:-)

Brayton is confused on the first point. Perkins cut checks to Duke's Impact Mail for his phone banking list, not as a fee for them to "make phone calls." Perkins bought the list so the senatorial campaign of Woody Jenkins, which he was managing at the time, could make "robo-calls" to reliably conservative voters urging them to get to the polls. Impact Mail sold its list to other campaigns (causing great scandals in the process), but it never made phone calls on any campaign's behalf.

I don't see any evidence anywhere that any mailing list was actually bought. There is a distinction between hiring a company to use their own mailing list to make calls on one's behalf and buying a mailing list that you can use on your own behalf. I've contracted for and paid for telemarketing and direct mail campaigns myself for business purposes and there is a big difference between paying a company to do a campaign using their in-house mailing lists and paying them to get their mailing list (the latter is considerably more expensive because you can use that list over and over again). The FEC report indicates that they contracted them to make the calls, not that they bought the list themselves:

After the 1996 primary election in Louisiana, David Duke contacted Woody Jenkins and recommended that he use the services of a computerized phone bank system run by Impact Mail. Jenkins purchased several rounds of calls from Impact Mail.

Again, there is a distinction between purchasing rounds of calls and purchasing the list from which those calls would be made. It's possible that they also bought the actual list, but I don't see any evidence for that in the FEC documents. You assert that it was not a fee for them to make phone calls, but the FEC document suggests otherwise. In the absence of evidence for that, I think it would be more accurate to say that they contracted with Duke's company to make calls rather than that they bought a mailing list. A minor point, of course, but that is exactly what I labeled it.

Second point:

Brayton's second point, that "the $82,500 figure that Blumenthal uses was not any fee paid to Duke but was the figure that the FEC said would be the usual fine for the violation of FEC regulations," is completely wrong. Brayton appears to have misread the FEC filing against Jenkins and Perkins that he cites in his own post. Contrary to Brayton's assertion, Perkins indeed paid $82,500 to Duke's Impact mail (through a third-party surrogate to cover his tracks). He did so in a series of three checks.

Ah, my mistake. I did indeed misread the FEC document on this. When it said $27,500, I missed the fact that there were three checks for that amount, which of course total $82,500. When I saw the $82,500 figure at the end, I thought perhaps that was where the figure came from since there was no other document with that figure on it. On this one, I was obviously wrong and you were right.

Brayton goes on to write that "Perkins' response is inaccurate on the big things," essentially agreeing with the main thrust of my argument -- that Perkins knew all along that he was dealing with Duke.

No, that isn't what I said. I said that it's perfectly plausible that Perkins did not know about the connection to Duke at the time the contract was signed. I don't know for sure whether he did or didn't, nor do you, but I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that he didn't know those connections at the time (which of course is not the same thing as claiming that he did not know, only that we don't have enough evidence to be certain that he did).

However, I did say, and still maintain, that at the very least, Perkins must have known about those connections when the calls started coming in complaining about Duke's name being on the caller ID and when Jenkins instructed him to stop payment on the check to Impact Mail and to launder those payments through another company. At that point, I find it extremely implausible that he did not A) know about the caller IDs showing Duke's name and B) didn't ask Jenkins why they were sending the money for Impact Mail through another company - and especially why it was important enough to stop payment on a check, which is not exactly routine procedure. So I do believe the evidence clearly suggests that Perkins must have known about Duke's involvement at the time the cover up began, and he was then a part of the cover up (he wrote the checks, after all). That, I think, is the most damaging part of the story and the part of the story clearly supported by the evidence at hand.

I also agree about his appearance before the CCC. I find it highly implausible that he did not know that the CCC was a racist organization and I said so in a posting on my own blog and in a response to a comment by Joe Carter. Before Perkins spoke to a CCC gathering there were relatively major scandals involving several other prominent conservatives speaking to them, including Bob Barr, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott. David Keene, the head of CPAC, had famously refused to allow the CCC in to a major conservative gathering because of their racist views and the head of the Republican National Committee had publicly declared them to be a racist group. Is it possible that Perkins didn't know? I suppose so. But I find it highly unlikely.

I only had two quibbles with Max's reporting, the claim that Perkins had actually bought a mailing list and the claim that he paid $82,500. Clearly, he was right about the last part - mea culpa on that one. But I still think the first claim is inaccurate. A big deal? Not really. It's a minor point and that is exactly what I called it. Perkins still comes out of all this looking pretty bad, as he should, but not so much because the evidence says that he deliberately sought out Duke to get his mailing list (the evidence doesn't confirm that), but because once he found out they'd contracted with a company that was connected to Duke, he helped cover that up and broke the law in the process. If he was really as opposed to Duke as he claims and really as ethical as he would have us believe, he would have resigned, refused to take part in laundering those payments to Duke's company, and blew the whistle on the whole thing.

by Ed Brayton on Fri Sep 28, 2007 at 01:19:43 PM EST

"In 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,500 for his mailing list. At the time, Perkins was the campaign manager for a right-wing Republican candidate for the US Senate in Louisiana. The Federal Election Commission fined the campaign Perkins ran $3,000 for attempting to hide the money paid to Duke."

Nowhere did I say that Perkins "bought" the mailing list of David Duke. Brayton accuses me of writing that, however, and quibbles with the point. Yet it is a point I never made. I only stated that Perkins paid Duke. That much is established and Brayton should issue a correction to reflect that.

by Max Blumenthal on Fri Sep 28, 2007 at 02:00:10 PM EST