bush officials” to top Republican donors. The group filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission, the Criminal Division of the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee. “It’s just round one of our legal actions,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told The Hill. Judicial Watch, a self-described public interest law firm that investigates government corruption, held a press conference Tuesday at the National Press Club to publicize the charges. However, the NRCC contends that the ethics group owes them a mailing list of 45,000 names that conservative activists say is worth up to $20,000. NRCC estimates that the names are worth between 20 and 50 cents each. NRCC officials say they have traded mailing lists with Judicial Watch over the last year-and-a-half, but stopped doing so in August after the group ran up a large debt of 104,000 names that it still hasn’t fully repaid. The trades were supposed to have an equal number of names. Larry Klayman, the chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, has denied having any business dispute with the House Republican committee. “We have no knowledge of owing them anything, we haven’t authorized any list going to the NRCC,” Klayman said in an interview with The Hill Tuesday. Klayman’s comments were corroborated by Fitton, who also attended yesterday’s press conference. “There’s no dispute,” he said. But business documents from National Response List Marketing (NRLM) Inc., a direct mail services company based in Alexandria, Va., show the company brokered the transactions between the NRCC and Judicial Watch since the fall of 1999. DeLay is a de facto member of the NRCC. The documents show that Judicial Watch owed the NRCC the names of 10,000 potential supporters in October of that year, a debt that steadily climbed to over 100,000 names by the following summer. At that time, Patty Catano, an NRCC official, sent a handwritten note to NRLM, the mail broker: “Sorry, but I will have to decline [an impending trade with Judicial Watch] due to exchange balance [and] quantity.” In political fundraising circles mailing lists are valuable commodities because they contain donor information that can be turned into millions of dollars in contributions. The value of a list depends on how likely the names will translate into future donors. The documents also clearly contradict Klayman’s claim that his group did not send any lists to the NRCC. A NRLM document dated April 4, 2000, shows that at one point the NRCC owed Judicial Watch 25,000 names. A memo from Robertson Mailing List Co., another independent mail broker based in Reston, Va., shows that last December the firm unsuccessfully attempted to obtain for the NRCC the names owed by Judicial Watch. Judicial Watch’s business dealings and its relationship as a debtor to the NRCC call into question serious allegations it made Tuesday against the committee, DeLay, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Vice President Dick Cheney. At the press conference, which was attended by over 20 reporters from media outlets such as CNN, C-SPAN and NBC, Klayman produced a document on NRCC letterhead allegedly sent to donors from Hastert. The document informs the recipients that Hastert will introduce them to senior Bush administration officials including Cheney at a tax reform workshop in May. Klayman claims the letter was sent out by Republicans as part of a donor solicitation effort and thus violates ethics laws. However, the document does not state anywhere that the meetings are a quid pro quo for donations given to the Republican Party. Judicial Watch said they will supplement their complaints against DeLay and the NRCC by filing complaints against Hastert and even people in the Bush administration. The complaints filed yesterday with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Justice Department and ethics committee allege that DeLay and the NRCC violated sections of the U.S. code that prohibit bribery of public officials and promising benefits for political activity. The action was prompted by an Associated Press story published last week that reported DeLay promised small-business owners meetings with top administration officials if they donated $20,000 to the party. In a letter to DeLay dated last week, Klayman wrote that he would pursue
legal action against the majority whip and the NRCC if they did not immediately stop the fundraising drive. The NRCC says they were never contacted by Klayman before he went before the cameras. “I called Klayman on Thursday and did not receive a return call. I sent a cordial letter on Thursday and didn’t receive a response, I’ve never spoken to the man,” said Don McGahn an attorney with the committee. |
