Director Kimberly Reed Tracks “Dark Money” in Montana Elections
John Ward, a veteran Republican politician running for state office, never stood a chance.
In 2008, only days before the Republican primary in Helena, a shocking postcard landed in one district’s mailboxes. “John Wayne Gacy, ‘the Killer Clown,’” it read, “sadistically raped and murdered nearly three dozen boys and young men.” It also avowed that “John Ward believes that monsters like this deserve to live.”
“Mothers Against Child Predators,” a murky group that had no correlation to moms, succeeded in upsetting the race. That killer clown postcard turned out to be bankrolled by “dark money,” sensational advertising where you don’t know who’s paying for the covert ads.
“Dark Money:” Director Reed Shines Light on Shady Entities
In her documentary “Dark Money,” Kimberly Reed ventures out to expose a light on shady entities that, with wealthy anonymous donors, have intruded in Montana elections. Scrutinizing the recent and distant past, she explores how and why both the state and citizens fought this meddling, as well as the underground forces behind it.
Reed emphasized that Montana has been leading the charge for bipartisan campaign finance reform since the days of William A. Clark and the closet and clandestine influence peddling of the Copper Kings.
“My family has been in Montana for three generations deep and I love calling attention to what’s going on in Montana,” said director Kimberly Reed. “What’s interesting is that Montana has been leading the way, even if you look at what has been happening with Governor Bullock taking on the I.R.S in last couple days. Montana is leading the charge for long-term campaign finance reform, and that will challenge some presumptions about Montana.”
Reed attended Helena High School and earned a Bachelor of Arts from University of California at Berkeley and later attended San Francisco State University where she earned a Master of Arts in film production.
“I’ve never been a Supreme Court watcher or one who was following campaign finance issues, and I never realized that it was such a fundamental issue. But I found it to be a really intriguing question to dig into. I learned that Montana was the main battleground of campaign finance issues and it had seen a high level of corruption before, and the people of Montana don’t want to go back there again, and I discovered a dramatic story there.”
Reed said that her research indicated that the people of Montana had a unique political history of battling corruption from powerful outside sources.
“A lot of the information was too abstract or too intentionally obfuscated, and even coming from Montana I remember seeing grade school videos about the Copper Kings, and seeing Butte and the long term effects of resource development done irresponsibly. And I found a strong grassroots push back of corporate dominance and big forces.”
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision—freeing corporations and unions to spend limitless outside money on elections—shocked the public, prompting hundreds of protests and inspiring a nationwide grassroots campaign to, as one group puts it, “reclaim our democracy.” “Dark money” campaign financing schemes have proliferated because the ruling gave corporations, labor unions and other interest groups the permission to spend unrestricted sums for the election or defeat of individual candidates. (Since then several judges have preserved the ability for laws requiring the disclosure of the source of donations.)
“After Citizens United more and more of these shadow organization started opening up shop in Montana,” said Reed. “They’ve continued going after our strong campaign finance laws. They figured that if you could take them down here, you can take them down anywhere. In some ways it sounds very hard to make that cinematic, but watching the dissemination of this exposition about campaign finance laws and how they function, and to watch it culminate from the trial and courtroom drama was very dramatic.”
Typically, political money goes “dark” when it is funneled through social welfare organizations or trade associations and political money can also hide when it is obscured through limited liability companies, or LLCs. In some cases, these companies are created solely to obscure the source of political spending.
Reed spent countless hours crisscrossing Montana to interview local and state politicians, from small-town representatives to Big Sandy farmer Senator Jon Tester and Governor Steve Bullock, a former Helena High classmate of Reed’s.
Over 98 packed minutes, Reed follows the money trail, or at least attempts to. “Dark Money” is filled with the classic tropes of a big commercial thriller. It’s a thorny, complicated story, one that stretches back at least to 1912, when Montana declared that corporations could not make contributions in state elections.
“The history of Montana serves as the ultimate cautionary tale about the power and peril of money in politics, “said Senator Jon Tester via email. “So, anyone who still doubts the danger dark money poses to our democracy should sit down and watch this film, because those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Montana Free Press
The film’s narrator is journalist John S. Adams, who Reed met while the two were overlapping similar research interests.
“I had been using and admiring and studying his reporting on the issue from afar,” said Reed. “I’d been following his coverage when I started out in 2012 and I met John in 2013 and we both had this phase where we were doing the same thing. We started comparing notes and exchanging contacts and exchanging theories and we were both digging into the same story in different ways. He was doing his daily story with his boots on the ground and his perspective and delving into this complicated issue. I started to think that I wanted to have a narrator for this and I’d studied “All The President’ s Men,” and I wanted see it through the eyes of reporters as a narrative device. It took me a little while to convince him.”
Adams’ plight as a full-time, professional working journalist is one of the film’s most gripping subplots. The undiluted humanness of Adams’ story is one of the film’s most haunting effects.
“I wanted him to be our guide through all of this Dark Money stuff,” said Reed. “In the process he loses his job and his own personal ordeals made him emblematic of the things that the journalism and newspaper industry was going through. The watchdog press is crucial to follow the money in politics and when it disappears then that is tragic for many, many reasons.”
In addition to its educational, yet never preachy or pedantic fluidity, Reed’s filmmaking should be noted for its non-biased agenda, lack of political pretense, and masterful editing that somehow condensed decades of complicated, messy chicanery into a tight, eminently watchable product. Preaching about truth in politics could have made it feel more like a political platform; yet, the film is noticeably absent of such opinionated statements.
“Campaign finance reform is a bipartisan issue that is important,” said Reed. “While the film is the depiction of how it played out in Montana, it’s an issue larger than Montana, and there is a broad range of the American public that believes that money and politics is an important issue. How we are handling it in our elections is clearly not working.”
Reed added that the fact that Montana comes across exceptionally photogenic won’t be lost on the audience, either. “If you ever need a cut away, well, Montana is the best place in the world to get those great cutaways. Montana has a really rich history and the film gets the point across.”
Standing Up to Dark Money
“Dark Money,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, has become something of a glaring microcosm on the problematic financial deeds rife in American politics.
“It’s true what they say: Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” said Senator Tester. “That’s why I’m working, day in and day out, to shine more light on the dark money flowing into our elections. Because, when special interests try to hide in the shadows, we must drag them into the light.”
Indeed, Montana continues to be at the vanguard of the fight against illegal campaign spending. In June, Governor Steve Bullock signed into law an executive order requiring the recipients of major government contracts to disclose dark money spending in elections. Bullock has crusaded against the undoing of campaign finance rules, suing the Trump administration to block it from eliminating a mandate that politically active nonprofit groups disclose the identities of their major donors to the government. Bullock said a change in I.R.S. rules will make it harder to monitor illegal spending in political campaigns.
“Where Citizens United opened the door for a wave of dark money, Montana is again shining a light. Montana is standing up for openness and fairness in politics,” said Bullock.
“Dark Money” screens in Montana beginning August 9 at the Art House Cinema & Pub, followed by showings which start August 10 at the Ellen Theater in Bozeman, the Myrna Loy Center in Helena and the Roxy Theatre in Missoula.
“Screenings in Montana will be of a much different nature,” said Reed. “Montana has had problems in their elections, and we did a lot to clean them up, and we are now the playbook and role model. Because of our rich history and our challenges in our elections, Montanans pay closer attention to this issue than people in other states and understand it on a deeper level, and I expect it to be screening to well-informed folks and people who are passionate about the issue.”
This article was written by Montana Mint Contributor Brian D’Ambrosio
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