Jan 27, 2005 -- Campaign Legal Center Asks DOJ to Investigate "Pay to Sway" Controversy
Federal Law Forbids Use of Gov't Funds for "Publicity or Propaganda."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 27, 2005
Press Contact: Mark Glaze, 202-271-0982

Washington — The Campaign Legal Center today called on the Department of Justice to determine whether members of the Bush Administration have violated federal law by using government-appropriated funds to pay columnists to promote Administration policies. Federal law forbids the use of appropriated funds for "publicity or propaganda," particularly when the source of the propaganda is covert.

The Campaign Legal Center is a nonpartisan, nonprofit group working to improve and enforce the nation's campaign finance, communications and government ethics laws. The group represents the public interest in administrative and legal proceedings where the nation's campaign finance and related media laws are enforced: at the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Internal Revenue Service and in the courts.

The Legal Center 's letter to Noel Hillman, chief of the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department, can be found by clicking here.

The following is the statement made by Mark Glaze, director of the Legal Center 's government ethics program, at a press event announcing the group's request for an investigation.

------------------------------

Today, the Campaign Legal Center is calling on Noel Hillman, the chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice, to conduct a thorough investigation into whether the incidents we've heard about today, and others that may yet be unknown, constitute a pattern of lawbreaking by members of the Administration or their contractors.

Since 1951, congressional appropriations acts have generally featured a provision aimed at preventing government agencies from using taxpayer dollars to for purposes of "publicity and propaganda." These measures go directly to the basic democratic tenet that the government should be in the business of administering the policies the people choose, rather than working to persuade the public of the rightness of a particular Administration policy or ideology.

In our letter to the Department of Justice, we cite relevant prohibitions contained in both the Consolidated Appropriations Acts of 2004 and 2003, which require that "No part of any appropriation contained in this or any other Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by the Congress."

Over the past fifty years, the Government Accountability Office has issued a number of decisions in this area and identified a number of inappropriate activities subject to the restriction. The agency has, for instance, declared that one of the main targets of the publicity or propaganda prohibition is one in which the "obvious purpose is 'self-aggrandizement' or 'puffery.' The GAO has defined self-aggrandizement as "publicity of a nature tending to emphasize the importance of the agency or activity in question."

For example, an agency would be prohibited from expending appropriated funds to issue a press release that attempted "to persuade the public as to [its] importance . . . as a Government agency."

The office has also interpreted the restriction on publicity or propaganda as prohibiting what it has called "covert propaganda" - materials that "are misleading as to their origin." In 1987, for example, the State Department hired consultants to prepare newspaper articles and op-ed pieces in support of the Reagan Administration's Central America policy. However, these pieces were published "as the ostensible position of persons not associated with the government . . ." The GAO concluded that such activities violated the publicity or propaganda restriction because they were "misleading as to their origin." Id.

In light of these decisions, we believe the Administration activities we've discussed today raise serious questions, and we will urge the Department of Justice to conduct a fair and thorough investigation.

# # #