John Rees is a player in the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Jack Abramoff was their bag-man and Rees is their spymaster. And it should surprise no one that Abramoff and Rees work together. In fact, their close relationship goes back decades.
When the police raided the Puppet Warehouse in 2000, Jack Abramoff was working with John Rees and the Maldon Institute. In 1999, Jack Abramoff became the Secretary / Teasurer of Rees’ operation and he held that position until his scandal landed on the front page of the Washington Post in early 2004.
Their relationship gives a clue as to how the various RW gadflies like Grover Norquist were funded. In 1999, Jack and Tom DeLay’s former Chief of Staff, Ed Buckham, discussed where to move funding from Richard Mellon Scaife. Here is the email:
You can be sure that many similar emails are buried in the 742,000 pages of documents gathered and suppressed by John McCain during his Abramoff investigation cover-up (more details on the McCain/Abramoff Cover-up can be found in this Diary).
In his new book, "The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule", Thomas Frank adds more details about the early relationship between Jack Abramoff and John Rees. When Jack first came to DC, it was Rees who was singing his praises in the pages of Conservative Digest, the movement publication founded by Richard Viguerie in 1975. Wrecking Crew will come out on August 5 and this is a book that you should have on pre-order. I thought I knew a lot about Abramoff and these guys, but Frank may know more and he understands why they do what they do. These are crooks with an ideological justification for their crimes—and that makes them the worst kind of crook.
Rees came of age when COINTELPRO was still a "secret" program and wrecking havoc on the land. As a John Bircher, Rees would infiltrate liberal groups and pass along the "findings" to law enforcement agencies. He would also include his research in the pages of the various right-wing publications he wrote for and edited. As COINTELPRO was exposed, Rees took his work private. An October 26, 2000 profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer (not online) provided some details (emphasis added):
For four decades, Rees, 74, onetime Washington editor for the John Birch Society, has tracked protest and dissent - from antiwar demonstrators in the 1960s to today's anti-globalization movement.
He feeds his research to a special audience - law-enforcement agencies- publishing his findings in a series of obscure periodicals. His alliances in the past with police in Washington, New York state, and Los Angeles have left behind a trail of outrage.
Sometimes, Rees has infiltrated groups himself, using a false name on occasion. He also says he has many sources.
"We have stringers," Rees said [snip]
One of his earliest publications was the mimeographed Information Digest. Rees gathered some of its material by posing as a leftist himself. Among other things, it contained lists of license plates of cars at a Black Panther rally.
His activity went largely unnoticed until a scandal broke in New York state as legislators learned that state police had kept files with information on a million citizens. A legislative committee conducted an inquiry.
"What was reported by Information Digest was casually used to create dossiers on a wide spectrum of Americans whose only crime was to dissent," the committee's 1976 report found.
"Information Digest was the string that held together a network of hidden informants whose information was recorded by police departments throughout the nation without the individual involved knowing of the process and without independent checking by the police as to the validity and source of this derogatory information."
The Maldon Institute still publishes Information Digest and we can be certain that their work is still being sent to law enforcement agencies as well as to Republican campaigns and the noise machines of the RW. We can be certain that the work of the Maldon Institute is still being developed in the shadows and that it is still influencing policy makers and law enforcement. I would guess that current issues of Maldon Institute publications are reporting on the "dangers" of the Netroots and how we are funded by communists. It is silly and yet, a real danger to our liberties. We need to expose and fight these RW spies for hire.
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