Commenters saying that the LNC’s treatment of its building donors was deceptive should realize that such deceptions have a long and unfortunate history. We return to 2001, and LP News’s deceptive coverage of teh scandal that John Famularo revealed.
Chapter Twenty Four of My Book Funding Liberty
Aftershocks
The LP News Cover-Up
LP NEWS is [George writes: Well, it was in 2001] the one news source that reaches essentially all Libertarian Party members whose dues are current. It is not as fast as the myriad of libertarian email lists, but its circulation is far larger. Individual email lists rarely reach as many as 1000 members, and a few hundred is more common. Depending on month, LP News [in 2000 AD or so] had a circulation approaching 30,000. The only real single competitor of LP News is Liberty Magazine, whose circulation—largely to non-LP members —is perhaps a third as great.
What news came from the LNC August Meeting? According to LP News, the LNC approved a “strategic plan”, elected Ken Bisson as Vice Chair and Don Gorman as At-Large Member, and passed or defeated various motions on the Browne-Willis scandal. Descriptions of these events reached the membership with the October issue of LP News. In that issue, the Strategic Plan was reported on Page One, while the Vice Chair and At-Large elections were the major article on Page Two. The top 2/3 of page 3 covered action on the war on drugs: The LP had joined a coalition opposing the appointment of John Walters. 3/5 of the bottom of the page went to good news from Virginia: The Virginia state party there had won the right to use partisan ballot labels. The final 2/5 of the bottom third of page three began the report on the Willis-Browne scandal.
Articles from Page One continued on Pages Fifteen, Sixteen, and Twenty. The other Page Three article with a continuation continued on Page Twelve. The bulk of the Censure Report was buried on Page Twenty-four.
For many LPUS members, the article was the first news that something irregular had happened during the 1996 Presidential Campaign. There had been an earlier article in the July issue, providing some background but not a link to Famularo’s web site and time line. In the October article, one might still have expected further background material, clarifying what had happened, and explaining how the LNC had come to this stage in its investigation. That background material was largely lacking. The article noted Perry Willis’s “public statement” of May 11, in which he “acknowledged violating LNC policy”.
The article did not note that Willis’s “public statement” was actually a vigorous defense of his decisions. John Famularo had posted to the web an extensive timeline from multiple sources; National Chair James Lark had done a detailed investigation, bye and bye to be available through dehnbase.org. URLs to these three sources, which were or would be available on the web, were not published. As background, the article explained how events began: In April John Famularo had “informally distributed a document to the LNC that suggested Willis had secretly worked for the Browne campaign.” The document, of course, was not just a ‘suggestion’ of work; it was the Willis Invoice, a bill from Willis for specified services rendered.
As written, the lead page of the article focused the blame entirely on Willis, complete with a quotation box from Ken Bisson, saying “The LNC rejects the Willis deception completely”. Willis was condemned ‘for violating party policy’. The involvement of Harry Browne was not noted until the end of the fourth paragraph, where Willis was said to have acknowledged that he had “secretly written fundraising letters for the 1996 Harry Browne for President Campaign”. While true, this statement was incomplete as a summary of Willis’s admissions. Even a careful reader would not suspect from the opening page of the article that Willis had been paid under the table by the Browne Campaign. Just as important, the reader would never learn about Willis’s claim—which has not been contested in a significant way—that Browne only won the nomination because Willis had violated Party policy. Willis was instead quoted as saying the letters had been written to “save the LP from a melt-down”.
The article then presented Israel’s resolution against Willis, summarizing as short bullets the key points of the original motion. Included as a bulleted point was the statement that ‘no further evidence had been presented’ about other wrongdoing. That statement was deleted from the original motion before it was passed. To learn about the deletion, to learn that there might have been new evidence, a reader would have had to compare the text bullets point by point with the ‘Text of the Final Willis Resolution’ sidebar, realize that they were different, and then realize that the sidebar was the motion actually passed by the LNC. The LP News article misrepresented the facts in a way that minimized any suggestion of further involvement by Browne and his entourage.
Mr. Dehn had decried the ‘no further evidence had been presented’ clause. The Minutes show him saying “he considers the motion an insult to the work of the Chair as well as others that have put time and effort into investigating this issue. He said that the statement that no other evidence has been presented is blatantly false.” What happened to those remarks? In LP News, Dehn’s remarks became “Joe Dehn said that the motion was ‘insulting’ because it was not forceful enough.” Once again the LP News article misrepresented the facts in a way that benefited Browne and his entourage.
So much for the first resolution. Scherrey’s substitute motion received a single paragraph. Its text was not presented. The 8-8 tie vote was reported, but the identities of the ayes and nays and Lark’s abstention went unreported. After a short discussion of Givot’s motion thanking Famularo for bringing forth the information (that motion was defeated), the LNC was described as continuing on to Scherrey’s resolution pressing for more data.
That resolution passed. The text of Scherrey’s second resolution, which was passed by the LNC, does not appear in LP News. The two motions appear equal in their importance; only the first, which refers only to Willis, was reported in full. Fragments of the second resolution appear here and there. Missing from those fragments and partial summaries was any hint of the clause “Whereas, it appears from the evidence submitted to this Committee that when said violation of policy was made public in late 1995, Mr. Browne then may have cooperated with Mr. Willis to hide further such violations by funneling further contracts with Mr. Willis through Jack Dean’s company”. Yet again, LP News coverage misrepresented the facts in a way that benefited Browne and his entourage.
LP News coverage of the LNC resolutions was thus carefully structured to minimize negative information about Browne and his campaign staff. The Editor of LP News for the issue in question was Bill Winter. John Famularo has published a 1995 memorandum from the Browne campaign indicating that Winter and Willis were both members of the inner circle of the Browne campaign team. As seen from the LP News coverage, as late as October 2001 Browne’s supporters were still sufficiently well placed that they were able to hide much of the Browne scandal from the Party’s membership.
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