Instead of providing an answer, the campaign attacked its scapegoat. In the April 24th LibertyWire, Perry Willis wrote:
“Our fundraising has been declining since Jacob Hornberger began his latest series of attacks against Harry Browne and the LP leadership…Unfortunately, our good name within the LP has been damaged to the point where the good will of a significant segment of the rank and file now seems lacking… Specifically, our motivations for wanting to challenge the FEC laws has been called into doubt…instead of simply offering arguments against the strategy, Mr. Hornberger and his allies have seized on the possibility that we have seized on challenging the FEC laws only to hide financial improprieties. And many people either have believed Mr. Hornberger’s assertions or have had sufficient doubts about us to stop contributing to our campaign.”
Willis’s message included an attack on Browne’s leading opponent, Don Gorman: “A Presidential campaign based on meeting voters in person and speaking engagements is doomed to achieve no more than a few hundred thousand votes.” Willis said nothing about the synergy of campaigning with other candidates. Willis’s prediction was right. A campaign based primarily on speaking engagements with no involvement with other candidates was precisely the campaign that Browne ran. And in November Browne was to receive precisely the voter response that Willis predicted for such a campaign, namely a few hundred thousand votes.
We now all have the FEC reports, so readers no longer need to entertain doubts. You can decide for yourself, based on the actual record, whether the Browne campaign failed to file with the FEC to hide its prevarications about its finances.
Readers may also ask themselves: Where was the Party’s establishment while all this was happening? Browne had made a wide variety of claims about his finances, and how his years of campaigning had given his team an enormous financial and volunteer base. Now those promises were crumbling. The $750,000 cash reserve had mysteriously disappeared. A party establishment that believed that Libertarians oppose fraud should at this point have insisted that the Browne campaign account for the discrepancies or remove itself from the scene. The most prominent response of the establishment was instead the “Shut the F___ Up!” campaign, which demanded that Browne’s critics stop raising their issues. The establishment seemingly hoped that the irregularities would be forgotten by the membership. This circumstance bodes ill for the Libertarian Party. A Party of Principle that opposes theft and fraud will survive poorly having a Party establishment that by its deeds and later silence has removed all doubt that it views fraud as an acceptable path to the Presidential nomination.
FEC reports do confirm some aspects of the Browne Campaign’s April 24 fundraising appeal. For example, the Browne campaign reported having spent a shade under $200,000 in advertising, including production costs for the video. FEC reports show that the campaign made disbursements to Polaris Productions for producing the ads, for roughly $149,000. It had also paid about $31,000 to make copies of the video, the copies it distributed and sold to delegates and others. Last and least, it had disbursed approximately $20,000 to The Firm Multimedia, which placed Browne ads on television. This total is indeed $200,000.
Almost all the money went to making the ads and copying the video for Browne supporters. Only ten cents on the advertising dollar went to putting the video in front of the general public. The Browne campaign’s video campaign ran on lines opposite to those in general use, in which not ten but ninety cents on the advertising dollar might go to putting the video in front of the general public.
On April 24, 2000, readers did not have the luxury of reading Browne’s FEC reports. They had the Browne campaign’s assertions as to its spending and results, and the promise “we will file the FEC reports next week.” The latter promise was reassuring to many readers. After all, if FEC reports were going to reveal serious fiscal improprieties, the campaign was hardly likely to file with the FEC before the FEC compelled it to file. By promising to file file as soon as practicable, the Browne Campaign suggested any reasonable person that nothing had been questionable in its conduct.
The Browne campaign did not file “next week”. Not until May 23 were the financial reports filed. Despite the controversy, April was one of the Browne Campaign’s better months for fundraising, with $107,358 coming through the door. For the month, the campaign spent only $68,164, leaving it with $45,674 cash on hand and a total debt of $1,000, all to Harry Browne.
