Campaign finance reform: Vast left-wing conspiracy

Led by the Pew Charitable Trust, the NY Post reports, a handful of liberal foundations devoted some $123 million to "create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform." On a tape of a conference held at USC's Annenberg School for Communication in March of 2004, Sean Treglia, a former program officer at Pew spills the beans.

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

Read the article by the Post's Ryan Sager, which details the favorable coverage CFR received from liberal news outlets that also received money from Pew. But here's the best part. On the videotape, Treglia is asked what he would have done if a major news organization had found out about the plan "at the wrong time":

"We had a scare," Treglia says. "As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress."

"But you know what the good news is from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."

The Post follows up with an editorial today:

Pew — not to put too fine a point on it — has some explaining to do.

And so do the politicians — such as Sen. John McCain, Sen. Russ Feingold, Rep. Chris Shays and Rep. Marty Meehan — whose speech-regulation schemes directly benefited from this scam.

So, what did they know?

When did they know it?

It's time to find out.

Via Lucianne.

More: John Fund on Opinion Journal:

Not only did the effort succeed in bulldozing Congress and President Bush, but it might have played a role in persuading the Supreme Court, which had previously ruled against broad restrictions on political speech, to declare McCain-Feingold constitutional in 2003 on a 5-4 vote. "You will see that almost half the footnotes relied on by the Supreme Court in upholding the law are research funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts," Mr. Treglia boasted.