The alleged fraudster behind a purportedly pro-Bernie Sanders super PAC that seemingly scammed“James Bond” actor Daniel Craig is out of jail and back in the political fundraising game.

Cary Lee Peterson — a self-described “congressional lobbyist and election campaign guru” who pleaded not guilty to securities fraud charges last month after the FBI arrested him in March— was released from federal custody on June 10 after posting a $200,000 secured bond.

Federal authorities released Peterson into the custody of his mother, who lives in Arizona. Court records show Peterson is currently subject to electronic monitoring and a daily curfew. Furthermore, Peterson was required to forfeit his passport — he regularly traveled abroad — and to resolve other, unrelated warrants for his arrest.

But Peterson first had other business. Within days of his release, he registered two new political groups with the Federal Election Commission: a political action committee called the Alliance Against Disabled Inmate Abuse and a super PAC called Democrats Socially United, which is backing Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to its nascent website, Democrats-United.org.

By law, super PACs are allowed to raise unlimited sums of money and spend that cash to advocate for or against political candidates. They may also operate without candidates’ permission and face few regulations on how they spend their funds. These factors have made super PACs attractive vehicles for professional political operatives — as well as less ideologically driven individuals hoping to profit off of popular candidates.

Peterson, who did not respond to questions related to this story, launched Ready for Bernie Sanders 2016 last year, which he later renamed Bet on Bernie. He settled on a third name — Americans Socially United — after regulators made him remove references to Sanders, per federal rules that allow committees to use a candidate’s name only if authorized by the candidate.

Americans Socially United’s most notable donor was actor Craig, who gave the super PAC $47,300 last July after donating the legal maximum of $2,700 to Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Craig, last year, told the Center for Public Integrity that he made the contribution in “in good faith” to support Sanders’ candidacy, apparently unaware of Peterson’s checkered past.

Then — and still today — Peterson has two warrants out for his arrest in Arizona, stemming from his failure to appear in court for misdemeanor cases against him. Furthermore, he was twice evicted from apartments in Texas. And two Texas courts ordered one of Peterson’s companies to pay creditors more than $200,000 for breaches of contract earlier this decade.

One of those creditors is Dow Jones & Co., which was issued a judgment of nearly $170,000 after Peterson’s company ECCO2 Corp. failed to pay for advertisements it took out in the Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Peterson told the Center for Public Integrity that his past troubles were irrelevant to his current endeavors.

“You don’t need to look back on my past,” Peterson said. “I’m going out there trying to make a difference.”

In an email Monday, Peterson told the Center for Public Integrity to “cease and desist all other activities prior to talking with me.”

He did not respond to numerous phone and email follow ups.

To this day, it’s unclear how Peterson’s Americans Socially United super PAC spent the money it raised.

Its only real presence was online, where it operated several social media accounts and a bare-bones website that was reachable via several addresses, including BetonBernie.com, BetonBernie2016.com, PledgeSanders2016.com and SociallyUnited.org.

Americans Socially United collected funds from an unknown number of donors — including some who told the Center for Public Integrity they came across the super PAC’s website by mistake and gave money to the super PAC while believing they were donating to Sanders’ presidential campaign.

Americans Socially United also attracted attention from Sanders’ presidential campaign, which sent it a pair of cease-and-desist letters last year. In them, Sanders campaign lawyer Brad Deutsch argued that the group’s activities were “illegal” and “causing harmful confusion for supporters of Senator Sanders’ campaign.”

The only official campaign finance report Americans Socially United filed last year was riddled with abnormalities. And despite the FEC’s threats of “civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action,” the super PAC still has not filed a mandatory campaign finance report that was due in January.

Americans Socially United is just one of eight political groups Peterson registered with the FEC last year.

He also created groups called the American Friends for Micronesia, the Congressional Committee on Cuban Affairs, the Congressional Committee on Eurasian Affairs, the Congressional Committee on Law Enforcement and Public Safety, the Congressional Task Force on Human Trafficking, the Every Vote Counts Restoring America Super PAC and the Independent National Committee.

Despite their names, none are officially affiliated with Congress. And none have filed mandatory campaign finance disclosures.

Peterson also presents himself as associated with a law firm called Robert Peterson and Fields Associates, which offers services for political candidates, international affairs and public relations. The company is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, at an address provided through a firm that specializes in virtual office space.

Terry R. Fields, a California lawyer whose name is connected with Robert Peterson and Fields Associates in some listings, told the Center for Public Integrity his name was being used by Peterson without his “consent, permission or involvement” and that he has “never, in any way, been his partner or his associate.”

Now, both the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission have cases pending against Peterson related to business dealings he undertook in 2012 and 2013 while running a penny-stock company called RVPlus Inc.

According to one of the government’s complaints against him, Peterson “defrauded investors by issuing false filings and press releases touting its purportedly lucrative — but wholly fictitious — business deals.”

At the time, Peterson claimed his company had secured nearly $2 billion worth of deals with foreign governments for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, including Haiti, Liberia and ministry of the environment for Katsina State in Nigeria.

In May, he pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against him by the Department of Justice in federal court in New Jersey.

U.S. officials aren’t the only ones interested in Peterson.

The Center for Public Integrity has also learned that law enforcement officials are investigating Peterson in the Pacific island nation of Micronesia, where he was trying to establish a medical marijuana program prior to his arrest in March.

This story was co-published with the Huffington Post.

BOKOSHE, Oklahoma — Here in the land of wind-whipped, rolling plains, the gray dust, which sparkles in just the right light, seems inescapable. Residents of this town near the Arkansas line say they have spotted it on their grass, trees, ponds, barns, furniture and cars.

The source of Bokoshe’s enduring misery is coal ash, an often-toxic byproduct of burning coal for electricity. Clouds of it, swirling like tornadoes at times, descend upon people while they sit in their yards and mow their lawns. The powdery material clogs swimming pools, air conditioners and chicken coops.

The ash, which contains harmful metals such as arsenic, chromium and lead, comes from a state-permitted disposal pit — operated by a company named Making Money Having Fun — fed by a power plant eight miles outside of town. Residents here began complaining about the dust to state regulators in 1998. More than a decade later, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency got involved and in 2014 finally acknowledged that the pit has shown “evidence” of escaping coal ash dust. But the grime that coats the town has not gone.

“I can look out onto the dump … and see the ash dust balloon up,” says Tim Tanksley, a Bokoshe native who lives a mile from the pit. He and some of his neighbors filed a class-action lawsuit against the pit operator and others, only to see the case dismissed.

What is happening in Bokoshe is a microcosm of a fierce — some say one-sided — battle over coal ash that has dragged on in Washington’s corridors of power for nearly four decades — and is not over yet. After a disastrous, billion-gallon spill of coal ash in Tennessee in late 2008, the EPA pledged to regulate this industrial waste. It then sat on its plan for five years. When agency officials finally acted, they chose the minimalist approach, setting baseline national standards for coal ash disposal at more than 1,400 sites nationwide while leaving regulation essentially up to the states. Under the coal ash rule, the agency has no authority to enforce its own requirements. At the same time, EPA officials determined that so-called beneficial uses, like the recycling that fills the pit here, could continue.

Utility companies and ash recyclers say such uses are safe if voluntary industry guidelines are followed. For some uses, however, the science argues otherwise. And for others, regulation has been passed on to the U.S. Department of Interior — which has been studying the issue for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, residents of Bokoshe cannot help but feel victimized by what they say amounts to a cruel regulatory hoax — with no end in sight.   

“They’re still dumping it, and we’re still breathing it,” Tanksley says of the coal ash. “It’s still making people sick.”

A weak rule

The situation in Bokoshe exposes the weakness in the EPA’s coal ash rule, the fallacy that dumping can continue under the guise of beneficial use. To encourage recycling of coal ash, the agency exempts from federal oversight any disposal method that meets this definition. And this gives carte blanche to sites like the Making Money pit, an old coal mine where disposal of coal ash is considered a beneficial use by the state.

For the purposes of coal ash recycling, there are two types of beneficial use: Encapsulated, in which, for example, the ash becomes part of concrete or wallboard; and unencapsulated, in which loose material is reused as fill for road construction or dumped in active and abandoned coal mines, a practice known as minefilling. The most common reuse method, minefilling remains unregulated at the federal level because of a loophole in the EPA’s coal ash rule. The EPA handed off regulation of the practice to the Interior Department, which has yet to act. The deferral was partly the product of vigorous lobbying by the utility industry over many years.

“If you choose to follow [industry] recommendations, then coal ash reuse is legitimate,” says Tom Adams, of the American Coal Ash Association, a group of utility companies and ash recyclers. He touts coal ash recycling as “one of America’s greatest recycling success stories.”

Evidence suggests otherwise. In 2012, a report prepared for the EPA analyzed a coal ash blend known as AgreMax, marketed by the AES Corporation as “structural fill” for construction — an unencapsulated beneficial use. Researchers found contaminants from the ash mixture can ooze into the environment. Tests showed that arsenic, boron, chloride and chromium could leach at levels up to 9,000 times safety standards.

In 2014, the EPA chronicled 158 cases in 32 states where coal ash compromised water quality. Of these, 22, or 14 percent, involved beneficial use. In some, pollution has degraded nearby water supplies enough to exceed safety standards. In others, the ash has sullied water on site. Some examples:

• In Rocky Mount, North Carolina, coal ash recycled as structural fill over 25 acres contaminated the groundwater of adjacent property with arsenic, mercury and lead, resulting in a $4,000 state fine.
• In Camden, Tennessee, coal ash used to fill a gravel quarry tainted two residential wells with boron and mercury; the EPA took emergency action after a resident had suffered “burning skin sensations” from the water.
• In Chesapeake, Virginia, developers reused 1.5 million tons of coal ash to build a golf course over a shallow aquifer, only to watch the ash blacken 25 residential wells.

“Structural fills have caused the same damage that [regulated] disposal sites cause,” says Lisa Hallowell, of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “They’ve proven to be dangerous.”

Problems have also been documented with minefilling at some of the nation’s coal mines, like the Making Money pit in Bokoshe. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences examined the risks associated with the practice and catalogued the ways coal ash can pollute ground and surface water. “The presence of high contaminant levels in many [coal ash] leachates,” the academy found, “may create human health and ecological concerns at or near some mine sites over the long term.”

In 2007, two environmental organizations — the Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice —examined minefilling at 15 coal mines in Pennsylvania and determined the ash had imperiled water quality at 10 of them. The study revealed rising levels of pollutants — arsenic, chromium, selenium — in water supplies after minefilling had begun. More recent reports have detailed similar pollution in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Richard Webster, of the public-interest law firm Public Justice, represents people living near minefills in those two Appalachian states. He says the EPA’s coal ash rule regulates landfills and some structural fills — two disposal methods similar to minefills — but leaves untouched the dumping of coal ash in coal mines. That matter is now in the hands of the Interior Department, whose surface-mining office oversees most of these operations. The department, while signaling the possibility of a federal minefill rule, has delayed any action for the past nine years.

“That’s the big irony from the EPA rule,” Webster says. “It is a giant loophole.”

Environmental advocates have begun pushing federal regulators to close it. Last November, 14 groups, including Public Justice, petitioned Interior’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement for a rule “to eliminate this dangerous regulatory gap.” The petition sets up yet another battle over coal ash, even as industry representatives challenge the existing EPA regulation. In January, members of Congress from both parties introduced the latest in a series of bills that would weaken national standards for coal ash disposal. Sponsored by U.S. senators John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — among the top Senate recipients of utility money over the years — the bipartisan legislation would eliminate the few limits on beneficial use.

A small mountain of ash

Nowhere does the debate over beneficial use resonate more than in Bokoshe, population 512, a desolate and decaying place situated atop a coal seam riddled with mine pits. Some brim with coal ash generated at the Shady Point Power Plant, in neighboring Panama. Owned and operated by AES, the 350-megawatt facility looks benign. Yet every year it sends hundreds of thousands of tons of coal ash to fill up old strip mines in tarped, 25-ton trailers. Residents see a caravan of ash trucks, averaging 180 loads a day, barreling down a two-lane highway past modest homes and shops.

One of those abandoned surface mines is the Making Money pit, which straddles the southern edge of town. Encompassing two “cells” and 458 acres, the mine has taken in so much coal ash it is half full — 125 acres in the first cell; 129 in the second. AES has trucked in enough to cover the 70-foot-deep pit and create a miniature mountain. Stacked 50 feet high — and permitted to rise another 550 or so feet over the next 20 years — the darkened ash in the disposal pit dominates the landscape. By 2036, the pit could hold 9.2 million tons of it.

For decades, the Shady Point plant has treated Bokoshe and environs, in the words of Bridget Wood, an Oklahoma activist who spent months videotaping the ash clouds, “as if [it] is AES’s dumping ground.” Since 1991, when state legislators declared coal ash a beneficial use “in any active or inactive coal or non-coal mining operation,” the utility has embraced minefilling. State records show seven minefills permitted in the county where the AES plant resides, compared to three in Oklahoma’s other 76 counties. All told, the plant has covered 500 acres of pits with coal ash at varying depths.

Seven miles west of Bokoshe, in McCurtain, where the ash protrudes like an iceberg from a water-soaked pit, residents have complained about dust clouds, spurring two state notices alleging violations — one in 2011; the other last year. Some residents have hidden special hunting cameras in trees to expose what they believe to be improper ash disposal. Others remember similar troubles at a pit just east of Bokoshe, where the ash has hardened into gray mounds resembling the surface of the moon.

“You choked to death,” recalls Joy Arter, who lives a half mile from that pit and, for years, did not go outside without a mask because the ash dust “was so thick and smoldering.”  

The Making Money pit began accepting coal ash in the late 1990s, whipping up dissent. By 2000, when operators officially applied for a permit, 44 Bokoshe residents had petitioned state regulators, objecting to the operation. At a public hearing, they expressed concern over “fugitive dust; ground water; surface water; [and] asthma,” according to a transcript.

The company, then named Making Money Having Fun, or MMHF, LLC, vowed to contain the ash and suppress the dust. In a 2000 letter, it assured the petitioners that “disposing of [coal] ash material in a safe manner … has advanced to ‘state of the art.’ ”

Waste generator AES, for its part, has portrayed coal ash as harmless, likening it to dirt. “They said you could put it on your peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich,” recalls Herman Tolbert, a rancher whose family has owned nearly 1,000 acres beside the mine pit for three generations.

AES declined interview requests from the Center for Public Integrity and did not respond to written questions. In a brief statement provided to the Center, the utility cited the dismissal of the class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Bokoshe residents against it, the pit operator and others over the disposal at the pit, which, the utility says, “did not present facts that would prove Shady Point’s practices caused injury to any of the plaintiffs.”

The plaintiffs and their attorneys say they wanted the case heard in an Oklahoma state court and chose, for tactical reasons, not to present detailed allegations of their injuries while the case was in federal court. A federal judge ruled the residents’ lawsuit did not meet the technical requirements to allow them to try their case in state court.

The utility says “the environmental practices at AES Shady Point comply with all applicable environmental regulations.”

Operators of the pit, now named Clean Hydro Reclamation, did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

‘Oxygen in use’

For years, people in Bokoshe saw the gray dust from the Making Money pit coat almost every surface in town. Gardens withered and crops died, residents say. Cows grew sick; calves were stillborn. Residents say ailments among their neighbors — from migraines to nosebleeds, heart conditions and respiratory problems — seemed to become commonplace.

Bridget Wood remembers visiting Bokoshe for the first time in 2009 and wondering why so many houses bore the same sign: “OXYGEN IN USE.” Canvassing the town, she met “all these people who were very sick,” she says, hooked up to oxygen, reliant on nebulizers. Some could not speak without gasping for breath. Others endured multiple bouts of cancer. No one connected their illnesses to the ash.

Leah Culwell, a school bus driver who for 30 years lived a mile from the pit, never questioned the company line on coal ash — until a capsized truck sent the material billowing over her bus. In the throes of a respiratory attack, her eyes swelled shut. She blew black mucus for days. Only then, Culwell says, did she suspect “this stuff is something more serious than they’re telling us.”

More than a decade would pass before residents knew the extent of pollution at the pit, where operators mixed coal ash with wastewater from oil and gas wells, another “beneficial use” permitted by the state. By 2009, the operation was taking in an estimated 1 million barrels of it annually, says Bert Fisher, an Oklahoma hydrogeologist who analyzed the site for the residents’ legal case. His analysis showed a plume of contamination — oilfield brine mixed with coal ash — tainting an on-site well, a neighbor’s well and two nearby creeks.

Fisher also sampled the dust in about a dozen Bokoshe homes abutting the pit and found coal ash particles in it. The ash samples contained elevated levels of the carcinogens hexavalent chromium and arsenic, much like those collected at the Making Money pit.

In 2009, inspectors for the state, which has primary oversight of the Making Money pit, witnessed coal ash “being blown into the air,” records show. They issued a notice of violation, alleging the operator had failed to fulfill multiple requirements, including taking “reasonable precautions” to keep dust from moving off site.  Federal inspectors then detected “unauthorized” saline discharges in the two creeks near the pit, resulting in two administrative orders — one in 2009, the other the following year. The EPA accused the pit operator of leaking pollutants into “waters of the United States” and demanded it “immediately cease and desist,” which forced it to stop accepting oil and gas wastewater. The state issued its own order against the pit, banning the mixing of this wastewater with coal ash — but not the ash itself.

That same year, Bokoshe’s battle with coal ash became known at EPA headquarters. While chronicling cases of coal-ash contamination, employees of the agency’s solid-waste office contacted Susan Holmes, of the citizens’ group Bokoshe Environmental Cause, who offered testimonials and photographs detailing the ash dumping at the pit.

“Your letter, and certainly many of the photos, illustrate how a waste unit can be state-permitted as a landfill while it is actually a surface impoundment,” an EPA employee told Holmes in an email dated April 2009, likening the pit to an ash pond — the kind of wet and unlined disposal site later targeted by the agency regulation.

Heavy lobbying by industry

In the meantime, coal ash regulation had become an explosive subject in Washington. By October 2009, the EPA had forwarded a draft rule to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for review. Under this draft, the agency essentially would have classified coal ash as “hazardous,” a distinction triggering a series of strict controls for its dumping. The EPA also proposed a crack-down on the use of recycled coal ash as structural fill for quarries, sand and gravel pits, and “large-scale” landscaping operations. It would have treated these fill applications as forms of disposal, not beneficial use, and regulated them like ash ponds or landfills.

The proposal set off a frenzy of lobbying by the utility industry, which has long opposed a “hazardous” label for coal ash. Records show utility companies, ash recyclers and trade organizations, such as the American Coal Ash Association and the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group launched an aggressive campaign throughout the OMB review. In 2009 and 2010, OMB analysts held more meetings on this environmental rule than any other in the office’s published history, 47 in all. Of those, 34 involved industry representatives. Environmental advocates and representatives of the public — including Bokoshe residents, like Holmes, who visited Washington twice to push for tighter coal ash controls — attended 13.

“It was such a blatant example of one-sidedness,” says Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland who has written extensively about the rulemaking.

Industry representatives reiterated longstanding claims about the costs of stringent environmental regulation — lost jobs, higher electricity bills. And they played down the hazards of coal ash. But as evidence of the ash’s threats mounted, the argument against federal regulation shifted. Records show utilities and ash recyclers asserting one dominant rationale for rejecting the EPA proposal: A hazardous designation would create a “stigma effect” on beneficial use, crippling the ash-recycling market. For ash recyclers, says the coal ash association’s Adams, the mere prospect of such a label could reap unintended consequences, such as dropped insurance coverage or building-code approvals.

In the end, the industry campaign had a clear effect: Post-OMB review, in June 2010, the EPA published a proposed rule featuring a weaker, less-costly alternative to its initial draft. It opted to designate coal ash “non-hazardous” and subject it to less-stringent federal requirements. OMB economists re-wrote the EPA’s cost-benefit analysis and added the hypothetical stigma effect, which they estimated would result in $233.5 billion in lost benefits. The costs, calculated over a 15-year period, dwarfed any anticipated benefits from regulation, says Maryland’s Steinzor, who has compared the EPA proposal to the OMB-edited version.

For several years afterward, the utility industry continued to flex its muscles in the regulatory process, inundating the EPA with comments, analyses, legal opinions and technical documents. The proposal remained stuck in the bureaucracy through all of 2011, 2012 and 2013. The EPA’s rulemaking “has been tied up in knots over beneficial use,” says Lisa Evans, of the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which, on behalf of 10 advocacy groups, sued the agency in 2012 over its stalled process and, two years later, won a court order forcing it to act.

By the time the EPA issued its final rule in 2014 — five years after its initial regulatory proposal — the agency had backed down. Instead of a rule treating coal ash as hazardous, the EPA issued minimum national standards that amounted to guidelines for states — guidelines that call for treating the disposal of coal ash as if it were household trash. The EPA retreated on another front as well: beneficial use.

The rule still puts limits on fill operations like sand and gravel pits. But it exempts other fill sites involving up to 12,400 tons of coal ash — enough to stack a football field six feet high — if they meet the criteria for beneficial use. To exceed this cap, operators must show the ash will not harm the environment.

The beneficial-use provision is ambiguous. It does not specify how a company should demonstrate the ash’s safety, for example. Even industry representatives acknowledge that it seems broad enough to allow for controversial applications, such as filling up silt and clay mines.

Still, they say, industry guidelines call for protective measures such as liners and water monitoring at these sites. “I see little real damage cases from large structural fills,” says James Roewer, of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, which is among a dozen industry groups that sued in July 2015, challenging various provisions of the EPA’s coal ash rule in court, including the tonnage limit for beneficial use. Since the EPA drafted its coal ash proposal in 2009, the solid-waste group has spent $1.2 million lobbying on either the agency rule or congressional measures that would have gutted it, disclosure reports show.

The EPA declined interview requests from the Center, citing the pending litigation. In answer to written questions, the agency attributed its reversal on coal-ash recycling to “EPA agree[ing] with commenters that, if constructed correctly, large scale fill operations can meet all of the criteria for beneficial use.” The agency defends its coal ash rule as an effort to “distinguish between beneficial use and disposal.”

‘Nobody cares’

Back in Oklahoma, regulators do not seem as concerned with such distinctions. The state Department of Mines oversees the “coal-combustion byproducts” program authorizing the disposal of coal ash as reclamation fill for mine pits. The department’s director, Mary Ann Pritchard, did not respond to the Center’s interview requests; program officials declined to comment.

Privately, department employees defend minefilling as a beneficial use, which they say helps restore thousands of acres scarred by strip mining. Minefills look like mounds of coal ash temporarily but, they insist, end up covered with soil and grass. Oklahoma regulators have touted minefills now used as grazing lands. Some have written papers and given presentations extolling the state’s minefill regulations — at times, highlighting the Making Money pit in Bokoshe. Still, officials acknowledge the practice is driven by the utility industry’s need to get rid of its ash.

“It was an afterthought to use these pits for coal ash disposal,” one says.

State regulators say their oversight of the Making Money pit has been rigorous. Inspectors from the mining department — as well as the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, which regulates air emissions — have visited the site, examined citizen complaints and monitored the company’s required reports, they say. Together the agencies have issued eight notices of violation against the pit, culminating in the 2009 enforcement actions over oil and gas wastewater and fugitive dust.

In 2010, regulators negotiated a consent order with the pit operator over the dust violation, requiring a plan to contain the ash, and monitoring its compliance. In 2012, they closed the case. Now, regulators say, the company has a more contained facility, replete with water sprayers and other equipment to wet the ash.

“We consider them in compliance,” says Sarah Penn, the environmental department’s deputy general counsel. While inspectors have since responded to complaints about the ash clouds — and issued a warning letter in 2014 over “visible fugitive dust” — Penn says the agency has yet to “see something we believe is a violation.”

Of the powdery ash, she says, “It looks worse than it is.”

To residents, the regulatory response has been feeble. Records show citizens logging complaints about the ash clouds for 11 years before environmental officials finally forced the pit operator to adopt a dust-suppression plan. Much of that plan reflects what the company promised years earlier — not just to neighbors but to state regulators, who, in 1999, issued their first violation notice over the dust. The state has dismissed most alleged violations and has never imposed a fine. Even the EPA’s orders, while stopping the use of oil and gas wastewater at the pit, have yet to yield any clean-up of ash-brine contamination in the creeks.

“People don’t want to do their jobs,” Tanksley says of the enforcement efforts. He remembers one state inspector assuring residents they would never see “with the naked eye” coal ash leaving the pit. Another attributed a billowy plume to a burning brush pile.

Environmental advocates have long argued that federal standards for minefilling could help plug state regulatory shortfalls. But the Interior Department’s mining office, which declared minefilling an “acceptable practice” in 1996, dismissed the need to do anything for years — until the 2006 National Academy of Sciences report. The report recommended that the mining office work with the EPA to develop “enforceable federal standards” that would create a regulatory floor for minefilling. In response in 2007, Interior officials published an advance notice of a proposed rulemaking, suggesting minimal changes. Nine years later, they have yet to unveil a draft plan.

Now that the EPA has issued its coal ash rule — and exempted minefilling — Interior is facing renewed pressure to develop its regulation. Evans, the Earthjustice attorney, explains that she filed the 2015 petition for a federal rulemaking on behalf of her group and 13 others after “plead[ing] with the office for years.” Under the federal mining law, Interior officials must respond to a formal rulemaking request or face possible legal action.

“We’re afraid minefilling will increase,” Evans says, echoing the fear among many advocates that utilities will turn to the unregulated practice as a way to get around the EPA’s coal ash rule.

Industry representatives counter that filling up coal mines with coal ash does not yield the same profit margin as other beneficial uses. Companies rely on minefilling more for the environmental benefits, they say, such as restoring old mines. Some states justify ash disposal in underground mines to combat another pollution problem: acid mine drainage. Coal ash, being alkaline, can help neutralize this acidic waste, the theory goes.

“I’d call that a benefit,” says Roewer, of the solid-waste group, which opposes tight controls on minefills. In recent years, he says, members of his lobby group and others have met with mining officials at Interior, urging them to allow the practice to continue as a beneficial use.

The mining office declined to comment, except to confirm that it intends to publish a proposed rule this year. In March, its director, Joseph Pizarchik, sent Evans a letter denying the Earthjustice petition as “moot” because the office “has already determined that a [minefill] rulemaking … is warranted.”

The jockeying for position in Washington seems worlds away to people in Bokoshe, including Tim and Sharon Tanksley and Susan Holmes. Their citizens group has relied on standard strategies to call attention to their plight — lobbying politicians, dogging regulators — as well as unorthodox ones. They have chased down ash trucks, scooped up ash samples, and staked out the pit at night. Once, they erected a billboard on the outskirts of town that announced: “WELCOME TO BOKOSHE, THE [COAL] ASH CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.”

In 2011, the Tanksleys, Holmes and three other residents sued AES, the pit operator and a dozen coal-ash haulers in Oklahoma district court, accusing the companies of “abnormally dangerous transport and disposal activities … pollution and contamination,” among other claims. Filed as a class action, the lawsuit sought remedy for those living within a three-mile radius of the Making Money pit — approximately 1,500 people — for “contamination of the environment in which they live, work and recreate and … the real and immediate threat of injuries.”

Viewed by Holmes as a “last-ditch effort” to shutter and clean up the pit, the lawsuit proceeded for a year before being removed to federal court, where it stalled and ultimately was dismissed. The residents’ attorneys argued the case belonged in state court, and filed multiple motions in federal court to move it back. Because of rulings there and in an appellate court that found the residents did not meet technical requirements enabling them to try the case in state court as a class, they are now left to pursue individual claims.

For many, the sense of powerlessness runs deep.

“Nobody cares,” Holmes says, alluding to state and federal regulators. “Everybody says, ‘It’s not up to us.’ It’s never anybody’s fault, and it’s always somebody else’s problem.”

Today, people in Bokoshe seem resigned to the dust in the air — and the destruction on the ground. Some have fled the town. Others have grown sick. In 2009, residents did an informal survey of the households located within a mile-and-a-half radius of the Making Money pit. Of 20 homes, 14 families had a relative who developed — and, in some instances, died of — cancer. A new survey is under way; organizers hope it will goad state health authorities to conduct an epidemiological study. An official with the Oklahoma State Department of Health says the state’s Central Cancer Registry plans to begin a preliminary study of cancer rates in Bokoshe this summer and should report its findings in the fall.

It all sounds familiar to Kristina Zierold, an epidemiologist at the University of Louisville who has researched the effects of coal ash on human health. In 2012, she explored the prevalence of disease in communities abutting ash dumps in that city. Residents had long complained that the billowing dust was making them sick, she says, “but there wasn’t any data.” In a year-long pilot study, she compared medical diagnoses and symptoms of 231 adults and children in what she calls “exposed” neighborhoods to 170 of their “non-exposed” counterparts, revealing a significant disparity. Of the two groups, the first had higher rates of illnesses, such as asthma, emphysema and cancer.

“We can definitely say that there’s this statistical difference,” says Zierold, who is now studying neurobehavioral symptoms among children exposed to the ash. Backed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, this five-year study is the only federally funded research exploring a possible link between coal ash and poor health. The study is in its earliest stages, but based on her work so far, Zierold says this much is clear:  “Coal ash does play a role in people’s health.”

In the past 11 years, Holmes has lost her sister and mother to cancer — lung and pancreatic, respectively — which she believes was tied to the coal ash. Her family lived along the pit’s haul route and breathed in the dust daily. Now living in her mother’s old house, Holmes says she promised her family she would stay until the dump closed. But her health is worsening. Her childhood asthma has returned, requiring an inhaler, a nebulizer, oxygen, and two medications. Recently, she was diagnosed with heart disease.

“We’re just a little Podunk town in the backwaters of nowhere,” Holmes says, explaining why so many residents believe the coal ash dumping has been allowed to continue. “We are considered throwaway people.”   

Joe Wertz of StateImpact Oklahoma contributed to this story

It’s shaping up as the nation’s hottest governor’s race, but the two actual candidates in North Carolina are not the ones controlling the conversation.

Instead independent groups not affiliated with Republican incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory or Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper are fighting proxy battles on the swing state’s airwaves, spending more than 47 times as much on political TV ads as the candidates.

Eleven entities — the most in any single state-level race so far — have spent more than an estimated $3.7 million for TV airtime about the environment, economy and controversial legislation such as the transgender bathroom law. They include some of the usual suspects: the Republican and Democratic governors associations, conservative bastion Americans for Prosperity, as well as a potent North Carolina environmental coalition that’s played in past elections.

McCrory’s own campaign has spent just $78,000, while Cooper’s campaign doesn’t appear to have aired any broadcast TV ads as of June 27, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from media tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

Kantar Media/CMAG offers a widely accepted estimate of the money spent to air each spot. The figures do not include ads for radio, the internet, direct mail or TV ads that aired on local cable systems. And the estimates do not include the cost of making the ads.

Outside group advertising isn’t new for North Carolina, which has been an early test case in the trend of millionaire donors bypassing traditional routes and pouring cash into groups with neutral-sounding names such as Real Jobs North Carolina instead.

But what may be most surprising this year is the scale of the ads and how early they’ve started to appear: The majority of the spending has occurred since Cooper and McCrory handily beat their opponents in the March 15 primary — yet still months before most voters start focusing on who they will pick on Nov. 8.

Both candidates, meanwhile, appear to be saving their firepower, having booked millions of dollars in TV airtime in the fall, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Communications Commission ad contracts for 25 broadcast stations.

According to recent polls and experts, it’s a tight race, so every dollar matters as Democrats try to tip the scales in a GOP-controlled state. While McCrory and groups aligned with him spent more than $1.2 million propping up the incumbent or attacking his opponent, Cooper’s allies on the left aired $2.6 million worth of political ads against McCrory.

“North Carolina has always been a pretty politically competitive state, and both Democrats and Republicans feel it’s winnable this year,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. “It is also one of the only states that should be competitive for the governor’s, senatorial and presidential races in the state, so expect a boost of outside and ‘dark money’ there.”

Nationally, candidates, political parties and outside players have so far pumped more than $53 million into TV broadcast ads about state-level races from governor to legislator in 30 states.

Outside groups account for almost 40 percent of all the TV ad spending, pouring $20.7 million into political ads this cycle.

“Donors are increasingly going to these groups so they can hide their identities and give more money without any accountability,” said Ian Vandewalker, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, which advocates for campaign finance reform.

About one-fourth of the outside players this election cycle are so-called “dark money” groups, entities that aren't required to disclose their donors.

The flood of outside groups is not a surprise to experts in North Carolina, a purple state where big donors and groups have experimented with outside money since 2010. That year, Art Pope, a billionaire former legislator who later became state budget director, pushed a coordinated strategy with such groups that helped turn the statehouse in Republicans’ favor, gaining a net total of 11 seats in the Senate and 15 in the House.

“These campaigns were very successful, and because of that success, it became a new mode of operation,” said Bob Hall, the executive director of Democracy North Carolina, a voting rights nonprofit.

Of the North Carolina gubernatorial ads from outside groups, 96 percent had a negative tone attacking one of the candidates, according to Kantar Media/CMAG.

“Outside groups are helpful because candidates themselves are more reluctant to put out attack ads, because that’s basically saying ‘Yes, I endorse this attack on someone else,’ instead of taking the moral high ground,” Vandewalker said. “It’s much easier to have groups with no accountability pop up for that purpose.”

Environmental groups have latched onto this strategy, decrying so-called cozy relationships between McCrory and the Charlotte-based electric and gas giant Duke Energy.

For 29 years, McCrory worked for the state’s largest utility, an economic powerhouse that has been steeped in controversy after a devastating coal ash spill in 2014. And Duke Energy is one of the top donors to McCrory's biggest advertising supporter, the Republican Governors Association, which seeks to elect GOP governors nationwide. (Duke Energy has also contributed to the Democratic Governors Association but has given the RGA three times more money in the past five years, according to Internal Revenue Service records.)

The North Carolina Environmental Partnership, a coalition of eight environmental groups including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southern Environmental Law Center, spent the most money on ads in North Carolina, $1.6 million so far, that slammed McCrory for trying to cut solar energy use, endangering drinking water and those Duke Energy connections.

“Tying Gov. McCrory to Duke Energy — one of the state's largest employers — is something far-left environmental groups have been trying to do since the last election, but the reality is that he has been the toughest governor on Duke Energy,” said Ricky Diaz, a spokesman for McCrory’s campaign.

Meanwhile the Durham-based North Carolina Waste Awareness & Reduction Network urged Cooper to change Duke Energy’s corporate charter in a series of TV ads and is running an online campaign calling on voters to force the candidates to stand up to the energy giant.

“Frankly, the opportunity is wide open for either McCrory or Cooper to distinguish himself by providing some actual leadership instead of just coddling Duke Energy,” said Jim Warren, executive director of the 28-year-old watchdog group.

“We have gotten absolutely no special treatment in any way from regulators,” said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy.

Cooper’s campaign did not return calls for comment.

National organizations on the right such as the Republican Governors Association and Americans for Prosperity bought ads directly under their names, while the Democratic Governors Association played one layer below the surface, putting money into NC Families First, which sponsored the ads.

“The DGA often partners with in-state organizations to bring an important local perspective on gubernatorial campaigns,” said Jared Leopold, the DGA’s communications director.

In total, the Republican governors' group leads with $664,000 worth of airtime in the North Carolina race compared with the DGA-funded group's $558,000.

With four months of campaigning to go, expect to see record levels of cash spent, especially because of a fractured GOP base.

“There are a lot of conservative groups that really don't like Donald Trump and aren't inclined to spend on the presidential race,” Kondik said. “One wonders if some of that money will be redirected to more down-ballot races, which are easier for these outside interests to influence. The political system as a whole is overflowing with money, and that money has to go somewhere.”

Data reporter Ben Wieder contributed to this story.

This story was co-published with TIME.

Former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson was so unhappy about Fox News’ decision to keep him out of the first Republican presidential debate last August, he filed an official complaint with the Federal Election Commission.

Now, the former dark horse presidential contender is even more upset that it took the agency 10 months to dismiss his complaint— after deadlocking on whether Fox News had violated federal campaign finance rules governing the staging of debates.

“The FEC should either be abolished or entirely redone,” Everson told the Center for Public Integrity. “It’s a bureaucratic waste.”

His complaint — which was dismissed in late May, according to new documents released by the FEC on Thursday — has also added fuel to the bitter infighting between the agency’s three Democratic-aligned commissioners and its three Republicans.

Last year, Everson alleged that Fox News had failed to use “pre-established objective criteria,” as required by law, to determine which White House hopefuls would appear on stage during the so-called “undercard” debate in Ohio.

Fox News had initially said the top 10 Republicans in the polls would appear at the first presidential debate. Roughly two months before the event, the network announced it would hold an additional debate for other GOP candidates garnering at least 1 percent in the polls.

Ten days before the big day, Fox News relaxed that standard to include “all declared candidates whose names are consistently being offered to respondents in major national polls.”

This had the effect of ensuring the appearance of several low-polling, high-profile candidates, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, former New York Gov. George Pataki and businesswoman Carly Fiorina.

Everson did not make the cut.

In a letter to the FEC, Fox News argued its decision-making fully “complied with the FEC debate regulation” and that Everson’s complaint was “without merit.”

Yet based on these facts, the FEC’s nonpartisan office of general counsel concluded that there was reason to believe that Fox News had violated the law, and could be fined. Two commissioners agreed.

“The office of general counsel said it was a clear violation of our rules,” Democrat Ann Ravel told the Center for Public Integrity. “My job here is to follow the law.”

“There’s reason to believe there may have been a violation,” added independent Steven Walther, who typically votes with the Democrats. “It was strictly a matter of what the regs say.”

Meanwhile, the FEC’s three Republicans — Lee Goodman, Caroline Hunter and Matthew Petersen — voted to find there was no reason to believe that Fox News had violated the law.

They jointly released a statement calling it “astonishing” that their own office of general counsel would conclude that Fox News had erred.

“The commission’s debate regulations cannot be used to impose government restrictions on newsroom decisions and to punish, and even censor, American press organizations,” they wrote.

“The government should not punish any newsroom’s editorial decision on how best to provide the public information about candidates for office,” Goodman added in his own statement. “How could expanding debate news coverage from 10 to 17 candidates be against the law?”

Ellen Weintraub, the commission’s third Democrat, voted to dismiss the complaint— but didn’t go as far as her Republican colleagues, who also said the commission“lacks jurisdiction to investigate or punish Fox News’ activity with respect to the debate.”

Tim Franklin, president of the Poynter Institute, a journalism-focused educational institution, said the FEC’s debate regulation “harkens back to the Paleolithic Era of the media.”

“I’m not sure how that rule fits with a 2016 media landscape,” he continued.

But supporters say the rules are on the books to ensure that debate sponsors — be those companies, nonprofit organizations or media outlets — don’t cede control to individual candidates, in turn, giving them the equivalent of a corporate contribution.

Federal law says debates must not be structured to “promote or advance one candidate over another.”

Now, for the second time in nearly three years, the FEC’s Republicans have ramped up their argument that the agency should not regulate debate sponsors that are media companies and should more fully respect the press’ First Amendment rights.

Yet the Democratic commissioners stressed that the regulations criticized by their Republican colleagues have been on the books for decades.

“Media organizations are mentioned specifically in the debate regulations,” said Weintraub. “It’s our job to interpret those regulations”

“It’s not the role of the FEC to determine constitutionality of our rules,” added Ravel. “If our rules are unconstitutional, there needs to be a court decision that says so.”

The FEC’s ideological disagreements don’t comfort Everson, the Republican presidential candidate who previously served as the head of the IRS under President George W. Bush.

“Listen, I know bureaucracy a lot better than the Federal Election Commission, with my pedigree,” Everson told the Center for Public Integrity.

“They clearly signaled that they weren’t interested in looking at things on a contemporaneous basis,” he continued. “If there was a time to do something, it was many months ago.”

This story was co-published with TIME.

In the nearly eight years since the first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was delivered to the Navy, it hasn’t won many ardent fans outside the Navy, its home-state lawmakers, or the employees of the two shipbuilders producing dueling models. The ships’ maiden voyages have been marked by cracked hulls, engine failures, unexpected rusting, software snafus, weapons glitches, and persistent criticism of how vulnerable they are to an attack.

“The ship is not reliable,” the Pentagon’s operational test and evaluation director said in a report released in January 2016, only the most recent such judgment it has made. During 113 days of testing on one ship last year, some of the engines and water jets responsible for propelling the ship forward were out of commission for 45 days.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed his concern last December by ordering the overall number of new ships trimmed from 52 to 40, saving billions of dollars. The department's leaders also ordered production scaled back from three to two ships in 2017 and said all the work should eventually go to just one of the two shipyards.  

But lawmakers on Capitol Hill — provoked or perhaps inspired by a steady stream of contractor donations and unusually determined Navy lobbying — are now on the verge of ordering the Pentagon to build more than Carter wanted.

A defense appropriations bill moving towards Senate approval in coming days or weeks directs that $475 million be spent by the Navy to procure an extra LCS next year. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation ordering that $384 million be spent on the extra ship. So it’s virtually certain to happen, a prospect that cheers the Navy greatly but has evoked dismay among the ships’ many critics.

The extra spending is a direct repudiation of the Secretary of Defense, putting the Navy back on track with its original three-ship production schedule for 2017 -- and pushing the decision about the fate and total size of the LCS fleet off to the next president.

The Obama administration “strongly objects” to buying the extra ship, the White House said in a budget message to Congress on June 14. It said just two are needed now to preserve a competition that “ensures the best price for the taxpayer on the remaining ships” and that spending more would needlessly drain funds from other military priorities, including undersea, surface and aviation programs. Carter made clear at the time he cut the program back that that there’s no love lost between his office and the Navy’s command, which he accused in a blunt letter of ignoring technical risks, neglecting warfighting needs, and prioritizing warship “quantity over lethality.”

The extra ship, which is part of a program with an estimated lifecycle cost of at least $45 billion, is just one in a long list of armaments that Congress is about to force the Pentagon to buy against its will — following an annual ritual that routinely pads spending for the nation’s defense by billions of dollars and sometimes gives U.S. soldiers equipment that doesn’t work or they don’t need.

According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit spending watchdog based in Washington, D.C., the House bill passed on June 16 contains at least $6.7 billion worth of research and armaments that the Defense Department’s leaders did not request in their February budget proposal. That’s even higher than the $4.6 billion in unwanted expenditures that Congress approved last year, the group says.

The House bill, for example, includes $1.5 billion for an unrequested modern “amphibious” warship for dual land and sea missions, $400 million for four unrequested C-40 aircraft to carry cargo and commanders, and $1 billion worth of unrequested National Guard equipment, a perennial pork-barrel favorite, the Taxpayers’ report said. The Senate bill itself would add almost $4.3 billion for 49 unrequested programs, including $1 billion for a coast guard ship to break ice in the Arctic and Antarctic, $130 million extra for an unspecified classified program, and $900 million worth of unrequested National Guard equipment.

“Congress wants to pass out the cash and look like they’re being strong on defense,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense and a former U.S. Coast Guard officer. He adds that members are also keen to help home-state contractors, including some that earn billions of dollars annually from Pentagon spending and whose employees in turn give generously to key lawmakers that support the weapons systems they make or service.

Struggling to meet minimal requirements

The LCS was conceived as an unusual multi-mission ship platform, capable of being used in shallow water to help fight battles on shore (“littoral” denotes a region along a shore) as well as in deep-water engagements, as a replacement for existing mine sweepers, frigates, and coastal patrol craft.  It was to be equipped to counter armed boats, submarines or mines by reconfiguring the ships’ weapon systems, sensors and crews according to needs of the moment.

In that sense, according to critics, it is unfortunately the sea-going equivalent of the Air Force’s trillion-dollar F-35 fighter plane: designed too ambitiously to fulfill too many roles and as a consequence well over its budget, flawed in its execution, and struggling to meet even minimal operational requirements.

Among its more notorious missteps, the first of the new littoral combat ships to be deployed, named the USS Freedom, was immobilized in the South China Sea— a key future operating area — during a trial run in 2013, after also experiencing a cracked hull and unexpected rusting. A year later, auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the USS Freedom had spent 58% of its 10-month deployment idle in port in Singapore.

Last December, a second ship, the USS Milwaukee, broke down and had to be towed 40 miles after a software malfunction failed to allow the clutch to transfer between the warship’s gas turbines and diesel engines, spewing metallic debris into the gears. Another ship, the USS Fort Worth, was sidelined in January — and remains in Singapore today — because its operators failed to follow proper maintenance procedures and adequate lubricants did not reach those same gears, which are vital to the operation of waterjets needed for high-speed operation.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Navy captain, told the service’s officials in a February letter cosigned by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Jack Reed (R.I.), that LCS “seaframe failures and system reliability shortfalls” as well as its weak armaments had made him highly skeptical that the ships could defeat anything more than “a small number of lightly armed boats” — well short of what he cited as the Navy’s boasts that it could put “the enemy fleet on the bottom of the ocean.”

McCain said the program had “significant design, testing, integration, and deployment challenges.” And his committee eventually approved a defense authorization bill that supported the Obama administration’s LCS production cutback. But it wasn’t the last word.

Despite the ship's troubles, the Navy wanted more. In March, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee that the military branch had a “validated need” for 52 littoral combat ships, 12 more than his boss at the Pentagon said it did. Mabus went on to say that Carter’s plan to choose one shipyard to make most of the ships instead of two would drive up the price. At an industry conference in January, he called the overall program a “success story.”

Key congressmen rushed to support Mabus. Led by Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., and Rep. Reid Ribble, R-Wisc., who represent districts that house the two competing shipbuilders, roughly 40 House lawmakers signed two April letters to the House Armed Services Committee and House Committee on Appropriations applauding the ship’s “production efficiencies and cost savings,” and stating that reductions to the fleet would “hinder the Navy’s ability to respond to threats around the globe.”

The shipyards in question — Austal USA, in Mobile, Alabama, and Lockheed Martin’s Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin — reinforced this message in hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lobbying from January 2016 to March 2016 according to reports filed by them with the House and Senate clerks. Lockheed said it spent $3.65 million to lobby Congress on all issues between January and March 2016, with an unspecified portion related to shipbuilding. Austal USA --which has narrower interests -- separately spent $189,096 lobbying just on the shipbuilding provisions in House and Senate defense appropriations bills.

Austal USA employed 12 lobbyists, almost all of which previously worked in government, including on appropriations committees, according to information gathered by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. Lockheed employed 70 lobbyists, according to the Center’s data, of which over two-thirds had previously been in government posts, including at the Department of Defense and on appropriations committees. At least six of Lockheed’s lobbyists formerly worked with the Navy; one of Austal USA’s lobbyists was a naval captain and another previously worked for Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a strong supporter of the LCS.

The two contractors’ home-state lawmakers didn't stop at signing the letters. “Congress should not allow a Secretary of Defense with less than a year left in office to decide the fate of a critical Navy program like the LCS,” Rep. Byrne said in a statement before the amendment passed in April. A provision he successfully inserted in the House-passed bill would block Carter’s plan to give all the work to just one shipyard.

“The LCS is critical to our Navy’s ability to respond to current and future threats across the world,” Sen. Shelby said in a statement after Carter announced his plan in December. “I will fight tooth and nail against this misguided attempt to needlessly undermine the security of our nation and the American people.”

It's clear why home-state lawmakers would support the extra spending. But the influence of the shipbuilders runs far deeper at the Capitol. Lockheed Martin has given campaign funds to almost every current Senate and House defense appropriations subcommittee member, a total of at least $2.3 million from 1999 to 2015, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of Federal Election Commission filings and Center for Responsive Politics data. Though the contractor is not allowed to give directly to candidates, Lockheed Martin’s employees can contribute and its company-directed political action committee or PAC, which collects employee and other funds, can donate.

Since 1998, Rep. Frelinghuysen R-NJ, the key House subcommittee chairman, has received at least $151,850 from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC; the amounts rose after he assumed that role in late 2013. Rep. Kay Granger, R-Tx, the vice-chair, has received at least $341,850 in contributions from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC, including those to her leadership PAC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The ranking member, Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-IN, has received at least $102,100 in individual and PAC donations. The House Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. Hal Rogers, R-KY, also received at least $82,475 from Lockheed Martin’s PAC and employees.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, vice-chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, received more than $72,000 from Lockheed Martin’s employees and PAC since 1989. Senate defense appropriations chairman Thad Cochran, R-MS, received over $40,000. Austal USA, a subsidiary of an Australian defense firm that mainly makes ships and has a much narrower set of legislative interests, has given thousands of dollars to Sen. Shelby and to two House defense appropriators.

Spokesmen for Cochran, Granger, and Shelby said the contributions did not influence their support for the ship; the others did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“When you’re the chair or senior member of the defense appropriations committee you’re going to get a lot of money from various defense contractors…[that] hope that you act favorably on their wants,” Ellis said. If the contractors have been making campaign contributions “right along, they can potentially get to the senior members of the committee whether [the members]…represent them or not.”

Upgrades with scant impact

Supporters of the program say that future ships will be different than those produced so far. They’ve been formally rebranded (from "LCS") as mere frigates — a less ambitious naval nomenclature referring generally to any fast and small ships. They are supposed to be equipped with a bit more armor, a better missile decoy system, improved electronic warfare gear, and a better air-search radar, which will boost their costs by an estimated 20 to 30 percent. But the troubled anti-mine warfare technology the ships were meant to have — which failed repeatedly in tests — will be dropped altogether, leaving that mission to more proven solutions.

The rebranding came in the aftermath of a special study ordered by then-Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in 2014, which used statistical modeling to assess the potential capabilities, costs, and delivery dates of many possible new designs. The Navy decided as a result of the study to procure a version of the warship that was “not substantially different” from the littoral combat ship, according to a 56-page report issued June 9 by the GAO.

Due to space, weight, power, and cooling constraints, it chose the “least capable” design of all the available options, a frigate that could not fulfill all the anti-submarine warfare and surface warfare tasks that were previously considered important, the report said. Navy officials agreed their selection contained only minor modifications to the LCS but said their choice was dictated by a need to operate the ship militarily by 2020 and to avoid the higher expenses of a more sweeping redesign.

The GAO report nonetheless cited internal Pentagon warnings that, despite the technical fixes, the new frigates' chance of surviving an attack is unlikely to be greatly improved. The report noted that its range will be as much as 30 percent lower and said it will not be capable of defending other ships in a pitched sea battle. It said the Navy, in its review of alternatives, had underestimated the new frigate’s likely costs, while overstating the costs of crew manning for rival ship designs.

“The Navy’s business case for the acquisition of the frigate is compromised,” the GAO said, “by unknowns related to the ship’s design, cost, and program oversight plans.”

The GAO report concluded moreover that proceeding with the production of additional ships without first conducting more testing is a mistake.  The last of the Navy’s LCS survivability tests will be completed in 2018, by which time 18 of the ships will have been completed and delivered to the service. The ships are already a year or more behind schedule and over budget, and so the GAO suggested a "production pause" in which Congress would fund no new ships at all in 2017, not even the two that the Pentagon’s leadership says it wants.

Some of the ships’ supporters say these growing pains are common with any new ship. Ronald O’Rourke, a naval issues analyst at the Congressional Research Service, said in testimony for the House Armed Services Committee in 2014 that many naval acquisition programs stumble in the beginning. The Navy’s favorite ships today were often “not very well regarded in earlier years,” O’Rourke said.

But extensive mishaps with the LCS have called into question not just the ship, but the Navy's ability to make decisions about what it really needs. In a report released June 14, O’Rourke cited naval officials’ admissions dating back to 2003 that it had not studied carefully enough whether the LCS is the right ship for warfare in shallow waters, an omission that he said explains many of its troubles today -- but which don't seem to undermine their confidence that they need to sail forward with the program, full speed ahead.

Lauren Chadwick is a Scoville Fellow at the Center for Public Integrity. The Center’s news developer Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this article.

What do billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have in common with civil rights pioneers of the 1950s? More than you might think, according to a recent ruling by a federal judge.

Each has faced threats and harassment from those who disagree with their views — and each is entitled to privacy when it comes to disclosing certain kinds of information to the government — so said U.S. District Judge Manuel L. Real in an April 21 ruling, citing constitutional grounds.

But the court decision has been more than a little controversial; comparing the travails of billionaires to the violent threats endured by civil rights workers in the 1950s is more than a stretch, say some of those familiar with the case — it’s offensive.

The argument is far from academic. Indeed, the case in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California represents just the latest front in an ongoing legal and public relations battle being waged by a wide range of mostly conservative groups attempting to keep donors to political nonprofits — including “dark money” groups — hidden from view.

Many of the legal tussles revolve around interpretation of a crucial civil rights case from 1958: NAACP v. Alabama. Increasingly cited since the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010, today that 58-year-old civil rights case is being trotted out again and again — in courtrooms, on talk shows, in news articles and in statehouses all over the country.

Death threats via Twitter

The historic Alabama decision — allowing the NAACP to keep its membership list secret — was deployed as a key argument in that recent court case.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a charitable, 501(c)(3) nonprofit group, had refused to turn over a list of its donors, their addresses and contribution amounts to the state attorney general, which had requested the information as part of a 2011 filing. The state requires such disclosures by all charities to help it guard against fraud.

While it does not typically release donor lists to the public, there was an inadvertent breech that did allow some filings to be viewed, the foundation noted.

The foundation’s chairman is the well-known billionaire industrialist David Koch, who, along with brother Charles Koch, ranks among the nation’s most prolific political donors and is playing a major role in the 2016 election.

In December 2014, Americans for Prosperity Foundation asked the judge for an injunction, which would allow it to keep its donor list secret, citing a threat to its First Amendment rights. It presented evidence of “serious and often horrific” threats against Charles and David Koch, wrote Mark Holden, senior vice president and general counsel for Koch Industries in a statement filed with the court.

One tweet, for example, stated “I say we kill the Koch brothers and their entire family line.”

In court, lawyers for the foundation used the 1958 NAACP v. Alabama case as justification for withholding the list of names and donors.

“For some 50 years, Your Honor, since the Supreme Court in 1958 upheld the right of the NAACP to resist compulsion by the state of Alabama of its membership list, courts have recognized that the First Amendment protects against this sort of compulsion in this sort of circumstance,” said the foundation’s lawyer Derek Shaffer, according to a preliminary transcript of the trial.

Judge Real granted the injunction.

The judge noted in his ruling that AFP Foundation, its employees and supporters “face public threats, harassment, intimidation and retaliation once their support for and affiliation with the organization becomes publicly known.”

“And although the Attorney General correctly points out that such abuses are not as violent or pervasive as those encountered in NAACP v. Alabama or other cases from that era, this court is not prepared to wait until an AFP opponent carries out one of the numerous death threats made against its members,” he wrote.

The state has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

‘Violence and bloodshed’ in Alabama

The Alabama case originated in 1956 when state Attorney General John Patterson sued the NAACP for failing to file papers required for it to do business in the state.

During the course of the litigation, a state court, acting on the Alabama attorney general’s motion, ordered the NAACP to produce its membership lists.

The NAACP, fearing for the safety of its members, refused to turn them over.

The NAACP was held in contempt and fined $100,000 for failure to produce the list. The Alabama Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956.

The civil rights group argued that it withheld the list for good reason. In an era of enforced desegregation, being a member of the NAACP was a hazardous proposition.

“If the state had these rosters, they would turn them over to the employers and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and people’s lives would be threatened and endangered as well as their jobs,” said Bernard Simelton, current president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity.

The case was argued in the midst of a tumultuous era for the nation’s civil rights movement.

In 1955, NAACP member Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.

“Violence and bloodshed have been predicted by high state officials if segregation is ended,” wrote the NAACP’s lawyers in the Alabama case. “Threats and actual acts of violence have been directed against Negroes who seek to assist their constitutional rights as well as against whites who seek compliance with the law.”

The lawyers cited a year-long series of bombings and shootings of black leaders around the bus segregation issue. An attempt was made to bomb the Montgomery home of the Rev. Martin Luther King, who was an emerging figure of the civil rights movement and a spokesman for the bus boycott. Ku Klux Klan activity, demonstrations and cross burnings were reported in the Alabama communities of Opelika, Montgomery, Mobile, Birmingham and Prattville, among others.

“In Birmingham, Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth was physically attacked when he attempted to enroll Negro students in an all-white school,” the lawyers wrote.

The high court ruled unanimously in the NAACP’s favor. On June 30, 1958, Justice John M. Harlan noted that the NAACP had made “an uncontroverted showing that on past occasions revelation of the identity of its rank-and-file members has exposed these members to economic reprisal, loss of employment, threat of physical coercion, and other manifestations of public hostility.”

NAACP case also used by ‘dark money’ groups

Citations of the NAACP case have gone beyond groups like the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. So-called “dark money” groups — made possible by the landmark 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision — have been using the NAACP v. Alabama case in arguments designed to keep their donors hidden from view as well.

The differences between the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and these “dark money” organizations are critical, especially to the Internal Revenue Service. As such, the use by “dark money” groups of the NAACP case as an argument for continued secrecy has been of far greater interest to campaign finance reformers and donors alike.

The Americans for Prosperity foundation, as a 501(c)(3) organization, is prohibited from paying for advertising that attacks or supports a candidate. In addition, donations to the organization are tax deductible. A “dark money” group, which is organized as a 501(c)(4) “social welfare” organization, can pay for such advertisements, and thanks to the Citizens United decision, can use corporate and labor union money to do it — meaning more and more cash is flowing in this direction. Donations to social welfare groups are not tax deductible.

In 2006, less than $5.2 million was spent by groups that spent money supporting or opposing candidates but did not release the names of their donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That amount grew to well over $300 million in the 2012 presidential cycle.

As the presidential race has narrowed to two candidates, a flood of “dark money” spending is expected in the 2016 race as well.

Americans for Prosperity Foundation actually has a sister organization, Americans for Prosperity, that is indeed a “dark money” nonprofit. Legally, they are separate organizations, but they share the same address, phone number, receptionist and spokesman.

The connections go even deeper. In the foundation’s 2014 tax return, it reported that the sister group is more than 35 percent controlled by the foundation and the “dark money” group pays the foundation millions of dollars for unspecified “services.”

The NAACP case is now being used as justification — in court, in press releases and in the media — for these social welfare, “dark money” nonprofits to continue to keep their donors secret.

For example, the Koch-backed “dark money” group American Commitment, which has spent more than $2 million on political expenditures supporting or opposing candidates since 2012, was adamant that the Center for Public Integrity use this quote when asked in 2014 about its donors:

"We agree with the Warren Court's landmark 1958 ruling in NAACP v. Alabama that protecting the privacy of our members is critical to their core First Amendment rights of free speech and free association.”

The quote was emailed by Phil Kerpen, a veteran of Koch-backed groups Americans for Prosperity and the Cato Institute.

Among the biggest and most active of the “dark money” groups is Crossroads GPS, a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, co-founded by Karl Rove, once an adviser to former President George W. Bush. In the 2012 election alone, the group made $71 million worth of independent political expenditures that promoted or slammed candidates. More than $15 million directly targeted President Barack Obama, who was seeking re-election.

Rove, in an interview on Fox News in April 2012, signaled how conservatives had seized on the NAACP case in framing their arguments against increasing pressure to disclose donors.

"They want to intimidate people into not giving to these conservative efforts," he said of disclosure advocates.

"I think it's shameful," Rove continued. "I think it's a sign of their fear of democracy. And it's interesting that they have antecedents, and those antecedents are a bunch of segregationist attorney generals trying to shut down the NAACP."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a 501(c)(6) trade organization, pays for ads but does not reveal its donors and has used the NAACP case argument to block attempts at disclosure — like the DISCLOSE Act, which would have required increased disclosure for corporations and labor unions.

The bill, which has never made it through Congress, was the subject of intense lobbying by the business league. Of the 2012 version the chamber wrote, it is “designed unconstitutionally to encourage retaliation against certain speakers who have unpopular or unfavorable political views by requiring groups to disclose the names and addresses of their donors.”

The NAACP decision has now been referenced in numerous lawsuits. It’s been used to bolster cases before the Federal Election Commission, such as in 2013, when the Tea Party Leadership Fund asked the agency whether it could avoid disclosing its donors because of “a reasonable probability of threats, harassment, or reprisals from government officials or private parties.” (The FEC, as it often does, deadlocked on the question — twice.).

Clearly the memo has gone out.

In Arizona, for example, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill in late March that would actually provide less disclosure for nonprofits. The legislation’s chief proponent, Republican state Rep. J.D. Mesnard, cited the NAACP case in an interview with a reporter for the Arizona Capitol Times.

“Transparency is a good principle,” he said. “But it is not the overarching principle.”

NAACP chagrined

To Simelton of the NAACP in Alabama, the argument rings hollow.

“To use the justification that they’re using … it really devalues the importance of what was going on back then,” he said.

Campaign finance reformers agree.

“Depending how it can be used, it can be offensive,” said Larry Noble of the Campaign Legal Center, of the argument. “It tends to minimize what true harassment really is.”

“What happened in the NAACP case is very, very different,” he continued. “People were being shot at, being killed, offices being destroyed.”

The Center for Public Integrity’s calls to Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Prosperity Foundation (they use the same number) were directed to spokesman Levi Russell. Messages on Russell’s cell phone and office line were not returned.

Who deserves an exemption?

Exemptions from required disclosure of political donations have historically been rare. Ask an election lawyer to name an example, and they will invariably point to the same case — Brown v. American Socialist Workers Party, decided in 1982 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Socialist Workers Party was a small political party with 60 members in Ohio that aimed to “abolish capitalism and establish a workers’ government to achieve socialism.” The group regularly ran candidates for office, without much success. Donors to the candidates were subject to considerable harassment, from both the government and private citizens.

Socialist Workers Party members and supporters in the four years preceding the trial experienced threatening phone calls, hate mail, the burning of literature, destruction of property, police harassment of a party candidate and the firing of shots at a Socialist Workers Party office, according to the trial court’s findings.

There was also evidence that in the 12 months before trial, 22 Socialist Workers Party members, including four in Ohio, were fired from jobs because of their party membership.

In addition, the group was subjected to “massive” surveillance by the FBI, which also ran the “SWP Disruption Program,” an initiative in which the bureau disseminated information designed to impair the ability of the Socialist Workers Party and another group to function, according to the court opinion, penned by Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In deciding whether that was enough to grant exemption from disclosure, the court looked to another Supreme Court case: Buckley v. Valeo. In that case, decided in 1976, the justices ruled that those seeking anonymity must show a “reasonable probability” that the disclosure will subject members to “threats, harassment or reprisals.”

The Buckley ruling also laid out the basic reasoning for why candidates should disclose in the first place. There are three government interests: enhancement of voters’ knowledge about a candidate’s possible allegiances and interests; deterrence of corruption and the enforcement of contribution limits.

In balancing the two interests, the court favored the Socialists. Justice Marshall wrote: “In light of the substantial evidence of past and present hostility from private persons and Government officials against the SWP, Ohio's campaign disclosure requirements cannot be constitutionally applied to the Ohio SWP.”

Why don’t nonprofits disclose?

Given that exemptions for disclosure are so rare, and that the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld rules requiring disclosure of political donations, why then are “dark money” groups permitted to stay dark?

First, nonprofits are not like political parties and are overseen by the IRS. While the IRS requires these groups to disclose their donor information to the government, it does not require that this information be made public. The Citizens United decision did not carve out any specific exemption for nonprofit groups — it didn’t have to. Donor identities were already secret.

When a social welfare groups pays for an advertisement or any other tool to support or oppose a candidate, that activity falls under the jurisdiction of the FEC. And the FEC, in 2007, said that nonprofits making election expenditures need identify their donors only if their donation was specifically for the furtherance of making an expenditure supporting or opposing a candidate.

In other words, unless the donor directs the nonprofit to use the donation for a specific election expenditure, it need not be reported. And that rarely, if ever, happens.

“Dark money” groups are not supposed to making politicking their “primary purpose.” There have been numerous complaints about secretive nonprofit groups spending the majority of their funds to advocate for or against a candidate, but the IRS has not acted on them.

In fact, there has been little action on the disclosure issue in Washington.

But there is a lot going on in the states.

“Dark money” groups have become highly influential in statewide elections, spending $25 million in 2014, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis.

“Since Citizens United, disclosure in general has been where the action is,” said Wendy Underhill, program director for elections and redistricting with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “And in the most recent years, as independent expenditures have become a major source of financing, that’s when legislators have looked at disclosure.”

So far in 2016, legislatures have considered a whopping 350 bills in 46 states related to campaign finance disclosure, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures’ database.

The outcome of all this debate on whether “dark money” spending will ever see the light of day remains uncertain. What is certain is that much of it will hinge on the words Justice Harlan penned some 58 years ago.

A major pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC that's raised tens of millions of dollars in support of the presumptive Democratic nominee has returned a questionable contribution it received from a Massachusetts construction company with federal government contracts — a situation first reported by the Center for Public Integrity.

Justin Barasky, a spokesman for Priorities USA Action, today confirmed to the Center for Public Integrity that the super PAC last week returned $200,000 it received in 2015 from Boston-based Suffolk Construction Company Inc. The Hill first reported the contribution return.

In an April 7 investigation headlined "How Citizens United is helping Hillary Clinton win the White House," the Center for Public Integrity detailed how the federal government had awarded Suffolk Construction more than $168.8 million worth of government contracts since fiscal year 2008, yet the company still made contributions to Priorities USA Action.

Companies with federal government contracts arebanned from making federal political contributions.

Earlier this year, officials at both Priorities USA Action and Suffolk Construction declined to answer questions from the Center for Public Integrity about Suffolk Construction's political contributions.

As a super PAC, Priorities USA Action may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for and against political candidates.

From January 2015 through May, Priorities USA Action has raised about $88 million, according to federal records. Millions of those dollars have come from so-called "dark money" entities, such as corporate entities and nonprofit groups, which aren't required to reveal information about the flesh-and-blood sources behind the contributions.

Clinton herself has railed against the influence of big money in politics.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our election, corrupting our political process, drowning out the voices and votes of people,” Clinton said in a speech last year.

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, a former two-term governor of New Mexico, is hoping to turn some voters’ dissatisfaction with Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton into electoral gold.

Recent polls show Johnson — who was also the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, when he earned about 1 percent of the vote — garnering more than 7 percent of the vote nationally. If he can repeatedly break 15 percent, he may make it into the official presidential debates this fall.

Johnson is now courting voters who are fiscally conservative, but socially liberal.

Four years ago, he raised about $2.8 million for his long-shot presidential bid and appeared on the ballot in every state except Michigan and Oklahoma. This year, his supporters are hoping to top that — and qualify for the ballot in all 50 states.

Johnson may be best known for supporting the legalization of marijuana.

Prior to entering the 2016 race, Johnson served as CEO of a publicly traded company called Cannabis Sativa, Inc., which, as Johnson once said, wants to be “the Dom Perignon” of marijuana.

Time will tell if Johnson’s 2016 presidential bid gain traction, or just go up in smoke. In the meantime, here are nine key facts about Johnson’s current and past campaigns.

Sources: Center for Public Integrity reporting, as well as Federal Election Commission filings, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, GaryJohnson2016.com, Reason.com, 247wallst.com and Wikipedia.

Image sources: Rick Bowmer/AP, Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Protestors will shout. Delegates may revolt. Factions will haggle over rules and platform proposals.

But come later this month, no amount of friction will stop corporations, unions and special interests from spending tens of millions of dollars to bankroll nonstop partying at the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Thank federal campaign finance rules that allow unlimited contributions to support them.

Special interests concerned about chaos under their corporate logos shouldn’t fret. There are plenty of ways to show support for the quadrennial bacchanalias and discreetly secure access to lawmakers and political power players without earning unwanted attention.

Certainly some high-profile companies and individual donors — the list includes billionaire Paul Singer, Apple, Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Wal-Mart — are scaling back on giving to the host committees this time.

Some reportedly want to distance themselves from controversies surrounding presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee-in-waiting, is also historically unpopular with the public and attempting to weather fallout from her State Department email imbroglio, in which the FBI this week deemed her conduct“extremely careless,” although not worthy of criminal charges.

Meanwhile, many special interests, from Comcast Corp. to financial giant JPMorgan Chase to insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield, will participate in convention-related activities, but they’ve become more creative in how they influence conventioneers — or are altogether refusing to discuss their convention plans.

“They want to show up, they want to rub elbows with everyone at the conventions, they just don’t want the corporate name out there,” said Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for advocacy group Public Citizen, who has long tracked influence efforts at the conventions. “They’ll be looking for lower-key ways of doing the same thing they’ve always done.”

The Center for Public Integrity contacted dozens of companies to inquire about their plans for contributing to the convention host committees or sponsor private events at the collection. The companies include the largest contributors to both 2012 national conventions and the top 10 Fortune 500 companies.

Many didn’t respond to questions, and almost none would provide specific details about their 2016 convention involvement. But through public records and other sources, the Center for Public Integrity identified major sponsorship opportunities and big-time backers.

Sponsor a delegation

One way to keep a lower profile is to sponsor a delegation. The Republican National Convention’s Texas delegation, which offers packages ranging from the $5,000 “Bluebonnet Club” to the $50,000 “Lone Star Club” — something for every budget.

Most packages include a certain number of passes to the convention and official delegation events and the ability to book hotel rooms at the same hotel as the delegation, ensuring easy access.

Public recognition also comes with a sponsorship — but this year, many sponsors don’t want their names associated with supporting the Republican National Convention.

“Part of the package is that they’re recognized, and some of them have chosen not to be recognized publicly,” delegation consultant Beth Cubriel said, adding, “they just want to be supportive of the delegates.”

The sponsorships have been almost entirely snapped up, Cubriel added.

Indeed, there’s more than one way to support the conventions, and many routes are decidedly opaque.

If you’re a special interest that wants to make a splash, you have three main options:

The most direct route is to give a six- or seven-figure contribution straight to the host committees — nonprofit organizations created to organize, host and fund the convention. These contributions will be publicly disclosed — but not until 60 days after the event. Corporations and unions may give money directly to these committees.

A second option, new this year, permits individuals and political committees to write checks directly to special “convention accounts” administered by the Democratic and Republican parties themselves.

Political parties at one time received $18 million each in public funding for their conventions, in addition to money earmarked for security. But Congress eliminated this funding in 2014. To make it up, lawmakers created special “convention” accounts for each political party, allowing individuals to contribute $100,200 and political action committees to kick in $45,000. That’s in addition to other contributions to the party.

Corporations and unions may not give directly to these accounts, although political action committees they sponsor may do so.

Republicans have so far raised roughly triple the amount of Democrats — more than $15 million so far this cycle through the end of May, compared to approximately $5 million. Those contributions are disclosed monthly.

The DNC declined to comment on the new convention fundraising accounts. In a statement, the RNC said the money they raise “will be used to defray the costs of putting on a national convention.”

The third option: throw a private party for lawmakers and partisan bigwigs. Such affairs might fly under the radar — great for many attention-avoiding special interests in 2016 — but they require all involved to follow a convoluted bunch of federal ethics rules.

Approaches among influence peddlers vary.

A host of Republican officeholders and eminences have announced they’ll be skipping the Cleveland event this year, contributing to questions about whether large investments are worth it — especially since most companies like to support both conventions to the same degree.

Kevin O’Neill, co-chair of the legislative practice group at law and lobbying firm Arnold & Porter, said clients have always gone through a process to evaluate the value of participating, and it’s been declining.

Now, O’Neill said, lobbying firm clients are concluding, “If we’re going we should have a smaller footprint, a smaller visibility, it should be very targeted, and we should do anything we can to steer our brand clear of controversy. You have two candidates here that have some high negatives, and that gives people pause.”

Wal-Mart spokesman Greg Hitt said the company’s political action committee is contributing $15,000 to the convention fund for each party this election cycle, and won’t be giving additional money to the host committees. Compare that to the $150,000 corporate contribution Wal-Mart gave to the host committee for the Republican convention in 2012.

Singer, a major Republican donor, has also contributed to the party convention account, giving the maximum $100,200 last year. Microsoft’s PAC gave $15,000 to the DNC convention account.

Some companies that have contributed heavily in the past, such as FedEx, which gave $250,000 to the Republican convention in 2012, did not respond to multiple inquiries about their plans this year.

Such circumstances don’t make soliciting large donations any easier. But representatives of both parties’ host committees say they’re nevertheless closing in on their fundraising goals, which are $50 million for the Democratic host committee and $57 million for the Republicans.

Representatives of both host committees acknowledge they’re relying heavily on big corporations anchored in their host cities, which is typical.

The strong regional appeal of conventions also means many big contributors from four years ago — companies headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida, for instance — aren’t necessarily in the mix this time.

Local funds pour in

By the time the Republican National Committee decided to award the convention to Cleveland, “we had nearly $30 million in commitments and the vast majority were from northeast Ohio or other parts of Ohio,” said David Gilbert, president and chief executive officer of the Cleveland 2016 Host Committee.

Consider KeyCorp., the Cleveland-based parent company of Key Bank.

Beth Mooney, the company’s chairman and chief executive officer, is co-chairwoman of the Cleveland host committee. So far, the company, has disclosed contributing $333,333.33 to the host committee in 2015.

Jack Sparks, director of communications for KeyCorp, did not respond to a question from the Center for Public Integrity about whether KeyCorp had given additional contributions to the host committee or planned to host private events.

Sparks did say the company “looks for innovative opportunities to help Cleveland and Northeast Ohio to thrive” and “is proud to partner with the Cleveland 2016 host committee as the committee works to make the most of the national spotlight that will shine on Cleveland during the Republican National Convention.”

Democratic convention organizers, meanwhile, are rebuilding their corporate base almost from scratch after prohibiting direct corporate, political action committee and lobbyist donations during 2008 and 2012.

Some companies still found ways to give, notably Duke Energy, which forgave millions of dollars in loans after the convention. But fundraisers for the Philadelphia host committee have had to convince many companies that putting the Democratic convention line item back in their budgets this year is a good idea.

Union push

Unions, which comprised seven of the top 20 contributors to the host committee for the Charlotte convention in 2012, appear to again be stepping up for Democrats.

At a National Press Club event in June highlighting preparations for the Democratic convention, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney and Kevin Washo, the host committee’s executive director said support from organized labor has been key.

“Organized labor has been at the forefront of this bid, both in terms of support financially and the commitment to the work that’s being done at the arena,” Washo said.

The Bricklayers AFL-CIO reported contributing $1.35 million to the Philadelphia 2016 Host Committee last year, according to a filing with the U.S. Department of Labor. James Boland, the president of the bricklayers’ union, is an at-large member of the Democratic National Committee.

Other unions have so far reported smallercontributions, including $50,000 from the plumbers’ union and the Service Employees System Council, which gave $10,000.

On the corporate front, David L. Cohen, a senior executive vice president of Comcast Corp., is a “special advisor” to the Philadelphia host committee, an informal but high-profile role.

The PAC of Comcast, one of Philadelphia’s most prominent corporate citizens, has given $45,000 to the convention funds for bothparties, according to public filings.

Comcast declined to answer questions about its contributions to the host committee or other arrangements tied to the convention, and refused to confirm plans for a party at the Barnes Foundation, a high-profile art museum.

For another way to avoid controversy, take the approach adopted by JPMorgan Chase. In 2012, the company gave $200,000 directly to the host committee for the Republican convention in Tampa, according to host committee filings with the Federal Election Commission reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

This time? The two host committees are apparently getting bupkis from the financial industry giant. Instead, JPMorgan Chase is giving $300,000 to nonprofits in Cleveland and Philadelphia in support of summer youth employment programs — but linking the charitable contributions to the conventions.

“JPMorgan Chase decided that the best way to support these conventions was to support the cities themselves where the events will take place,” JPMorgan Chase global government relations head Nate Gatten wrote in a blog post about the contributions.

In press releases touting the charitable contributions, JPMorgan Chase first mentions the national conventions in the eighth paragraph of the Philadelphia press release and the seventh and last paragraph of the Cleveland release.

Private parties, ethics minefield

Of course, much of the mingling between influencers and politicians takes place at private events — parties, concerts, hospitality suites.

Those aren’t simple to throw together. They’re governed by a variety of ethics rules, including some that only apply to events conducted during the conventions. The rules, many passed in response to influence-peddling scandals, govern even small details and often seem illogical.

Individual members can’t be honored by special interests, for example, but delegations can. Senators can be billed as “featured speakers,” but House members cannot.

The rules even cover the types of food that may be served. In other words, no dangling entire lobsters off toothpicks.

Kenneth Gross, head of the political law practice at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and a veteran of the confusing tangle of rules governing convention events, quipped he’s stopped reviewing menus himself. “I have a sous chef who does that,” Gross joked.

Seriously, though, this isn’t a good area for misunderstandings. Not only are the rules technical, they aren’t uniform. There are different restrictions for members of the U.S. House of Representatives than for senators, and states have their own ethics requirements.

“We remind people these conventions are not ethics-free zones,” Gross said.

Some observers, including Public Citizen’s Holman and elections lawyer Brett Kappel, say they’re seeing signs of fewer such private events this time. Kappel says he hasn’t received a single inquiry from clients seeking legal advice regarding holding events at, or in association with, the 2016 presidential nominating conventions. That’s down from to several inquiries four years ago.

Rich Gold, head of law and lobbying firm Holland & Knight’s public policy practice, said the firm is still nailing down its convention plans, but they will be more modest than in past years. For example, he said, the firm will co-host a dinner for Democratic mayors in Philadelphia.

In 2012, he said, the firm’s large office in Tampa and its representation of the city of Charlotte prompted it to hold much larger events, with hundreds of guests and live performances. Clients, too, are taking a more muted approach, he said, given the turmoil this year.

In addition to the tension on the Republican side, “I just don’t think … given the major issues on the Democratic side now in terms of income inequality and CEO pay that this is the time to have an outlandish presence,” he said. “People are trying to be more tasteful.”

There are still plenty of schmoozefests to attend — if you know how to score an invite.

Schmoozefests abound

For example, law firm Dentons is hosting events at both conventions — one honoring former DNC chairs Joe Andrew and Howard Dean at a rooftop garden in Philadelphia, and one spotlighting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to an invite obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. All three men now work with Dentons, one of the world’s largest law firms. Andrew serves as its global chairman.

Political Party Time, the Sunlight Foundation database that tracks invitations to fundraisers, has so far obtained two convention party invites — one for a “Sex, Politics, and Cocktails” fundraiser for Planned Parenthood Action Fund at the Democratic National Convention and another offering sponsorship packages for the “Republican All Star Challenge” at Progressive Field in Cleveland, honoring Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee as well as the Republican Congressional Baseball Team. (Yes, such a team exists, playing annually against Democrats in the name of charity.)

Invitations for several other Cleveland events are making the rounds.

The country band Rascal Flatts, which has Ohio roots, is headlining the “Buckeye Welcome Bash,” a July 18 reception in Cleveland sponsored by the Cleveland Clinic Educational Foundation and the Jones Day Foundation.

The reception benefits the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center and honors Steve LaTourette, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio who is now chairman and chief executive officer of the Main Street Partnership, an advocacy group.

The Jones Day Foundation is the charitable arm of the law firm Jones Day, which was founded in Cleveland and still has deep roots there. Of particular note: the Trump campaign’s legal team is led by Jones Day lawyer and former Federal Election Commission Chairman Don McGahn. Jones Day partner Chris Kelly is a co-host of the Republican convention host committee in Cleveland.

Jones Day did not respond to a request for comment.

Country stars headline

Country singer Kip Moore will also headline a concert in Cleveland sponsored by the Republican Governors Association — and honoring Republican governors — and BGR Group, the lobbying firm headed by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

Sponsorship packages for the event are split into a $25,000 and $50,000 tiers, and include tickets, photo opportunities with Moore, sponsorship signage, and other benefits.

Country duo Big & Rich is headlining another benefit concert; sponsor logos on the “Make Housing Great Again” invite include the Mortgage Bankers Association.

There are also notices for a series of concerts planned to honor the House Republican Whip team, among others, that benefit a charity called Concerts for a Cause, which raises money for epilepsy-related causes.

Another event, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, will honor the Republican leadership and members of the U.S. Senate. U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi are featured speakers, and the event will be sponsored by AFLAC, Blue Cross Blue Shield and AT&T.

When asked for comment, an AFLAC spokesman said the company is sponsoring events at both conventions, though he didn’t give details. A spokesman for AT&T, which is the official communications and technology provider for both conventions, said the company supports them “on an impartial basis.” Blue Cross Blue Shield did not respond to requests for comment.

AT&T is also subsidizing free admission for all to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during the Republican convention.

In Philadelphia, there are signs that high-profile private venues are booking up.

The Barnes Foundation, whose Philadelphia campus houses its world-famous art collection and offers a wide range of high-end event spaces, is “nearly fully booked” for private events during the convention, according to Deirdre Maher, the director of communications, who also said the convention has brought “an uptick in interest.”

And pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA Action, which has raised more than $88 million this election, will co-host a “unity party” at the Electric Factory, a storied Philadelphia music venue.

Headlining the event? Rapper Snoop Dogg — a curious choice, given that his lyrics have frequently referred to women in a varietyofderogatoryways.

But Snoop Dogg last year promised to never again call a woman a “bitch“ or “ho,” and he has since endorsed Clinton, who has made women’s rights a cornerstone issue of her campaign.

A version of this story appears in the Columbus Dispatch.

Pork barrel ship

The great Washington tradition of pork barrel politics is alive and well if work from the Center for Public Integrity’s National Security team is any indication.

Lauren Chadwick, on a fellowship with us from Cornell, and managing editor Jeff Smith peeled back the web of self-interest and local advantage that’s still behind so much defense spending with a piece on the $400-million-odd U.S. Navy Littoral Combat Ship which the Pentagon doesn’t want and has called “not reliable.”

Apart from running on our own site where Jeff’s Gift Economy section has a litany of similar fiascos linked to pork-hungry politicians, the piece was also published by a key Washington partner of ours, Politico Magazine and at the time of writing has been shared almost 7,000 times.

Presidential bid

In case you thought it was only the Hillary and Donald show, Michael Beckel and Jared Bennett reminded us that the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson is still out there proving that hope triumphs over wisdom despite apparently still owing $1.9m for his 2012 campaign. It’s all part of the full non-partisan presidential coverage.

Nowhere is that non-partisanship clearer than in the federal political team’s impressive coverage of the big and dark money backing the Hillary Clinton campaign. Dave Levinthal reported a while ago on the irony that Hillary is this year the beneficiary of the “Citizens United” case which was all about a campaign against her. Dave updated that piece with news of a pro-Hillary super-PAC handing back money from a Massachusetts construction company that gains from government contracts.

As part of his almost encyclopedic coverage of the implications of the Citizens United case on contemporary politics, our deputy executive editor John Dunbar wrote about the weird comparison between the rights of the billionaire Koch brothers to hide the identity of supporters of a political group they stand behind and civil rights campaigners in the 1950s who won a privacy ruling protecting their backers from racist retribution.

A lawyer for the Kochs argued that they deserved the same protection from “threats, harassment, intimidation and retaliation”. It’s an intriguing read which also published in slightly different forms in Mother Jones and Newsweek. And if you thought that was enough Citizens United, the lawyer who successfully argued that case in the Supreme Court is out to make it even easier to give big money, according to a strong interview with Carrie Levine.

Ford and ICIJ

In fundraising news, we’re grateful to the Ford Foundation for a significant contribution to the Center for Public Integrity, earmarked for the work of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. It was a direct response to the impact of the Panama Papers investigation which additionally has generated a robust level of online contributions. Ford is also a big backer of the Money & Politics team at the Center, in particular stories like this one on the state of broadband access in poorer areas relative to richer areas, part of Ford’s focus on inequality.

Catching up

This is my first of these notes for a little while and so I need to catch up on some “herograms”. The ICIJ team won the Digital Journalism Award for investigation of the year for the Panama Papers from the Global Editors Network in Vienna last month. It’s the second year running the ICIJ has won. (Full disclosure, I am the president of the GEN).

Center and ICIJ journalists also won seven awards from the Washington chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Jamie Hopkins, a reporter on the Center’s environment and labor team, has been named a National Health Journalism Fellow and Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism grantee by the University of Southern California. Hopkins will attend sessions in Los Angeles and receives a reporting grant for two environmental health stories.

The New York Timeseditorial board also today caught up with the excellent investigation into the civil rights record of the Environmental Protection Agency by Kristen Lombardi and Talia Buford. It’s great to have that level of recognition for a work which has already triggered a review by the EPA itself.

I welcome feedback on this note, thank you.

Peter Bale
CEO, The Center for Public Integrity
Cell: +1 347 960 3151
Off: +1 202 481 1212

pbale@publicintegrity.org @peterbale

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity is sending reporters to the national political conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia to exclusively focus on special-interest influence, lobbying, partying, big-money politicking and corporate schmoozing — our specialties.

The Center for Public Integrity’s money and politics reporting team is among the best in the business, this year producing a barrage of exclusive stories and investigations about the bankrollers and influence peddlers behind Election 2016.

And our team is already revealing what's happening behind the curtains in Cleveland and Philadelphia — see our recent investigation: “Special interests look to influence political conventions — discreetly.”

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Founded in 1989, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity is one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations.

Our mission: To serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

In an extraordinary move, the Federal Election Commission — frequently gridlocked and often criticized as toothless— has fined three so-called "dark money" groups funded by the donor network connected to conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch a total of $233,000 for failing to reveal the source of their funds.

The fines — stemming from a 2014 complaint filed by a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog organization based in Washington, D.C. — involved funding of congressional elections in 2010.

The FEC requires organizations that spend money on advertising and other activities designed to help or hurt a federal political candidate for to report who has funded the activity. But if the group paying for the ads is a "dark money" nonprofit, the names of the donors go unreported.

Nonprofits are only required to note who their donors are if the donors indicate that the funds are targeted for a specific race — something that rarely happens.

The groups involved in the FEC complaint claimed that the funds they collected from the Koch network were not meant for specific ads or races and were not required to be reported.

But in this case, the connections between the funder, the recipients of the funds and the ultimate purpose of the funds were apparently too obvious for the FEC to ignore.

"These rules provide some of the only windows into the funding of dark money groups, but the FEC almost never penalizes groups that break them," CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder said in a press release announcing the settlement. "It is hard to overstate how significant this is."

The Koch-controlled entity that made the donations to the "dark money" groups was called the Center to Protect Patient Rights, now known as American Encore. The nonprofit gave millions to three other nonprofits: the 60 Plus Association (which agreed to pay $50,000 in a "conciliation agreement" with the FEC), the American Future Fund (which agreed to pay $140,000) and Americans for Job Security (which agreed to pay $43,000).

Those groups in turn paid for ads that helped dozens of Republican political candidates — or attacked Democratic candidates — during the 2010 midterm election.

The case hinged on Sean Noble, a conservative political consultant with extensive ties to the Koch network.

Noble was executive director in 2009 and 2010 of the Center to Protect Patient Rights. He was also owner of Noble Associates, which was a subcontractor to media consulting firms that produced and placed advertising during the elections for the three "dark money" groups, according to the conciliation agreement.

Noble, according to the agreements, assisted the three groups with targeting specific members of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections. The "dark money" groups, in turn, focused on those races, at least in part, in their advertising.

Noble, who has since fallen out of the Koch network’s good graces, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The agreement was announced by CREW based on documents it received from the FEC.

The FEC declined to comment and did not release information about how the agency's six commissioners voted. The documents in the case, according to an FEC letter sent to CREW and dated July 8, will be released within 30 days.

This story was co-published with Newsweek.

By almost any objective measure, the fledgling nation of South Sudan is an unmitigated disaster — reeling from a violent power struggle that’s left an estimated 50,000 people dead just in the past three years. Last week, as the country turned five, renewed factional violence reportedly killed as many as 270 more and displaced thousands before leaders agreed to a ceasefire on Monday.

While opposition forces are responsible for some of the historical bloodshed, South Sudanese government forces “bore the greatest responsibility” for human rights violations in 2015, according to a United Nations report. Those government forces have raped and murdered civilians, recruited child soldiers and looted civilian property.

Meanwhile, more than 5 million people in South Sudan are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the World Food Programme’s estimate, and many of them face “unprecedented levels of food insecurity,” say U.N. agencies. One in five South Sudanese have fled their homes, according to international development organization Mercy Corps.

But while the South Sudanese government largely claims it doesn’t have enough money to fix these problems, the struggling government wasable to spend $2.1 million on Washington, D.C., lobbying and public relations firms from 2014 through the end of 2015 — $2.1 million to buff up its image, keep U.S. aid flowing and stave off harsher U.S.-backed sanctions in response to its atrocities.

That cash has gone to folks like former Republican U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts, as well as R&R Partners, the firm famous for the “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” campaign. And a hunk of South Sudan’s money went to lobbying giant Podesta Group, led by high-profile Democratic Party fundraiser Tony Podesta.

Podesta’s brother, John Podesta, is Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, and also led President Obama’s transition team and served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Among the Podesta operatives who worked on the South Sudan account: former high-level officials of Bill Clinton’s Defense Department and Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

It’s all perfectly legal—or almost all of it, anyway. There are questions about whether everyone who flakked for South Sudan complied with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires foreign governments and other foreign actors to detail how they’re attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy and laws.

Beyond that, though, a variety of critics contend that South Sudan’s relationships with U.S. power brokers are just the latest distasteful symptom of how Washington really functions. As the Center for Public Integrity has previously reported, countries with the worst human rights records have increasingly sought help from Washington lobbyists and PR professionals. In fact, South Sudan was a relatively small player among a boatload of troubled nations that together inked more than $168 million worth of U.S. lobbying and PR contracts from 2010 to 2015.

Regardless of human rights abuses, if you have the cash, it’s likely there’s a firm happy to smooth the rough edges and represent your interests in the hallways of the State Department or corridors of Capitol Hill. For the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless or even the tortured or families of the dead, scoring meetings with lawmakers or airing grievances in the nation’s capital is a far more daunting assignment.

A troubled history

The history of South Sudan, though short, is both complex and troubling.

In 1983, when Sudan was still one nation, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army began fighting the Khartoum-based Sudanese government over control of resources and the marginalization of some ethnic groups.

After the war ended in 2005, the south gained autonomy. Then — following Sudan People’s Liberation Movement leader Salva Kiir Mayardit’s election as president — South Sudan won full independence in 2011. A relatively peaceful period ensued. But in December 2013, President Kiir accused Vice President Riek Machar, a former commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, of attempting a coup and fired him and Kiir’s whole cabinet, sparking brutal combat between the two rivals’ loyalists.

Divisions split around ethnicities, pitting the Nuer groups, like those loyal to Machar, against Dinkas, like Kiir and his forces. In an August 2015 peace agreement, both sides agreed to a unified government and end to warfare, but promises were repeatedly broken. Most recently, in April, Vice President Machar made a much-delayed return to the capital of Juba, a provision of the peace deal, but he has been living in a makeshift camp with armed soldiers and a supply of weapons. Kiir and Machar met to discuss further implementation of the peace agreement last month, but the situation remains volatile. 

Against that backdrop, Washington has struggled to figure just what to do in regard to the situation in South Sudan.

The U.S. has spent $1.6 billion since the war began in December 2013 on humanitarian aid for the South Sudanese. In 2014, President Barack Obama and the Treasury Department authorized modest, targeted sanctions to freeze assets and halt travel of two low-level military commanders from either side of the conflict. In July 2015, the U.N. Security Council approved the addition of six individuals to its sanctions list in order to freeze assets and ban travel. The United States then added two of the six individuals to its sanctions list.

But various advocacy groups and some in Congress believe that far more forceful U.S. action is required, especially against Kiir and the sitting government; they have repeatedly cited tougher sanctions and an arms embargo as potential tools to address the conflict in South Sudan.

Such sanctions, if strictly enforced, could create leverage over warring parties and halt the efforts of military commanders who are “perpetuating the conflict,” said Ian Schwab, director of advocacy and impact strategy for the Enough Project. The nonprofit conducts field research and makes policy recommendations on global issues relating to genocide and mass atrocities.

In a recent op-ed, U.S. Reps. Michael Capuano, D-Mass., and Brian Higgins, D-N.Y., acknowledge that an arms embargo would be belated but they encourage it as a way to “blunt the fighting in the medium term and put warring parties on notice that they cannot continue ignoring the peace agreement.”

U.S. Rep. Thomas Rooney, R-Fla., sponsored legislation on South Sudan last July to bring attention to the conflict and support actions like an arms embargo or expanded sanctions on warring parties. The legislation hasn’t moved since it was referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations in August 2015.

At an appropriations hearing in February, Rooney asked Secretary of State John Kerry about U.S. plans with the international community to impose such an arms embargo and tougher sanctions on “individuals who’ve committed violations of international humanitarian and human rights law” in South Sudan.

“I don’t think South Sudan has a better friend than the United States,” Kerry responded, adding that if the nation’s leaders continue to fail on delivering its commitments in the peace agreement, “the international community is absolutely prepared” for individual sanctions.

But the administration has not added anyone to the list of sanctions since July 2015, nor has it pursued an arms embargo. A State Department spokesman, in an e-mailed response to questions, says the administration remains “committed to seeing the peace agreement implemented” fully and has not hesitated to criticize the actors that hinder it.

The spokesman added that the administration’s policy has not been influenced by lobbyists and has “always been driven by the desire to catalyze progress in the peace process.” Since the administration’s sanctions last year, “we believe the threat of further action was key” in advancing the peace process, the email said.

But some remain exasperated. Shortly after Machar’s return to Juba, U.S. Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., noted the United States’ hesitation in adopting measures to help stop the war, calling the idea of an arms embargo “an empty threat” in a hearing of that House Foreign Affairs Africa subcommittee.

The policy and politics remain muddled, and it is impossible to directly attribute this lack of further action against the South Sudan government to the lobbying and PR campaign. But those advocating a more vigorous stance contend that the lobbying and PR created a misleading narrative that contributes to the current paralysis.

Human rights advocates note their messages are often drowned out by those of well-funded lobbyists.

“We don't have enough resources and capacity to deflect against that sort of firepower, so we are effectively muzzled,” said Maran Turner, the head of human rights organization Freedom Now. “That means that the messages that are coming from [PR firms] are what are getting to the various places in the U.S. government.”

Those efforts by lobbyists and PR firms were setbacks for groups working to encourage action by Congress, added an expert on South Sudan’s humanitarian situation who asked not to be named for security reasons.

“They’re spreading completely false information and undermining the efforts of a united international community that’s seeking to bring peace to a country that’s had more years of conflict than of peace since it was founded,” the expert said of the lobbyists.

Close to home

For Mayom Bol Achuk, it’s all a little more personal.

He recently held an outdated gold iPhone 3 as he recounted the details of his life — bearing witness to a long-ago civil war in his home country, spending a decade in a refugee camp as a Sudanese “Lost Boy” and later being chosen for resettlement in the United States, where he attended college and graduate school.

His friends have joked with him about the old phone, he says, but he won’t give it up — because it holds photographic proof of violent atrocities he witnessed in Sudan and helped save his life after he returned there.

That was in the summer of 2012, when Achuk went back to South Sudan to work for a USAID-funded agricultural program, in part to confront the memories of his past that haunted him “I feel like the only way to get rid of these bad memories,” he said, “is to go back home and get reconnected with my people and the land.”

But just a year-and-a-half later, the bad old memories were replaced by bad new ones, as he found himself again in the middle of a war. After that old iPhone documented the bodies of 32 people killed for being suspected rebels, he knew it was time to go. After a few panicked days and nights, the iPhone helped connect him with a U.N. evacuation flight out of South Sudan.

These days, from suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, Achuk, 35, uses the phone in a battle that is far safer, but sometimes almost as aggravating. He’s tried to connect with congressional offices and advocates in Washington to educate them about conflict in his home country, as part of a loose network of former Lost Boys.

But it’s been frustrating, he says. A narrative spread that portrayed South Sudan — in the words of a press release — as “committed to upholding the democratic ideals of an elected government.” The government is simply “defending itself and its people against the brutal actions of [the opposition]” — or so the press release said. Paid lobbyists and professional message peddlers repeated the story in social media, press releases and meetings with lawmakers and administration officials.

Achuk’s reaction to this argument is emotional. The firms working for South Sudan, he said, are profiting from war.

“You are benefiting, you are a beneficiary of a war situation,” he said. “This is blood money.”

Spin doctors

That South Sudan government press release, circulated last July, came from a firm called R&R Partners, a Las Vegas-based marketing and lobbying agency with 330 employees and offices in nine cities, including Washington. The firm is best known for coining that promotional phrase, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

The firm is led by Billy Vassiliadis, a longtime friend and PR consultant for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. His profile on the R&R website begins with a quote from TheNew York Times: “Every dream needs a merchant, every myth a mythmaker. In Las Vegas, that job falls to Billy Vassiliadis.” The website profile goes on to say that Vassiliadis has been “swaying opinions, shaping public policy and persuading the hard to persuade … for more than 30 years.”

Vassiliadis said he was not personally involved in the South Sudan contract, but in addition to helping South Sudan, his firm has also worked for the Indonesian government, Sri Lanka, Boeing and Busch Gardens. The firm’s website mentions that R&R has worked in West Central Africa, but doesn’t mention South Sudan by name.

R&R nevertheless agreed to “develop a plan to heighten the visibility and positive image of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan in the United States,” a Center for Public Integrity review of the firm’s contract with South Sudan indicates.

R&R’s pro-South Sudan public outreach plan included communicating with nonprofits and U.S. government officials. The firm’s consultants contacted dozens of members of Congress, congressional staff, State Department officials, think tanks and nonprofits to discuss the issues of sanctions and the peace process, disclosures show.

“Sanctions only serve to weaken peace efforts and demoralize ambitions of the elected government,” reads a press release that R&R Partners prepared for South Sudan.

The poverty-stricken nation paid R&R Partners $900,000. That’s more than any other public relations firm South Sudan employed for communications designed to boost its image, secure financial aid and investment and discourage punitive measures by the U.S. government. The contract, which began in January 2015, ended at the close of 2015, though documents show that South Sudan still owes R&R another $900,000 payment.

R&R also set up a now-defunct social media campaign around the slogan “Stand up South Sudan,” on Twitter, describing the account as “a voice for the people and the Republic of South Sudan … focused on achieving peace and prosperity.”

Among those working on the South Sudan contract was Bill Owens, the former Republican governor of Colorado. Sean Tonner, the president of R&R’s Denver office, who also worked on the account, previously served as the deputy chief of staff to Owens during his gubernatorial tenure.

Last March, Owens wrote that “forces of evil have been on the march,” and warned that “terrorism thrives where civil society has collapsed,” in an op-ed in The Hill.

“I believe it is in our national interest to be engaged and to support the elected government of the world’s youngest nation,” he wrote of South Sudan.

The fact that Owens was paid $50,000 for his work on South Sudan through R&R went undisclosed in the commentary, which instead listed him as the 40th governor of Colorado and a senior fellow at the University of Denver's Institute for Public Policy Studies. The Foreign Agents Registration Act dictates that a “conspicuous statement” must be present on disseminated materials, disclosing the relationship between the firm and client.

Monica McCafferty of R&R Partners, who worked on the contract said in an email, “the failure to issue the disclosure on the op-ed itself was an inadvertent human error and mistake, made in haste.”

Owens did not respond to requests for comment.

McCafferty sent an emailed statement saying, “Our goal was to help end the civil war and direct more U.S. foreign aid to the nation.”

The firm worked with members of the South Sudanese community that “shared the vision of bringing long-lasting peace,” the statement continues.

“We stand behind our work. … All work our firm chooses to take on is done so deliberately,” she stated. “In this case, we knew that we were representing the elected, recognized side of government (as opposed to the rebel forces).”

R&R was not alone. Government affairs firm Watts Partners, which bills itself as “the largest African-American owned lobbying company in Washington,” represented South Sudan from July 2015 to February 2016 as a subcontractor with London-based advisory firm Arise Consult. The firm provided “government-to-government advocacy and business development advisory services” for South Sudan for $120,000, documentsshow.

Firm founder and chairman J.C. Watts Jr. is a former star quarterback at the University of Oklahoma who was considered an up-and-coming star in Republican political circles during his eight years representing Oklahoma’s 4th District in Congress, from 1995 to 2003.

The Watts Partners website does not mention South Sudan. And the firm submitted required disclosures to the Justice Department only after the Center for Public Integrity inquired about the relationship. Filings showed that Watts Partners met with lawmakers, State Department officials and nonprofits to discuss sanctions and U.S.-South Sudan relations.

Steve Pruitt, a senior partner at Watts Partners who worked with South Sudan, said the goal of the contract was “to help the government develop and increase communications with U.S. policymakers” concerning humanitarian aid and peace talks.

The contract was successful, he said, because in the end, parties signed the August peace agreement. And as for concerns over human rights violations, Pruitt said he was unaware of the government’s and opposition’s involvement in such acts.

“I have no direct knowledge on the part of either party as to what kind of atrocities, if you will, were being perpetrated,” he said. “I really can’t speak to that. I think our whole objective was to use our knowledge of the U.S. system and resources to help bring peace, and I think that’s what we focused on.”

The list goes on. KRL International began working on behalf of South Sudan in February 2014 to provide “a communications and advocacy program in support of efforts to consolidate peace, reconciliation and the development of priorities,” according to the contract.

The company describes itself online as a boutique consulting firm that tries to “bridge the divide between the United States and the world’s emerging markets.” Headed by longtime international consultant K. Riva Levinson, other KRL International clients include the government of Liberia, for which the firm writes that it has “sustained an aggressive advocacy effort” on its website.

Working on the South Sudan account was Eric Chinje, a Cameroonian national, who formerly worked for the World Bank. The contract cost South Sudan $600,000 and ended in May 2015.

KRL International was first introduced to its client in November 2013 before the outbreak of war, when South Sudan invited the firm to its country, KRL’s managing director Chris Beatty said in an email. The firm “returned to the country in February 2014, at the height of the conflict, to support mediating efforts to consolidate peace and reconciliation” Beatty continued. He did not respond to questions about human rights concerns in South Sudan.

The super-connected Podesta Group also worked for South Sudan, collecting $480,000 for its representation from March 2014 to December 2015, disclosures show. In regard to its global work, the firm’s website says it “knows where to go, who to talk to and what makes them listen.” One of the services offered by its global group is “reputation management.”

The company provided research, communicated with the press and lawmakers and counseled South Sudan on strengthening its ties to the U.S., the contract shows. In its outreach, the firm contacted dozens of members of Congress, State Department officials, nonprofits and newspapers, meeting with several in person to discuss U.S.-South Sudan relations.

Firm leader Tony Podesta, one of the Democratic party’s more active fundraisers over the years, has through March 31 helped Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign raise nearly a quarter-million dollars, federal records show.

The Clinton campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Shortly after South Sudan gained independence, then-secretary Clinton welcomed the new government, saying, “We will work with you, we will stand with you, we will support you.” But her tenure as secretary ended in early 2013, 10 months before factional fighting broke out.

Podesta Group employees working on the account included a number of former high-ranking government advisers and Washington insiders.

• David Adams served as assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs and chief legislative adviser to then-secretary Clinton;
• Mark Tavlarides worked as the special assistant for international security affairs to the secretary of defense during President Bill Clinton’s administration; and
• Stephen Rademaker previously served as former assistant secretary of state, and headed State Department bureaus under President George W. Bush; he also served as a chief staffer on several committees on Capitol Hill.

When the Center for Public Integrity asked Tony Podesta about the contract by email, a communications strategist at the firm responded, stating, “It is our company policy not to discuss the work we do for clients other than what is publicly available.”

Reporters from the Center for Public Integrity and its reporting partner WAMU-FM, a Washington, D.C., National Public Radio affiliate, went to the firm in person to ask about the work, but upon identifying themselves as reporters, were told by a receptionist, “You gotta’ exit. You don’t have an appointment. Good day.” Podesta Group’s foreign lobbying has included other controversial clients — including Azerbaijan, Egypt and the Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, an arm of the Saudi government.

In Podesta Group’s words, South Sudan’s government is “committed to lasting peace, justice and accountability” and President Kiir “cares deeply about his people and their wellbeing,” according to a press release issued on behalf of the South Sudanese Embassy.

This glowing review, along with others, was sent to dozens of staff members both on Capitol Hill and in the State Department, disclosures show.

A U.N. report on human rights, accountability and reconciliation in South Sudan, released in March, offered a contrasting assessment.

“Despite repeated commitments to end the violence, protect civilians and punish perpetrators, to date, there is no evidence or available public information of any genuine efforts by the government to investigate, prosecute and punish violations and abuses, some of them amounting to international crimes,” the report states.

For its part, Podesta discouraged sanctions in press materials as something that “will undoubtedly lead to [the] collapse of [a] fragile peace agreement, resulting in potential loss of lives and suffering for the people of South Sudan.”

But the humanitarian expert said South Sudan’s lobbying efforts included statements that were “just blatantly, patently false” in portraying the nation.

“This is the first time ever, since I’ve done this job,” said the expert, “… that I’ve had to lobby against a professional lobbying firm which is trying to undermine peace, and human rights and humanitarian efforts.”

Seeking help in DC

But South Sudan’s lobbying is far from an isolated phenomenon. Egypt turned to Glover Park Group for help after cutbacks to military aid in late 2013 that came about because of the Obama administration’s disappointment in the slow progress toward democratization and fair elections. Last year with the help of Podesta Group, Azerbaijan successfully turned its image around from human rights abuser to friend of the United States.

Countries with the worst human rights records have increasingly sought Washington lobbyists and PR professionals since 2010, the Center for Public Integrity reported in December.

More than $168 million worth of contracts for lobbying was expended on behalf of troubled nations from 2010 to 2015. Russia and Saudi Arabia far outspent most countries on representation with more than $40 million each worth of contracts during that period. Firms like Ketchum, Qorvis/MSLGroup, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Squire Patton Boggs topped the list of those taking work from the governments with the worst human rights records. Other countries that spent millions to try to influence public opinion and policy included Egypt, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Iraq and Azerbaijan.

Toby Moffett, a former congressman and current lobbyist for Mayer Brown, has years of experience representing foreign nations on Capitol Hill. For nations that are still developing or face problems like human rights violations, navigating Washington can be difficult, he said.

“The more of a developing country that you are, the more difficult it is to cut through the noise,” he said of D.C.

At his firm, Moffett asserted, clients must pass a tough screening process that examines how work would be paid for and whether there’s been progress made on any problems. However, “there’s firms that’ll do virtually anything,” he said.

And taking on the worst offenders might be worth it for some.

“I think the really bad guys have to pay a premium,” Moffett said.

Cost effective?

Not surprisingly, some contend that South Sudan’s funds could have been better invested elsewhere than on reputation management in the U.S.

For one, the money could’ve helped avoid the dire food crisis that the South Sudanese currently face, said Daniel Sullivan, formerly director of policy and government relations for nonprofit United to End Genocide.

“There is no doubt that the million-plus dollars spent by the government of South Sudan on lobbyists could have been better used to relieve the suffering of millions of people in South Sudan,” Sullivan said. “Instead of focusing on public relations, South Sudan’s leaders should have focused on preventing the alarming food insecurity, effectively famine, decimating their people today.”

The South Sudanese Embassy did not respond to requests for comment.

Others say the lobbying efforts were fruitless, while still others say it’s hard to tell, or is simply beside the point.

Capuano, who co-sponsored legislation on South Sudan and visited the nation last year, said his priority is the effective delivery of humanitarian aid. He expressed uncertainty that lobbying efforts could help the nation and said it’s unhelpful to play the “blame game” with the warring parties.

“I need to help people stop being murdered,” Capuano said. “That’s the moral high ground to me. And I will deal with anybody I have to deal with. I will withhold judgment on those people if I think it’ll help.”

But the situation is too violent for the South Sudanese government to hide their actions with lobbying, he said.

“No lobbyist, no matter how good they are, they can’t change the facts on the ground,” Capuano said.

Aid workers targeted

Even on Capitol Hill, where seemingly every moneyed special interest is vigorously represented, there have been moments of exasperation.

At a December hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, experts from USAID and the State Department, after some hesitation, confirmed that South Sudanese government forces, as well as the opposition, had intentionally targeted aid workers in violence.

“You ought to be embarrassed,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., told representatives there from the South Sudanese Embassy.

Corker asked how a nation could accept more than $1 billion in aid from the United States while targeting aid workers. He then held up a press release, saying, “I would be embarrassed to send out the kind of press release that you sent out prior to this hearing.”

The press release had been sent to nearly 20 staff members on Capitol Hill and in the State Department just before the hearing. It praised President Kiir as a “hero” and blamed humanitarian challenges on a “lack of funds.” It also asked the U.S. and others to “redouble its efforts” to support South Sudan.

A Capitol Hill staffer who shared the press release with the Center for Public Integrity said there was no indication that a PR or lobbying firm was involved in the writing or distribution of the document.

But filings that the Center for Public Integrity requested from the Department of Justice reveal its creators in an email: “The Podesta Group provides representation to the government of the Republic of South Sudan.”

Patrick Madden of WAMU-FM 88.5, a Washington, D.C.-based National Public Radio affiliate, contributed to this report.

Versions of this story appear on Vice News and WAMU-FM 88.5. Listen to WAMU's radio report here.

Editor's note: The Center for Public Integrity’s money-in-politics reporting team is bringing you news from the Republican National Convention — focusing on special-interest influence, big-money politicking and corporate schmoozing. Senior political reporter Dave Levinthal is on the ground in Cleveland. Please check back regularly as this article will be updated throughout the week.

TOBACCO, ENERGY INTERESTS GOLF FOR THE KIDS — AND ACCESS

8:37 a.m. Sunday, July 17: Come Monday — the first day of the Republican National Convention — a gaggle of Republican lawmakers, corporate interests and a prominent Fox News host are scheduled to tee off at a posh Cleveland-area golf course in the name of helping educate children of injured and deceased members of the armed services.

It's a good cause, no doubt. It’s also a prime schmoozing opportunity for those looking to befriend elected politicians.

“Attendees include members of Congress and staff, governors, mayors, government relations professionals, wounded service members, professional athletes and celebrities,” an invitation reads.

Led by avid golfer and honorary chairman Bret Baier of Fox News, the “No Greater Sacrifice Congressional Shoot-out” at Kirtland Country Club is slated to feature five U.S. senators. They include former presidential candidates Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, according to an invitation reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, chairman of the U.S. House’s Select Committee on Benghazi and someone most certainly not on Hillary Clinton’s Christmas card list, is also listed as a participant.

The top event sponsor is Southern Company, the Atlanta-based energy giant, that since 2008 has spent between $12 million and $16 million annually lobbying the federal government. Next is Altria, the Richmond, Virginia-based tobacco company that since 2008 has spent between $9 million and $14 million annually to lobby the federal government.

Both companies contributed five-figure amounts, based on event sponsorship information, and will earn a variety of perks for their donations, including, for Southern Company, “high level visibility for company name and logo on all event marketing leading up to and at the event.”

Other event sponsors include pharmaceutical giant Abbott, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, tire maker Continental, Emerald direct lending advisers, Fierce Government Relations, FTI Consulting and NextEra Energy.

Fierce Government Relations’ government lobbying clients in 2016 include tech titan Apple, oil company BP, Coca-Cola Co., Delta Airlines, Ford Motor Co., H&R Block, Home Depot, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the National Football League Players Association, Time Warner Cable and the United Parcel Service, according to federal data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The No Greater Sacrifice Foundation is a nonprofit charity that in 2014 had $1.12 million in income, according to tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service.

— Dave Levinthal

CELEBRATE DIVERSITY

6:24 p.m. Saturday, July 16: On Wednesday evening, AT&T, agriculture titan Cargill and liquor giant Diageo are among the sponsors of "A Celebration of Diversity" — a festive gathering at the Greater Cleveland Aquarium that will fete several minority- or women-focused government relations/lobbying organizations: Washington Government Relations Group, Hispanic Lobbyists Association), H Street, Q Street, Women in Government Relations and Professional Women in Advocacy.

Lobbyists aren't normally a shy bunch. But they're apparently not in the mood for celebrating diversity with people who might ... report on their celebrating. "I am sorry but the sponsors of the event do not wish to invite press to attend," event associate LeeAnn Petersen told the Center for Public Integrity.

Here's what we do know, according to an invitation: a top-shelf "platinum" event sponsorship scores you "premier visibility on all marketing materials associated with the event including invitations, flyer and signage at the event," as well as a "speaking role" and 25 event tickets.

In addition to celebrating diversity in general, the event is designed to "recognize elected leaders who come from or support diverse backgrounds and constituencies." Organizers are certain to point out that the event is "planned to comply with all laws and Congressional Ethics Rules." The same groups are also gathering during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Asked about Cargill's event sponsorship, spokesman Pete Stoddart told the Center for Public Integrity: "We are sponsoring this event at both the Republican and Democratic conventions to advance and promote inclusion and diversity in the workplace.” He declined to say whether Cargill requested the event be closed to the press. Representatives for AT&T and Diageo did not return requests for comment.

— Dave Levinthal

Goodbye, Washington, D.C.

Hello, Cleveland. #RNCpic.twitter.com/Cb6F4MD0dy

— Dave Levinthal (@davelevinthal) July 16, 2016

WITHER DONALD?

2:47 p.m., Saturday, July 16: Fly into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport on a Saturday morning flight from Washington, D.C., the weekend before the Republican National Convention, and you’ll see plenty of familiar faces.

Over there is CNN’s Jake Tapper graciously taking selfies with a young fan as he waits at the United Airlines baggage claim.

And here’s PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff, stretching her legs with a small entourage after enduring a ride in the decidedly claustrophobic coach section.

One thing you won’t find? Almost anything to do with Donald Trump, who’s set to formally accept the Republican presidential nomination later this week at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena.

In this Trump-free zone, there are no massive banners. No gaudy imagery. Even toothy Trump t-shirts or Donald-themed swag are nowhere to be found.

Based on initial airport impressions alone, it’d seem equally plausible that some politico other than Trump — Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Wendell Willkie— is headlining the upcoming Republican National Convention.

Or maybe basketball royalty LeBron James, whose face is everywhere. Or the cape-clad Man of Steel, who lords over an exhibition that declares, “Did you know Superman was created in Cleveland?”

The Cleveland 2016 Host Committee — a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization designed to raise money (latest: it’s begging GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson for cash) and manage Republican National Convention affairs — itself has rolled out a decidedly minimalistic red carpet.

Arriving convention delegates, journalists, political operatives and assorted lobbyists and will see some maroon-and-blue “We the people welcome you to Cleveland” signs and perhaps be greeted with a free bottle of water from a friendly volunteer in a white host committee polo shirt featuring the logo of AT&T— one of the major companies lending its brand and services to the Republican National Convention.

Many other major corporations, though, have kept a lower profile here at the airport, which fits a pattern for many special interests: don’t be too obvious when supporting the Republican National Convention and a shoot-from-the-mouth candidate in Trump who has taken more than a couple of controversial policy stances.

That doesn’t so much apply to local companies. Several arriving conventioneers, for example, seemed genuinely impressed by a billboard sponsored by Ohio-based Duck Tape brand duct tape.

—   Dave Levinthal

LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED

1:40 p.m., Saturday, July 16: The Republican convention committee may be scrambling to raise a final few million dollars for the show, but corporations, unions and special interests have already given tens of millions of dollars toward businessman Donald Trump’s official anointing as the Republican presidential nominee.

The Cleveland host committee — a nonprofit organization that exists to fund and operate the Republican convention — doesn’t have to reveal its donors until 60 days after the convention. But the Center for Public Integrity has already unearthed some major backers, including KeyCorp, which is based in Cleveland.

Some companies have pulled back, nervous about the controversial nominee. Others are finding quieter ways to give — such as sponsoring private parties that don’t have to be disclosed, but allow them to rub elbows with lawmakers. Want to hear Rascal Flatts or Kip Moore? Sorry — invitation only.

For more, check out our story here— and remember, we’ll be on the lookout for special interest influence throughout the convention.

— Carrie Levine

Just five years out of law school, Gennady Litvin ran a bustling legal practice that took in millions of dollars from distressed homeowners who hoped they could avoid foreclosure.

The Litvin Law Firm grossed $5.2 million in 2013, much of it from financially strapped clients who paid $500 a month or more for help negotiating lower mortgage rates or other legal assistance to keep them from losing their homes. That year, Litvin drew a salary of $466,477, according to court filings.

But the Brooklyn, New York, law firm’s fortunes soured as it faced repeated accusations of fraud and other illegal conduct in complaints filed by state regulators and disgruntled clients, some of whom were low-income and minority homeowners who lost their property after trusting the firm. In March and April 2015, Litvin and the firm both filed for bankruptcy, leaving more than 4,500 potential creditors, mostly former clients.

“There was a ton of money that he made and where that money has gone, we don’t know,” said Cleveland lawyer Geoff McCarell.

McCarell represented Branko Perisic, of Parma, Ohio. Perisic ran a small trucking firm that fell on hard times as fuel prices spiked and demand for his services fell off during the recession. In 2011, he hired the Litvin firm to get him a break on his home mortgage.

Perisic paid a total of $4,760, but got nothing but stall tactics and unmet promises as his finances worsened, according to a lawsuit he filed.

In April 2015, a Cuyahoga County judge awarded Perisic $287,575. Most of the award was to punish Litvin for “fraudulent and/or deceptive conduct, and his willful, reckless and/or grossly negligent breaches of care and/or ethical duties to plaintiff,” according to the court docket.

But because of the bankruptcy case the chance of Perisic getting paid is “slim to none,” according to his attorney.

Litvin, who lists his current practice address as the Law Office of Yuriy Moshes in Brooklyn, would not discuss his legal career.

“Thank you for reaching out seeking comment but I have no comment to make on your article,” Litvin wrote in an email.

Litvin is one of hundreds of lawyers and law firms nationwide that have participated in suspect foreclosure “rescue” schemes in the wake of the housing market crash nearly a decade ago, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found. State and federal authorities contend these plans typically have violated a range of legal ethics codes and consumer-protection laws. But while dozens of lawyers have been stripped of their licenses for running them, many others have paid little in penalties — even when desperate homeowners lost millions of dollars. Litvin is in “good standing” with the Florida Bar Association, which oversees lawyers in the state. He is not eligible to practice there, however, unless he completes 30 hours of continuing legal education required of all lawyers, officials said.

In New York, Litvin has “no record of public discipline,” according to the New York State Unified Court System.

Litvin graduated in 2008 from the University of Miami School of Law and practiced in Florida and in Brooklyn. In a 2013 deposition,  he recalled operating an “open door” practice, as in “anything that walks in through the door.”

Within two years, Litvin had cut a deal with telemarketers operating out of Fort Lauderdale who were pitching expert foreclosure relief plans nationwide for which homeowners paid $595 to $750 a month.

Sales of these foreclosure “rescue” plans took off in the wake of a 2009 federal government program that encouraged lenders to cut rates or balances on home mortgages through a review process known as loan modification.

Federal officials had hoped cutting loan balances would help millions of people behind on their mortgage payments from being foreclosed on. But they quickly were overwhelmed by complaints that scam artists were ripping off desperate homeowners by promising them loan modifications for a fee and not delivering.

Often, telemarketers partnered with a law firm, which gave them a look of legitimacy. The practice also exploited loopholes exempting lawyers from regulations that prohibited advance fees for securing loan modifications.

Litvin early on caught the attention of regulators in several states. In December 2011, Connecticut officials ordered Litvin to “cease and desist” from soliciting its residents because he lacked a license to practice law there. Officials in Georgia, Rhode Island and North Carolina later issued similar orders.

Litvin pushed back, arguing he had built a network of “affiliated” attorneys in 31 states, which he said permitted the firm to operate in those places and accept advance fees.

Some of the Litvin “affiliated” lawyers were hired in response to ads he posted on the online classifieds website Craigslist. The Litvin firm split the fees it received from homeowners with the affiliated attorneys, Litvin testified in a deposition.  

One Litvin ad sought lawyers with “experience in the foreclosure defense area” who were “looking to make an extra $5,000 to $10,000 per month per state (and more with time) without having to increase their expenses.” At different times, Litvin listed at least 52 lawyers as  affiliates.

In late 2012, the Federal Trade Commission sued the Florida telemarketers working with Litvin, alleging their customers suffered “significant economic injury,” including “going into foreclosure and even losing their homes.”

The FTC accused the telemarketers, who operated as Prime Legal Plans as well as under several other names, of taking $21 million in fees “from distressed homeowners through deception.” The FTC suit criticized the performance of the Litvin firm, but it did not name him or the firm as a defendant. The FTC would not discuss the matter.

According to the FTC, the marketers falsely promised clients that a “network of top-notch attorneys” would defend them against foreclosure actions and “win concessions from lenders that will result in lower mortgage payments.”

The FTC cited an email telemarketers sent to customers, written in capital letters, that read: “YOU HAVE RIGHTS, AND NOW HAVE AT YOUR DISPOSAL, AN ATTORNEY NETWORK THAT IS ABLE TO KEEP YOU IN YOUR HOME, HALT THE FORECLOSURE PROCESS, AND FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS!”

In 2012, Litvin was enjoying his honeymoon in Hawaii when an associate phoned to tell him federal agents had raided the Fort Lauderdale offices and shuttered the sales operation, according to his deposition.

Despite the raid, Litvin forged ahead with his foreclosure practice. In New York, Litvin relied partly on a website to promote his services.

 “Who said that a high quality defense attorney had to cost a fortune?” reads a note on the Litvin Law Firm’s website, which has since been taken off-line.

“Litvin Law firm understands that if you could afford to pay high attorney fees then you probably could afford to pay your mortgage.”

Nattily attired and confident, Litvin starred in several videos posted on YouTube, some replete with gushing testimonials from thankful clients. He also made appearances on New York radio and television, weighing in on a host of debt-relief strategies.

But punching back at regulators and civil lawsuits from upset clients began to take a toll and business dropped off sharply. In 2014, the firm took in $3.5 million, down from $5.2 million the year before. Litvin’s salary in 2014 fell to about $92,000 from $466,477 the previous year, according to bankruptcy court filings.

The Maryland Attorney General’s office filed administrative charges in 2014 questioning whether that money was made honestly, accusing the firm of projecting an “air of trustworthiness” while providing little or no legal services.

At least 129 of 500 Litvin clients in Maryland, who paid more than $1.4 million in fees, were foreclosed on anyway, according to the suit.

Sixty-three clients eventually lost their homes, while 10 others kept them only by resorting to bankruptcy, according to the Maryland attorney general’s research.

In New York, criticism from regulators was blistering. The New York Attorney General’s Office in a lawsuit accused the Litvin firm of “repeated and persistent fraud and illegality.” Potential clients were told they could “get foreclosures dismissed and mortgages deleted,” results the attorney general called “improbable at best,” according to the lawsuit.

Some clients, according to complaints, said the firm advised them to avoid contact with their lenders, leaving them in the dark about how their cases were proceeding, if they even were.

One couple alleged the Litvin firm led them to believe they would be given their Maryland home debt-free. Instead, the house where they had lived for two decades and raised six children was sold out from under them because the firm failed to complete paperwork to forestall foreclosure, according to a lawsuit they filed.

So far, both regulators and former clients — at least eight have sued Litvin for what his bankruptcy petition calls “malpractice and fraud” — have received nothing.

Litvin, in a June 2015 court filing, said the cost of defending lawsuits and a drop-off in clients “took a heavy financial toll” and that “bankruptcy loomed for me and for the firm.”

In that filing, Litvin denied misleading anyone and said he had saved his clients more than $75 million, including reductions in future mortgage payments.

The lawsuits are on hold while the Litvin bankruptcy cases play out. So is a $2.3 million federal court judgment from May 2015 that names an earlier Litvin legal partnership that operated out of Miami.

In court filings, Charles H. Lichtman, a Florida attorney appointed in the FTC case to chase after any possible money on behalf of victims, said he knew “collectability was problematic.” But Lichtman said he sought the judgment because of the firms’ “substantial roles in this massive consumer fraud,” and that he couldn’t “let them simply get away with it without recourse.”

Lichtman said in an interview that he handled hundreds of phone calls from people who lost their homes, or gave some of their “very last money” to the scheme.

“It caused them immense personal distress,” he said. “It was genuinely heartbreaking when you heard the stories.”

The New York Attorney General’s Office has sought more than $24 million from Litvin, half of it restitution and half as a penalty.

But in early May, the office offered to settle, for far less. The deal would require Litvin to pay $15,000 and for five years 15 percent of his annual salary, or $12,000, whichever is greater. The agreement says the minimum overall amount Litvin must pay is $75,000.

A hearing on the matter is set for July 19.

Ohio is a perennial presidential battleground state, and Republicans are acutely aware of this as they host their party's national convention there this week.

So are Democrats. Hillary Clinton and her super PAC allies have run more than 8,500 television ads there since June 8, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data provided by ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG. That's an average of about one ad every six minutes since Clinton clinched her party's presidential nomination.

With the exception of Florida, no other state has seen so many ads since the primaries ended.

Democratic state Sen. Capri Cafaro, who represents an area of northeastern Ohio outside of Cleveland, is concerned that Republican nominee Donald Trump is more appealing to Rust Belt voters than Clinton is. An average of recent polls in the state helps support this notion: it currently gives Clinton less than a two-point lead over Trump.

The Center for Public Integrity recently caught up with Cafaro to talk about her qualms about Clinton, why Trump is winning over many Ohioans and the role of super PACs in the 2016 election.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Center for Public Integrity: How competitive do you think Donald Trump will be in Ohio?

Capri Cafaro: Very. One of the reasons he’s gotten so far is because there is a general frustration by the electorate that they are sick of career politicians. People have come to the Rust Belt for the last 20, 30-plus years and promised X, Y, Z as far as an economic resurrection. But no one has really reflected the anger and the frustration of these people. That’s where I think Trump really has a competitive advantage.

Look at the primary results. Basically every single county from Lake Erie all the way down to West Virginia, from Ashtabula to Gallia County, all went for Trump. There’s a good reason for that. He didn’t win because Republicans voted for him. He won because Democrats voted for him. There are a lot of disenfranchised Reagan Democrats who may cross over for Trump in battleground states like Ohio.

What do you think about Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee in 2016?

I’m very open about my reservations in regards to Secretary Clinton. Frankly, I would have preferred [Vice President] Joe Biden. I feel that she’s certainly capable of doing the job, but she, in my view, is not a perfect candidate.

What weaknesses do you think she has?

She has weaknesses in regards to relatability, in regards to trustworthiness. It seems as if she is more focused on becoming president of the United States because she wants to be president of the United States, not necessarily because she wants to serve the people of the United States. However, I am a Democrat and a Democrat for a reason. And there is a lot at stake in this election — issues like Supreme Court vacancies, the protection of reproductive rights and the continuation of the Affordable Care Act.

What’s your take on the role super PACs are playing in 2016?

I have general disdain for both super PACs and Citizens United. What has come of politics is greatly fueled by the glut of money that has entered, particularly post-Citizens United.

What lessons do you think Democrats should learn from the proliferation of super PACs?

In order to compete, people are going to have to play by the rules that exist. Obviously, Bernie Sanders has done an incredible job raising low-dollar donations at a high volume, which we saw Barack Obama do, which we saw Howard Dean do. But it’s possible [super PACs will continue to be embraced], unless there is significant campaign finance reform.

There is a bill pending in Congress to limit the amount of time one spends raising money, which I think is fantastic. The fact that members of Congress spend more time raising money than they do, you know, actually doing their job — in order to keep their job — there’s something obviously, distinctly wrong with that.

Some people have proposed getting rid of contribution limits to ease politicians’ fundraising pressure. How would things be different if you could ask for checks of unlimited amounts?

Our contribution limit is like $12,500, okay? That’s a pretty high individual contribution limit. In a place like Ohio, I don’t necessarily know how many people you could just call upon to get $12,500. It could have some kind of an impact, but as with super PACs, it creates an inherent discrepancy between those that have networks of people who can write huge checks and those that can’t.

What do you find most striking about an election between Clinton and Trump?

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been known by the American public for 25, 30 years. How are either of them going to move the needle with just ads, or tweets, or anything else? People’s minds are pretty made up. How do you redefine yourself? How do you re-introduce yourself to the American public when you’re already ingrained in the American consciousness?

This article was co-published with PRI.

At laboratories and factories where American nuclear weapons are designed and built, and at the sites still being cleansed of the toxic wastes created by such work, contractor employees outnumber federal workers six to one. That makes them key sentinels when something goes awry, a circumstance that officials say explains why they get legal protections when whistleblowing.

That’s the theory. It turns out that the Energy Department has actually handed most of the oversight over these protections to the contractors themselves, robbing workers at key nuclear weapons sites of confidence that pointing out security and safety dangers or other mistakes won’t bring retaliation, according to an audit released by the Government Accountability Office on July 14.

The Energy Department’s decision to embrace contractor self-regulation of its whistleblowing protection system means in many cases that those overseeing it work for the contractors’ top lawyers, who must defend the contractor against employee claims of wrongdoing, or for those officials responsible for deciding about job cuts, the report disclosed.

The result has been a climate of widespread anxiety: At four of five nuclear weapons sites where DOE conducted surveys from 2012 to 2014, roughly a third of the employees said they disputed a claim that “management does not tolerate retaliation,” the report said. More rosy contractor-run surveys were marked by “leading or biased interview questions and problems assuring confidentiality during interviews,” the GAO said.

At the Energy Department’s Hanford Nuclear Site, for example, a contractor employee reported that in the first iteration of one such survey, specific responses could be linked directly to those participating, and after revisions, the employee had heard managers “were pressuring employees to give favorable responses.” Many of the results were deleted before being analyzed, the employee said – part of a series of flaws that DOE overlooked.

The report disclosed that despite some highly-publicized instances of retaliation against whistleblowers in the nuclear weapons complex, and many public statements by DOE and contractors of support for transparency and technical dissent, DOE has only three times punished contractors who retaliated against whistleblowers in the last 20 years. One of those punishments was just a stern letter.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Washington, who requested the GAO report with two Senate colleagues, said at a Capitol Hill press conference about it that “in my view, the department is guilty of willful negligence at best, and at the worst, actively aiding the violation of whistleblower rights.” The government’s costly cleanup of the Hanford site, located in Wyden’s home state, has been tainted by repeated allegations of retaliation against whistleblowers.

When DOE allows “contractors to grade themselves on how well they treat whistleblowers,” Wyden said, it’s a rigged test and “there is no failing grade.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, who appeared with Wyden at the press conference, said she suspected that contractors have been muffling dissent because heeding whistleblowers’ safety warnings delays projects and causes contractors to lose out on lucrative bonuses that are conditioned on good and timely performance. “This is all about everything going smoothly so they get the plus-ups that are baked into the contracts,” McCaskill said.

In a written response attached to the report, DOE’s top oversight official on safety and security matters, Glenn Podonsky, reiterated what he described as the department’s “commitment to foster a work environment that encourages open communication, a questioning attitude and an organizational culture that promotes the free expression of safety concerns by our workforce.” He said that while progress had been made, DOE “acknowledges that work remains.”

But the GAO report was scathing about the department’s long record of inaction. It said “DOE has taken limited or no action to hold contractors accountable for creating a chilled work environment – in part because DOE has not clearly defined what constitutes evidence of a chilled work environment or the steps needed to hold contractors accountable.” DOE officials have been crafting new, stronger regulations for whistleblower protection since 2008, and they’re still not complete, the report said.

“Our problems are with the way [the Energy Department] allows the contractors basically to self-assess how open their environment is,” Diane LoFaro, the assistant team leader for the GAO’s investigation, told The Center for Public Integrity in an interview. “Our recommendation is that those assessments need to be independent. The contractor should not be assessing themselves. The DOE should be assessing the contractors’ cultures.”

The problems run deeper than self-regulation, the report states. When contractor employees have brought concerns directly to the Energy Department, partly out of fear of retaliation by their bosses, the department has often referred those complaints back to the contractor, potentially jeopardizing the complainer’s anonymity or creating the appearance of “impaired independence” at DOE. And a program meant to adjudicate such issues within DOE is procedurally complex and sometimes too challenging for workers, the report said.

Monitoring whistleblowers to suppress them

To prepare their report, auditors from the GAO interviewed whistleblower protection officers – known formally as “employee concerns program” managers – from the DOE and its contractors at the 10 sites with the largest budgets between 2014 and 2016, and reviewed 87 whistleblower cases form those sites between 2009 and 2014. “All of the DOE [employee concerns program] managers we interviewed regarding the issue told us that they were aware of contractors that had created chilled work environments,” the GAO report said.

One such manager, at a site that was not named, went so far as to write a Freedom of Information Act request to get emails between the worker and the DOE’s whistleblower protection office. During a mandatory meeting with everyone from the manager’s department in attendance, he warned employees not to raise concerns with DOE’s whistleblower protection office.

“After the incident, officials told us there was a substantial drop in the number of employee concerns received from employees of that contractor,” the GAO report said. The whistleblower protection officer told his supervisors about the situation, but they didn’t act on it, and generally – according to the officer’s account – were not responsive to retaliation complaints.

“Knowing what I know about the [employee concerns program], if I had a concern, I would not use it,” that protection officer told the GAO.

An Energy Department official told the auditors about similar harassment, according to the report. He said that a contractor at the nuclear site he’s assigned to help oversee insists on its lawyer being present for every whistleblower discussion, even during the earliest informal stages, long before it’s evident whether resolving an employee’s complaint will be contentious. “He believes this practice may be intimidating to employees,” the GAO report said of the official.

The auditors experienced some of this themselves, they noted. During their visit to a nuclear weapons site they did not name, a contractor insisted on its lawyer being present at all the meetings, including the officer in charge of fielding whistleblower complaints. “During our meetings, the attorney advised his client not to answer certain questions or, in some cases, provided the answer for the client,” the GAO report said. Those interactions “were extremely tense and did not result in a free exchange of information.”

Sandra Hightower Black, who headed the employee concerns program at Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, in Aiken, S.C. – a consortium of Fluor Corporation, Honeywell International Inc. and Newport News Nuclear Inc. – told the press conference that she repeatedly witnessed such acts of intimidation. She said one manager pressured an investigator in her office to flip a whistleblower complaint that had been substantiated and categorize it as unfounded. Another manager demanded the name of the “rat” in a whistleblower case.

To executives at the company, Black said, she eventually became “an employee advocate,” which they regarded as a liability. A 59-year-old single mother, Black trembled at the press conference behind dark-framed glasses, as she said she was eventually fired for doing what she thought she was supposed to do.

“I would not lie or cover up substantiated concerns or engage in unethical or illegal activities that I was directed to do,” she said.

In an email Thursday, a spokeswoman for Savannah River Nuclear Solutions denied that Black’s firing had anything to do with her cooperation with the GAO. “We deny in the strongest possible terms, that Ms. Black was terminated for an improper reason or in violation of any law or regulation,” Angeline French wrote. “SRNS disputes Ms. Black’s version of events, and we are in the process of vigorously defending against her allegations through the appropriate legal channels.”

French wrote in the email that Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is paying for its own legal defense in Black’s case. But the Energy Department typically reimburses contractors for the settlements they reach in such whistleblower cases, the GAO report said.

Black’s case is still pending. But the report said other contract employees at the Savannah River site told the auditors that a poor climate persisted there:

• “We were told that if you talk to DOE, you will not be considered part of the team.”
• "They will make an example of anyone who challenges them.”
• “Employees are very afraid to raise safety issues at the meetings because they will be terminated or embarrassed.”
• “They fired the [employee concerns program] Manager. What do you think they will do to me?”

A whistleblower from the Hanford site, Walter Tamosaitis, also appeared at the press conference. He’s an engineer who worked on the management team constructing the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford, a project long plagued by delays and cost overruns. In 2010, he spoke up at a management meeting about his worries that the costly plant would be unsafe, and even provoke an unexpected nuclear chain reaction. Tamosaitis almost immediately was kicked off the project and spent the next 18 months in a windowless basement office, before finally being fired.

Last year, one of the major contractors at the site, AECOM (formerly URS Construction), agreed to pay 69-year-old Tamosaitis $4.1 million, but did not admit wrongdoing.  He said at the news conference Thursday that the suppression of dissent by DOE contractors is motivated by “greed.”

The GAO noted that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission handles whistleblower protections differently. Unlike the DOE, the commission tracks every case of reported retaliation, even if it’s not substantiated. When investigating claims of retaliation, the NRC studies whether managers at the site in question are generally open to workers’ raising safety concerns. If the NRC determines that it is not, a public letter is issued to assure the workforce that the regulators are monitoring the situation. Neither of these steps occurs in retaliation cases involving the Energy Department and its contractors.

In 2013, McCaskill authored an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act meant to reform how the department’s contractor whistleblower cases are adjudicated. McCaskill’s amendment directed that whistleblower complaints -- in lieu of being decided in a court-driven process that can be difficult to navigate or afford -- be adjudicated by the independent Inspector General’s office.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives changed the language, however, and turned what McCaskill intended to be a permanent solution into a temporary pilot program that ends in 2017. The Senate has passed legislation this year that would make the process permanent, however, and a House bill to achieve the same goal is awaiting a vote.

In 2012, after a heart attack left him too ill to work and unable to make his mortgage payments on time, John M. Green turned to the Litvin Law Firm for help.

Green said he paid the firm some $8,000 over the next two years to negotiate better terms with the lender on his house in Baker, Louisiana. But he lost the home anyway, he says, because the Brooklyn, New York, law firm did little beyond taking his money.

“My experience was horrible,” said Green, 72, who is back at work part-time as a school teacher. “They didn’t follow through with anything they said they were going to do.”

It’s not just former Litvin clients like Green who are aggrieved. The attorneys general of New York and Maryland have accused the firm of preying on distressed homeowners by failing to deliver the legal firepower it promised.

People deeply in arrears on their mortgages wasted money they could ill afford to lose, while dozens lost their homes, Maryland officials charged. The case, filed in 2014, targets the firm and its founder, attorney Gennady Litvin. Both state proceedings are pending.

Litvin would not comment.

Since 2010, tens of thousands of strapped homeowners have alleged they were cheated by lawyers or marketers boasting ties to law firms, whom they trusted to renegotiate mortgage loans or stave off foreclosure actions, a Center for Public Integrity investigation found.

Since 2010, a coalition of consumer and law enforcement groups organized by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has tracked companies and law firms that promise to “rescue” homeowners from foreclosure and mostly fail to deliver. The group has collected more than 46,000 written complaints from homeowners whose losses totaled more than $100 million — nearly two-thirds linked to apparent misconduct by lawyers or their associates.

Minorities accounted for just over half the complaints, and they tended to lose more money than whites. Hispanics lost the most, more than $4,200 on average.

“They take $3,000 from someone who only has that much, not from a population with a lot of wealth,” said Michael Tanglis, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Tanglis analyzed the complaint data at the request of the Center for Public Integrity.

Many victims haven’t recovered much, if any, of their money. The Federal Trade Commission, which has the duty to protect consumers, and the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which oversees lenders and financial companies, have won more than $341 million in civil judgments against foreclosure rescue outlets including law firms since 2009. But the agencies have actually collected less than 5 percent of that amount, court records show.

The sheer number of attorneys who have engaged in dubious foreclosure enterprises — the Center’s research identified more than 1,000 nationwide — also has vexed state bar associations and courts that both license lawyers and run funds to compensate their victims. Bar groups say the schemes are clearly illegal, yet attorneys who help orchestrate them mostly escape serious discipline, while victims often aren’t compensated, the Center found.

Brooklyn attorney Litvin and his firm, for instance, both filed for bankruptcy protection last year to get out from under debts. They listed more than 4,800 potential creditors — many ex-clients.

Carlos Gardea, a driving instructor who lives in El Paso, Texas, is on the list. When he agreed in 2012 to pay a $1,700 upfront fee and $595 a month to cut his mortgage payment, he considered it a good deal. A paralegal emailed him requesting documents, but each time he phoned the firm asking about progress on his case, all he got was a brush-off, he said in a court filing.

Gardea told the Center he eventually saved his home from foreclosure with the help of a local attorney. He feels the Litvin firm deceived him.

“I just hope to see some kind of money in my mailbox one of these days,” Gardea said. “I did pay a lot. It is pretty unfair.”

Meanwhile, new scams on foreclosure rescue are playing out in some communities, particularly ones with hot real-estate markets. Vulnerable homeowners, often minorities and immigrants, say they have been tricked into signing over their property deeds to scammers who used illegal or unethical pressure tactics to gain their trust.

Having a lawyer at the table in these deals adds “a veneer of authenticity,” said Jenny Eisenberg, a Brooklyn, New York, legal-aid attorney.

False Fix

More than $7 trillion in wealth vanished when the nation’s housing bubble burst nearly a decade ago, devastating many working-class homeowners. In 2008, more than 3 million homes were foreclosed on nationwide as real estate prices tanked and millions of people lost their jobs.

A year later, federal officials rolled out the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, hoping to keep millions of others from being forced from their homes. The voluntary program called on lenders to cut mortgage interest rates or loan balances through a negotiation process called “loan modification.”

How much HAMP has helped overextended homeowners is debatable. Of the 5.7 million households that applied for loan modifications between December 2009 and April 2015, nearly three-quarters were turned down, according to the report of a special inspector general reviewing the program.

Andrew G. Pizor, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, which advocates for low-income and disadvantaged people, said mortgage servicers have done a “horrible job,” often losing paperwork or slow-walking loan modifications.

“People were strung along for months, then told to start from scratch,” Pizor said.

The high rate of HAMP rejections played into the hands of entrepreneurs willing to falsely guarantee they could cut through red tape and renegotiate mortgage loans. And as homeowners grew more desperate to keep a roof over their heads, many were easy prey — and some still are.

Court records show that telemarketers, often denizens of boiler-room alleys in California or Florida, so named for their high-pressure sales tactics, have relied on direct mail, websites, and radio and television ads to pitch broadly worded foreclosure protection services by attorneys. Many charged homeowners a monthly fee of up to $700.

In one ad entered into evidence as part of an FTC lawsuit against the Danielson Law Group, a male announcer intones: “Attention homeowners. The government has increased pressure on lenders to prevent foreclosures. If you’re one of the millions behind on their payments, struggling to stay afloat and in danger of losing your home, call … for your free professional consultation.”

Some marketers have advised homeowners to quit making monthly mortgage payments while they worked on renegotiating their loans, which is bad legal advice, authorities said.

Others have persuaded property owners that their mortgage debt would be forgiven because of past misdeeds by their lenders, an unlikely scenario.

In another enforcement action, the FTC cited an advertisement hawking attorney services with the headline, all in capital letters: “DON’T LOSE YOUR HOME.”

“Attorneys have been successful in proving fraud and predatory lending practices which has caused some borrowers’ mortgage to be dismissed in court,” reads the ad. “Most of the mortgages done over the last decade have some kind of violation and only an expert can reveal the proverbial needle in the haystack.”

Some have strongly implied or falsely claimed to be affiliated with the U.S. government, court cases show. Others mailed homeowners official looking “Loan Modification” notices. “Based on your mortgage lender information and your property profile provided to us you may be qualified for loan modification,” reads one. The notice warns: YOU MAY FORFEIT LEGAL RIGHTS IF YOU DO NOT TAKE PROMPT ACTION. WE CAN HELP SAVE YOUR HOME.”

There’s no way to know how many people who paid these firms might have been able to secure a home loan modification by negotiating directly with their lenders.  It’s also likely that some people who answered one of these ads had not made mortgage payments for months or were so deeply underwater financially that they had little hope of keeping their homes. But state and federal lawsuits filed against foreclosure law firms and their marketing arms typically cite examples of homeowners who not only paid thousands of dollars needlessly, but also lost their property because they trusted the firms to guide them through the process.

Citing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to scams, in 2010 the FTC issued the Mortgage Assistance Relief Services, or MARS, Rule to stop the practice. The rule barred companies from taking advance fees for foreclosure relief, which the government viewed as the primary trap for homeowners.

But when writing the rule, federal officials agreed with the American Bar Association and some state bar groups that lawyers should be exempted under certain conditions. Several legal groups argued lawyers would shun foreclosure work unless they were paid up front. The FTC decided to allow lawyers to collect advance fees so long as they kept the money in a client trust account and met other conditions, which have proven difficult for authorities to monitor.

Some states that passed laws to prevent scammers from collecting hefty fees up front also left a significant loophole for attorneys.

Today, it’s clear the exemptions helped encourage rip-off artists to partner with law firms, or at least to give customers the impression they were affiliated with attorneys.

“We anticipated people would get scammed, but not to the level that actually happened,” said Rutledge Simmons, a lawyer and senior vice-president at NeighborWorks America, a housing advocacy group.

California Scheming

In early 2009, state bar associations in California and Florida warned members to steer clear of mortgage-modification deals in which they split fees with non-lawyers, or accepted referrals from telemarketers or other salespeople.

Later that year, a California Bar official revealed that loan-modification complaints were skyrocketing. Calling it a “crisis,” Russell Weiner took the rare step of calling out 16 foreclosure lawyers then under investigation for allegedly fleecing homeowners.

“The number of attorneys using their law licenses to essentially take money from unwary, but trusting consumers is astounding,” Weiner said in an article in the October 2009 California Bar Journal. “There are literally thousands of victims who have lost money they could not afford to lose.”

Yet tough talk did little to protect the public. Since 2010, California, Florida and New York have accounted for nearly 70 percent of the $65 million in losses linked to legal representation complaints, according to the Center’s data analysis. Firms with addresses in Orange County, California, have drawn the most complaints.

California’s role as the scam’s epicenter also is reflected in more than 2,300 orders to halt illegal mortgage modification tactics issued by the state’s Department of Real Estate from October 2008 through January of 2014. It’s not clear how many of these orders stemmed directly from misconduct by attorneys.

Still, many lawyers plied the foreclosure-rescue trade for years in California, Florida, New York and other states in the face of repeated warnings, disciplinary rulings by state bar associations and “cease and desist” orders from civil law enforcement agencies, such as state attorneys general, the Center’s investigation found.

Even though the mortgage crisis has abated in many regions of the country, and complaints have fallen off, they remain a concern.

“This is still going on, surprisingly,” said Melanie Lawrence, ‎deputy trial counsel at the State Bar of California.  “One would think over time [lawyers] would come to understand that this is unethical and illegal and stop doing it.”

The California Bar has nearly 100 disciplinary cases either pending or still being actively investigated, officials said.

The Center for Public Integrity examined more than 300 loan modification disciplinary actions taken since early 2009 against attorneys licensed either in California or Florida. (Disciplinary reports from New York aren’t searchable by type, according to the New York State Bar Association.)

While they typically accuse lawyers of multiple violations of consumer protection statutes and legal ethics codes, authorities haven’t been particularly eager to revoke an offender’s law license.

That’s happened in less than a third of California actions, including a lawyer charged in a relatively rare criminal case with bilking thousands of homeowners out of $12 million. Less than 15 percent of the Florida Bar’s orders called for disbarment, records show.

Case files show many errant lawyers had been approached by telemarketers who for decades have flourished in Sunbelt locales, particularly in Florida and California. Some partnered with telemarketers or hired sizable staffs of non-lawyers who handled most of the work but were not properly supervised, as required by Bar rules.

Some practitioners admitted they were overwhelmed by the torrent of business telemarketers could send their way, and rarely had any contact with, or did any actual legal work for, their clients. In disciplinary hearings, some lawyers admitted they were lured in by the easy money they made, while others insisted they did nothing wrong.

As part of their punishment, many lawyers have been ordered to make restitution, at least to people who took the trouble to lodge formal complaints against them. Many don’t pay up, however, pleading poverty. Nearly three dozen of the disciplined California attorneys, many responsible for major consumer losses, filed for bankruptcy protection, court records show.

The California Bar’s client security fund has stepped in and paid out nearly $16 million to compensate people who lost money to about 200 foreclosure lawyers. But half of that payout arose from 10 high-profile cases in which authorities estimated consumer losses were much higher. Most victims haven’t received any compensation.

The Florida Bar’s client security fund, which is more restrictive in compensating victims, has paid out about $400,000 since 2010 for mortgage-relief misconduct involving about 20 attorneys, according to the Center’s analysis of Bar records.

Though they’ve won many large eye-popping court judgments, federal law enforcement agencies have had a tough time actually collecting from offenders.

Most of the $341 million in court judgments the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau secured in more than two-dozen enforcement cases since 2009 have been “suspended due to defendant’s inability to pay,” court records show. However, the CFPB is drawing on a special “victim relief” fund to pay out about $23 million.

William Goodrich, a Harvard-educated real estate lawyer well into his 70s, didn’t pay the $38 million default judgment that grew out of his role in a major California loan-modification operation called A to Z Marketing, which the FTC sued for fraud in July 2013.

Goodrich, who at the time was in ill health and used a scooter to get around, filed court papers in September 2013 saying he couldn’t afford to pay an attorney for his defense. He said he had more credit card debt than savings and that his only income was $1,275 a month from Social Security.

A month later, FTC lawyers found out that Goodrich had sold his Orange County home in August 2013 and left the country, moving to Israel.

“He vamoosed,” said Thomas McNamara, a lawyer paid by the court to recover any assets left behind.

Goodrich died in November, according to an email from his wife.

Many California lawyers, including several disbarred for their roles in major foreclosure scams, have taken refuge in bankruptcy court.

Collection efforts have been stymied in many other high-profile cases brought against lawyers.

In August 2015, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey touted a $625,000 court judgment her office won to repay 68 clients of attorney David Zak, based in Revere, who she said for years had targeted Spanish and Portuguese-speaking homeowners with misleading radio advertising that falsely guaranteed them loan modifications.

Zak was stripped of his Massachusetts law license in March after a judge cited his “repeated misconduct” over eight years “involving hundreds of poor, often uneducated, non-English speaking clients, in desperate financial circumstances, and facing the dire prospect of losing their homes.”

In at least two cases, Zak’s non-lawyer associates advised clients to stop making mortgage payments, which resulted in the clients “being forced into foreclosure and losing their homes.”

When it issued the press release announcing the $625,000 judgment, the attorney general’s office didn’t mention Zak had declared bankruptcy.

In May, Zak agreed to pay $20,750 to settle the case.

CLEVELAND — For retired Col. Rob Maness, a Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Louisiana, the real action at the Republican National Convention is everywhere but the Quicken Loans Arena, where delegates are gathering this week to nominate presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Instead, his focus is on the back-to-back-to-back-to-back fundraisers, parties and meet-and-greets his campaign has scheduled for him this week.

How many such private events, exactly?

“About 35,” Maness told the Center for Public Integrity on Sunday while waiting to clear security outside a party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Look, everyone you want to see is all here at once. I’m just hoping we get in touch with the right folks here. It saves a lot of time and effort.”

Raising money during the convention is essential for Maness, one of several candidates vying to replace outgoing Sen. David Vitter, R-La.

Louisiana’s “jungle primary” elections are decidedly novel: All candidates run in the November election. If no single candidate achieves 50 percent of the vote on Election Day, the top two vote-getters — regardless of party — advance to a December runoff.

Despite placing third in the state’s 2014 U.S. Senate election, Maness is trailing several of his opponents in recent polls, including Republican Reps. John Fleming and Charles Boustany Jr., Republican state Treasurer John Kennedy and Democrat Foster Campbell, a state public service commissioner. Former Republican Rep. Joseph Cao and several other contenders are also in the mix.

As of July 2, Maness had about $200,000 in the bank, not counting about $95,000 in reported campaign debt.

Fleming, for one, had about 12 times the cash on hand: about $2.4 million.

Maness says his approach to wooing donors is straightforward: Tell his personal story, because “nobody else has the story that I do.”

That story begins with Maness’ military service — he is a highly decorated veteran with broad Air Force leadership experience. And it ends with how he believes that resume makes him eminently qualified to better secure the nation’s southern border, fight terrorists and otherwise defend against threats both foreign and domestic.

But he knows he won’t have the opportunity to press that agenda in Washington, D.C., unless he’s financially competitive.

Which is why, he said with a smile, “everything is about fundraising.”

And with that, his campaign fundraiser pulled him aside so he could talk with two women from Texas who had expressed interest in making donations.

A pro-Donald Trump super PAC called “Rebuilding America Now” has positioned itself as an attack dog, unafraid to take shots at Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

One of its hard-hitting ads spliced together clips of Clinton denying ever sending classified information via her private email with clips of Bill Clinton denying having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky while president. Another ad intimated that Hillary Clinton doesn’t think women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct should be believed.

This week, Rebuilding America Now continued its tough anti-Clinton tack in multiple new ads, while also launching its first positive, pro-Trump spot.

One new attack ad features Clinton defending the outsourcing of jobs while in India as a U.S. senator in 2005. Another criticizes her for Libya turning into a “breeding ground” for terrorists.

Meanwhile, the positive ad uses excerpts of the June 28 speech Trump gave in Pennsylvania focused on jobs to argue that Trump will turn the U.S. economy around for American workers.

Officials with Rebuilding America Now told CNN on Monday that the new ads were part of a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign now underway. Some of this new ad buy will be focused on the presidential battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to the Washington Post. Others will air on national cable — the distribution method of choice for the super PAC so far.

Rebuilding America Now’s new ads come at a time when Trump and his allies have been massively outgunned on the television airwaves.

Clinton’s campaign and Priorities USA Action — her well-funded super PAC supporter— have aired more than 60,000 ads since June 8, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data provided by ad tracking firm Kantar Media/CMAG.

Pro-Trump groups, meanwhile, have aired fewer than 3,000 ads during the same period — with Rebuilding America Now accounting for fewer than 200 of them.

Trump’s own campaign has not aired a single TV ad since early May, when he won the Indiana primary and all-but-clinched the GOP presidential nomination.

The ad’s sponsor

Rebuilding America Now was officially registered with the Federal Election Commission last month.

As a super PAC, it can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations or labor unions — so long as it doesn’t coordinate its spending with Trump.

Who’s behind it?

Wealthy real estate investor Tom Barrack, a longtime friend of Trump's, helped launch Rebuilding America Now, although he is now reportedly backing away from as active of a role as he once envisioned.

Barrack, who is slated to be one of the featured speakers at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, is a major Trump campaign fundraiser.

In May, he hosted Trump at his home in California for a fundraising event at which guests paid $25,000 or more to attend. He has also personally donated $415,000 to Trump's joint fundraising committee — money that benefits Trump’s campaign as well as the Republican National Committee and GOP parties in several states.

Also behind Rebuilding America Now? Veteran GOP political operative Ken McKay, who previously served as the campaign manager of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's failed presidential bid. In April, McKay was hired to advise Trump's presidential campaign, a role he has since left.

Meanwhile, Laurance “Laurie” Gay, a close associate of Trump campaign adviser Paul Manafort, serves as the super PAC's managing director.

Rebuilding America Now has also hired GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, who has long advised GOP presidential campaigns about advertising, including during Romney's 2008 bid and George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004.

The super PAC's treasurer is Ryan Call, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado.

Money in

Rebuilding America Now is not yet the giant it dreams of being.

It collected about $2.16 million during its first few weeks of existence, according to a recently filed campaign finance report.

The bulk of that money — $2 million— came from California real estate developer Geoffrey Palmer. Another real estate developer, Rick Carlton of Tennessee, ponied up $10,000 to the super PAC.

Among the other notable donors to Rebuilding America Now: Ohio-based coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., which gave $100,000 on June 29, and Southeast QSR LLC, which gave $50,000 on June 28. That company is owned by businessman Nicholas Peters and operates dozens of Taco Bell franchises in Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina.

In its first weeks of existence, Rebuilding America Now also raised $450 from an unknown number of small-dollar donors who each gave $200 or less and, therefore, did not need to be itemized in the group's campaign finance filing.

Money out

Rebuilding America Now has so far spent more than $1.6 million on anti-Clinton ads, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

As of June 30, the super PAC had about $570,000 in the bank— although a deep-pocketed donor could always improve the financial health of the group with a single check at any time.

Why it matters

Unlike Clinton's supporters, wealthy Trump fans haven't, to date, coalesced around a single super PAC. (Trump spurned super PACs during the GOP primary.) Rebuilding America Now hopes that will change.

When Rebuilding America Now launched, officials told CNN they had secured $32 million in commitments. Most of that money has yet to appear.

Nevertheless, the group raised the stakes on Monday, suggesting that its receipts could rise to more than $60 million — including one so-far-unnamed donor who has pledged $20 million.

If such significant funding does materialize, Rebuilding America Now would have a formidable war chest to help Team Trump combat Team Clinton on the airwaves.

That is certainly Rebuilding America Now's goal.

"With your help, we will continue to make these hard-hitting ads and show people the truth about Hillary," the group states on its website. "We will run a national campaign just like Priorities USA, but we will do it better."

This article was co-published with TIME.