Unlikely Victims and Enduring Consequences: Kimberly Reed’s documentary Dark Money (2018)

Reed manages to reduce a sprawling, complex story into an engaging, if tentacled, 98-minute political thriller, focusing on Montana’s fight against dark money at the US Supreme Court, in the legislature, and in State courts.

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In 1995, a flock of snow geese circled a lake.

The body of water they landed on was Butte, Montana’s Berkeley Pit, a massive abandoned open-pit copper mine – and Montana’s flagship symbol for corporate abandonment. The Anaconda Copper Company owned that mine, and it controlled Montana politics for many decades. In 1982, Anaconda’s successor corporation, ARCO, stopped mining. They turned off the pumps.

Within hours of landing on that snowy night in 1995, 350 geese were dead.

The Berkeley Pit is a giant poisoned lake that gets deeper every day despite a decades-long Superfund cleanup effort. This isn’t just Montana’s problem: because it sits at the headwaters of the Columbia River, the Berkeley Pit could someday threaten the entire Pacific Northwest.

Doomed birds are an apt opening symbol for filmmaker Kimberly Reed’s documentary Dark Money, a scathing story with unlikely victims and enduring consequences.

Dark money is easy to define and hard to stop. In the US, unlimited private (secret) donations to special nonprofit interest groups are legal. These groups use mass media, social media, and direct-mail blitzes to electrify a “third rail” that jolts people off track on the way to the voting booth. A politician who won with the help of dark money can claim “It wasn’t us! We didn’t smear (insert opponent’s name here).”

Helena Republican John Ward was an early victim of dirty tricks. Ward, the owner of a local Porta-Potty business, lost his re-election to the Montana legislature when, days before the election, a slick flyer from a front group called Mothers Against Child Predators claimed he sympathized with serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

I lived in Great Falls, Montana at the time. I remember my mailbox, stuffed with election-eve flyers accusing politicians of heinous acts and indefensible positions. These slick black-and-red postcards came from very patriotic-sounding groups, with words like “Tradition,” “Values,” “Rights” … and they showed opponents as fanged wolves or blood-covered cowards.

I remember thinking, “Sheesh, this is lame. It’s desperate. Would anyone believe this stuff?”

The voters in John Ward’s district did.

John Adams, then a reporter for the Great Falls Tribune, talked to the defeated candidate after the election. Adams voiced Ward’s frustration: “You can’t argue, can’t debate, you don’t even know who they are.”

In some ways Montana is an easy target. It’s a state with a lot of mineral riches and a small, basically conservative population.

But don’t think the state is too savvy to succumb to dark money.

The power of these smear campaigns, funded by invisible donors, is that they work like moths on the fabric of our republic. Special interests don’t want a democracy – they want to know what elected officials will do before their votes are cast.

Ann Ravel, former Chairperson of Federal Election Commission (FEC), says “campaign finance is a gateway issue.” Ravel knows the topic is not sexy. With their 2010 Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court established that unlimited secret spending is the same thing as holding up a sign in a protest rally.

It doesn’t help that the moths, who thrive in dim moonlight, eat their own.

The victims in Reed’s documentary aren’t socialists. They aren’t even Democrats – they’re mostly middle-aged Montana Republicans who are against abortion and don’t like unions.

The only thing that distinguishes these candidates from their fellow dark money-committed conservatives is that they would rather be elected than bought.

Montana is a great microcosm to study corporate corruption, and Reed does a fine job digging at Montana’s old scars and fresh wounds. Rich folks have always been intent on removing treasure from the Treasure State – leaving Montanans to pick up after them.

Montanans have fought back. Reed highlights the State’s 1912 anti-corruption law, but she neglects other benchmarks: in 1972 the state passed a constitution that guarantees “a clean and healthful environment.” In 1975, the legislature established the Coal Tax Trust Fund, to force coal companies to put up money in advance, to offset at least some of the impacts of strip mining.

Reed manages to reduce a sprawling, complex story into an engaging, if tentacled, 98-minute political thriller, focusing on Montana’s fight against dark money at the US Supreme Court, in the legislature, and in State courts.

Three heroes keep the audience engaged: Jonathan Motl, Montana’s former Commissioner of Political Practices, whose tiny, underfunded office exists to “preserve public trust in the election process”; investigative reporter John Adams, who doesn’t let being homeless interrupt his quest; and Sarah Arnold, a young anti-union, anti-choice conservative who risked her career to testify in court. “We can’t fight evil,” this principled young woman says, “by becoming evil.”

Other victims of dark money campaigns provide insight, drama, and even humor to Reed’s narrative. Dark Money does a fine job of capturing both the vulnerability and backbone of Montana politicians. The vignette of Montana’s US Senator, Jon Tester – complete with cuss words and a flash of ‘farmer’s crack’ – is spot-on. Reed even gives a few moments to Jim Brown, an attorney for American Tradition Partnership, to defend his contention that “free spending IS free speech.”

Governor Steve Bullock is portrayed as a soft-spoken guy who, as Montana’s attorney general, swung a big stick at the US Supreme Court. Bullock failed to get the court to reconsider Citizens United, the court case that established these dark money conduits. Bullock carried the lumber back to his home base of Montana, along with a few choice words of warning for every state in the Union.

Dark Money is, in many ways, Montana’s political Boyhood. Over the six years it took to produce, people get older. They get wiser. They get help from unexpected sources. They get canned.

In 2015, Chuck Johnson and Mike Dennison, the last two full-time state capitol reporters, had the newsprint pulled out from under them. Their employer, Lee Newspapers, which had kept an eye on all the hell in Helena, downsized.

Reed’s cameras captured Johnson’s dignified grief at losing his job – and his understanding that dark money loves waving goodbye to people who write things down.

John Adams, who worked for the Great Falls Tribune for seven years, was also forced out of his job at the Pulitzer-winning newspaper. Adams founded the online Montana Free Press, which also sells stories to newspapers, including his former employer.

Dark Money cracks a fast whip, despite a few jumpy timelines and unexplained visuals. Its central story – involving papers seized from a Colorado crack house, a red-headed Missouri attorney, and a legislator accused of underhanded tactics – is gripping.

Investigative reporter Adams uses a whiteboard to draw the insidious cycle of Dark Money, where it (probably) comes from, and where it (might) go. All fingers point to the Koch Brothers, National Right to Work, and the shell organizations that funnel funds into what one printer described as “a shock and awe electoral bombing campaign.”

Dark Money falters by not fully explaining the mushrooming of 501-C4s, nonprofit groups that allow a tremendous amount of opacity.

By not mentioning liberal groups, viewers of Dark Money might assume Democrats are somehow “above” using dark money. While the big money is with the far right, there are liberal groups who fight against dark money … by using dark money.

Though there are small victories, this isn’t an uplifting film – unless you own a corporation with influence to peddle and money to burn, and you’d like to know who to talk to and see how it’s done.

In 2016, despite efforts to keep snow geese from taking another Berkeley Pit stop, ten thousand more birds, seeking shelter from a raging snowstorm, landed and perished there. Geese with a less-than-lethal dose took the scourge high into the flyway, across state lines, where they dropped dead or landed on hunter’s dinner tables.

Politics is, according to Dark Money, becoming a toxic pit. If we don’t protect ourselves, pass the gravy. Our goose may be cooked.

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Dark Money is scheduled for release in select cities in July 2018. Go here for more information.