Ad political, group must file financial disclosures

State campaign watchdogs told a political committee Tuesday it has 48 hours to reveal where it got the money it is using to blanket Washington with television commercials against attorney general candidate Deborah Senn.

The commercials, which criticize Senn for her handling of a 1997 settlement with an insurance company, are political ads, the state Public Disclosure Commission said in a letter to the Voter Education Committee.

“When advertising maligns a candidate’s character, it is ‘express advocacy,’ ” wrote Philip Stutzman, PDC director of compliance. “As such, the activities of Voters Education Committee are reportable to the Public Disclosure Commission” under state law.

Reports of contributions and expenditures must be filed with the state by noon Thursday, or the committee could face state sanctions, said Doug Ellis, a spokesman for the PDC.

Valerie Huntsberry, an official listed on the committee’s federal filing, said the group’s attorneys are reviewing the letter. Those attorneys previously said the committee was not required to file reports of campaign donors and expenditures, she said.

Earlier Tuesday, Democrat Senn denounced the ads as a “smear campaign” during a press conference in Spokane, and predicted they would backfire. She also called on Rob McKenna, a candidate in the GOP primary for attorney general, to denounce the ads.

“It’s his friends and his followers,” Senn said.

But Craig Wright, McKenna’s campaign manager, said there was no connection between Voter Education Committee and the campaign.

“We had no involvement in the placement of these ads, and no prior knowledge of them,” Wright said.

Wright said he wouldn’t comment on the content of the ads. He said he hadn’t talked with McKenna about whether they “were appropriate or inappropriate.”

“We certainly support compliance with state law,” he added.

The ads suggest that Senn gave Prudential Insurance a break in 1997, when the company was forced to pay $1 billion nationwide for misleading sales practices. Senn, who was state insurance commissioner at the time, fined Prudential $700,000 but suspended $600,000 in exchange for the company paying for the addition of four staff members to the insurance commission staff to help regulate the insurance industry.

“Senn even tried to cover up the deal from state legislators,” the commercial contends.

Senn denied there was any coverup: “Some secret. It was in a press release.”

Voter Education Committee is set up as a 527 organization, which is a section of federal law that allows groups to run independent campaigns in presidential and congressional races. Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group attacking Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, and MoveOn.org, which has run ads contending President Bush deliberately lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, are 527 organizations.

Under federal law, such groups can receive almost unlimited sums of money from donors, and have very limited reporting requirements that make tracking donors difficult. In its filing, Voter Education Committee lists Huntsberry as its custodian of records and Bruce Boram as its director.

Both are executives of United for Washington, a pro-business organization that is one of the state’s biggest lobbying groups. Over the past seven years, Boram also has been involved in setting up dozens of independent expenditure campaign committees that funnel money into state races from different business groups. Those groups usually have innocuous-sounding names like “Concerned Citizens for Good Government.”

Boram told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week that the ads had nothing to do with the election, but were designed to educate voters about what Senn did as insurance commissioner. They don’t tell viewers to vote for or against Senn.

But on Tuesday, the PDC said a 4-year-old state Supreme Court ruling says the ads are political because they attack Senn. That means the Voter Education Committee must give full details on its donors and expenditures.

By one estimate, the committee has spent $585,000 on the commercials, but Senn said Tuesday the group may have spent more than $1 million.