Congressman Alan B. Mollohan
August 9, 2010
Dear Friend:
In the weeks since I lost the Democratic primary, many friends and supporters have let me know how disappointed they were in the outcome. I appreciate every single one of those calls and visits - ironically, one of the few positive things about losing an election is being reminded of just how many friends you have.
At some point in these conversations, I am almost always asked how I'm doing. And I answer, honestly, that I am doing fine. I was disappointed in the election results, naturally, but I can accept losing an election.
What I cannot accept is any notion that I ever abused the trust my constituents gave me for more than a quarter century. The fact is that during my 28 years of Congressional service, I have never violated my public trust. I have never used my official position for personal gain. Yet my opponent in the primary election, Michael Oliverio, used a four-year-old dishonest Republican smear campaign as the centerpiece of his race. So, as I prepare to leave office, lingering questions about my ethical conduct float in the wake of the last campaign.
My reason for writing today is to set that record straight, once and for all. That is my sole purpose in writing, and I hope this letter receives your fair consideration.
How it started - the battle over ethics rules in the House . . .
This attack against me began more than four years ago, after I played a pivotal role in the Ethics Committee's investigation of then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
At the time, I was the senior Democrat serving on the Ethics Committee. After several ethics complaints were filed against Mr. DeLay in 2004, the Ethics Committee unanimously agreed on October 6, 2004 that Mr. DeLay had in fact violated House ethics standards on several occasions.
Although this was not a partisan action - every Republican and every Democrat serving on the Committee agreed that Mr. DeLay had violated House ethics standards - our votes so outraged Mr. DeLay and other national Republican leaders that they took a series of steps in an effort to make sure that Mr. DeLay would not be further sanctioned.
* The Republican leadership replaced the Republican Ethics Committee Chairman and three of the five Republican committee members with more partisan figures.
* The new Republican Chairman fired the committee's Chief Counsel and tried to replace him with his personal Chief of Staff.
* The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, tried to change the Ethics Committee rules to make it impossible for the Ethics Committee to do its job.
This transparent attempt to save Tom DeLay's political career at the expense of a working ethics process was highly controversial, both within Congress and on the editorial pages of the national newspapers. As the ranking Democrat on the Committee, I was both the leader and public face of the opposition. On March 10, 2005, my fellow Democrats and I voted to keep the Ethics Committee from organizing under the weakened rules. I took every measure I could to fend off the partisan attack on the ethics process.
This was not a role I sought, but it is one I accepted. I believed in the ethics process, and I was convinced that the Republican leadership's attack ultimately posed grave danger not only to both parties but, more importantly, the Congress itself.
So began several months of stalemate and increasingly bitter rhetoric. Resolutions were debated, speeches were delivered, op-ed pieces were published, but the Speaker and his leadership team refused to back down - until finally they began to lose the support of some of their own members. Reading the writing on the wall, Speaker Hastert finally relented on April 27, 2005 and reinstated the existing rules. The impasse over the staffing issue dragged on through June until the Republican Committee Chairman backed down over that as well.
The right-wing retaliates . . .
We had won, but at what cost? I was about to discover one very personal answer.
My efforts were strongly resented by the Republican leadership, and they began a major, negative campaign designed to destroy my political career. Republican Speaker Hastert visited Parkersburg and openly said that "they [the national Republicans, including Karl Rove] were going to play offense with Mollohan."
And play offense they did. Karl Rove, political operative and adviser to President George W. Bush, recruited Chris Wakim in the White House to run on the Republican ticket against me in 2006. In October of 2005, Mr. Wakim bragged about being asked to come to the White House to be recruited by Karl Rove. Mr. Wakim commented at the time that, in words or effect, he asked Mr. Rove, "how can I beat Congressman Mollohan?" Mr. Wakim said Mr. Rove responded, in words or effect, that "when we get done with Mollohan you [Mr. Wakim] will win easily."
That signaled the beginning of a multifaceted smear campaign, employing all the tools of the propagandist - lies, half truths, false association of facts, tabloid journalism, and name calling.
There is an established game plan for this sort of campaign. It begins with exhaustive negative research. Such a negative research effort was undertaken against me by the so-called National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) - which advertises its mission as "promoting ethics in public life" but is a demonstrably right-wing attack organization. The NLPC receives much of its funding from the Scaife Foundation, well-known for its support of right-wing political causes.
The NLPC researched my wife Barbara's and my investments, and they scoured my Financial Disclosure Statements and my appropriations to nonprofit organizations in West Virginia. The NLPC then constructed a narrative - a fictionalized story that combined perfectly legal investments and perfectly appropriate appropriations in a way to suggest that we used federal dollars to enrich ourselves.
They shopped this storyline to the national press and persuaded the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to write long articles detailing our investments and my appropriations. The Washington Post quickly followed suit.
The Justice Department launches an investigation . . .
The NLPC also made a complaint to the U.S. Attorney in Washington, DC. The NLPC refused to make its complaint public - and even admitted under questioning that "its contents might not be accurate" - but, after the high-profile articles in the national newspapers, the Justice Department had little choice but to pursue an investigation.
It is important to understand at the outset that the Justice Department never contacted me and there was never any allegation of wrongdoing. There was only an ugly, and false, insinuation that something inappropriate must have occurred. Having nothing specific to examine, the U.S. Attorney undertook an exhaustive review of our investments and my appropriations. They looked into every investment and every detail of my financial life. They examined every appropriation I directed to West Virginia.
I'm sometimes asked why the Justice Department spent so much time on this investigation if there was no inappropriate activity on my part. The question answers itself - you always spend more time looking for something that just is not there. And for four years - three under the Bush Administration and one under the Obama Administration - the Justice Department looked. And looked . . . and looked . . .
And finds nothing . . .
. . . and came up with nothing - because there was no wrongdoing to find.
On January 25th of this year, the Justice Department confirmed as much and said that the investigation was closed and that no charges would be filed.
"Case closed," you might think - figuratively and literally. That's certainly what I thought. I looked forward to a reelection campaign decided on real issues that affect people's lives - jobs, health care, the economy.
I had misjudged the quality of today's political discourse. Rather than accept the Justice Department's conclusion, Dick Morris and other right-wing fringe elements theorized - or even reported as fact - that the Justice Department dropped the investigation in exchange for my vote for the health care bill!
Talk about a no-win situation - if the Justice Department filed charges, there would obviously be evidence of some wrongdoing; these right-wing bloggers were now suggesting that the Department's decision not to file charges must be evidence of some underhanded deal.
The media abandons its role ...
The first time I saw this link between the Justice Department probe and the health care vote, I almost laughed out loud - surely no one could possibly believe such nonsense! But, outrageous as it was, this particular slander persisted and even crept into the conventional media, especially the editorial pages of the Ogden newspaper chain.
In retrospect, I should not have been surprised. The Ogden papers - covering the Wheeling, Weirton, Parkersburg, and Elkins markets - had long since abandoned even the pretense of balanced reporting on my race. They had instead linked arms with the NLPC and the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) and spent months on a blatant and profoundly dishonest campaign to discredit me.
The Morgantown Dominion Post, owned in part and controlled by John Raese, had played a comparable role in 2006, when Republican Chris Wakim made this right-wing smear the centerpiece of his campaign. John Raese was at the time running against Senator Byrd for the United States Senate (and is today running to succeed him).
Never once did the Ogden papers - or the Dominion Post four years earlier - question the truthfulness or the motives of the NLPC or the NRCC. This was particularly reprehensible in the case of the Ogden newspapers, since they pursued their attack well after the Justice Department had cleared me.
This smear campaign cried out for genuine investigatory journalism. There is a real story here - who started this attack, what their purpose was, who backed them financially, what their political goals were - but the two dominant newspaper organizations in my District not only didn't answer those questions, they didn't even ask them.
The "watchdogs" market their lists at the expense of truth . . .
This hostile media regularly sought validation from credible "watchdog" organizations. Two figured prominently in this smear - Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). Neither group had cause to attack me, but both allowed themselves to be used by those who did.
CREW's role was especially irresponsible. Dedicated to "promoting ethics and accountability in government," the organization operated in relative anonymity for a number of years before coming up with a new marketing device - it would publish an annual list of the "most corrupt" Members of Congress and disseminate that list across the country in a series of press releases.
It was a brilliant public relations coup. As any visit to the dentist's waiting room will show, we're all naturally drawn to these sorts of lists - the best books of the year, the richest persons in the country, the best-looking stars in Hollywood, the most corrupt politicians in Washington. The only problem is that in compiling its list, CREW relies almost entirely on published news articles - in my case the exact same articles that had been engineered by the NLPC and its right-wing sponsors and that predated the Justice Department decision to close the investigation.
CREW's "most corrupt" list draws attention to its legitimate mission, but only by sacrificing any fairness towards the individual. It willingly became part of the mindless echo chamber that perpetuated questions about my ethical conduct well after the Justice Department had emphatically answered them.
The Center for Responsive Politics employs a similar media-driven gimmick with an annual list of the wealthiest Members of Congress. Its most recent list counted me as the 24th richest Member of the House, with an estimated net worth of more than $13 million. That figure gave weight to the central theme of the four-year-old attack against me - that I had somehow enriched myself through inappropriate earmarks. There's only one problem with that $13 million figure - it is wildly inaccurate. I wish that Barbara and I were that well off, but I assure you that our net worth is much, much smaller.
The CRP gets its information from the financial disclosure forms Members of Congress are required to complete every year. Those forms require Members to list their assets and liabilities in wide ranges. The information is intended to guard against conflicts of interest and is not useful in calculating net worth. As the CRP concedes, all it can really deduce from the financial disclosure forms is that my actual net worth could lie anywhere between a negative $268,000 and a positive $27 million.
In an effort to appeal to its media audience - which values simplicity above accuracy - the CRP selects the mid-point of the range and, consequently, reported our estimated net worth as the $13 million figure. While our actual net worth is far closer to the low end of the range, the CRP's annual list enabled editorial writers to call me - inaccurately - the 24th richest Member of the House, worth up to $27 million. It's easy to understand how someone reading a newspaper in Wheeling might lift an eyebrow at those figures.
A few final thoughts . . .
In conclusion, the smear campaign ran against me in this year's Democratic primary is based on the lie that I enriched myself by benefiting from appropriations dollars.
The source of this lie goes back more than four years when Dennis Hastert, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove, resenting my service on the Ethics Committee during the Tom DeLay investigations, decided, in Speaker Hastert's words, "to play offense with Alan Mollohan."
These operatives employed a right-wing attack group - the National Legal and Policy Center - to research my personal financial life and my appropriations work and then construct a narrative suggesting that "something" must be bad about Alan Mollohan.
The NLPC shopped this narrative to the press, which, of course, is always eager to find the next political scandal. The NLPC also made a complaint to the U.S. Justice Department, which, in this highly charged political environment, undertook an investigation.
The Justice Department investigation did two things. It gave the smear campaign a patina of credibility, and, since the Justice Department never releases information about ongoing investigations, it essentially froze the entire narrative in place for as long as the investigation was underway. That made the entire matter ripe for political exploitation - a tool to be used during a political campaign.
In 2006, the Republican candidate made that tool the centerpiece of his campaign to unseat me. He failed.
In 2010 - even though the Justice Department had by then exonerated me - Mike Oliverio picked up that very same tool and made it the centerpiece of his campaign. Ironically, this package of lies, built by Republicans for a Republican candidate, was successful only when used in this Democratic primary.
I have a 28-year relationship with my constituents. Aside from my family, it is the most important and the most enduring thing in my life.
Again, my only purpose in writing is to assure you that I have never dishonored that relationship. I have never, not once, violated my public trust.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this letter.
Most sincerely,
Alan B. Mollohan
