The Latest News from the Institute for Free Speech September 9, 2022 Click here to subscribe to the Daily Media Update. This is the Daily Media Update published by the Institute for Free Speech. For press inquiries, please contact Luke Wachob at [email protected]. We're Hiring! Senior Attorney – Institute for Free Speech – Washington, DC or Virtual Office .....The Institute for Free Speech is hiring a Senior Attorney with a minimum of seven years of experience. The location for this position is either at our Washington, D.C. office or remotely anywhere in the United States. This is a rare opportunity to work with a growing team to litigate a long-term legal strategy directed toward the protection of Constitutional rights. We challenge laws, practices, and policies that infringe upon First Amendment freedoms, such as speech codes that censor parents at school board meetings, laws restricting people’s ability to give and receive campaign contributions, and any intrusion into people’s private political associations. You would work to hold censors accountable; and to secure legal precedents clearing away a thicket of laws, regulations, and practices that suppress speech about government and candidates for political office, threaten citizens’ privacy if they speak or join groups, and impose heavy burdens on political activity. IRS Judicial Watch: Judicial Watch: Unsealed Depositions of Former Obama IRS Officials Lerner and Paz Detail Knowledge of Tea Party Targeting .....Judicial Watch announced today that it received previously sealed court documents, including depositions of IRS officials Lois Lerner, the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Holly Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements, which show that they knew most Tea Party organizations were legally entitled to tax-exempt status in the run up to the Obama reelection in 2012... The sworn depositions were given in 2017 by Lerner and Paz. In the newly unsealed deposition transcripts, the two IRS officials repeatedly have memory lapses and regularly plead ignorance of the fundamental matters in question. The unsealed Lerner and Paz deposition transcripts reveal through sworn testimony the bureaucratic tangle created by the Obama IRS to single out, delay and deny the processing of conservative, especially Tea Party non-profit groups’ applications for tax-exempt status and to disclose their donors’ names. At the same time, Paz admits under questioning that she knew from the beginning there was not sufficient legal basis to deny most of the targeted groups tax exempt status: The Courts New York Times: After a Legal Fight, Oberlin Says It Will Pay $36.59 Million to a Local Bakery By Anemona Hartocollis .....Oberlin College, known as a bastion of progressive politics, said on Thursday that it would pay $36.59 million to a local bakery that said it had been defamed and falsely accused of racism after a worker caught a Black student shoplifting. That 2016 dispute with Gibson’s Bakery resulted in a yearslong legal fight and resonated beyond the small college town in Ohio, turning into a bitter national debate over criminal justice, race, free speech and whether the college had failed to hold students to account. The decision by the college’s board of trustees, announced Thursday, came nine days after the Ohio Supreme Court had declined to hear the college’s appeal of a lower-court ruling. DOJ The Hill: Garland bans political DOJ appointees from participating in campaign events By Zach Schonfeld .....Attorney General Merrick Garland [last] Tuesday banned political appointees at the Department of Justice (DOJ) from participating in campaign events in any form, changing a longstanding agency policy. “We must do all we can to maintain public trust and ensure that politics — both in fact and appearance — does not compromise or affect the integrity of our work,” Garland wrote in a memo to DOJ employees. Previous policy allowed political appointees to sometimes attend partisan events in their personal capacities if they participated passively and obtained approval, but Garland on Tuesday barred those individuals from participating in partisan political events in any capacity, even if the event is private. Bloomberg Law: Circuit Splits Reported in U.S. Law Week—August 2022 By Bernie Pazanowski .....Do state anti-SLAPP statutes apply in federal court? The Ninth Circuit joins the First Circuit saying that they do. But the Second, Fifth, Tenth, Eleventh, and D.C. circuits disagree. FEC Washington Post: FEC unanimously rejects complaints about Zuckerberg’s 2020 election grants By Isaac Stanley-Becker .....A unanimous bipartisan vote this summer by the Federal Election Commission has undercut fantastical claims about Mark Zuckerberg’s role in the 2020 election that have taken hold among GOP leaders, candidates and activists decrying “Zuckerbucks.” The claims originate in the more than $400 million donated in fall 2020 by Zuckerberg, the chief executive and founder of Meta, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to a pair of nonprofits that provided grants aiding state and local governments with election administration in light of the challenges posed by the coronavirus... Meanwhile, the contributions gave rise to numerous complaints before the FEC. Among the allegations were that Zuckerberg and Chan had made excess contributions in violation of federal campaign finance law and that one of the nonprofits they funded had failed to register as a political committee. The regulator rejected those claims in a series of 6-0 votes — a show of unity by the commissioners, who are split evenly by party. The votes took place in July, and attorneys for Zuckerberg and Chan were notified of the decisions in an Aug. 8 letter that was made public Thursday. Candidates and Campaigns Axios: Transparency issues haunt digital ads ahead of midterms By Ashley Gold .....After Big Tech platforms cracked down on political ads in the 2020 election's wake, political advertisers have increasingly flocked to the new Wild West of programmatic ad companies, per a report exclusively shared with Axios... Published by the University of North Carolina's Center on Technology Policy, the report, supported in part by the Knight Foundation, looks at the growing impact of programmatic ad companies to understand how they are shaping political speech ahead of the 2022 midterms... Social media platform rules around political advertisements are under close scrutiny, as they serve the majority of digital political ads in the U.S. Yet programmatic political advertising sorely needs clearer policies around content, disclaimers, targeting, transparency and accountability, the report argues... The report offers 12 recommendations for improving regulation and transparency of programmatic political advertising. The New Republic: Why Candidates Get More Bang for Their Buck Than Super PACs—Starting Now By Walter Shapiro .....Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon signed legislation that has turned out to be a de facto super PAC tax. Starting Friday, and continuing until the election, political candidates are entitled to discounted TV ad rates while super PACs, dark money groups, and party fundraising organizations have to pay the often-inflated market price for the same time slots. The political implications of the half-forgotten law are significant in a year when the Democratic candidates are out-raising their GOP counterparts. An analysis by Politico found that the number of online donors to Republicans dropped during the first half of 2022, an unexpected event at the beginning of a campaign year. Yet the super PAC tax limits the ability of conservative mega-donors and groups like Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund to rescue flailing candidates—like Blake Masters and J.D. Vance—this fall. New York Post: Dems’ cynical spending on Trumpy primary candidates shows their priority is power, not ‘saving democracy’ By Dan McLaughlin .....President Joe Biden says that “MAGA Republicans” stand for “semi-fascism” that “threatens the very foundations of our republic.” Who are these semi-fascists? Sometimes he says they’re President Donald Trump and his supporters, then he backpedals. Sometimes he says they’re the Jan. 6 rioters or people who think Biden stole the 2020 election. Sometimes he lumps in pro-lifers, Wall Street and anyone who opposes Biden’s agenda. Biden’s a Democrat, so it’s fair play for him to oppose all Republicans. But if Democrats want Americans to take seriously their dire warnings about Make America Great Again candidates being a threat to the survival of democracy, the least they could do is stop helping Trump allies and “Stop the Steal” protesters win Republican primaries. They’ve been up to that all year, to the tune of $43.9 million and counting in spending on TV ads and mailers. In nearly every case where Democrats have taken sides in Republican primaries, they’ve backed either a Trump-endorsed candidate or one who says Trump was robbed in 2020: Read an article you think we would be interested in? Send it to Tiffany Donnelly at [email protected]. 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