Former Iowa Republican official admits to taking payment for support of Ron Paul’s presidential bid

Kent Sorenson said he was paid $73,000 to switch his allegiance from Michele Bachmann to Ron Paul in 2011

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A former Iowa state senator who abandoned then-presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to endorse Ron Paul a week before the 2012 Iowa caucuses has pleaded guilty to “concealing payments” from Paul’s campaign in exchange for his support, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday.

In December 2011, state senator Kent Sorenson, then the Iowa chairman for Bachmann’s campaign,made a surprise announcement that he had switched his endorsement to Paul. At the time, Sorenson said he made the decision based on his support for Paul’s policies, but this week he admitted to accepting tens of thousands of dollars from the Paul campaign as part of the deal. According to a DOJ release, “from October to December 2011, he met and secretly negotiated with a second political campaign to switch his support to that second campaign in exchange for concealed payments that amounted to $73,000.”

The payments were delivered in $8,000 installments, which were “concealed by transmitting them to a film production company, then through a second company, and finally to Sorenson and his spouse,” the DOJ statement read.

“An elected official admitted that he accepted under-the-table payments from a campaign committee to secure his support and services for a candidate in the 2012 presidential election,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Caldwell said in a written statement.

Paul, a Texas Republican who retired from Congress in 2013, went on to place third in the state caucuses behind Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney. He continued to campaign through the spring and ended his run in May 2012. Paul’s son, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, is considering his own bid for the presidency in 2016.

The consequences for those involved with Paul’s campaign are unclear. Jesse Benton, a Paul campaign spokesman at the time, did not return a request for comment. Benton is currently the campaign manager for  Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who is running for re-election.

In an interview with Yahoo News, DOJ spokesman Peter Carr declined to discuss details of the agreement but said that the investigation “remains ongoing.”

Sorenson resigned from his office in 2013 amid allegations that he had also taken illegal contributions from a political action committee aligned with Bachmann.

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Bachmann wins GOP 2012 test vote

AMES, Iowa (AP) — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann won a test vote of Iowans on Saturday, a show of popularity and organizational strength for the tea party favorite five months before the state's caucuses kick off the GOP presidential nominating season.

The result is the first indication of what Iowans think of the field of Republicans competing for the chance to challenge President Barack Obama next fall. But it's hardly predictive of who will win the winter Iowa contest, much less the party nod or the White House.

Rather, Saturday's outcome suggests that Bachmann has a certain level of support and, perhaps even more important, the strongest get-out-the-vote operation and widest volunteer base in a state whose caucuses require those elements.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul finished a close second while former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty placed a distant third.

"We have a lot more work to do," Pawlenty said, making clear he wasn't dropping out despite a disappointing finish. "We are just beginning and I'm looking forward to a great campaign."

The results of the nonbinding vote, held on the Iowa State University campus, came just hours after Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the race.

"I full well believe I'm going to win," Perry told South Carolina voters on a conference call before delivering his first speech as a candidate.

"It's time to get America working again," he declared in Charleston, S.C. "America is not broken. Washington, D.C. is broken."

Despite Perry's best efforts to overshadow the day, the epicenter of the presidential contest was in this Midwestern town, where nearly 17,000 Iowans cast ballots during a daylong political festival, a late-summer ritual held every four years.

In speeches throughout the day, candidates scouted for support by assailing Obama and offering themselves as the answer to an America plagued by high unemployment, rising debt and stock market swings.

"We know what America needs. But unfortunately Barack Obama has no clue. He's like a manure spreader in a windstorm," Pawlenty said, adding: "Mr. President, get the government off our backs." That elicited chants of his nickname: "T-Paw! T-Paw! T-Paw!"

Pawlenty had a lot on the line. He's ranked low in polls and was looking to prove he was still a viable candidate. He argued that he was the candidate of results, given his record as Minnesota governor.

Bachmann stressed faith and her Iowa roots — she was born in Waterloo — as well as her opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage. She earned cheers when she declared: "We are going to make Barack Obama a one-term president."

Bachmann, riding high since entering the race earlier this summer, had hoped that a strong finish would give her even more momentum just as Perry looks to infringe on her base of tea party and evangelical support. She invoked God and faith as she stressed what she called her conservative values, saying: "In Iowa, we are social conservatives and we will never be ashamed of being social conservatives."

Paul, with a following among libertarian-leaning voters, wanted a surprise showing that might convince Republicans he was more mainstream than not in his second shot at the GOP nomination. He referenced his fellow Texan's entrance in the race and said he didn't anticipate many of his supporters jumping ship for what he called a "super-establishment candidate."

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, businessman Herman Cain and former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia also were on the ballot. So were GOP front-runner Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, though they weren't competing in the contest.

Perry and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who made a splash Friday when she visited the state fair, weren't listed. But their backers planned write-in campaigns that could outpace candidates who have spent months trying to line up supporters to participate.

The straw poll isn't a scientific poll at all; it amounts to a popularity contest and a test of organizational strength.

Poor showings usually force some candidates, mostly those who are not well-known and are struggling to raise money, to abandon their bids. That could happen this year, too.

The straw poll has a mixed record of predicting the outcome of the precinct caucuses.

In 2008, Romney won the straw poll, but the big news was the surprising second-place showing of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses, but dropped from the race soon after. Sen. John McCain, who eventually won the nomination, didn't compete in the straw poll and finished in 10th place.

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On eve of Iowa visit, Bachmann trails Obama in nationwide poll

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann. Photo: Bachmann for Congress, Facebook

On eve of Iowa visit, Bachmann trails Obama in nationwide poll

Public Policy Polling released a nationwide poll of potential candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination against President Barack Obama on Thursday, and U.S. Rep.Michele Bachmann — who is scheduled to speak Friday night at an event in Des Moines — would lose to the incumbent by 18 percentage points.

Bachmann garnered 33 percent against Obama’s 51 percent, putting her at the bottom of the pack of five candidates polled by PPP. Seventeen percent were undecided. Obama beat Mitt Romney at 48 to 43 percent, Mike Huckabee with 49 to 44 percent, Newt Gingrich by 51 to 39 percent and Sarah Palin with 55 to 38 percent.

Bachmann had a net unfavorable rating with 22 percent viewing her as favorable and 31 percent viewing her unfavorably. Forty-eight percent had no opinion of her.

The polls authors said Obama had some of his best polling in recent months.

“Barack Obama’s in his strongest position for reelection in our polling since 2009,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “Democrats have really rallied around him since the party’s defeat in November and he continues to benefit from a pretty weak field of potential opponents.”

In a new Washington Post/ABC poll, Obama has a 54 percent approval rating. Gallup and CNN polls also show him with a 53 percent approval rating.

The tea party makes trouble with a capital T

The tea party makes trouble with a capital T

The peaceful hamlet of Mason City, Iowa, hasn't been in the headlines much since it served as the model for River City in Meredith Willson's "The Music Man." But this week, Mason City raised a real Fuhrer.

The geniuses of the North Iowa Tea Party erected a billboard in town depicting three leaders: Adolf Hitler (with swastika), Vladimir Lenin (with hammer and sickle) and Barack Obama (with 2008 campaign logo). Over Hitler were the words "National Socialism," over Lenin was "Marxist Socialism" and over Obama was "Democrat Socialism."

"Radical leaders prey on the fearful & naïve," the billboard informed passing motorists.

Folks, we've got trouble in River City.

The Tea Partyers eventually took the billboard down -- to hush the national uproar they provoked, not because they thought they had done something wrong. "There's going to be a lot of billboards just like this across the United States," the group's leader told the Des Moines Register.

He's probably right about that. The vile sign in Mason City was not a one-off by a fringe group. It was a logical expression of a message supported by conservative thought leaders and propagated by high-level Republican politicians.

Late last month, Thomas Sowell of the conservative Hoover Institution penned an irresponsible column likening Obama's presidency (particularly his pushing BP to set aside funds for oil-spill victims) to the rise of Hitler in Germany and Lenin in the Soviet Union.

After the column came out, Sarah Palin tweeted her followers with instructions to "Read Thomas Sowell's article." Sowell's theme -- that Obama, like Hitler and Lenin, exploits "useful idiots" who don't know much about politics -- was strikingly similar to what wound up on the Iowa billboard.
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Sowell to Palin to Mason City: They spread Nazi labels as smoothly as Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance turned double plays. And let's not deny an assist to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), who went to the House floor to read aloud the Obama-Nazi comparison by the "brilliant" Sowell.

Twenty years ago, the dawn of the Internet Age gave us Godwin's Law: If an online argument goes on long enough, somebody will eventually invoke Hitler. When that happens, it's basically the end of the conversation, because all rational discussion ceases when one side calls the other Nazis.

These sentiments have long existed on the fringe and always will. The problem is that conservative leaders and Republican politicians, in their blind rage against Obama these last 18 months, invited the epithets of the fringe into the mainstream. Godwin's Law has spread from the chat rooms and now applies to cable news and even to the floor of the House of Representatives.

Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck's show on Fox News since Obama's inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama -- as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck's nightly "report."

It's not strictly a phenomenon of the right. California's Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Jerry Brown, likened his opponent's tactics to those of the Nazis, while Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) talks blithely of a health care "holocaust" and an aide to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) dubs the opposition "Brownshirts."

But at the moment, the anger pendulum has swung far in the conservative direction, and accusations that once were beyond the pale -- not just talk of Nazis and Marxists but intimations of tyranny, revolution and bloodshed -- are now routine.

A few from recent weeks: Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) comes out in favor of lawsuits alleging that Obama was not an American citizen at birth. Sharron Angle, the Republican candidate challenging Sen. Harry Reid in Nevada, speaks about the possible need for violence to overcome the "tyrannical" government. Gohmert, the Sowell admirer, says the children of illegal immigrants are going to return and "blow us up."

Isn't there a grown-up to rein in these backbenchers when they go over the top? Don't ask House Minority Leader John Boehner, the man who would replace Nancy Pelosi as speaker. He accuses the Democrats of "snuffing out the America that I grew up in" and predicts a rebellion unlike anything "since 1776." Boehner also said one Democratic lawmaker "may be a dead man" for his vote on health care and predicted that the bill would bring "Armageddon."

Recall, Mr. Leader, the wisdom of the Mason City billboard: "Radical leaders prey on the fearful & naïve."

danamilbank@washpost.com