Probably the richest their brothers in the world, certainly in america who are very Strong Political views and have taken fortune over the last 40 years to try doing a america. They spent in very targeted ways in interesting ways to try to change the whole direction of american politics. Poster what are their names and where are they located . Guest charles koch and david koch are the ones that people think of the Koch Brothers. 11 wichita, kansas where Coke Industries is based. David lives in new york. He is the wealthiest in manhattan. They are actually two other Koch Brothers that people dont talk about too much. There is bill koch and fred koch. You talk about hear about them than about the mostly dont much in the headlines. Host why not . Guest they are not as political and in some ways they are losers and a huge family struggle but to this over the years. And at that kind of struggle and the family for who is going to control the family company. A huge privately owned company that the Koch Brothers had joked about it the Biggest Company no one has ever heard of. It is a company that almost every american comes into contact with. You dont know you do, but if you buy dixie cups, lake ray, vanity fair napkins, georgiapacific lumber, so many other products. You are a consumer Koch Industries and there is this epic fight a month is for boys for who is going to have control of this company that the father fred koch started in the two that last out were the ones you dont hear about much and those are fred and bill. Host why do fred and bill do . Guest they are very interesting. Will started up his own business that is also in fossil fuels, the part of Koch Industries are fit to mention is the biggest part of it, which is in fossil fuels to every science oil and house gas. So bill koch has his own company that actually sells a different kind of refining oil. Fred is a shy philanthropist who is very interested in the arts and gives money to all kinds of cultural institutions, but mostly anonymously, which is interesting because the other brothers are quite flashy, like to get attention and david kochs name is not too everybody in new york city because it is emblazoned on so many of the two shins, but he likes to get attention for her, for his older brother fred is quite quiet about it. Host when you refer to fred as artistic are you saying he is . Guest well, i wouldnt say that i would know because fred has said himself that he is not gay. His brothers have accused him of being gay. Was according to a document that i describe in the book, acl Court Document that described under a testimony from bill koch, one of the brothers you dont hear about much about how he and his two other brothers tried to frame their older brother fred. They call it into a meeting that they said was a company meeting. In fact their older brother they had walked in in his 20s at that point. They said they were going to tell their father he was gay and must be turned over his shares in the company to these other brothers. So it was an attempt to blackmail him about what they claim to speak in private life. His private life has remained private and so i dont feel it is my role in life to try to out people who may be gay or may not be gay. I would like to give him the right to decide what kind of privacy he wants to live in. But i think it is too bad his own brothers didnt show that came kind of respect. It is an insight into this family. This is a rough, tough, ruthless bunch of people. This is the story i tell in the book about this family members. They ran against each other. The idea you might try blackmailing your brother and say you are going to tell your father and they told their older brother that the father would disinherit him if he found out. The older brother didnt buckle under. He did his brothers well. He had grown up with them in the years. He stood up and fred watt out of the room before he dead he said i dont want to ever hear about this again. He didnt actually get treated the same by the family terms of inheritance, but he walked out on that. In recent years, david koch has said hes a supporter of gay writes, even though people think of them as vastly conservative. They are not really social conservatives get their libertarians. It may be that david koch has changed his views. Many people in the country have changed their views about gay right, but it was a brutal confrontation between brothers over grabbing the familys fortune. Host how does a doctor get a hold of a field Court Document . Guest with lots and lots of trying. There are certain things that i cant really talk about how i got documents i have, but you can see that nobody has challenged the authenticity of it since this book has come out. There are new documents in this book and i took a long time to put the book together. I was have to get the information, but the Court Documents are one of the most unavailable facts you can bring to the public. Host in the sub one the dark money the Hidden History of the billionaires behind the rise of radical right, were you able to interview any of the koch families . Guest i wish i could talk more about the people in the interview who did not want to be discussed. I cant really talk about that in great detail, but i can say neither david koch or charro scope and they did try for a few years. Somebody who worked with them or talk to people who try to get an interview. Theyve got a long history of secrecy. Theres this saying that his father used to say it is when the whale flips out that he gets harpooned. For that reason he is prepared to spend under the surface. The story that i tell here is mostly a story that these people really did not want told and they certainly didnt want to help. Host oddly enough to make you right and true unobtrusive libertarian koch family otis fortune through historys most famous dictator, Joseph Stalin and adolf hitler. Guest is not remarkable. These are maybe the countrys foremost libertarian influences that are supposed to be antiauthoritarian. At his familys fortune began when the father who was apparently a very bright man, an early graduate of m. I. T. Figures out a better way to crack oil and refine it. He had this breakthrough, but he couldnt sell it in america because he felt the major monopoly. He had to take it elsewhere. Ironically, the place i went first was the soviet union and he went and built Something Like 16 Oil Refineries in the first fiveyear plan of the soviet union. They could copy it. Its kind of out of business there. He then helped design one of the most important refineries. He got to commission in 1933, started loathing in 1934. The rise of hitler became chancellor of the third right in 1933. He is in control of germany at this point spread koch was making money and the refinery that was built there called winkler koch and one other partner had to be personally greenlighted by hitler. At first hitler said they didnt want this american refinery. Hitler said they wanted it. He okayed it and it became key to the war efforts. It was a very advanced refinery that could refine a feel that was necessary for the air force in hitler was trying to build up the military at this point. So the possibilities became a very big part of the war effort. The u. S. Allies on that several times because it is the key target during world war ii. According to reports that came out after my book, and between the bombings that was rebuilt by slave labor by people whom the concentration camp had to put it back together again. It is a story of an ironic, interesting twist on one of americas biggest companies, great companies, kind of a Hidden History and part of the story that i tell that they didnt necessarily want the world to know. Host how important is it that help . Guest i think it is very important. Im not saying one of the experts, but i did start my career at the wall street journal, so the difference between a public and private company is first of all the private company is accountable mostly to the owners. In this case is almost exclusively to brothers. So they have been able to plow their money back into it over and over again instead of trying to show immediate gains for stockholders. This has helped them make it very successful. It is phenomenally asked successful. It has been great for them financially and has kept them out of the public eye. It has been kind of a Secretive Company that doesnt have to answer to many people. Host how long do you work on the book and where do you get the interest . Guest it started with a piece for the new yorker where i am a staff writer. I did that in 2010. I suppose you could say it has been five years or Something Like that. I was a working exclusively on the book the whole time. Maybe the last three years i was working on it exclusively. My entry is pretty much a serendipitous. It comes from my career as a reporter in 1983, the wall street journal brought me to washington to cover the Reagan White House. I started in 1984, reagans reelection campaign. These were my sources. Many people of the books ive written for people i interview, i saw. What interested me and part of the reason i wrote dark money is when i started back many years ago, these people were on the fringe. Reagan was president , but there are always people on the far right fringe who i would call because they were interesting for a counterpoint and comment and people interested in ideas off him, they were way out there. In this example and dont take my word for it, theres a quote where william f. Buckley describes the movement at the Koch Brothers are part of it as a narco totalitarian. They were part of the far right that the conservatives were trying to purge because they thought they were the lunatic fringe. And so, what interested me by the time i wrote this book was they came with so much power that they had some wife had become the center of gravity of the Republican Party. There is a new study out from harvard and another professor there who described the koch effect. They say it is a magmatic poll on the Republican Party to pull the whole party with them. So how did they get from way out there to the center of republican politics and in many ways the center of american politics. Host is the Political Network interview stronger than the Republican National . Guest yeah. They are in competition in some ways, but in some ways what has happened is the network has subsumed the Republican Party to the position of the republican candidate take are often positioned that the koch state. They have the money and they offer the Campaign Funding and other support from all the different proof they have, the candidates who Will Champion their positions. So as an example, right now in the republican field of president ial primary candidates, all of the major candidates have calmed to ask for their financial backing. So they are sort of one candidate who was the exception and not as donald trump. He is called the other puppet and his play into the crowd as they all the others are owned. It becomes dynamic in this campaign. Host what made the koch familys growing financial gold in american politics extraordinary was the way it was all forms of political one investment and the huge future dividend . Guest well, that is true. The coax in particular have a kind of a force magnifier. It is not just they are among the richest people in the world, which in themselves as a certain amount of clout to their addition. Theyve been very smart as have the other families and using philanthropy. The idea that they can give money to to take tax deductions. With those foundations they push their ideology and pushes their interests. It is almost like lobbying operation of the taxdeductible. Each of these families has done not so what youve got but the kochs is people who give money and a Huge Corporation to a gigantic private family fortune and three network of philanthropic groups that act out their message all across the country. It is that youre wrong in some ways that make them so interesting and so important. Host how is that different than a george soros on the left doing the same thing through their donation. Guest in some ways he got into counterbalance to this. He is kind of the johnnycomelately to this. One thing he does is his money that he gives is disclosed money. The book is called tran 11 because it is about money that is given behind the scenes by people who dont want you to see fingerprints on it. In order to hide their money shows, the kochs in some of the others give money to this philanthropic groups that dont show who the donors are, 501 c 4 . Theyre supposed to not be principally of politics. Thats debatable i would say. This is about the active in particular and how important its become. Soros gives some of the money in an undisclosed way through an organization in the past of the tides foundation. I did do a piece about soros. When you read about the kochs in this country, inevitably what you hear about is people state why dont you write about soros . What a nice at this on the table. I wrote a very long piece in the new yorker about solaris 82,004 which was the year he surely started putting serious money. And i wrote all about them. After the election he was disappointed. He was trying to defeat george w. Bushs reelection. He withdrew from electoral politics somewhat. The reason im focusing on the kochs, they stepped up their world. They are currently putting together a jackpot that they themselves have described as having 889 million potentially for this 2016 election cycle. At its height, george soros spent Something Like 20 million. So we are talking about 20 million versus 829 million even with inflation between 2004 and now, you are talking about a ton of money in a few hands that nobodys seen in this country before. Host jane mayer, we will show some video you will know what it is an something youve read about in your book. Very soon after i discovered an Opposition Research project. The top people at Koch Industries in washington had organized it and had hired a private eye who turned out to be the Police Commissioner of new york city, former Police Commissioner, not current with his son and daughter in the fbi and they have a private firm in new york. I eventually pieced together the story just as a reporter word and found a source who told me they were looking for dirt, dirt, dirt and if they couldnt find it, they would make it out. They came and put together a story saying i was a plagiarist and i 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 anyone believed it could likely nobody ran with it. Guest yeah, tell us about the kochs higherrated well, lets be careful about this. The top people at Koch Industries working in washington put together a boiler room operation in which they worked with a private eye in new york city and they spent quite a few packages to discredit me. I am not alone in this. There are many instances in this book is specifically on people who challenge them. They have a huge private company and played a role in public life from behind the scenes and they dont really like it when one shines a big lead and not what i was trying to do. Host you say it was the lobby office. Guest some extra space in the back room. It took some time but i eventually was able to get a pretty good picture of what was going on. It was extraordinary in my experience. Ive covered a lot of things, but i was not as far as i know in the target of an effort to discredit me though is quite like that. Maybe i should be flattered on some level that anyone would take a reporter so seriously. But it was scary in a way. It felt like an effort to ruin me and i think they succeeded in convincing people that i was plagiarizing. That is a crime of moral turpitude. It is something that can take you down. So it was not a minor affair. It was a killer after. Im very glad it didnt succeed and my colleagues from whom i was supposed to have plagiarized were fantastic and stood fantastic and stood up and said this is not true. One of the stories i was supposed to have stolen, a Washington Post reporter says not only did you not still from a company accredited me in the next sentence. So you know, it was a badly done operation and some ways. It is unusual and nick is doing it right into the heart of it these two brothers who want so much power over american politics have played. Host word of the title, the dark side your 2008 come from . It came from former Vice President dick cheney. He went on the air himself shortly after 9 11 and said, you know, in order to win this war on terror, we need to play on the dark side. It was unclear what he was talking about at that point, but the book explained what that title, what that term was talking about. Host did you ever meet Vice President cheney or interview him . Guest you know, i have certainly met Vice President cheney and had a chance to talk to them. He did not give me the interview for the book. For a little while i had the church of the interview request on my bulletin board. I said could you talk to me anytime in the next two years . The answer came back from an assistant is an unfortunate Vice President cheney will be very busy during the next two years. That was kind of a blanket no. But i have had a chance to see him since. We actually were in a brief room at one point going on abc together and it is just the two of us having our makeup put on. It was great to have a chance to talk to him. He commented on some of the things in the book that seemed as