Only way we will win. In to do things like that and the matter has gone too far now we have no choice but to act in a reduced need to call on the courage to resilience. I was Young Americans everywhere to know to call on the spirit of the 16th president of ameritech, Abraham Lincoln a common man who rose to be an common leader. And with extraordinary desire that went through so much loss that ended that the emerging at enormously critical time that is what i want American Children to be taught it doesnt matter how much you disappoint or fight the great thing about america is to get the opportunity other countries dont give you that opportunity but this gives you the greatest chance to succeed and that is something that we need to break to people and the personal story of Abraham Lincoln has propelled me throughout my life a man whose first love died he lost six elections and had a terrible relationship with his father and had no indication whatsoever no College Education everything he learned was selftaught. Boris did kentucky race in illinois he was a wrestler and never back down when challenged. That is the spirit we need to call on. End i say to those that are watching on cspan to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve to make that clear with the extraordinary honker and desire in to get back up on that horse. That is interesting of action because what i am suggesting it requires leadership. Because historically prior to world war ii coming back in declaring peace forever only churchill stood up in parliament we send people over to read maya area in germany and later mussolini. Only when a catastrophe occurs to reappear to wake up is that required to respond . To the american us that he loved after exhausting every other option. And alexis de tocqueville said with the ability to recognize a trajectory and i remained wildly optimistic that america will crush Political Correctness. I am optimistic because there is a remarkable brings spirit. I am optimistic because even right now in the depths of despair and the traditions of america were optimistic because we have to be. It is also zero other american and not only of leaper ugly. To take a pearl harbor type of situation. The mime message she today thules believe in america because it is a providential nation. And asian and like any other to preserve them protected and defended it to retake from the elites that force us into conformity to retake america to crush Political Correctness and i encourage all of you to see me with advance copies of my book i will be more than happy to personalize if you love america and aPolitical Correctness this is the book free of. This past september with the Chairmans Council if you want to know please ask but we stood in gettysburg talk about standing and facing adversity of a common man not a professional military officer and then to come up that hill they are though last space they knew the orders are you cannot retreat or surrender. And run out of ammunition they were ready for one last final charge. Up until the entire civil war stated on a Little Round Top and there is no other recourse with the new embodiment and that is bayonets. They give for the year today with the former head of the Defense Intelligence agency and that would be great to understands god bless you all in place for being with us. All the weekends it is all others. Watching those nonfiction authors and to have a longer conversation. Booktv brains you off there after offer like the work of fascinating people. [inaudible conversations]. Founder of several nonprofit organizations including the investigative reporting workshop here at the school of indication in the fourth epicenter of republican integrity. Chucks most recent book 935 lies in the future truth and the decline of American Integrity and he was counting the number 35 is a fascinating exploration of the many ways to the sum is manipulated by Government Corporation or burned an Important National conversation. Check is the author of a while new book series the buying of the president the chilling look into the financing of president ial campaigns written with staff from the center for public integrity. Chuck is a fulltime professor in the school of indications and does investigative journalism. He recently returned from a fellowship at the university of oxford Writers Institute for the study of journalism. Tonight he is going to have a conversation with jane mayer someone who spent five years influencing the research of dark money and our system of passion that chuck shares. Chuck. [applause] sydney thank you very much just than welcome everyone and jane welcome very much to American University. By way of introduction and then we will Start Talking but to introduce jane, we would take 10 minutes just to go through her bio, which is an astonishing bio one of the preeminent journalist in the u. S. , the new yorker now 11 years. I shouldnt ask ray several years, a few years yeah and anyway literally the winner of so many words John Chancellor award george poca road turner prize for excellence in political reporting bad stone medal for journalistic independence and of course the j. Anthony lukas prize, rice and our prize and thats for her book dark money but numerous awards but i urge those of you who should absolutely buy this book dark money, read the bio too. Its a pretty interesting bio. Welcome and where do we start here . Since we have several aspiring or current students, many are students but they aspire to be jane mayer. Could you please explain to us where you come from and what that whole story is about . Seriously how did you end up causing all this trouble . Does this work . Part of what got me on that trajectory i have to say is chalk. Check it were some of the inspiration for this book. I kind of remember and iced tea together as we were talking that i was working on a story for the new yorker magazine and they caught my eye for friday reasons that we can talk about in a minute. But i just wanted to say chop lewis as i was talking to him over this iced tea gave me this quote that was kind of the money quote for the whole piece. Its sort of was the thing that made me think okay there may be more here when im doing a book. So professor lewis has exactly the right quote and it says the kochs run a whole different level. There is no one else else who is spent as much money. This year dimension of that it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation and opposite vacation today been washington since watergate and im very seen anything like it. They are the standard oil of all times. That quote, wow. When i read that quote i think why did they spend years in 450 pages adding to it. He kind of summed it up you know so i want to thank you. You have been an incredible colleague, amazingly generous and set the path on how to cover the kochs kochs and the work you have done the work you have been following my main manpower and america. And how i got into this, you know like most things it started innocently. I turned a corner in new york city at one point where i grew up and saw david kochs name and i thought david koch anaconda ring a bell. I remembered while i had read a story about them putting money into the tea party somewhere and i thought i wonder if new yorkers through sophisticated manhattanites who are the people who go to Lincoln Center have any idea who david koch really is. I thought it was worth taking a peek. Thats kind of, so was crossing that street i think going around the corner that got me going on this. One thing led to another and thats how five years went down the drain. [laughter] im not going to let you wiggle out of the question either. Thank you for the kind words. If they are the standard oil of our times and i still very much believe that, that would make you a guitar bell. One of my heroes. You doggedly investigated the subject unlike any other journalist and it was inevitable that we would discuss this. I didnt know at what point we would would bring it up but while we are at it not only did you devote all these years and obviously upset them and its reported i think you mention in your book that or your article in august 30, 2010 the new yorker, was actually nominated for a National Magazine award and they mounted a campaign against you. You have additional dealings with them that have been chronicled recently in the new york times. Im sorry to ask you but clearly , well they are perhaps equally interested in you but maybe you can describe that whole story. Its an amazing story. Its a badge of honor or any representative order what you hopefully will tell us. Well, thank you. It was an unexpected bright product of writing about the kochs which to me was an investigative piece. I covered policy for the new yorker magazine and inevitably covering money and the kochs you cannot cover money in politics without them. They are such a concentrated force financially in american politics. It basically was going about my job but when i finished the story and it came out they had have declined to participate and declined to give interviews. I guess we can say they were not happy with it. Its too bad but i felt it was a very good piece and captured the subterranean world they were playing in american politics. They have been very much in the shadows so wasnt surprising really that they have been secretive for many years. And so anyway they were unhappy with the piece and i discovered, ive yet to hear strange things. I began to hear that there was a private eye poking into my life and i at first thought was kind of funny because im married, had kids, a dog, a pretty subtle life and not that interesting. I thought the poor private eye, but anyway i laughed it off and then i was at Christmas Party and a colleague said to me who had been a reporter, you know a couple of legionnaires have hired a private eye to look into a reporter wrote a story that they didnt like about them and they are looking for dirt. They asked me if i might work on this too. She said it occurred to me that might be you. So i thought of code thats weird. Anyway very soon after i discovered there had been an Opposition Research project on me and a couple of the top people at koch industry organized it. They had hired a private eye who turned out to be the Police Commissioner in new york city howard safer the former Police Commissioner, not current, with his son and daughter who were in the fbi and they have left ripe firm in new york. I eventually pieced together the story is a reporter would and i found a source who told me they were looking for dirt, dirt, dirt and if they couldnt find it theyd make it up. So she made something up and they put together a story saying that i was a plagiarist and they tried to peddle it to a couple of news organizations neither of which would run it because it turned out not to be true. It would have been pretty terrible if it would have got into print in anyone believed it. Nobody ran with it but in the reporters who works work i was supposed to rep doffed stood up for me and said is untrue. It was eyeopening. Truthfully i can look back on this and almost say this kind of flattering that they took that seriously but you dont see it that often. I have covered a lot of different things. I have covered awards. Ive covered cia. Ive covered several white houses, politics at every level and nobody has ever done this before. It was eyeopening in terms of showing you the kind of unaccountable power that these private leaders can have an america where they throw around their weight to try to control the free press from covering them as honestly as they possibly can wish is what i was trying to do. I learned when i was doing more research that i was far from alone. The kochs have hired private eyes whenever people have challenged them. They have had a bit eyes look into fbi when the fbi was investigating Koch Industries and they have gone after federal prosecutors who were looking into them and they have hired hybridized to look into their own brothers because there are four Koch Brothers and they broke into two teams of two. The 22 teams have to have litigated against each other for lease 20 years because they were fighting over who is going to get the bigger share in the Family Company and the family fortune. It got so brutal that they hired private eyes on each site to look into each others garbage. So its a company that is remarkable. Its remarkably successful and remarkably hardball playing. The standard oil of our time. In my assessment humor the attempt to destroy you occurred the two outlets one in particular was so anxious to get something out of the hits on line of the word koch that the headline and think with smear job gone bad or gone wrong. There is one that said smear disappears. The truth is that was the New York Post and the New York Post kind of did a good job. They could have just said thats weird and gone away. They did not. Kid kelly who covers the media to New York Post thought that strange, heres this reporter didnt plagiarize that i was being told that she did. I wonder who is behind this and it was the number of intermediaries in between so you couldnt really tell who is behind it. He kept pushing at it and then he said recently it is a pretty short list of suspects. It eventually took a long time but it got back to Koch Industries in this private eye that they had hired. Back when you and i were talking a few years ago we did a project at the workshop called the koch club and we had 20 people working on that over two and half years. One of the things was about Climate Change legislation dying in the congress mainly the house of representatives. There were so many things that pummeled out of that, switching gears here clearly, sorry but its not just a bunch of dilettantes billionaires here. In addition to trying to smear journalists. Can you talk about the impact . The Obama Administration came into power in one of the things i wanted to do was enact Climate Change legislation. Oil and gas contributions and lobbying doubled in the twoyear cycle. That was the 2008 residential cycle that president obama came in on partly because they were worried about him. As you both know died in the house of representatives and there are all kinds of reasons for that. Is that a good base to jump off . People lose sight is not just the atmosphere but the unusual thing about to billionaire brothers. Its also the impact that they and their other billionaire friends are brought to bear. Tremendous impact and im glad you asked because its not just about elections. We are obviously in an Election Year and thats what everybodys focused on both kochs these two particular billionaires have joined with 400 or 500 other spectacularly wealthy conservatives many of whom have serious financial interests in the u. S. Government. They have pooled their resources to some extent and created a project which has great flick influence over american policy. One of the policies they have affected the most is anything having to do with Climate Change. Many of the big interests in the koch group including the kochs himself our fossil fuel. There are bottomline boom depends on fossil fuels. They have colon they have got gas and they have got pipelines. Anything that moves the United States away from fossil fuels is a threat to their Business Model they have played a really thorough game of trying to capture congress and make it follow in a direction that is good for their business which meant as you were talking about 2010, 2011 congress is considering a bill to capandtrade Carbon Emissions putting some kind of price on carbon pollution. The reason it didnt work in great measure was because the kochs another fossil fuel interests is clobbered anybody who is going to support it. They worked very hard to take out particularly conservative democrats and moderate republicans who might have strayed from the orthodox line that they set which is to say Climate Change isnt real or doesnt matter or we can afford to do anything about it. Right in the bill to put Climate Change to the house of representatives ended up dying Something Like 90 or 100, and forget the numbers of house members all republicans would sign this pledge and climate tax pledge. Its now 156. How does a private interest the couple of really in their subject policy . The kochs have an Organization Called americans for prosperity which is supposed to be a grassroots Citizens Group which they founded and helps fund and it spreads across the country. It has a pledge and candidates who want to get backing from their organizations have to sign a pledge saying they will do nothing about Climate Change unless it costs nothing. 156 members of the congress have now signed this pledge. Its a private agreement practically with sub live type industries which is pretty incredible when you think about it via. It is also the same year they did this with a pledge in blocking the legislation they also, they were all doing other things with universities. This is a fullcourt press on multiple levels and of course we have tracked to an 21 universities receiving 30 or 40 million from them in the span of a fiveyear period which i think has increased since we did