Its the Biggest Company no one has heard of it almost every american probably comes into contact with a. But theres georgiapacific lumber like so many other products you are a consumer of the industries and it was an epic fight who is going to have the control of the company that the father started and the two that lost out are the ones you dont hear about. Host what do bill and fred do . Guest he started up his business of fossil fuels. It has call and gas. He has his company that had a different kind of coke and fred is a shy philanthropist who is very interested in the arts and gives money to all kinds of cultural institutions because the other brothers are splashy and like to get attention and david cokes is known to everybody in new york city because he is ablaze and on so many institutions but he likes to get attention for its where his older friend is quite quiet about it. Host when you refer to fred as artistic or you saying that hes gay . Guest i wouldnt say that i know because fred has said himself that hes not gay. His brothers have accused him of being gay over the years and a say in fact they tried at one point according to a document that i described in the book it is a sealed Court Documents that describes under oath testimony about how they tried to frame their older brother and they said they called him to a meeting that they said was a Company Meeting and infected was a Kangaroo Court where they had their older brother walk him in his 20s at that point and they said they were going to kill their father he was gay and unless he turned over his share in the company to their other brothers, said was an attempt to blackmail his private life. His private life has remained private so i dont feel that its my role in life to try to out people who may be gay or not be gay. I would like to give him the right to decide the privacy he wants to live in but i think that its too bad his own brothers didnt show that same kind of respect and its an insight into this family. This is a rough, tough, ruthless bunch of people. And this is the story i tell in the book about the story dark about the story of the family members. They went against each other and the idea that you might try black telling your road brother and they said they would disinherit him if they found out. The older brother didnt buckle under. Theyve grown up with him and us all the rough. They stood up and fred walked out of the room and before that he said i dont ever want to hear about this again. He didnt get treated the same and runs of inheritance but he walked out on that and in recent years he said he is a supporter of gay writes even though people think of them as vastly conservative, but they are not really social conservative, they are libertarians with me that he changed his views on this but it was a brutal confrontation. Host held as how does a reporter all circuit a hold of a sealed Court Documents like that . Guest with lots and lots of trying. There are certain things i cant talk about how i got the documents i have. You but you can see that nobody has challenged for the authenticity of it and there are new documents in the book and its took it took a long time to put this book together up against the law to try to get the information but as a reporter i think the Court Documents are one of the most kind of unassailable types of factors that you can bring to the public. Host and dark money the history of the millionaires behind the radical right, were you able to interview any of the family members . Guest i wish i could talk more about the people i was able to interview who do not want to be discussed. I cant really talk about that in greater detail but i can say that neither david or charles spoke to me. And i did try for quite a few years and for some feedback people worked with him or talk to people that tried to get an interview, theyve got a long history of secrecy. So there is kind of a family saying he said it is in the whale spouts that he gets harpooned and so for that reason he has preferred to swim under the surface. So, the story that i tell here is mostly the story these people dont want told and they certainly dont want to help me tell it. Host you write the fiercely terry and family owned part of its fortune. These are maybe the countrys foremost libertarian influences opposed to the antiauthoritarian, yet the familys fortune begins when the father is a very bright man and an early graduate at mit figured out a better way to crack lille to turn it into refinement and he had this breakthrough he couldnt sell it in america because he felt the Major Oil Companies were blocking him and they had kind of a monopoly so they had to take it elsewhere if he was going to make money so ironically the place he went first was the soviet union and he went to stalin and he built Something Like 15 royal refineries in the first fiveyear plan of the soviet union and then he realized he could get his own people to design these and they could copy it. So he was kind of out of Business Bear and looking further for where he could go come he then helped to design one of the most important refineries and not see germany. He got the commission in 1933, started building in 1935 so at this point by then come the people who are watching the rise of hitler became chancellor of the third right in 1983. Hitler is in control at this point in a lot of bad things are beginning to happen. But, fred coke was making money and this refinery that was built to be personally greenlighted. At first they said they didnt want this american refinery and hitler said he wanted and okayed it and it became key to announce the war efforts. It was a very advanced refineries that could refine highoctane fuel that was necessary for the air force and hitler was trying to build up the military at this point and saw the possibilities and this became a very big part of the not the war effort. The u. S. Allies bombed several times because it was a key target during world war ii and according to the reports that came out after my book, in between the and between the bombings was built by slave labor by people people who do not cease concentration camp to put it back together again. So it is a historic and interesting twist on one of americas Biggest Companies and its kind of the Hidden History that i totally didnt necessarily want the world to know. Host how is it that they are privately held . Guest i think its very important. Im not one of the worlds experts on business that i did start my day to come come like a rear i could hear was 12 years at the wall street journals of the difference between public and private company is the first of all, the private company is accountable mostly to its owners and in this case thats principally and almost exclusively exclusively these two brothers so theyve been able to pile their money back into it over and over again instead of trying to show a media games for stockholders. This has helped them make it very successful. Its phenomenally successful, so its been great for them financially and its kept out of the public eye so its been kind of a Secretive Company that doesnt have to answer to many people. Host how long did you work on this book and where did you get the interest . Guest i was working on this book it started with a magazine piece for the new yorker, where im a staff writer, and i did that in 2010, so i suppose you could say that its been five years or Something Like that, but i wasnt working exclusively on the book the whole time. Maybe the last three years i was working on it exclusively. My interest in the right pretty much is serendipitous. It comes from my career as a reporter in washington in 1983 the wall street journal property to washington to cover the Ronald Reagan white house and i saw that the campaign so i lived through this period and ive watched these were my sources many of the people in the books ive written were the people i interviewed and i saw and what interested me and part of the reason i wrote dark money is that when i started many years ago, these people were on the fringe. These were people if reagan were president that there were always people that were on the far right that i called because they were interesting for the counterpoint and comments but they were way out there. Dont take my example for it, there is a close in the beginning where william f. Buckley describes the movement as a narco authoritarian. They thought they were kind of the lunatic fringe and so what interested me by the time i wrote this book is that they have gained so much power that in some ways they have become the center of gravity in the Republican Party. I mean, there is a new study out from harvard who described the effect and they say it is a magnetic pulling on the Republican Party that has sort of pulled up a whole party with them so i was interested how did they get from way out there to the center of the republican politics and republican politics and in many ways the center of american politics. Host is the Political Network in your view stronger than the Republican National committee. In some ways whats happened is the network has subsumed the parties of the positions that the candidates take are often the positions that they have the money and offer to Campaign Funding and other support from all the different groups they have to the candidates who Will Champion their positions, so as an example right now in the republican field of the president ial primary candidates, all of the major candidates have come to ask for their financial Backing Service kissing the ring to some extent. There is one candidate who was the exception. Hes saying i own myself and all the others around and its become a dynamic in this campaign. Host what made the growing financial role in american politics extraordinary was the way that merge all forms of political spending into one investment aimed at paying huge future dividends. Guest that is true. In particular, they have a kind of a force magnifier its not just that they are among the richest people in the world which of course adds a certain amount of clout their political ambitions but theyve been very smart as have the other families that i write about about using philanthropy. The idea that these families have private foundations that they can give money to and take the tax deductions, though they are subsidized basically i the public treasury and with those foundations they push their ideology and it pushes their interest. They are almost like lobbying operations but they are taxdeductible and each of these families that i described has done that in different ways and it, you know, youve got is people who can give money for the Huge Corporation, through a gigantic private family fortune and through a network of philanthropic groups that echo their message all across the country and its the third prong in some ways that made them so interesting and important. Host how is that different than someone on the left doing the same thing through their donations . Guest in some ways i think that he probably got into counterbalance. One thing that he does is his money that he gives is disclosed money. Its called the dark money because its about money that is given behind the scenes by people who dont want you to see the fingerprints so in order to hide the money trail they give money to these groups that dont show who the donors are and they are supposed to not be principally in politics. Thats debatable i would say. So this is about the that theme in particular and how important its become. She saw rose gives some of that money in an undisclosed way through the organization at least he hasnt passed so his engagement to some extent i did do a big piece about him and when you write about them in the country inevitably what you hear about since they are on the right is people saying why dont you write about him so i might as all get this off the table i wrote a very long piece in the new yorker in 2004 which was the year he truly started putting serious money into electoral politics and i wrote all about him and after that, he was very disappointed. He was trying to defeat george w. Bush and he withdrew from the electoral politics somewhat. The reason im focusing on the kochs, they stepped up their role in politics. They are currently putting together a jackpot they themselves have described as having 889 million potentially for this cycle. At its height he spent Something Like 20 million of his own money so we are talking 889 million. Even now youre talking about a kind of money and a few hands that nobody has seen in this country before. Host let me show some video and you will know what it is. This is something you write about in your book. Very soon after i discovered that there had been kind of an Opposition Research project on me and the people at Kochs Industries had organized it and they have hired a private eye that turned out to be the police commissioner, the former police commissioner, not current, exactly, with his son and daughter whod been at the fbi and they have a private firm in new york and i eventually pieced together the story just as a reporter would and found a source that told me they were looking for dirt and if they couldnt find it they would make it up, so they have actually made something up. They put together a story saying that i was a plagiarist and they tried to peddle it to a couple of news organizations neither of which would run it because it turned out not to be true but it would have been a pretty terrible if it had gotten into print and luckily nobody ran with it. Its about the top people in than in washington putting together an operation in which they worked with a private eye in new york city today got dirt on me and they spent quite a few months looking for anything they could use to discredit me and im not alone in this. There are many instances in this book of specifically hiring them to dig up dirt on people who challenge them. They have a huge private company they are trying to play a role in americas public life but from behind the scenes and they dont like it when one shines a big light on them and that is what i was trying to do. Host you say that it was set up in the lobbying office. Guest there was extra space in the back room. Eventually i was able to get a pretty good picture of what was going on and it was extraordinary in my experience. Ive covered a lot of things that i have not asked far as i know been the target of an effort to discredit me as quite like that. Maybe i should be flattered on some level that anyone would take a reporter so seriously but it was scary in a way. I mean it felt like an effort to ruin me and i think that if they have succeeded in convincing people that i was plagiarizing, i mean for a reporter, that is a crime of purpose to it. Its something that could take you down. So it wasnt a minor kind of effort, it was a killer effort. So im very glad that it didnt succeed, and my colleagues from whom i was supposed to plagiarize where fantastic and stood up to defend me and said that this isnt true. One of the stories that i was supposed to he said not only did you not, you credited me in the next sentence, so it was a badly done operation in some ways but its unusual and it gives you an insight that these two brothers who wants to much a much power over american politics have played. Host where did that title of the book come from . Guest it came from the former Vice President dick cheney. He said in order to win this war on terror, we are going to need to kind of play on the dark side and it wasnt clear what he was talking about at that point. What did the dark side mean. But the book explains what that title and the term was talking about. Host did you ever meet Vice President dick cheney were interviewing for the buck . Guest i certainly have met him and had a chance to talk with him. He did not give me the interview for the buck. For a little while, i had the answer to my interview request on the Bulletin Board i said can you talk to me anytime in the last two years and the answer came back from an assistant said Vice President will be very busy the next two years but i have had a chance to see him since. We actually were in a room together at one point going on abc together and it was just the two of us sitting there having our makeup put on and it was great to have a chance to talk to him. He commented on some of the things in the book that seemed as if he had read some of it and we talked about the labrador retrievers which we share a great love for. Host this is a complicated story. In the efforts to stop the clock, im a reporter, we all see the headlines and can lead a story thats maybe a few inches long, 20 inches long in the newspaper. They are all efforts to say there is so much more going on here and the only way that i can do is take a leave of absence from my day job and write deep down and explain what was going on behind the curtain so thats what these books are kind of an effort to do. Host you write the lead architect of the administrations idiosyncratic interpretation of american law was a tall and be speckled government lawyer who had the luck dc captain. Host that was David Addington who is a fascinating character and a true leader. Again a lot of his characters ive written about here are people who kind of fit that the justice talked about they are true believers even though they feel pure of heart they are in some ways many of the people are dangerous. They are such true belief is that they kind of can take the country right off the cliff and he was a true believer in executive power and secrecy and he was in a position to help guide the Bush Administration into authorizing the war on terror was behind closed doors from the comfort operations using tactics that if they were public might have been very controversial. Host they blamed the Scooter Libby story. Was that a sideshow to all of this in a sense . Scooter libby was the a