General Discussion

In the wake of the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision Buckley v. Valeo, they understood that this opened the door for the creation of what we now know as super PACs, that you could contribute an unlimited amount of money to candidates as long as you didn't do so directly through the campaign, that you did it through an independent expenditure. And this opened up the floodgates for the tsunami of money in our politics. And so they - along with Terry Dolan, who was the head of this organization that was this first vehicle for independent expenditures called NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee, this - they really understood what were the vulnerabilities in our system. And they took advantage of them to maximum effect.

DAVIES: So this lobbying firm that they form, Black, Manafort and Stone, what kind of clients did they have?

PEHME: They - Black, Manafort and Stone had among the largest corporations in the country, people like Rupert Murdoch. They also were particularly well-known as the so-called Torturers' Lobby because they were willing to take on clients like a slew of third-world dictators - Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Mobutu Sese Seko in the Republic of the Congo.

And they felt perfectly at ease taking on these clients because these dictators were all ostensibly fighting Communists and in line with the Republican, Reagan agenda of the time. And Charlie Black says in our film that if you want to give criticism to Congress that funded these dictators and the wars that they were waging, that they will take that criticism at Black, Manafort and Stone. But they were really doing something that was viewed - they viewed as patriotic at the time. And they are unabashed in having worked for these people with absolutely horrible human rights records.