Ryan Sager writes in the New York Post that he has obtained a videotape that indicates that the whole idea of campaign finance reform has been an immense scam perpetrated on Congress and the American people. 

In the videotape, Sean traglia, former program officer of the Pew Trust, reveals how Congress was buffaloed into passing McCain-Feingold.

"I'm going to tell you a story that I've never told any reporter," Treglia says on the tape. "Now that I'm several months away from Pew and we have campaign-finance reform, I can tell this story."

That story in brief:

Charged with promoting campaign-finance reform when he joined Pew in the mid-1990s, Treglia came up with a three-pronged strategy: 1) pursue an expansive agenda through incremental reforms, 2) pay for a handful of "experts" all over the country with foundation money and 3) create fake business, minority and religious groups to pound the table for reform.

"The target audience for all this activity was 535 people in Washington," Treglia says — 100 in the Senate, 435 in the House. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot — that everywhere they looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

 In other words, there was no mass movement for reform.  There was, instead a narrow group of interests who wished to have campaign finance reform passed for their own reasons, and who were willing to decieve both Congress and the Electorate into thinking that broad public support for it existed.

Back to the videotape, where an unidentified (but apparently sympathetic) individual asks Treglia: "What would have happened had a major news organization gotten a hold of this at the wrong time?"

"We had a scare," Treglia says. "As the debate was progressing and getting pretty close, George Will stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column. And a lot of his partisans were becoming aware of Pew's role and were feeding him information. And he started to reference the fact that Pew had played a large role in this — that this was a liberal attempt to hoodwink Congress."

"But you know what the good news is from my perspective?" Treglia says to the stunned crowd. "Journalists didn't care . . . So no one followed up on the story. And so there was a panic there for a couple of weeks because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up."

Treglia's right. While he admits Pew specifically instructed groups receiving its grants "never to mention Pew," all these connections were disclosed (as legally required) in various tax forms and annual reports. "If any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots," he said. "But they didn't."

Of course they didn't.  Either it was too much work to do the required dot-connecting, or they simply didn't care to do it.  Either way, if Mr. Treglia is being honest in his admissions on the videotape, it was all a scam, and a successful one at that.

Of the $140 million spent to promote campaign finance reform, $123 million came from only 8 foundations, all of whom support a variety of left-wing causes, according to a Political Money Line report (paid subscription required).  And this money didn't just buy ads, or public lobbying campaigns.  It appears to have bought good press coverage as well.

* In September of 2000, less than two years before the passage of McCain-Feingold, the liberal magazine The American Prospect put out a special issue devoted to campaign-finance reform. With incredible hypocrisy, the magazine failed to tell its readers that the "Checkbook Democracy" issue was paid for with a $132,000 check from the Carnegie Corporation — which, again, has spent $14 million promoting the regulation of political speech in the last decade.

* Since 1994, National Public Radio has accepted more than $1.2 million from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance reform for items such as (to quote the official disclosure statements) "news coverage of financial influence in political decision-making." About $400,000 of that directly funded a program called, "Money, Power and Influence."

NPR claims that there has never been any contact between the funders and the reporters. NPR also claims that some of the $1.2 million went to non-campaign-finance-related coverage. But at least $860,000 can be tied directly to coverage of money in politics.

* Lastly, the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation accepted $935,000 between 1995 and 2001 from liberal foundations promoting campaign-finance reform for things like a "training initiative to help television, radio and print journalists provide better news coverage of the influence of private money on electoral, legislative and regulatory processes."

The Post contacted Mr. Treglia to obtain his repose before going to press.

Treglia, contacted by The Post yesterday, was singing a different tune about Pew, saying it would be "incorrect to suggest that the organization would attempt to deceive or mislead about its funding efforts." Pew's president, Rebecca Rimel, calls the charge "false" in a written statement.

Well, I imagine we'll see which version of Mr. Treglia's story is closer to the truth, won't we?

UPDATE [Jon Henke] —  Ryan Sager has much more on his (very good) blog, including links to the video and partial transcripts of Treglia's remarks, and this comment:

" the revelations in a video I obtained ... should lead to a seismic change in the way campaign-finance reform is perceived by the public and by the media. ...if you’re a journalist, note the disdain with which Treglia regards you.

It’s warranted."