George Phillies is a longtime Libertarian Party activist who presently serves as the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Massachusetts. Phillies publishes a newsletter called Liberty for America, which is devoted to news about the Libertarian Party. He released his newsletter’s latest special report today; it is a breakdown of Gary Johnson’s campaign spending for July 2016:
Liberty For America
Special Report
August 21, 2016
Gary Johnson 2016 financials for July–analysis of his FEC filings.
The campaign had cash on hand at the start of the month of $459.063. Its Receipts This Period were $1,602,810. It spent $856,518, leaving it at the end of July with Cash on Hand of $1,205,355.
I have gone through the FEC filing and totaled up expenditures. There are a lot of numbers, so errors may have crept in, especially at the typing stage, but the following should be reasonably if not necessarily perfectly accurate.
So how did Johnson 2016 spend its money in July? To summarize,
$64,741 or 7.6% went to classical advertising.
$111,877 or 13.1% went to printing and mailing houses.
$530699 or 62% went to consultants.
There was advertising. Signage came to $24,128. Evan Twede was paid $33,784 for media advertising, Jesse Ranney was paid $3400 for media spots. There were Facebook ads, totaling $3003.62. Website hosting from Godaddy cost $205. Postage and Shipping was $221. There is always a question as to how much media spending was to produce a spot, and how much was to air the spot, but the total here was $64,741, or 7.6% of campaign income.
Printing came to $111,877, paid to Alita Grafx, Documart, and Salt Lake Printing and Mailing. In addition, direct mail is advertising. Direct mail of $111,877 amounted to 13% of campaign income.
Raising and spending money costs money. We see $443 in bank fees to Wells Fargo, $2158 in JFA Expense to Avondale Finance, Nathan Grabau, and DB Capitol Strategies, $9,878 in accounting and reporting fees to McCauley & Associates, PC, and merchant processing fees to , PayPal, and WePay of $49,975. Rent came to $1733, paid to Marilyn Prince.
Refunds of excess contributions covered $12,933.
Computer software cost $13,917, with payments made to Aristotle International, Caspio, Inc, Marketing Systems, and Northstar Campaign Systems.
Governor Weld promised $100,000 for ballot access. Between ballot access, ballot access consulting, and a $2500 Presidential Election Filing Fee in West Virginia, we see a total of $12,946. There was a $1132 mileage reimbursement of Lou Jasikoff.
The campaign traveled a great deal. Air fares came to $34,295 for 92 flights. That’s an impressive amount of air travel for one month. Lodging came to only $4324. Car rental, cab fare, train fares, and fuel for car travel came to nearly $2995. $346 was spent on travel insurance.
Now we come to “consulting” You may expect someone to claim that this line hides advertising expenses, so that Consultant X spends $50,000 for TV ads, is reimbursed the $50,000, but the money is paid to Consultant X, so the payment shows as $50,000 for consulting. IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY! Under FEC rules the filings must show the final destination of the money, and Johnson 2016 is doing its filings correctly. What you in fact see in the report is series of entries like
Person’s name and address MEMO ENTRIES: SEE BELOW 468.02
Followed immediately by
Comfort Inn Travel – Hotel 379.93 MEMO
Chevron Fuel for campaign travel 88.09 MEMO
so it is immediately clear where the money finally went. Reimbursements are not being used by the Johnson campaign to hide expenditures. (Readers might also wonder why a campaign would want to hide advertising expenses as consulting fees.)
Campaign Consulting came to nearly $490,000. That includes $445,000 to Liberty Consulting Services, $13,000 to Carlos Sierra, $10,000 to Joseph Hunter, $5650 to Chris Thrasher, $4193 to Phil Kregel, $3000 to Pojunis Communications, $2666 to Steve Kerbel, $2600 to Tom Mahon, $2032 to Lou Jasikoff, and $480 to David Valente.
There are other sorts of consulting. Media Consulting to Brandon Ellyson and Evan Twede, Inc. cost $12,250. Joseph Hunter received $12,000 for press relations and media consulting. Social media consulting came to $4480, while social media monitoring cost $800. Robert Clarke received $266 for consulting, while Robert Cain received $3500 for digital consulting. Ashley Edwards and Nathan Grabau received $3251 for fundraising fees. Jason Weinman received $3000 for youth volunteer consulting. Andy Craig got $2500 for Grassroots advocacy.
Food and beverages came to $845.
The grand total for consulting variously titled was not quite $531,000, out of $856,518 in disbursements. 62% of campaign spending thus went to various consultants.
Are the expenses producing results and what are they? Eliminate what is not productive!
It’s time to go.
The LNC should rescind its authorization for the chair to negotiate with John$on 2016, because while they love their chair, the conditions under which the motion was framed have ceased to be applicable.
From the LNC-Business email list and reproduced by permission:
On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 9:40 PM, Joseph Buchman wrote:
The past LNC meeting, if memory serves, responded to an apparent (mis)characterization of the contract negotiations with Ron Nielson/the campaign as being near an end and a contract as “imminent” — on that basis Nick was, if I remember, authorized to finalize the deal (with an expectation that would occur within a day or two).
As that has not happened my requests are:
1) For the full LNC to reengage/remove the authorization for Nick to finalize.
2) For an update of what happened/why the delay.
3) If possible, for the campaign to disclose the boilerplate of its contracts with key staff. Specifically any non-disparagement clauses.
4) If such clauses exist, I would call on the LNC (just as I would call on the US Congress) to open whistle blower hearings (in Executive Session if necessary) for key staff, and in return for such testimony to the LNC offer legal counsel for their defense against Ron Nielson/The Campaign for any actions against them for having told the truth.
Bottom line, I call on the LNC to be an exemplar in these matters of how we expect/demand our government act in similar situations. Transparency, accountability, truth and an honoring of private contracts only to the point that are not used to cover crimes, waste, fraud, etc. The LNC deserves to know how this campaign was managed (mismanaged) to better prepare the party for 2018 and 2020.
That is your alls prime fiduciary responsibility, IMO.
So, again . . .
Why no contract? Hasn’t the authorization the committee gave to the Chair now, clearly, expired? What was the nature of the misrepresentation (optimism) of the July LNC meeting? Is the campaign actively preventing those with knowledge of fraud, mismanagement, misreported expenses/revenues from whistle blowing? Can the LNC act to hear those claims/protect those folks from such immoral (and likely unenforceable) clauses?
Feel free to reword the above as you see best for a formal motion to the LNC.
Hope the above is helpful to you, and ultimately to the cause of advancing liberty/ending tyranny (even right here in River City!)
Joe
Joseph G. Buchman, PhD
584 Hillside Circle
Alpine UT 84004
http://www.josephbuchman.com
To which Caryn Ann Harlow responded:
Joe, thank you so much for writing. You know I take the questions and concerns of my Region very seriously, and I am copying this email to the LNC business list to ask that a response be given. The similar concerns of the Colorado affiliate are very well known via a statement by the LPCO Chair on the State Chair’s list.
This is a failure in our system.. be it a blame on the LNC, elsewhere, combination, or simply unavoidable this needs to be openly dealt with. I know that other than “none signed yet” we are in the dark.
If information cannot be public, I ask that the LNC be updated in Executive Session if need be on what precisely is going on. I know I feel inadequately informed, and that is not serving my representative capacity for my Region to be so.
I believe Joe is right to call us out on our fiduciary responsibility to the best interests of the Party which will be here after November while the candidates (unless they win the election–and Trump and Clinton seem very determined to assist us in that endeavor) will not.
One correction Joe, the authorization granted to the Chair for negotiations was in May. I believe he has strived zealously with the assistance of counsel to get this done. But it is nearly three months now and not the quick, decisive resolution that was certainly in my mind when I voted so. We either admit defeat now and hold ourselves accountable to the membership as to why this wasn’t done or take another tactic. But this slow descent of this issue into oblivion will not do.
In Liberty,
Caryn Ann Harlos
Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) – Caryn.Ann. [email protected]
Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
Joe,
You are correct… all the vultures will descend upon a bunch of defenseless rubes who have repeatedly proven they can be taken advantage of.
You are reading it correctly.
What are the consequences if the LP ticket gets 5+ percent of the vote nationally? Millions of federal dollars flow into the LP HQ?
According to http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/pubfund.shtml
“The amount of public funding to which a minor party candidate is entitled is based on the ratio of the party’s popular vote in the preceding Presidential election to the average popular vote of the two major party candidates in that election. A new party candidate receives partial public funding after the election if he/she receives 5 percent or more of the vote. The entitlement is based on the ratio of the new party candidate’s popular vote in the current election to the average popular vote of the two major party candidates in the election.”
If I’m reading through all the FEC rules correctly (George, help!), then it seems if Johnson/Weld gain 6 percent or so on November 8th, then $12 million or so will be available to whoever the 2020 LP nominees are.
Is that correct?
If so, I’d sure expect Ron Nielson, et al, will find a candidate, if not Gary Johnson himself, to run in the LP Primary starting about 3 years from now (the summer of 2019). I’d also expect other campaigns would be attracted to a potential payout of over $10 million.
Or am I misreading things here?
If the ticket can get the LP ballot qualified in most, if not all the states in 2020, and the LP uses that opportunity to nominate a strong libertarian ticket, then I suppose the 2016 cycle will have had at least one positive aspect to it.
I think politics should generally be kept to the local and state level as much as possible. I will likely be voting for two Libertarian down ticket candidates.
Krzysztof Lesiak Post author @ August 23, 2016 at 00:19
“Leavitt was never an ambassador nor is he fluent in Mandarin. You’re thinking of Jon Huntsman.”
You are correct. My bad. But hey, happy to help the Johnson campaign recruit former Republican governors from Utah. The more the merrier!
🙂
There were rumors that Johnson would be bringing in folks from old conservative Republican Presidential campaigns to run things.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/tea-party-pacs-ideas-death-214164#ixzz4IA2NCpF8
POLITICO last year reviewed the activity of 33 conservative PACs for the 2014 cycle. Combined, they raked in $43 million dollars, according to the POLITICO report. Of that, $39.5 million went to overhead including $6 million to entities owned by PAC operators; candidates got $3 million. Another report analyzed 17 conservative PACs from the 2014 midterm. It came up with different numbers than POLITICO, finding that the bottom 10 PACs in terms of the ratio of spending to actual candidate support received $54,318,498 and spent only $3,621,896 supporting candidates.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/super-pac-scams-114581
” Since the tea party burst onto the political landscape in 2009, the conservative movement has been plagued by an explosion of PACs that critics say exist mostly to pad the pockets of the consultants who run them. Combining sophisticated targeting techniques with fundraising appeals that resonate deeply among grass-roots activists, they collect large piles of small checks that, taken together, add up to enough money to potentially sway a Senate race. But the PACs plow most of their cash back into payments to consulting firms for additional fundraising efforts.
@Joe
Leavitt was never an ambassor nor is he fluent in Mandarin. You’re thinking of Jon Huntsman.
Agreed. Johnson’s most ardent supporters don’t seem to care about the facts, his record, his views, his outrageous statements and the waste of donors’ money in his campaign. All they care about is that Johnson is a “nice guy,” and “we finally have an actual human being” running for president. It’s basic, primitive appeal to people’s emotions – glossy, “feel good” style campaigning. The facts don’t matter when your candidate likes to ride his bike smiling and climb big mountains and his running mate, a member of an organization dedicated to promoting insane neoconservative engineering of the world’s geopolitical scene, talks about how “socially accepting” he was way ahead of the curve. It’s not socially acceptable to be appointed by a notorious war criminal of a president who in conjunction with NATO unleashed hell upon Serbia by killing thousands of thousands of innocent human beings.
Hopefully I’ll be permanently living in Poland by then, but regardless, if the LP doesn’t nominate a real libertarian like Tom Woods for president in 2020, I believe the best option would be to dissolve the LNC and let all the Libertarian state parties function separately and with full, unrestricted autonomy. Maybe they could focus time, energy and resources on running Libertarian candidates in actually winnable elections on the local level instead of spending so much effort to lavishly spoil CFR members with their presidential ballot lines.
I think a fair headline would be “GARY JOHNSON NO LONGER RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT”
I say this for two reasons:
1) While he DID run for the LP POTUS nomination, and has done whatever free media landed in his lap, he is not running a real campaign — meaning most if not all of the money raised for the campaign (as well as the money raised for the CPD lawsuit) goes to “overhead” and not to any political activity that increases votes (and, indeed, much of the free media is resulting in a loss in votes (at least for those for whom seeing “noble public servant” HRC compared to “pussy” DT is disgusting/offensive/stupid)).
There is no current, competent, real campaign for POTUS.
2) And more importantly, GJ has positioned himself as one of the TWO “Co-Presidents” running as equals in the LP for POTUS/VPOTUS — a combination with “one staff” and with Weld making major decisions. This is a rather obvious pandering for Romney money (as well as a Romney endorsement — but it is the money they want). And, apparently Romney and others are smart enough to know not to throw their money into the pockets of the consultants.
Remember a vote for Johnson is a vote for “Co-President Weld” as well as “Secretary of Defense Romney,” “Secretary of State Levitt” (actually that might not be too bad, he seemed a beloved Utah Governor and competent Ambassador to China/speaks fluent Mandarin) — but also “Chief of Staff Nelson,” and “Press Secretary Joe Hunter” who would bring what to the White House? The same level of transparency and integrity they have brought to the 2012 Campaign, the OAI CPD lawsuit (how much of the funds raised REALLY went to legal activity verses more consulting and overhead) and now this anti-Libertarian-Party-building, wreck of a non-campaign in 2016?
I expect that Gary Johnson himself is included in that consulting free, on the payroll with Nielson for a fat, 6-figure amount.
GP, you say that campaigns must report the end beneficiary of the funds.
That’s not necessarily true. With media, it’s common practice that funds flow through brokers. Take a look at Cruz’s PAC FEC reports. A broker in Plano received millions but funds ended up with local stations. But it was listed as media.
Another example of this is how Johnson is handling payroll (Trump is doing the same thing). A management company pays employees and then the company charges the campaign for consulting — as technically it would be. Outsourced campaign management. We all know it’s just a way to hide payments and amounts from the public and criticism.
I don’t agree with the practice but it has benefits of not stirring up controversy with throusands of bloggers doing opp research of every single campaign employee — or hackers targeting comms from employees.
I know that Thrasher and Jasikoff received payments from the Johnson campaign for ballot access work.
…like langa who ripped me a new one.
I did? Hmm, that wasn’t my intent. In fact, I don’t think I have said anything at all about you recently.
What was the name of that popular Dire Straits song from the mid-1980s? Every time I hear it, I think of Ron Nielson…
Speaking of money, I see that Gary Johnson still hasn’t repaid the $332,441 that he owes the U.S. Treasury — the American taxpayers, to put it more precisely — stemming from the misspent federal matching funds received during his 2012 campaign. The FEC, incidentally, declined his request for a re-hearing in that case on July 13th.
My the way, you may not see many comments from me in the future. I have been called to the carpet and I am too old to pull myself up.
I used to think that debate was healthy and people entered with at least a glimmer of an open mind. The world has changed and I refuse to sell out my integrity to change with it. Maybe when people start being polite again, I will return. Not that many of you will miss me, like langa who ripped me a new one.
LOL, I meant “good authority” Someone I trust who told me that.
Someone I feel would not sell his integrity for any amount of money.
When I get exited my fat fingers mistype. My apologies.
And my apologies for thinging Chris Thrasher was a rat fink all this time. He is just your run of the mill human.
Excerpt from something I wrote yesterday, that might be published elsewhere next week:
—–
The second possibility is that this campaign, like his last, is a Harry Browne style black box into which money flows and out of which comes … well, not much, and certainly nothing both identifiable and of consequence that has to be paid for.
Browne’s campaigns were, from a financial standpoint, really just ways to provide for the care and feeding of Perry Willis and Michael Cloud. Johnson’s last campaign was, and this one so far seems to be, dedicated to the care and feeding of campaign manager Ron Nielson.
Yes, Johnson is raising more money than Browne. Yes, Johnson is getting more attention than Browne. But that attention is of the “free media” variety, not advertising paid for by the campaign (a couple of PACs are doing a little bit of advertising “for” Johnson, but seemingly not so much that the spending takes a noticeable bit out of staff salaries). The campaign’s main activity when CNN isn’t offering free camera time seems to be, a la Browne, raising money so that it can spend money to raise more money.
Of course, Browne actually did pretty good on the messaging front, probably because his fundraising pool consisted almost entirely of LP members and other libertarians. I remember him getting spanked twice — once in 1996 over matching funds and once in the 2000 campaign when he floated a “flat tax” trial balloon — and both times he straightened up ASAP. Since Johnson is raising most of his money outside of libertarian circles, he doesn’t have to care nearly as much about what libertarians might think.
—–
Hi Shivany –
You said that you had it on “food authority.” Does that mean you heard it through the grapevine? 🙂
Mitt Romney. The new face of libertarianism.
Let’s face it. The Libertarian Party is nothing more than a convenient ballot line in this year’s presidential election, reminiscent of New York’s less-than-principled Liberal Party in its declining years while shamefully playing the role — nationally — that the aborted Americans Elect organization expected to play four years ago.
The fact that the party’s pandering pair would like to see an Establishment figure like Mitt Romney serve in a high-level Cabinet position in a Johnson-Weld administration sort of says it all.
The Libertarians have been played — big time.
“Maybe they’re getting paid to advise him to say stupid shit like this: “Gary Johnson says Mitt Romney would be ‘guaranteed’ a spot in his administration”
Made that prediction for free…that was an easy one…Listen, the GOP carpetbaggers are just going chirp “lesser of three evils” argument at this point.
who is “Liberty Consulting Services”?
Best I can tell, TeamGov looks to be a campaign to generate some up-to-date mailing lists to find enough dupes to pay Liberty Consulting Services…
Any idea what all of the consultants are getting paid to do?
Maybe they’re getting paid to advise him to say stupid shit like this: “Gary Johnson says Mitt Romney would be ‘guaranteed’ a spot in his administration”
http://beta.deseretnews.com/article/865660664/Gary-Johnson-wants-Mitt-Romney-and-Michael-Leavitt-in-administration.html
Near as I can tell, Thrasher follows the money. He’ll work for whomever, and do whatever they want, as long as they can deliver the dough.
I would be interested n what kind of consulting Chris Thrasher is doing since he is the one who bailed on John McAfee midway through the campaign and went running to Johnson. I have it on food authority that he was not a mole or a saboteur, however it does beg the question as to how he went running to Johnson and immediately got paid $500. Then in excess of $2000 these last two months. If I thought I could get $2000 a month for looking pretty for Johnson, I would do it.
All kidding aside, I could host his website, and make it look much better for a fraction of what he is paying. John McAfee did it all with volunteers because we believed in him and his message.
It looks like they’re spending most of their money in a targeted campaign to carry Ron Nielson’s household.
By the way, the latest Reuters poll, released on Thursday, shows Johnson dropping to 7 percent nationally.
“Any idea what all of the consultants are getting paid to do?”
I guess they consult him on how to de-libertarianize his message and act awkward in public appearances? Lol
Any idea what all of the consultants are getting paid to do? This would be an interesting breakdown.