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Quis Custodiet?

What the heck is Campaign for Accountability, the group requesting Sen. Jennifer Fielder's emails?

By Dave Skinner

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, actually … from Latin to English, who is guarding the guards?

Some of you might be tracking a federal lawsuit over the e-mail records of Republican state Sen. Jennifer Fielder of Thompson Falls. The plaintiff is Washington, D.C.-based Campaign for Accountability, described in the Montana press as a “national government ethics group.”

The Campaign (CfA) wants whatever correspondence (thought to be hundreds of pages) Sen. Fielder might have sent or received regarding the issue of transferring public lands (TPL) to the host states.

Now, in the interest of transparency, I feel lands transfer (or transfer of management authority) is a worthy topic deserving adult discussion, especially given the consistently poor state of federally “managed” public lands. Because Montana’s a small state, Fielder and I have crossed paths from time to time — on good terms.

This story line about Fielder’s emails really begins in June 2015, when CfA filed complaints with attorneys general in three states alleging fraud by Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory. None of the allegations “stuck,” but the news coverage “encouraged” Rep. Ivory to quit his position as director of the pro-state-transfer American Lands Council in February 2016.

His replacement? Fielder. Not coincidentally, CfA immediately filed an “all correspondence” records request with Montana’s Legislative Services Division (MLSD) — and is now suing in federal court against MLSD and Sen. Fielder. Then, the second week of March, news came of the Montana Legislature considering an appropriation of $100,000 to defend against CfA’s litigation, a very unusual action.

So what the heck is Campaign for Accountability? Who, when, where, and maybe why?

Well, the ICANN Internet registry shows CfA’s website was created on Jan. 1, 2015, only six months before filing its first — an impressive start that’s not a start at all.

CfA’s site was registered by veteran Beltway “watchdog” operative and attorney Anne Weismann. Prior to creating CfA, Weismann spent 10 years as Chief Counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, yet another “nonprofit watchdog” that focuses on “corporate” and mostly Republican political skullduggery. In 2011, Ms. Weismann was inducted into the Society for Professional Journalists’ National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame as a champion of “the people’s right to know.”

Also of interest is the address Ms. Weismann lists as CfA’s headquarters: 1201 Connecticut Avenue NW Suite 300, a location shared with an amazing number of organizations. Strikingly, the first listed is the New Venture Fund. Others popping up in a Google search before CfA include Arabella Advisors, a private firm that actually administers NVF — for a fee. Cozy.

How cozy? NVF’s revenue for 2014 was $179 million, paying Arabella a warm and fuzzy $8 million for “consulting.”

In fact, CfA doesn’t even show up in Google until the third page of results, and that result isn’t CfA’s website. In fact, CfA’s website doesn’t list its physical address, not even on its “Press Inquiries” page.

What about the contact telephone used for the site, (202) 780-5750? Well, it’s not only the tip line/press contact number for CfA, but for something called the “Google Transparency Project,” run by CfA. What’s that?

Here’s where it gets really thick — Fortune, the Hill and other Silicon Valley news providers all report CfA’s “transparency project” is funded (first secretly and now openly) by Oracle, which famously lost a $9 billion lawsuit against Google over the Android app.

Even thicker, if you wish to donate to CfA via “secure.donationpay.org,” Siliconbeat reports your “charitable donation” receipt will actually come from the New Venture Fund. Why is that? Oh, it might be because CfA describes itself as a “501(c)(3) project” — a legally correct way of cloaking the fact that they aren’t a “national government ethics group” on their own. More honestly, the Campaign for Accountability is only a tiny part of New Venture Fund’s rather opaque, Russian-doll corporate structure.

While you might be wondering if any credentialed Montana journalists will ever uncover the real story about NVF’s Campaign for Accountability actions against Sen. Fielder, don’t worry.

Fortune reporter Jeff John Roberts has it covered, writing last year that “the practice of ‘astro-turfing’ — when wealthy companies or individuals pose as a grass-roots group like the so-called ‘campaign for accountability’ project — can confuse news and public relations, and foster public cynicism.”

Quis custodiet?