Election Law; Supreme Plot Palm Beach County Commissioner faces stiff fine over illegal fund-raising effort to oust three state justices
In a case with national political implications, the Florida Elections Commission has ruled that Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty violated Florida State campaign finance rules in working to oust three Florida Supreme Court justices.
Florida State Administrative Law Judge Harry L. Hooper, who presided over Mary McCarty’s hearing in February on the campaign finance charges, concluded on May 1st that the former Palm Beach County Republican Party Chairwoman, was little more than a "front" for a Washington, D.C.-based campaign against the 3 Justices, which was organized during the 2000' presidential election re-count battle.
That campaign, Judge Hooper found, was orchestrated by Roger J. Stone Jr., a Republican lobbyist and political operative who has said he worked for President Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era re-election Committee and served as Campaign Strategist for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Roger Stone, who owns a $2.2 million bayfront mansion in Surfside, FLA, received $1.8 million from the Miami-Dade County Commission last year, for political work he did for the County.
During Mary McCarty’s 2-day hearing, the FEC’s lawyer argued that Roger Stone and Mary McCarty established the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" to pressure the Florida State Supreme Court to rule in favor of then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in his ballot re-count battle with Al Gore. Mary McCarty testified that the Committee began to take shape 6 to 9 days after the Nov. 7th election. The Florida Supreme Court was first asked by Al Gore to order hand re-counts in the decisive Florida race on Nov. 15th.
“This was an attempt to let the Justices know, who were going to eventually decide the presidential election, that they were going to be watched,” Commission Assistant counsel Eric M. Lipman said in his opening arguments. “And it was an attempt to influence what they were going to do.”
According to Judge Hooper’s 36-page order, Roger Stone, through his Washington, D.C.-based firm, "Ikon Public Affairs", was the real agent behind the campaign in late 2000 and 2001 to defeat the Florida Justices in the 2002 merit retention election. But who, if anyone, was paying Roger Stone and giving him orders remains unclear.
At the hearing, Mary McCarty, 48, who was re-elected to her fourth term on the County Commission in November, testified that she was “played by Stone.” In an earlier deposition, she called the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" - “a scam,” according to a transcript.
‘Mad as hell’
Mary McCarty’s lawbreaking, including findings that she certified the accuracy of a Campaign Treasurer’s report that was “incorrect, false, or incomplete,” accepted excessive contributions and displayed a “reckless disregard” for Florida State Election laws, stemmed from her Chairmanship of the now-defunct "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary".
The PAC, which began operating in late November 2000', but wasn’t legally established until early January 2001, targeted Justices: Harry Lee Anstead, Charles T. Wells, and Justice Leander J. Shaw for defeat in the 2002 merit retention elections. Mary McCarty’s highly publicized “Mad as Hell” letter, mailed to as many as 350,000 conservatives in early December 2000', sought to raise $4.5 million to unseat them.
Florida Election records show that hundreds of people responded to the solicitation letter, which raised a total of about $220,000. That sum included a mysterious $150,000 loan whose origin still hasn’t been determined. The contribution limit to State Election PACs in Florida is $500.
Despite the aborted campaign against them, Judges Wells and Anstead both won their retention elections; Judge Anstead is now Chief Justice. Judge Shaw stepped down this past January because he faced mandatory retirement at age 70.
Through a spokesman, Judges Anstead, Wells, and Shaw declined to comment.
Mocked McCarty’s defense
The commission found that Mary McCarty falsely certified the accuracy of a campaign disclosure report, and that she and the Committee accepted excessive contributions, incurred expenses illegally and made an unauthorized expenditure to fund the fundraising letter.
The 9-member FEC commission consists of 5 Republicans and 4 Democrats appointed by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, based on recommendations from legislative leaders.
The FEC ruling was based on findings and recommendations from an Administrative law judge who presided over a two-day hearing that took place in February in West Palm Beach and Tallahassee. In his May 1st Order, Judge Hooper issued findings that Mary McCarty had committed "willful violations of Florida State Election law, including signing and certifying as accurate a Campaign Treasurer’s report she knew nothing about".
Judge Hooper’s 36-page order found that Mary McCarty knowingly violated Section 106.07(5) of the Florida Statutes governing the preparation of campaign treasurer reports, and that she wrongly relied on “Mr. Stone’s operatives to accurately prepare the report.”
“Despite warnings on the face of the document she signed, she nevertheless made no attempt to determine if the report she submitted was correct,” the Order reads. The warning says it is a first-degree misdemeanor to falsify a public record in Florida. No criminal charge has been brought against Mary McCarty.
At the hearing, FEC counsel Lipman mocked Mary McCarty’s claim that she was duped by Roger Stone. He called that “the Sergeant Schultz defense,” after the character on the old “Hogan’s Heroes” TV show. “I see nothing. I hear nothing. I know nothing. … And nothing could be further from the truth,” Lipman said, according to a hearing transcript.
Roger Stone recruited her
The investigation of Mary McCarty and the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" started with a June 2001 complaint sworn out by Andy Martin, a Palm Beach County political activist and perennial Republican candidate for office who currently is running for the U.S. Senate.
Following the probe by Elections Commission staff, an order of probable cause was filed with the Commission last August. The charges included one count of willfully certifying to the correctness of a Campaign Treasurer’s report that is incorrect, false or incomplete; one count of violating a statute that prohibits an officer or agent of a political committee from incurring a campaign expense without enough money on deposit to pay for those expenses; 9 counts of accepting campaign contributions over the $500 limit; one count of failing to report a contribution and a count that makes it illegal to make or authorize a prohibited expenditure.
At her hearing, Mary McCarty testified she was drafted into the presidential re-count battle on the morning after the Nov. 7th Election meltdown in Florida. Top Republicans recruited her to oversee the ballot re-count in Palm Beach County, home of the notorious "butterfly ballot" that confused many voters.
"Members of the Bush-Cheney campaign 'took up residence in my office',” she said.
The re-count controversy landed before the Florida Supreme Court the week after the election when Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the Florida co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to grant the request of the Gore-Lieberman campaign for a re-count. On Nov. 21, the Florida State Supreme Court unanimously decided to give Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties more time to finish hand re-counts sought by Al Gore.
Mary McCarty testified that between Nov. 13 and Nov. 16, Roger Stone called her at her home. “He explained to me that people were very, very upset with the way the Florida Supreme Court was conducting itself, and that in Florida we have a merit retention
system.”
A few weeks later, on Dec. 8th, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, ordered the then-stalled re-count to resume and be extended Floridawide. Four days after that, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote in Bush v. Al Gore, effectively shut down the re-count, prompting Al Gore to concede the election to Bush.
Mary McCarty testified she previously had met Roger Stone at a campaign fund-raiser for Sen. Arlen Specter, Republican-Pa., and that they had worked together briefly when she considered running for Congress in the late 1990s. So, when Roger Stone told her he was forming a Committee “for the purposes of taking action against the Florida Supreme Court”, which is what Judge Hooper subsequently found, she decided to go along.
Dianne Thorne of Miami Beach, who became the Committee’s Treasurer, testified in a deposition that Roger Stone asked for her help in setting up the Committee’s clerical operation. Dianne Thorne said Roger Stone had contacted her because she used to date his son. The Committee listed as its business address a P.O. Box at a USA Pack & Post on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach.
On Thanksgiving Day 2000, according to Mary McCarty’s testimony, Roger Stone faxed her the text of a fund-raising letter to which she’d agreed to lend her name. Later, Mary McCarty said, Roger Stone and his "Associates" arranged to file all the necessary paperwork to create the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary". The FEC investigators found that the papers sent to the Florida Department of Elections to establish the Committee were sent from the Washington office of Ikon Public Affairs, according to documents in the FEC’ s case file.
Mary McCarty testified that the original version of the fund-raising letter she was asked to review did not target specific 3 Florida Supreme Court justices. But, the final version that went out the first week of December did. She said she didn’t approve it, but acknowledged she didn’t object either. “I just decided that I would be held accountable for something that I agreed to get into,” she said. “And wherever it took me, I would just be the one to take the lumps.”
Who fronted the money?
Mary McCarty’s “Dear Friend” letter was shrill. “Were you as outraged by the Florida Supreme Court’s efforts to highjack [sic] the presidency for Al Gore as I was?” the letter asked. “It was an outrageous, arrogant power-grab by a left-wing court which is stuck in the liberal 60s… We must raise at least $4.5 million by the ‘Vote No’ campaign to organize Florida voters to reject the retention of these three liberal Supreme Court justices.”
The direct mail fund-raising campaign cost $150,000. According to Judge Hooper, Roger Stone came up with the money that Committee campaign records later listed as a “loan” from an Alexandria, Va.-based firm called Creative Marketing. The mailing address reported by the Committee for Creative Marketing was the same as that of the Stone Group, a fund-raising and marketing firm owned by Roger Stone’s ex-wife, conservative Republican activist Ann Stone. Investigators could find no company by the name of Creative Marketing.
Mary McCarty said Roger Stone told her he and his partner, Craig Snyder, would be personally responsible for repaying the $150,000 that funded the “Dear Friend” mass mailing.
There were also questions about who the money went to. Judge Hooper found that Roger Stone “or his Organization” actually paid the $150,000 not to Creative Marketing but to a Virginia company called Unique Graphics and Design, which, according to Virginia State corporate records, had as its principals Ann Stone and Lora Lynn Jones. The Committee subsequently paid Unique Graphics an additional $50,000 in May 2001 for purposes that remain unclear.
Last November, Lora Lynn Jones testified in a deposition that it was Roger Stone who hired Unique Graphics for the Florida work, gave her “marching orders,” and was responsible for paying the tab for the fund-raising letter. Lora Jones said she asked for and received the entire $150,000 payment by wire, in advance, because Roger Stone had “burned” her once before on a job.
Neither Hooper nor the FEC determined why the Committee listed "Creative Marketing" rather than "Unique Graphics" as the recipient of the payments. In another anomaly, a Daily Business Review examination of Virginia State corporate records found that "Unique Graphics" was NOT a legal entity when the two payments of $150,000 and $50,000 were made and received. The company’s charter was terminated in 1994, and the firm was purged from the state’s records in 1999.
And despite state records showing that Ann Stone was a principal of "Unique Graphics", Lora Jones said she was the sole owner and employee. She also said, however, that she was a longtime employee of the Stone Group.
Lobbied for Miami-Dade
Roger Stone’s service as a Republican Party political operative dates back to his work on President Nixon’s notorious CREEP, the "Committee to Re-Elect the President". The Watergate break-in was traced to CREEP, though Roger Stone was not implicated in the scandal.
More recently, Roger Stone has worked on high-profile Florida issues. Last year, his lobbying firm, "Ikon Public Affairs", was paid $1.8 million by Miami-Dade County to defeat a Florida-wide referendum on a Constitutional Amendment that County leaders feared would erode local autonomy by allowing the Legislature to propose changes in the county’s home rule charter. The referendum failed.
The County Commission waived routine bid procedures to give the lobbying contract to Ikon. In 1996, Roger Stone helped Florida "Sugar Growers" defeat a Floridawide ballot initiative that would have imposed a penny-a-pound tax on sugar to restore the Everglades. Recently, Roger Stone, 50, incorporated a Miami Beach company called Fairbanks LLC with his wife, Nydia.
Roger Stone previously has gotten into trouble for activities that bear some resemblance to the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" events. In 2000, the New York State Temporary Lobbying Commission fined Donald Trump’s Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc., the Institute for Law and Society and Roger Stone, their lobbyist, $250,000 as part of a settlement that ended an investigation into unreported lobbying expenses.
The lobbying campaign sought to scuttle legislation permitting the Mohawk Indians to build a casino that would have competed against Trump’s Atlantic City casinos.
A lobbying commission investigation found that the direct mail campaign sponsored by the purportedly public-minded Institute for Law and Society was actually orchestrated by Donald Trump and Roger Stone, with the true source of funding hidden from the state’s voters. As part of the settlement, Roger Stone and Donald Trump publicly apologized for misleading the public “concerning the production and funding of the lobbying effort.”
Fort Lauderdale attorney Mitchell Berger, a major fund-raiser for the Gore-Lieberman campaign who was part of Al Gore’s re-count legal team, said the activities of the "Committee to Take Back Our Judiciary" should be investigated further.
“There were a lot of things that happened at the time that went un-reported and that for the sake of history and for the sake of understanding how our government worked need to be looked at,” said Mitchell Berger, Chairman of Berger Singerman.
“To threaten members of the Judiciary with 'removal' at the time cases are pending is NOT the way our founding persons intended our democracy to function.”
Reporter Dan Christensen can be reached at dchristensen at floridabiz.com or at (954) 468-2616.