"Oh, what a tangled web we weave..."
And, boy, was there some deceiving being practiced in Show Me State.
Mark Fernlund "Thor" Hearne is in the thick of it (previous diary with links for background here). Hearne is a member and principal of the Lathrop and Gage law firm and served as National Election Counsel for Bush/Cheney in '04 and Missouri Counsel in '00. In 2005 he founded the American Center for Voting Rights, a GOP front group that was designed to perpetuate the "voter fraud" myth and subsequently suppress the Democratic vote. It was dissolved in May.
However, in recent days, Hearne has deleted all references to ACVR on his personal page of his law firm's website, and his ACVR ties were deleted from his wiki page by someone with a Lathrop and Gage ip address.
From the Election Law website:
Battle over Thor Hearne's Wikipedia Entry Continues
Two days ago, in this post, I noted that someone had deleted information on Thor Hearne's Wikipedia page noting Hearne's affiliation with and controversy over the American Center for Voting Rights. I updated to post to note that someone from Hearne's law firm, Lathrop and Gage, made a change to that page. Since my post appeared, Wikipedia readers restored information about on ACVR on Hearne's Wikipedia page. But now, that information was deleted again by someone from ip address 65.204.234.241, which also belongs to Lathrop and Gage. Indeed, this search shows that someone at that law firm also has been editing the page on the American Center for Voting rights too.
But why is Hearne so anxious to disassociate himself from ACVR?
Howard Beale, over at FiredUp! Missouri has an idea why:
More so than ever before, the interconnected nature of the national and Missouri-based efforts to advance specious "vote fraud" claims and bend the operation of government entities to specific partisan political advantage is becoming clear. And the centrality of Mark F. "Thor" Hearne II to all of those efforts has never been more obvious than it is after the aggregation of a number of key facts.
State corporate and federal tax filings indicate that Thor Hearne --the undisputed mastermind and ringleader of the now-defunct and "disappeared" American Center for Voting Rights (ACVR)-- was responsible for the creation of a Missouri-based front group that issued public "reports" about topics like voter registration fraud which echoed messages being pushed at the national level by prominent GOP officials and ACVR itself. The Missouri organization, the Center for Ethics and the Free Market, was partially funded with one of the only (if not the only) monetary grant awarded by the ACVR and had its bookkeeping and non-profit filings done by Garrett Lott, a key figure in the Matt Blunt fee office management company scheme.
[I touched on the above-mentioned fee office scandal here - I told you, this is one TANGLED web of deceit!]
According to The Brad Blog, someone from ACVR also lied on the 05 990 tax form:
"During the year, has the organization attempted to influence national, state, or local legislation, including any attempt to influence public opinion on a legislative matter or referendum? If "Yes," enter the total expenses paid or incurred in connection with the lobbying activities."
Someone checked the "No" box, which of course is ridiculously fraudulent. That form indicates that the ACVR awarded exactly one grant in 05: $28,000 to the Center for Ethics and the Free Market, "non-profit" entity with the registered agent listed as....Thor Hearne! From FiredUp! Missouri:
It's worth noting that on the same IRS 990 form, ACVR reports having paid $122,870 to Thor Hearne's law firm, Lathrop & Gage for "Program/Legal Services." That payment was the largest expenditure for professional services made by ACVR in the 2005 year.
We don't have time to detail the mountains of evidence that, of course, the "non-partisan" tax-except 501(c)3 organization --- co-founded by Rove's friend and Bush/Cheney national general counsel Hearne and RNC Communication Directory Jim Dyke --- was meant for little else than to do exactly that. Through public on-the-record official testimony, propaganda, back-channel influence, helping to write Voter ID legislation in a number of states, etc.
While we're no tax attorney, we're fairly certain that knowingly lying on a tax form for a public organization falls under the category of "illegal". Perhaps someone at Thor's lawfirm Lathrop & Gage, like, um, Thor for instance, would be better able to answer that question for sure.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, Thor can run, but he can't hide. But he can keep trying. Every time he does, we'll just up the ante. Wanna keep playing, Thor? We don't have your $1 million dollar funding or friends in high places. All we have is the truth on our side, and an army of folks who find your un-American, democracy-undermining efforts to be appalling at the deepest level. That'll keep us going for now...
Are you still with me? I'm not sure I am. Hearne, at Rove's urging, created the Center for Ethics and the Free Market to generate "research" that supported the "voter fraud" claims, and funded it with ACVR dough.
Murray Waas:
Separately, less than a week before Election Day, the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., brought voting-fraud charges against four employees of the activist group ACORN, which registers low-income people who typically vote for Democratic candidates. Justice Department guidelines discourage prosecutors from bringing criminal charges so close to an election.
Although the actions of the two U.S. attorneys were unconnected, they shared a common denominator: Mark (Thor) Hearne, a Republican Party operative who had served as national election counsel for the 2004 Bush-Cheney presidential campaign and played a behind-the-scenes role in both cases. Hearne's role provides a window into how a Republican activist was pushing Bush administration officials -- and perhaps in some cases working in concert with them -- to use the Justice Department for partisan purposes.
snip
Republicans feared that an investigation of the Blunt administration by the U.S. attorney in Arkansas, Bud Cummins, could tar Blunt and hurt Talent and other GOP candidates on the ballot. Blunt himself was not up for re-election. The investigation was spurred by allegations that the Blunt administration had improperly awarded state contracts to political contributors to run privately operated bureaus where Missouri residents obtain driver's licenses and register their vehicles. Because of potential conflicts of interest, the U.S. attorneys in Missouri weren't handling the investigation. Cummins said in an interview that a former senior Justice Department official from the Bush administration, William Mateja, repeatedly contacted him during the investigation and asked whether Blunt was implicated in the corruption probe. Cummins said he was unaware at the time that Mateja was making his calls at the behest of Hearne, whose law firm had retained Mateja on Blunt's behalf.
According to ms panstreppon over at TPM Cafe, one of the directors of ACVR is Pat Rogers is "the same Pat Rogers who met with Monica Goodling to complain about David Iglesias."
And now, Brad Schlozman has testifed (and "clarified" his testimony) about his role in bringing the "voter fraud" indictments:
Grilled by a number of senators over his decision as U.S. attorney for Kansas City to bring four voter fraud indictments just days before last year's election, Schlozman repeatedly testifed that he'd brought the indictments "at the direction" (he used the phrase ten times) of the director of the Election Crimes Branch in the Public Integrity Section. That raised more than a few eyebrows on the panel since that director, Craig Donsanto, is the man who wrote the DoJ manual discouraging such investigations close to an election.
Schlozman's story had the effect of distancing himself from the controversial decision and pinning it on a Department veteran.
Now Schlozman is changing his story:
As required by Section 9-85.210 of the U.S. Attorney's Manual, at my direction, the Assistant United States Attorney assigned to the case consulted with the Election Crimes Branch prior to the filing of the indictments. I want to be clear that, while I relied on the consultation with, and suggestions of, the Election Crimes Branch in bringing the indictments when I did, I take full responsibility for the decision to move forward with the prosecutions related to ACORN while I was the interim U.S. Attorney.
In other words, somehow, some way, Schlozman was able to get a green light for the indictments.
A nice summation from the FiredUp!Missouri article:
But more broadly, the discovery of Hearne's ties to the Center for Ethics and the Free Market serves as a reminder that is unproductive to think of either the "voter fraud" scheme, the fee office scheme, or plain-old GOP politics as separate and distinct from each other. At their core, they're all part of the same thing. The more digging that people do, the more they find the same players --longtime GOP stalwarts like Thor Hearne and Garrett Lott-- using trickery and institutions to ingrain permanent GOP advantages.
Sources:
FiredUp! Missouri
The Brad Blog
mrs panstreppon's blog at TPM Cafe
Murray Waas
Wiki: American Center for Voting Rights
[UPDATE: Many thanks to antirove for help with the title]