How is it that in 1996 that vendors also received large-scale payments via staffers, as Bergland claimed? Did the 1996 campaign outspend the 2000 campaign by, say, $200,000 and not $100,000? At some point it becomes difficult to explain how the smaller 1996 campaign could have outspent the 2000 campaign by so much, particularly when the 1996 spending was for fundraising that ought to have enlarged the 1996 campaign.
Bergland’s claim about disbursements leads to the remarkable conclusion that the 1996 campaign massively outspent the 2000 campaign in mission-critical areas of printing, postage, and travel. Is this true? Or was Bergland’s claim that staff salaries were engorged by reimbursements a clever political ploy, a clever turn of phrase that was literally true but non-clarifying, all to win a party election? The record leaves one in doubt.
Campaign Mailings
We now come to the puzzle of the campaign mailings, the puzzle that was recently solved. As I noted earlier, the puzzle’s explanation raises further serious questions about the Libertarian National Committee’s conduct prior to the 1996 convention. I could replace the remainder of this section with a single table and a half-dozen lines of text. I leave it in place so you will see a specific piece of forensic analysis being employed. The accuracy of the analysis was finally confirmed by direct evidence. I am being repetitive so that when you see the same forensic analysis applied to 1999 reports, you will know that the first time I used this method that the method worked.
From February to June 1996, the Browne campaign spent roughly $22,000 on printing, nearly $27,000 on postage, and $1900 for two rentals of the Liberty Publishing mailing list. Liberty Publishing advises me that their mailing list would have been in the vicinity of 7000 names, so the list rental would account for mailing around 14,000 letters. $49,000 for printing and postage implies that a far larger number of copies were mailed, perhaps in the vicinity of 125,000 (assuming 40 cents per letter). The printing and postage bills are consistent with each other, but almost nothing was spent on list rental. Where did all the addresses come from?
By comparison with Browne’s 1995 FEC filings, and consistent with the Presidential nominating campaign that I advised, if Browne’s February-June 1996 mailings had used rented lists, then corresponding to the $49,000 for printing and mailing would be $10,000 or a bit more for list rental, not the reported $2,000. Of course, the Browne campaign could have mailed exclusively to its own mailing list of donors, which would have cost nothing for list rental. To spend $49,000 on mailing to donors the campaign would have needed tens of thousands of donors, ten times as many as it had had in 1995 or would have in 2000. Well into the 2000 campaign Browne appears to have had more like 3000 donors. So where did Browne get the names to which his campaign paid for mailings?
In July 1996, no spending for list rental was reported. Very large sums were paid in this month to the Libertarian National Committee for ‘Administrative Services’. Before the truth became known, it had been suggested to me that the Browne campaign did indeed mail regularly to the National Party list during the first half of 1996, but that it was allowed to postpone paying for those mailings until after the convention. At the time I wrote the above, the evidence for such a transaction was circumstantial. ‘Administrative Services’ could have included mailings; they could alternatively have included orthodox administrative acts.
In Fall 2001 the truth came out. I am embarrassed to note that if I had known exactly where to look, there would never have been any doubt about the question, because the requisite information was publicly available from statements filed under penalty of perjury. However, there was no rational reason to look at those statements to explore this question. After all, what was happening was a serious violation of Party rules. One might have expected that at least a modest effort would be made to disguise what had been done.
I begin with an aside. The Libertarian Party has a National Committee. That Committee has elected members, hires staff, and files with the Federal Election Commission. Some years ago, it also incorporated itself. Skipping some abstruse legal details as to whether the Libertarian National Committee elected by the National Convention and the Libertarian National Committee that is the Board of Directors of LNC, Inc. are technically one legal entity or two legal entities one of which appoints itself to be the other’s officers, there is a unitary Libertarian National Committee.
Its elected members and its hired staff are not the same people, but LNC, Inc. includes both of them. The elected Committee has charge of its finances; it can’t say ‘we didn’t do that, they did it’ unless there is a record that when the staff made mistakes that these mistakes were noted and corrective actions were taken. To paraphrase the words of a distinguished writer of the last century, the elected members are not entitled to use the staff as their flak-catchers. If improprieties are judged to have occurred, they happened on the watch of the elected National Committee, which is properly judged on what it did after the impropriety was revealed.
So how was the list paid for? We now come to the truth:
The Libertarian National Committee Directly Funded Browne’s Nominating Campaign
