Yesterday a reader commenting on the "Cotter, trial lawyers, and money" story asked:

"Didn't the trial lawyer from Billings, Cliff Clint(?) Edwards set up some sort of special PAC in the past in order to pour a lot of his own money into some of these judge races? I don't remember ever seeing a good explanation of how that could happen."

We figured the answer to that warranted a stand alone-post for an answer.

The PAC that this person is thinking of is actually the Montana Trial Lawyers Association PAC, called the Montana Law PAC - the same one referenced in the Cotter story from yesterday.  I don't have numbers handy this morning on contributors to the MT Law PAC for 2000, but I do have their 2004 campaign finance reports, and these figures should raise some eyebrows.  Their major 2004 contributors include:
Alexander Blewett, Great Falls, $20,000
Cliff Edwards, Billings, $50,000
James Hunt, Helena, $10,240
Gene Jarussi, Billings, $10,240
L. Randall Bishop, Billings, $10,226
Tom Lewis, Great Falls, $10,000
Peter Meloy, Helena, $10,185
David Paoli, Missoula, $10,229
J. David Slovak, Great Falls, $10,240

These nine individuals accounted for $141,360 of the total $337,859 that the trial lawyers raised in 2004.  Incidentally, you'll likely find most of their names on some major plaintiff's cases that have come before the Montana Supreme Court in recent years.  Most of that money, $308,171 was spent on independent expenditures on behalf of Judge Jim Nelson.  To put that in perspective, Nelson's re-election campaign raised only $231,790.  The Trial Lawyers actually spent more to get Jim Nelson elected than he did himself!  (To be fair, a conservative PAC, Montanans for Justice, was set up to help challenger Cindy Younkin, but that PAC raised only $39,850.)

To answer the second part of the question, Montana campaign finance laws allow unlimited contributions from individuals to PACs.  And PACs are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on expenditures for candidates as long as there is no coordination with the candidate.

This campaign finance system should work as long as contributions and expenditures are reported and the public has easy access to the information.  If an individual wants to spend $50,000 to help a candidate get elected, he should have the right to do it...but the public needs to know about it, and that's where the Montana press is failing us.  Contributing $50,000 to a PAC is a big deal.  Cliff Edwards knew exactly how his money was going to be spent.  And Jim Nelson knows exactly where that $50,000 that helped him get elected came from.  But the most important people, the voters, had no clue what was going down.

When large sums of money are being tossed around like that, the only safeguard we have is public scrutiny.  A search of the Billings Gazette archives yielded no stories on the huge sums of trial lawyer money connected to Jim Nelson's re-election (if you can find such a story, please set me straight).  It's accurate to say that the trial lawyer's "bought" Jim Nelson's election in 2004, and Chuck Johnson, Mike Dennison, et al turned a blind eye.

The frustrating part is that we know these reporters have it in them to write these kinds of stories.  Remember in 2006 when Mike Dennison pressed hard to find the funding source for the Montananas in Action campaign?  That was a good bit of investigative journalism.  The only difference I can think of between the Montana Law PAC and Montanans in Action is that the former is a liberal group and the latter was a conservative group - yes, that old charge of liberal media bias rears its ugly head. 

Let's hope they can do better in 2008 when the trial lawyers attempt to buy another term for Pat Cotter.