We recently exposed some of Koch's alleged shills in the media, and ThinkProgress previously alleged that Koch groups were using paid social media "sock puppets". However, Koch cash is not the only thing powering the right-wing political Astroturf machine.
A recent article in Politico alleged that Koch-linked group called American Commitment had been associated with constituent messages that "had come from constituents who didn’t recall sending them." What the article neglected to mention is that allegations of similar "political identity thefts" have been levied against multiple right wing advocacy groups at least as far back as 2006.
The Washington Post ran a story back in July 2006 alleging that Koch-funded group Citizens for a Sound Economy had been inflating its membership rolls by selling group health insurance policies that required policy holders to join and pay dues to CSE (without necessarily knowing what CSE was):
Citizens for a Sound Economy -- now called FreedomWorks and headed by former House majority leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) -- has netted more than $638,000 and about 16,000 members through the sale of insurance policies.
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the insurance policies themselves...never mention FreedomWorks or Citizens for a Sound Economy and label the group policyholder simply by a number: 1214.
"The certificates of insurance issued to class members, despite the clear language contained therein, did not disclose the identity of the Group Policyholder of the group policy, despite the fact that each putative insured must 'join' and pay money to such group as a condition of obtaining the insurance," the suit's motion for class certification states. The motion was granted in December.
In 2009, a coal industry group called American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), which does not appear to be associated with the Koch brothers, was "Linked to Fake [constituent] Letters on [a] Climate Bill" by a
New York times article:
A trade group representing coal producers and power companies says that it indirectly hired a lobbying firm that sent fake letters to lawmakers purporting to be from nonprofit groups opposed to climate-change legislation.
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On Tuesday, staff members across Capitol Hill combed through constituent mail in search of other fake letters. The search began after three members of Congress said they had received them.
In the most recent
Politico article, Koch-linked American Commitment:
boasted that it helped direct more than 1.6 million messages earlier this month from more than half a million voters to members of the House and Senate.
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Many of the critical statements from American Commitment’s past email petitions began arriving in lawmakers’ inboxes en masse earlier this month.
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Speier’s office noted the similar emails and then calculated that about 98 percent of the messages had come from constituents that her office had never heard from before. The congresswoman’s team set about trying to reply to some senders, and a few of the constituents replied that they had never signed up to send emails criticizing net neutrality.
Lockheed also flagged the notes, saying in its memo that the “source of these messages … is not clearly/currently identified.”
It is long past time for Congress to establish harsh sanctions for these types of "political identity thefts"--sanctions that are commensurate with their ability to "strik[e] at the heart of our representative democracy" (in the words of Rep. Jackie Speier).