Another fake "grass-roots" group exposed

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/26/american_action_network_big_donors

Last year we spent some time reporting on the tiny group of billionaires that, virtually on their own, put up the money for a heavy-hitting conservative campaign group associated with Karl Rove, American Crossroads.

Now it looks like another one of the outside groups active buying ads in the 2010 campaign was also funded by just a handful of super-rich donors. Led by former Sen. Norm Coleman, American Action Network was created in 2010 and presented itself as a "grass-roots" group. It is organized under a section of the tax code that allows it to keep donors' identities secret.

AAN does, however, have to make certain public disclosures with the IRS, and the Washington Post has a story on what a new filing from the group shows:

American Action Network, a Washington group formed by Republican power broker Frederic V. Malek and run by former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), collected $2.75 million from July 2009 to June 2010 in just 11 checks, the filing shows. The largest were two checks for $1 million apiece, and the smallest were two checks for $25,000.


More at the link --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Malek

Frederic Vincent "Fred" Malek (born December 22, 1936) is the former President of Marriott Hotels and Northwest Airlines and former assistant to United States Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush. Malek served as a National Finance Committee co-chair of John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. . . .

Malek served in the Nixon administration in several different roles, including Deputy Under Secretary of Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Secretary Robert Finch, as special assistant from 1970–73 and deputy director of Nixon's re-election campaign. Malek served as deputy chief of the Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972. . . .

In the first Nixon administration, Malek designed and directed the "Responsiveness Program", a strategy to replace civil servants with Nixon supporters and to steer government resources to benefit Nixon's 1972 re-election. According to the Senate Watergate report, Malek wrote in a 1972 memo to Haldeman that someone was needed to "take the lead in the program to politicize Departments and Agencies" and to "supervise the patronage operation and closely monitor the grantmanship operation." In advocating the plan, Malek wrote of "substantial risks" to politicizing the Executive Branch and expressed concern that the plan would "undoubtably backfire" if made public; therefore he recommended that "to minimize any links to the President, there should be no directions on this project in writing."

:rofl: