LISTEN: Fred Wertheimer on Planet Money — From Watergate’s “Suitcases Filled With Cash” To Today’s Billions In Secret Campaign Money

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NPR’s Planet Money: Suitcases, Secret Lists, and Citizens United

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“If money is buying influence and results over government policies, then most Americans are shut out, because the campaign finance system is dominated by people who are putting up very large sums of money.”  – D21 President Fred Wertheimer

There’s a corner of the Watergate scandal you probably haven’t heard about, one with far-reaching impact, according to National Public Radio’s Planet Money in an episode that features an in-depth interview with Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer who has been fighting for campaign finance reforms since the early days of the Watergate scandal.

Wertheimer discusses corporate executives flying to Washington carrying “suitcases filled with cash” – secret donations for the Nixon reelection campaign – in April 1972, the week before the Federal Election Campaign Act and its disclosure laws took effect.

When Wertheimer “learned the [Watergate] burglars were paid in part by secret donations to the Nixon campaign, he launched a hunt for answers,” Planet Money reports. “His work helped make huge changes in how we pay for elections.”

Wertheimer discusses how Common Cause, the public interest group he was working at, sued and ultimately forced the Nixon reelection campaign to turn over the names of those donors, and how they were able to quickly turn that raw data into detailed campaign finance studies, with the help of a team of volunteers. Those campaign finance studies provided reporters with the donation data and, importantly, information on who the donors were and what companies they represented.

“No one could figure out how we did it,” Wertheimer says about how quickly they turned around the information for the press.

(How they did it – long nights, stick-on labels, and lots of Wite-Out.)

The piece discusses Watergate – what Wertheimer calls “the biggest campaign finance scandal of the century” – and its direct line to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010 which opened the campaign money floodgates, allowing billions of dollars in secret, influence-seeking contributions to pour into today’s campaigns.

The episode first aired on July 1, 2022.

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