National Review: GOP Oppo Group Tries New Tactic: Crowd-sourcing Dirt on Democrats - America Rising PAC

National Review: GOP Oppo Group Tries New Tactic: Crowd-sourcing Dirt on Democrats

Within hours of the news breaking that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail account while she was secretary of state, employees across the federal government fired up their computers to share their disbelief. “How is this even possible?” Michael McDonald, general counsel at the National Endowment for the Humanities, asked his deputy Lisette Voyatzis […]

March 17, 2016

Within hours of the news breaking that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private e-mail account while she was secretary of state, employees across the federal government fired up their computers to share their disbelief. “How is this even possible?” Michael McDonald, general counsel at the National Endowment for the Humanities, asked his deputy Lisette Voyatzis in an e-mail sent March 3, 2015. “They [the State Department] are as ass-backwards as NEH when it comes to records management. That’s comforting,” she replied.

Charles Beamon, the top ethics official at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sent Clinton’s story staff-wide as a cautionary tale, calling it “another scandal involving the use of personal e-mail for official business.” The acting inspector general at the National Archives and Records Administration sent a tersely worded e-mail to Paul Simms, the agency’s chief records officer. “Were we aware the gov email system was not being used by Ms.Clinton?” He asked. “If we were not aware, why not?” These new messages, together with previously published government e-mails from incredulous Labor and Treasury department employees, undercut the Democratic front-runner’s persistent claim that her private e-mail set-up was commonplace and aboveboard. But they would have remained on federal servers, far from the public eye, if not for a painstakingly thorough public-records operation launched by America Rising, one of Washington’s most powerful Republican opposition-research firms.

Democratic “oppo” groups have effectively deployed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) against Republicans since at least 2012, and America Rising felt that conservative groups weren’t properly utilizing that same ability to scrutinize Democratic candidates. So in the gear-up for the 2016 cycle last May, the group quietly hired an experienced former FOIA attorney in a bid to bolster its ability to search public records for incendiary details on Democrats of all stripes. “Every day, like people need their coffee, I need to send out two or three FOIAs just to feel better,” says Allan Blutstein, an FOIA veteran with nine years of experience as a public-records lawyer at the Treasury and Justice departments. Now, after ten months of nonstop FOIA requests, America Rising is launching ARCHIVE, a fully searchable FOIA database with records on more than 90 current or former Democratic officeholders — including Clinton, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and several sitting U.S. senators and governors. The crowd-sourcing effort is America Rising’s latest push in its quest to leave no stone in a Democratic opponent’s record unturned. “Information is only good if it gets out there, it’s no good sitting on a shelf on a website here,” says America Rising’s executive director, Colin Reed, who hopes both journalists and activists can go after Democrats with the documents.

This article was excerpted from National Review. Click here to read the full article online.