New from the Institute for Free Speech

Why Donor Privacy Matters for Free Speech

By Alex Cordell

Throughout our country’s history, privacy has been a necessary component for many Americans to feel comfortable speaking out on contentious issues in our ongoing civic debate. Even 250 years ago, the Founding Fathers recognized the importance of protecting free speech and expression, including the right to speak anonymously. Unfortunately, the use of disclosure as a weapon to silence speakers one disagrees with is also nothing new. For example, this tactic was often employed by those seeking to preserve the status quo during the Civil Rights Movement to intimidate and silence activists by revealing their private information. The Supreme Court, long recognizing this threat, has ruled multiple times to uphold privacy protections for political speech and association.

Nonprofit groups play a vital role in educating and increasing the range of information available to all Americans, as well as opening debate on new issues across the ideological spectrum…

Groups primarily interested in speaking on policy rather than elections should be free to participate in that debate without having to worry about filing a litany of campaign finance reports and without being forced to turn over the private information of their members and supporters. Only groups with a primary purpose of influencing elections can properly be required to report the private information of their supporters to the government. 

In the News

Bloomberg BNA: Online Ad Disclosure Bills Guard National Security, Sponsors Say

By Kenneth P. Doyle

In addition to the affected companies, other critics of campaign finance regulation have maintained that the FEC should be cautious about regulating political speech on the internet. The Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that is critical of regulation, issued a statement Oct. 19 criticizing the new bill announced by Klobuchar, Warner and McCain and complaining that a full text of the bill hadn’t yet been released.

“Though purporting to regulate Russia, in fact this regulates Americans,” said Bradley Smith, the center’s chairman and a former Republican FEC commissioner. “By imposing more broad burdens on Americans’ speech rights rather than targeting foreign interests interfering with our elections, their bill would make America look a little bit more like Russia.”

In the same statement, Eric Wang, a CCP senior fellow, said that, rather than regulating online political ads, lawmakers should look at strengthening the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), “which is appropriately limited to the type of foreign political activity that Russia engaged in, and amending that law if necessary.”

Portland Tribune: Multnomah campaign contributions ruling could come any day

By Nick Budnick

Written by the county’s charter review committee with input from local activists, the measure was designed to conflict with Supreme Court rulings on both the state and federal level, giving activists a path to revive campaign contribution limits in Oregon and the entire country through the appeals process.

In April, the Multnomah County Board of Commissioners started that process, voting to forward the measure to a judge for constitutional validation. County attorneys filed a brief supporting the campaign reforms.

In August, Multnomah Circuit Judge Eric Bloch heard arguments over the measure. Business groups including the Portland Business Alliance argued against it, citing past court rulings, and so did the Taxpayers Association of Oregon – the latter in conjunction with a Virginia-based group called the Center for Competitive Politics…

“The plain fact is that these very regulations have been tried before, these same arguments routinely made, and both have been repeatedly rejected by the highest courts. This court has no discretion to revisit those decisions,” contended two attorneys for the Virginia center, Owen Yeates and Allen Dickerson. 

Bloomberg Radio: Lawmakers Propose New Legislation for Online Ads (Audio)

Bradley Smith, a professor at Capital University Law School and former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and Bradley Moss, a partner at Mark Zaid Plc, discuss a new bipartisan plan in the Senate to regulate online advertising after foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. They speak with Bloomberg’s June Grasso and Michael Best on Bloomberg Radio’s Bloomberg Law.  

IRS

Fox News: Trump DOJ settles lawsuits over Tea Party targeting by Obama IRS

By Brooke Singman

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced early Thursday that the Justice Department had entered into settlements with Tea Party groups whose tax-exempt status was significantly delayed by the IRS dating back to 2013, “based solely on their viewpoint or ideology.” … 

“The IRS’s use of these criteria as a basis for heightened scrutiny was wrong and should never have occurred,” Sessions said in a statement Thursday. “It is improper for the IRS to single out groups for different treatment based on their names or ideological positions.”…

“The IRS admits that its treatment of Plaintiffs during the tax-exempt determination process, including screening their applications based on their names or policy positions, subjecting those applications to heightened scrutiny and inordinate delays, and demanding some Plaintiffs’ information that TIGTA determined was unnecessary to the agency’s determination of their tax-exempt status, was wrong,” the IRS said in court documents. “For such treatment, the IRS expresses its sincere apology.”

The Justice Department’s settlement would pay the claims of each of the over 400 groups in the case. The attorneys for the groups said it was “a great day for the First Amendment,” but noted that day “was too long in coming.” 

USA Today: Trump names new IRS chief as Koskinen’s controversial reign ends

By John Bacon

President Trump on Thursday named Treasury official David Kautter as acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service effective when controversial IRS chief John Koskinen’s term expires Nov. 12.

Kautter, Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy since August, will continue to carry out those duties “while we wait to confirm a permanent commissioner,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement…

Koskinen was a frequent target of Republican lawmakers, even fending off an impeachment effort last year. Members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus wanted Koskinen held accountable for the the destruction of 422 tapes containing thousands of emails sought by congressional investigators looking into the IRS handling of Tea Party and other conservative groups that sought tax-exempt status.

Congress

Inside Higher Ed: Congress Rallies Around Campus Free Speech

By Nick Roll

At a congressional hearing on free speech on college campuses Thursday, witnesses and senators from both parties championed the free exchange of a diversity of ideas, though they almost all had the same opinion: free speech needs to be vigorously defended on college campuses in the wake of a spate of instances in which students have shouted down speakers.

Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, was one of the witnesses at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions’ Thursday hearing, “Exploring Free Speech on College Campuses.” She joined Senators Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray — the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat, respectively — in expressing her commitment to seeing colleges uphold free speech…

The panel generally formed a consensus that the best way to combat hate speech is with more positive speech. And while that is certainly a pro-free-speech opinion, it’s not — as the Middlebury protesters demonstrated in March, and colleges have seen since — the only opinion.

The Media

Business Insider: Twitter is banning all ads from Russian news agencies RT and Sputnik effective immediately

By Natasha Bertrand

Twitter announced on Thursday that it would ban all advertisements from the Russian news agencies RT and Sputnik.

“Twitter has made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik, effective immediately,” the company wrote in a statement posted on its blog.

“This decision was based on the retrospective work we’ve been doing around the 2016 U.S. election and the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that both RT and Sputnik attempted to interfere with the election on behalf of the Russian government.”

RT directed reporters to a lengthy statement published on its website in which it said it “never violated any rules while advertising on Twitter” and “has never spread any sort of deliberate misinformation.”

Sputnik told Business Insider in a statement that it “has never used paid for promotion on Twitter.”…

RT said last month that the US Department of Justice had asked it to register as a foreign agent, and Yahoo reported around the same time that the FBI had interviewed a former Sputnik reporter as part of an investigation into whether the company was violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Candidates and Campaigns

Politico: How Facebook, Google and Twitter ’embeds’ helped Trump in 2016

By Nancy Scola

The peer-reviewed paper, based on more than a dozen interviews with both tech company staffers who worked inside several 2016 presidential campaigns and campaign officials, sheds new light on Silicon Valley’s assistance to Trump before his surprise win last November.

While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches…

The companies offered such services, without charge, to all the 2016 candidates, according to the study, which details extensive tech company involvement at every stage of the race. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign declined to embed the companies’ employees in her operations…

“Facebook, Twitter, and Google [went] beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys,” the paper concludes, adding that their efforts extended to “actively shaping campaign communications through their close collaboration with political staffers.”