The first time he criticized our coverage was in the summer of 1998. At the
time, Harry was a senior editor at Liberty, so when we prepared to publish a
report on the 1998 convention, I sent a copy to him as a courtesy. The report,
written by Liberty contributing editor Brian Doherty, was in my judgment a fine
piece of reporting, describing what happened both on the podium and on the floor
of the convention. Harry, however, was very unhappy about two things: first,
Doherty reported comments from a Pennsylvania delegate that were critical of
Michael Cloud, who had been Browne's chief fundraiser; second, Doherty reported a
conversation between himself and the daughter of Steve Dasbach, the retiring LP
national chair, who had been promised the paid position of national director if
Browne's candidate for chair, David Bergland, was elected. "Dasbach's young
daughter was hanging around the soda machines, expressing her eagerness for
Bergland to win so that her Dad 'will get a good job and we can move to
D.C.!'"
Browne argued that the anti-Cloud remarks were insignificant and
should not be reported. I considered this opinion but decided to leave the
passage in the article. It provided some local color. In addition, I suspected
that Harry's real motivation for wanting it cut was that it portrayed Cloud in a
unflattering light.
Doherty's second piece of reportage he claimed was
simply an outright lie. This surprised me. Doherty had just finished a stint as a
researcher and ghostwriter for Browne, who, I assumed, would not have hired him
if he thought he was dishonest. So I called Doherty, who stood by his story, and
provided additional details, which I passed on to Harry. One detail Doherty had
told me proved him a liar, according to Harry: Doherty's claim that the
conversation had taken place next to the pop machines by the doors of the
convention hall. The nearest pop machine to the convention hall was a good deal
further away, Harry said, so Doherty must have fabricated the whole story. I
called Doherty with this news, and he said that Harry had simply been misinformed
and that there were indeed soda machines outside the doors that led to the
loading dock. There followed phone calls and emails with Harry, who continued to
insist that the conversation never happened and to condemn Doherty as a liar.
Doherty surmised that Harry had asked someone at the convention where the nearest
pop machine was and had been told it was farther away, and that therefore Doherty
was lying. Both Doherty and I were taken aback by the whole matter. I didn't
remove the passage from the article, and the issue died.
As early as 1997,
I had heard rumors that the Browne campaign had misspent campaigns funds. But the
rumors came from Browne's severest critics, and I didn't attach much credibility
to them. Sometime in 1998 or 1999, I went to the Federal Election Commission
Website and began to look at the reports that the Browne campaign had filed. To
my surprise, I learned that several members of Browne's staff were paid salaries
that seemed a bit, well, exorbitant, and that the campaign had spent relatively
little money on conventional campaign activities. I filed this information away,
figuring that it merited further investigation and, perhaps, an article in
Liberty at some time in the future, a time when reader interest in politics would
be much higher.
Early in 2000, the staff of Liberty began a systematic
examination of the Browne campaign's spending, based entirely on the reports that
the campaign had made to the FEC. We discovered that Browne's campaign manager
had been paid nearly $130,000, despite having no previous political experience,
and that the campaign had paid over 40% of its funds to staffers and consultants.
But this wasn't what was really disturbing. We also learned that, despite
promising to spend considerable funds on the purchase of advertising and claiming
in its report on the campaign that it had indeed spent over $238,673 on
advertising, the campaign had reported to the FEC that it had spent only $8,840
for advertising purchases.
While that story was developing, another aspect
of Browne's involvement in the Libertarian Party came under scrutiny. Jacob
Hornberger, head of the Future of Freedom Foundation, publicly accused Browne and
his staff of an improper relationship with the LP, which had resulted in
conflicts of interest. In particular, he charged that Project Archimedes, an
outreach project designed and managed by Browne's close associate Perry Willis,
for which the party had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and which Browne
and Willis had said would result in 200,000 new members, had been a colossal
failure and had wasted huge amounts of party funds.
We investigated
Hornberger's charges, concluding that Project Archimedes had resulted in far less
growth than it had promised, but had actually cost the party far less than
Willis, Browne and other LP figures had claimed. We also concluded that its
managers had systematically misrepresented its prospects and costs in order to
maximize fundraising, and had spent the money they raised for Project Archimedes
for other purposes.
We published a report on all this in our July 2000
issue, which appeared in May. In addition to our audit of Browne's 1996 campaign
and Project Archimedes, we explored charges that Browne had fraudulently raised
funds in early 2000 and that there had been a serious conflict of interest
between him and his staffers, on the one hand, and the LP, on the other. We found
both of these charges to have a certain merit, but we also found that the
fund-raising campaign in question escaped qualifying as fraud as defined on
technical legal grounds and that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that
a conflict of interest had harmed the party.
None of this was enough to
preclude Browne's agreeing to endorse Liberty for a direct mail circulation
campaign in July, for which we agreed to use Browne's newest book as a premium.
