Lobby firm forges anti-climate-bill letters from Hispanic group and NAACP

The Charlottesville, Va., Daily Progress broke the story of a D.C. lobbying firm forging letters in opposition to the House climate bill:



The letters came from the Washington lobby firm Bonner & Associates, which offers “Strategic Grassroots / Grasstops support to help you win.” It hasn’t yet come to light who hired the firm to do this possibly illegal work. Another set of forged letters claimed to represent a local chapter of the NAACP.

Behind The Forged Letters: Jack Bonner's "White-Collar Sweatshop"
By Zachary Roth - August 4, 2009, 5:54PM

Last week, Jack Bonner blamed a "bad employee" for the fact that his lobbying firm had sent forged letters, purporting to be from local minority groups, urging a member of Congress to oppose climate change legislation. (It's since been revealed that Bonner's firm was working on behalf of the coal industry.)

But a closer look suggests a culture at Bonner and Associates that makes such deception all but inevitable. As one former employee put it, at Bonner, distortion "was the norm rather than the exception."

Internal Bonner documents obtained by TPMmuckraker, and interviews with former employees, shed light on the modus operandi of a firm that's known as the pioneer of astroturf lobbying -- that is, creating the illusion of grassroots support for corporate-backed positions, just as corporate-backed groups like Freedom Works are currently doing in their fight against health-care reform. Bonner's business model involves using both carrots and sticks in spurring low-paid and poorly-trained employees to convince local groups or individual voters to agree to offer nominal expressions of support for the campaigns of the firm's corporate clients, which have included Philip Morris, the health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, among others. Often the voters or local groups know little about the legislation at hand, which is typically obscure to all but the industries affected by it -- medical liability reform, say. But the resulting form letters, faxes, or phone calls are then represented to a list of targeted lawmakers -- generally drawn up by the client -- as genuine expressions of grassroots concern. Bonner then satisfies its client by reporting back to it on the number of communications it's generated.

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What does all this amount to? Certainly not a smoking gun that Jack Bonner himself knew about those forged climate change letters. Rather, what it suggests is Bonner and Associates' entire business model -- encouraging underpaid, poorly trained employees, at pain of firing, to focus only on generating as many communications to lawmakers as possible, in order to impress clients with the raw numbers of those communications -- all but ensures that such out and out deception will occur.

Which may be one reason why Bonner's clients hire it in the first place.

Bonner then served for several years in the press office of the Republican National Committee, where he provided press counsel to a variety of Republican congressional and senatorial candidates and state parties.

He then became press secretary and then senior political aide to U.S. Senator John Heinz (R-Pa).

Bonner is a nationally acknowledged expert in developing and executing corporate grassroots campaigns. He has done so for a wide variety of corporate and association clients such as Citicorp, Aetna, Dow Chemical, Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Research Association, General Motors, Northrup, Grumman, Pacific Telesis, AT&T, Commonwealth Edison, COMSAT, The Business Roundtable, Merrill Lynch, Proctor & Gamble, American Bankers Association, Merck, Ameritech, Boeing, Browning Ferris Industries (BFI), NYNEX, and Nationwide Insurance. Bonner & Associates has won 75% of the battles they have been in.

Bonner has been referred to as the "King of Grassroots" by National Public Radio, the "guru" of grassroots by Fortune magazine, the "pioneer" of grassroots efforts by the New York Times and The Wall Street Joumal, and was listed by Washingtonian magazine as one of the top 50 lobbyists in Washington. He has been featured on Nightline, and the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Bonner has been for several years an adjunct professor at American University School for Public Affairs Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies.