If you live in Wisconsin, you’re probably familiar with a fellow by the name of Chris Kliesmet.
Scott Walker and Chris Kliesmet from CRG Network
October 4, 2009
But I don’t live in Wisconsin. I live in Oregon. And my relatives live in Nebraska, and in October of 2006, we all learned WHO Chris Kliesmet was.
I didn’t intend to find this story. It literally fell into my lap, as I was checking the tax returns of Wisconsin Club for Growth Inc. (WCFG), which I’ve talked about at length (“Who Is Behind Wisconsin Club For Growth?” and “Water, Tea or Koch?” among others in the past week.) But this was what dropped into my lap, as did my jaw when I saw it, the 2009 Wisconsin Club For Growth, Inc. tax return:
Wisc Club for Growth INC 990 for 2009
Now, why would that $126,500 grant to Citizens for Responsible Government (CRG) cause slack-jawed astonishment? Why?
Well, perhaps because I’ve covered the two (of the six people* involved in this transaction before), UNDER ENTIRELY DIFFERENT NAMES as “giver” to “receiver.”
[* There are only three board Members listed on Wisconsin Club for Growth's board. And there are only three names listed on the Citizens for Responsible Government tax return.]
CRG was founded in 2006 : their initial Federal tax return states that they were founded on April 6, 2006 as the somewhat illiterate CITIZEN’S FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT FOUNDATION, INC. of 9272 N. THRUSH LANE, BAYSIDE, WI 51327. Phone: 414-429-9501.
CRG’s FIRST tax return 2006 (click for larger)
The address, and the phone number given are for Chris Kliesmet then, and are for Chris Kliesmet NOW. (This is easily and multiply verified, journalists.)
And Wisconsin Club for Growth only lists three officers on their board, one of whom is Eric O’Keefe, who is ALSO a Director on the Board of Citizens in Charge with Paul Jacob (from the beginning) as I have documented in “Water, Tea or Koch?” and “Who Is Behind Wisconsin Club For Growth?“
Moreover, take a careful look at the transaction: WCFG is a 501(C) (4), which is a ‘civic league’ and which can raise money ANONYMOUSLY in large bunches, and spend that money on political action, as the Citizens United decision blew open the doors on, but which had been used to mask donations from big donors for years before that.
And Citizens for Responsible Government is a 501(C) (3) — which means it’s a public “charity” with its donations 100% deductible below a certain threshold. Like the Red Cross, or the Girl Scouts of America, etc.
So, why, I asked, was Eric O’Keefe’s WCFG “granting” $126,000 to Chris Kliesmet’s CRG? It seemed ODD, given that for the only two tax return years available, 2006 and 2007 weren’t exactly barn-burners.
The first CRG tax return shows total donations (donation?) of a nice, even $10,000, of which they only spent about $2500.
The second year, 2007, CRG took in a hair under $41,000 and spent almost exactly $14,000. At the beginning of 2008, CRG had about $35,000 on hand. Not bad for a non-profit that had taken in a grand total of $51,000 in its first two years of existence:
CITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT FOUNDATIONC/O: CHRISTOPHER A KILESMET9272 N THRUSH LNBAYSIDE, WI 53217-1373414-429-9501AliasesCITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBLE GOV FDN INCCITIZENS FOR RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT FOUNDATION INCAvailable 990sYear …. IRS Process Date ……Form …….Type ……………… Assets
Both tax returns were 990 EZs, which, like a 1040 EZ is for a non-profit that didn’t make anything. There are no tax returns available for 2008 and 2009, which may be that 2008 they fell below the threshold that a non-profit needs to file a return. ($25,000). But if they got $126,500 from Wisconsin Club for Growth, they would HAVE to file a 2009 return. Perhaps it will show up.
Now, again, Wisconsinites are probably familiar with Chris Kliesmet’s strongarm and headline-grabbing tactics. He first came to prominence in a recall election in Milwaukee, IIRC. But what you DON’T know about Chris Kliesmet is that he ran a multiple state “Denial of Service”-style political attack for the Citizens In Charge in 2006. Here, the original page from 2006 as Eric O’Keefe’s wife tells all [emphasis added]:
STAFF
Leslie Graves is the national director of [the Government Transparency and Accountability Project] G-TAP. She shares about how she became interested in the G-TAP project:I live near Spring Green, Wisconsin, with my husband Eric O’Keefe. Eric has been involved for many years with the term limits and school choice movements, recently serving as Chair of the Executive Committee of Americans for Limited Government.
We’ve raised three children. In early 2006, after two decades as a stay-at-home mom, I started a petition drive management company and plunged into managing the paid part of two petition drives in Nebraska.*
* See “America At Its Worst (i)“ and “America At Its Worst (ii)“
The second week of our ballot drive, a young woman called me one night and, in tears, relayed an experience she had had that day while knocking on doors in the Omaha area to ask voters if they’d consider signing her petition to place a spending lid amendment on the ballot.
[...]
John Fund** describes other issues with the Nebraska petition drive in “Taking the Initiative”, appearing in the Wall Street Journal on October 16.
[** Jeepers. There's John Fund carrying water for Eric O'Keefe and Howie Rich and Paul Jacob even back then. See "Things Go Badder With Koch™"]
[...]
As the petition drive wore on, it occurred to me that if the union-backed group that was working hard simply to keep the Spending Lid amendment off the ballot was using email extensively to communicate with government workers across the state, it would be important to know about that.
Did any government workers abuse public resources in their determination to shut down this ballot drive?To what extent were government workers being inundated at work with extremist rhetoric and propaganda from opponents of the Spending Lid initiative, with scare-mongering stories about petitioners, mass emailed invitations to government workers to “spot” petitioners, “call in” their locations, or earn extra money on weekends getting paid to block voters from signing petitions?
As I relayed my experiences to Mike Groene, chairperson of the Spending Lid initiative committee in Nebraska, it turned out that he shared my concerns. He collected many signatures and worked with many volunteers on the petition drive. His experiences, and the stories he heard from his volunteers, were strikingly similar to the stories I was hearing from petitioners who were collecting signatures for pay.
My old friend Paul Jacob of Citizens in Charge has helped with hundreds of statewide petition drives over the last 25 years. As I spoke with him about my experiences in Nebraska, Paul said he’d seen problems like this for years, in many states, in many petition drives. However, there didn’t seem to be a good way to study or learn about the full extent of the problem.
As Paul and I talked, I remembered a presentation I’d heard earlier in the year featuring Chris Kleismet of Citizens for Responsible Government. Chris sat on a panel about greater citizen involvement in the activities of local government. He said that voters can and should become more aware of actions of local government agencies. How are budgets determined? How are decisions made? Chris said that in order for citizens to become fully informed about these matters, they need to read and understand public documents. Any public document from a government agency can and should be made available to a voter who asks for it using an “open records” request.
I shared my recollection of Chris’s presentation with Paul. Together, we realized that an open records request might, for the first time, enable voters to have an effective means of studying whether petition drives ever collide with public resource abuse.
Paul and I got together with Chris in mid-August to learn more about his database management system. It turned out that his database was already constructed so as to enable a large-scale study to take place. His system is able to archive and sort public documents. Eventually this database will allow people from around the country to search all the public documents archived on it by keyword. Chris was enthusiastic about participating and has been a wealth of information and support.
As word about the study got out, voters and activists in a number of states asked if they could participate.
That’s how G-TAP got its start. [...]
Uh, yeah. I’ll let you see what the newspapers in some of those states had to say about their little “experiment in Democracy.”
Cozy. You will recall from “Things Go Badder With Koch™” that Paul Jacob was originally hired by Howard Rich and Eric O’Keefe in 1990:
Howie Rich and Eric O’Keefe noticed my work on the petition drives and offered me a job running the Tax Accountability Amendment in Illinois. Half a million voters signed petitions to put the measure on the ballot. Then, at 77 percent in the polls, the Illinois Supreme Court took it off the ballot. (The same thing happened again four years later with a term limits petition.)
[...]
In 1992, I was hired to run U.S. Term Limits...
[* Note, if Jacob ran the Tax Accountability campaign in Illinois, he worked closely with the chief petitioner, Jim Tobin. And just to keep it fun and frolicsome, Paul Jacob and Jim Tobin share the "Tax Day Tea Party" platform in Chicago in 2009. According to Right Wing site, "Founding Bloggers" :
We continued digging, and came across another tea party website, teapartypatriots.org. This appears to be the group largely, though not solely, responsible for organizing the previous round of Tax Day Tea Parties.
Teapartypatriots.org was founded by Eric Odom in 2009, who was, at the time, the head of New Media with the Sam Adams Alliance, run by ... Eric O'Keefe, as shown in "Ripped From Today's Headlines."]
OK. Here’s where it gets really interesting. This is what HAPPENED from that little plot cooked up between Leslie Graves and Paul Jacob. From “Unlimited Terms of Endearment Part XXI: So Which One Is Shemp?” October 9, 2006:
Their campaign style has always been to attack, never defend, and try to grub up any ‘dirt’ they can on the opposition. To make grandiloquent pronouncements about giving “control back to the people,” putting “the people in charge,” and so on and so forth. But the attack component is always there.
This weekend, the attack spread through several states, the political equivalent of a Denial Of Service (DOS) attack: mailbombing your server via proxies with so many emails that the server shuts down.
Oregon, 6 other states blanketed in records bid
FOIA – A group wants e-mail pertaining to property rights and spending limits, an effort that will cost time and money
Saturday, October 07, 2006
GOSIA WOZNIACKAClose to 500 cities, school districts and state agencies in Oregon, and thousands more in six other states, have been hit with public records requests for all e-mails pertaining to any communication regarding measures on term limits, property rights or limiting spending, an undertaking most local municipalities say will take months and thousands of dollars to complete.
A Virginia-based group, Citizens in Charge, is mounting what its Web site calls “a study of public resource abuse” under the name CitizenFOIA (FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act). Citizens in Charge is aiming its campaign, which also includes requests for Internet and e-mail use policies and their enforcement, at Oregon and other states where groups backed by Howard Rich, the head of Americans for Limited Government and U.S. Term Limits, pushed spending limits or property rights measures this year.
Citizens In Charge’s president, Paul Jacob*, says his group is nonpartisan…
And, a little further down, the Omaha World-Herald reports:
SOS requests swamp agencies
October 6, 2006
BY DAVID HENDEE
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITERA leader in the push for a limit on state government spending is blanketing Nebraska cities, counties and school districts with public records requests that officials say would cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars to fulfill.
“This is harassment,” Lynn Rex, director of the League of Nebraska Municipalities, said Thursday.
Hundreds of school districts, all 93 counties and Nebraska’s largest cities have received at least four requests for records from Mike Groene of North Platte, Neb., chairman of the Stop Overspending Nebraska group.
Among other things, he is asking for all records and documents relating to computer, e-mail and Internet use policies and all electronic records that mention the Nebraska SOS campaign and its petition gatherers.
The SOS group is campaigning for Initiative 423, a proposal on the November ballot that would limit state spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth.
After receiving Groene’s second request, Omaha Deputy City Attorney Tom Mumgaard replied that a good faith search of all computer records would entail a substantial effort and could cost at least $276,000.
The City of Papillion estimated its cost at more than $100,000. Individual school districts report estimated costs of at least $500 to $1,000.
Groene said the records requests are not part of the spending lid initiative.
He said the requests are part of a national study by Citizens in Charge, a Milwaukee organization seeking to catch public employees violating electioneering rules by supporting or opposing ballot issues with public resources.
Groene said the study has found examples of Nebraska public officials using office computers to encourage their employees to fight the spending lid … Groene said the requests should be easy to fulfill. “Anybody who knows computers knows that it’d only take 15 minutes to search for a key phrase,” he said….
Now, just compare what that Nebraska “local” fellow said to what Idaho’s “local” Laird Maxwell said within the same 72 hour period:
Thursday, October 05, 2006
JOHN MILLER Associated Press WriterBOISE, Idaho — Nearly 2,000 school districts and local governments in Idaho and at least five other states, including Montana, are being targeted by foes of big government, who think taxpayer funded resources such as computers are being used improperly in political campaigns. Sweeping, three-page public records requests have also been made in Montana, Nebraska, Arizona and Michigan, said Laird Maxwell, a Boise activist involved with groups behind property rights or government-limiting initiatives up for a vote in those states. In Nevada, agencies could receive records requests this week, the groups said. Some officials call this a disruptive fishing expedition aimed at taxing scarce resources…
Paul Jacob, a Virginia limited-government advocate who heads Citizens in Charge, and Chris Kliesmet, with Citizens for Responsible Government in Milwaukee, are helping…Maxwell says the information should be just a keystroke away. “They’re stonewalling us,” he said. “Either we have transparent government — or we don’t.”
Or compare with what Montana’s Trevis Butcher (whose Montanans in Action was FINALLY outed as being financed by Howard Rich groups on Yellowstone Public Radio, when MIA co-chair Senator Joe Balyeat, of Bozeman admitted as much on Sept 21 (see HERE )
The Great Falls [MT] Tribune:Political activist Trevis Butcher’s name appears at the bottom of the letters. Butcher sponsored three statewide initiatives, which were thrown out by a Great Falls judge because of deceptive and fraudulent signature-gathering methods. The Montana Supreme Court is reviewing the lower court’s decision regarding CI-97, CI-98 and I-154.
Although Butcher’s signature stamps the bottom of each FOI request, the Winifred rancher distanced himself from the massive request for public records. Butcher couldn’t say how many agencies across the state were asked to divulge public records, and he referred questions to the president of Citizens In Charge, Paul Jacobs (sic). Jacobs (sic) could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening.
However, Butcher said every agency that received an FOI request is suspected of having used public resources for political means, he said, either by exchanging e-mails with national political organizations and labor unions or through inner-agency exchanges.
The information requested has nothing to do with Butcher’s appeal to the high court, he said, so much as the information will indicate how well Montana complies with open record policies or misuses public resources, he said.
“All of this (data) is going to come out long after the initiatives are over,” Butcher said. “I’m certainly not the individual that put together the criteria for the study and the research. It has nothing to do with the initiatives in the (state) Supreme Court.”
Does any of this sound familiar?
Leslie Graves (Eric O’Keefe’s wife) admits they conspired together to launch this multiple state attack weeks before the 2006 election. From the October 7, Portland Oregonian article cited above:
[Paul] Jacob and others at Citizens in Charge, such as Eric O’Keefe, listed on the group’s board of directors, and Chris Kliesmet, the designated auditor for the records requests, are longtime supporters of term limits, limited government spending and property rights. Kurt Weber, whose name is at the bottom of the FOIA requests, is a Libertarian Party leader in Oregon.
[...]
Though Jacob said his group “works with people all across the political spectrum” and simply supports the initiative and referendum process (“let the voters decide how they use it,” he said), the records sweep appears to be part of a coordinated campaign by a close-knit group of longtime libertarian activists.
[...]
In August, O’Keefe, who is chairman of the Americans for Limited Government executive committee, Kliesmet, and Jacob were featured speakers at the organization’s conference in Chicago. Americans for Limited Government and Fund for Democracy, created and backed by Rich, have supported about two-dozen initiatives in 14 states, most aimed at scaling back government power. In 2004, Citizens in Charge spent more than $640,000 in an Arkansas ballot measure battle over term limits.
“I love term limits, I think they’re the best thing since sliced bread,” Jacob told The Oregonian this week…
When the election was over, the records requests were dropped. But they had succeeded in making a lot of state workers run around to no particular purpose pulling old emails, records, etcetera.
You can read more about it here.
In 2006, it should be noted Eric O’Keefe served on the board of Wisconsin Club for Growth at that time. And on the board of Citizens in Charge — as you can clearly see on their 2006 Tax Return — as well as the board of Howard Rich’s Americans for Limited Goverment, as Leslie Graves has told us.
ALG had released this press release in July of 2006, a mere three months earlier:
ALG PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 11, 2006
Contact: Heather WilhelmYesterday, activists in Michigan turned in over half a million signatures, topping off what has been a tremendous response to ALG’s grassroots campaigns for property rights and spending reform. ALG is supporting the efforts of local groups in Arizona, California, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington this year. […]
OK. So what does this mean?
Eric O’Keefe and Paul Jacob were Chris Kliesmet’s paymasters in a coordinated attack on the goverments of SEVEN western states that year. Ultimately, Howie Rich’s old “Craniac” machine was stomped into the dirt, losing in every state but one, Arizona. In Idaho, in what OUGHT to have been a slam-dunk, they lost three to one.
The hallmark of that campaign was secret money, and, at the end of it all, the Center for Public Integrity reported:
December 21, 2006
Three Big Donors Bankrolled Americans for Limited Government in 2005Americans for Limited Government, the tax-exempt organization that bankrolled a series of controversial ballot initiatives this year, raised 99 percent of its $5.4 million in total contributions in 2005 from just three donors, the Center for Public Integrity has learned. Read more
(That didn’t stop them from releasing a press release falsely claiming victories in nine OTHER states, which is essentially quoted by the current version of Wikipedia, showing how easy it is to rewrite history. Careful checking of financial records turns up ZERO financial contributions by Rich in the claimed “victory” states.)
ALG 2006 official Press Release. Never challenged by the mainstream media.
All right. So where are we?
Yes. Eric O’Keefe, who is noted for NOT playing nice, and Paul Jacob, with whom Chris Kliesmet once attacked seven Western states in a futile attempt to distract attention and to attack “state workers” and “unions” in 2006 are attacking state workers and unions again in 2011 in Wisconsin.
And, guess who is running the effort to recall 7 of the 14 Democratic State Senators who fled Wisconsin to deny a quorum to the union-busting Wisconsin Republicans?
Chris Kliesmet.
Scott Walker and Chris Kliesmet, Oct 4, 2009
From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, THIS WEEK:
All Politics Blog
From Madison and beyond, a daily dose of political news and glimpses behind the scenesLet the recalls begin
By Bill Glauber of the Journal Sentinel
Feb. 19, 2011Madison - The Committee for Responsible Government Network was the first group out of the box to formally raise the prospect of recall elections in the wake of the political storm over Governor Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill.
In a news release issued late Friday, the group announced it will provide training and advice to those who want to seek the recall of Democratic State Senators James Holperin of Conover and Robert Wirch of Kenosha. The two have been among those legislators to leave the state to block passage of Walker’s bill.
Chris Kliesmet, CRG Network administrator said: “If these senators do not wish to perform the job for which they are paid and to uphold their oath of office then they should resign or face dismissal by their constituents.”
Whose little “Charitable” 501 (c) (3) foundation received $126,500 of neatly untraceable 501(c) (4) cash from Wisconsin Club for Growth, on the board of which Eric O’Keefe sits. And who launched massive radio ads and robocalls throughout Wisconsin this week.
And, just for fun, while we’re looking at interesting transactions, U.S. Term Limits (on whose board Paul Jacob sits with Howard Rich) gave Paul Jacob’s Citizens in Charge $300,000 of its $300,315 in donations in 2006. Of which they spent $178,955, of which $139,125 was spent on “consulting.”
I wonder who those “consultants” were, and what they were doing. But we DO know this: unless Chris Kliesmet ran those massive FOIA-bombs in seven Western states for free (highly unlikely) he picked up a nice chunk of those consulting fees, if not all of it.
And you might recall how Howie Rich and Eric O’Keefe were impressed with Paul Jacob and “recruited” him to serve in their political skullduggery from 1990 to this very day. At bare minimum, that $126,500 that Club for Growth gave to the organization run out of Chris Kliesmet’s house and from his cell phone number probably entitles them to ask for some favors in return.
Address of record for CRG: 9272 N. THRUSH LANE, BAYSIDE, WI 51327
Which is interesting, because who was rolled out to run a recall effort that Wisconsin Club for Growth is very interested in?
Chris Kliesmet.
When you focus on the people, and not the endless profusion of astroturf foundations slushing money between one another, it’s actually not a very large club.
But they sure swing it hard.
Courage.
==============================
Note: The original links to most of the newspapers from 2006 have expired. I have electronic copies, but I leave them, to preserve historical accuracy. They are available in the respective archives of all newspapers quoted.
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