Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (60 page)

Although Brown was a low-profile
: See Brian Mooney, “Late Spending Frenzy Fueled Senate Race,”
Boston Globe
, Jan. 24, 2010. The total spending by Brown and his opponent, Martha Coakley, in the Senate race was roughly equal, but while Coakley benefited from a large amount of cash from conventional Democratic Party committees, Brown got no money from GOP committees. The $2.6 million in contributions he got from outside conservative groups, which was almost $1 million more than Coakley got from outside spending groups, played a crucial role in filling this gap.

Two of the most active
: According to Steve Leblanc’s report for the Associated Press, Feb. 19, 2010, the American Future Fund spent $618,000 against Martha Coakley, and Americans for Job Security—a group that would receive $4.8 million from the Center to Protect Patient Rights in 2010—spent $460,000 on ads against Coakley. Together with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s $1 million in last-minute ads, those three groups made up the bulk of the $2.6 million spent by conservative outside groups in the last twelve days of the campaign.

“We thought we had it won”
: Participant who spoke on the grounds that he not be identified, interview with author.

Its clients ranged
: Ed Gillespie said he never supported the individual mandates, even though his firm represented the coalition of companies that suggested the plan. See James Hohmann, “Ed Gillespie’s Steep Slog to the Senate,”
Politico
, Jan. 13, 2014.

Within weeks, he set out
: Vogel,
Big Money
, 47, describes the meeting at the Dallas Petroleum Club in greater detail.

“People call us”
: Ken Vogel, “Politics, Karl Rove and the Modern Money Machine,”
Politico
, July/August 2014.

“It was all conceived”
: Glenn Thrush, “Obama’s States of Despair: 2010 Losses Still Haunt,”
Politico
, July 26, 2013.

By the end of 2010
: See Olga Pierce, Justin Elliott, and Theodoric Meyer, “How Dark Money Helped Republicans Hold the House and Hurt Voters,” ProPublica, Dec. 21, 2012.

“It was three yards”
: See Nicholas Confessore, “A National Strategy Funds State Political Monopolies,”
New York Times
, Jan. 12, 2014.

In the previous decade
: The $40 million spending figure is according to an analysis of tax records by Democracy NC, a progressive government watchdog group.

“He was a terrible candidate”
: Bob Geary, interview with author, which first appeared in Jane Mayer, “State for Sale,”
New Yorker
, Oct. 10, 2011.

“I’m not a charismatic”
: Art Pope, interview with author, which first appeared in ibid.

Under his guidance
: See Ted Gup, “Fakin’ It,”
Mother Jones
, May/June 1996. He writes that homemade-looking placards were in fact FedExed to the smokers’ rights groups from the tobacco company executives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

In 1994 alone
: Peter Stone describes the organization of smokers’ rights groups in his piece, “The Nicotine Network,”
Mother Jones
, May/June 1996.

In 2012, he pleaded guilty
: Ellis pleaded guilty in June 2012 to a felony charge of making an illegal campaign contribution. In the plea deal, he received four years of probation and was fined $10,000. He says it is his understanding that following the probationary period, in 2016, further adjudication may dismiss the charge.

“The grass roots was designed”
: Jim Ellis, interview with author.

At a second Capitol Hill rally
: Sam Stein, “Tea Party Protests—‘Ni**er,’ ‘Fa**ot’ Shouted at Members of Congress,”
Huffington Post
, March 20, 2010.

“You know they’re gonna”
: Halperin and Heilemann,
Double Down
, 13.

“We made a deliberate”
: Johnson, “Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems Fits.”

About a third of this
: The forms showed TC4 sending money to what accountants call “disregarded entities,” so that instead of appearing to go to CPPR, it went to two phantom limbs called Eleventh Edition LLC and American Commitment. See Viveca Novak, Robert Maguire, and Russ Choma, “Nonprofit Funneled Money to Kochs’ Voter Database Effort, Other Conservative Groups,”
OpenSecrets.org
, Dec. 21, 2012.

Previously, they had given
: The main such “social welfare” group the Kochs supported prior to 2010 was Americans for Prosperity, which they only moderately funded during the Bush years. Instead, they had donated mostly to what the IRS defined as charitable organizations, or 501(c)(3)s, for which they could take tax deductions and which were more strictly barred from electoral politics.

For example, at the end of 2010
: The Center for Responsive Politics first reported on the fact that the Center to Protect Patient Rights reported no spending on politics in its 2010 IRS 990 tax form. Kim Barker did an excellent, extensive report later, “How Nonprofits Spend Millions on Elections and Call It Public Welfare,” ProPublica, Aug. 18, 2012, describing the phenomenon in further detail.

Yet it granted $103 million
: These spending figures cover the years 2009 to 2011 and include the TC4 Trust.

In 2006, only 2 percent
: These sums were calculated by the Center for Responsive Politics and exclude spending by party committees.

“The political players”
: Barker, “How Nonprofits Spend Millions on Elections and Call It Public Welfare.”

Some joked that they attended
: Steven Law said several attendees, including himself, “went so they could tell their friends they went to Karl Rove’s house.” Joe Hagan, “Goddangit, Baby, We’re Making Good Time,”
New York
, Feb. 27, 2011.

“the birthplace of a new”
: Vogel,
Big Money
, 49.

Working closely with both
: Bloomberg reported, for instance, that in 2009 and 2010 the health insurance industry secretly funneled over $86 million into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for attack ads. Drew Armstrong, “Health Insurers Gave $86 Million to Fight Health Law,” Bloomberg, Nov. 17, 2010.

“there wasn’t one race”
: Vogel,
Big Money
, 53.

“in order of the likelihood”
: Eliana Johnson, “Inside the Koch-Funded Ads Giving Dems Fits,” National
Review.com
, March 31, 2014.

Efforts to track down
: Jim Rutenberg, Don Van Natta Jr., and Mike McIntire, “Offering Donors Secrecy, and Going on Attack,”
New York Times
, Oct. 11, 2010.

“has no purpose”
: Mike McIntire, “Under Tax-Exempt Cloak, Political Dollars Flow,”
New York Times
, Sept. 23, 2010.

In addition, Noble directed millions
: In 2010, Noble’s CPPR distributed $31 million—just under half of its funds—to five conservative groups that then spent similar amounts on TV ads targeting fifty-eight House Democratic candidates. The groups were the American Future Fund ($11.6 million), the 60 Plus Association ($8.9 million), Americans for Job Security ($4.8 million), Americans for Tax Reform ($4.1 million), and Revere America ($2.3 million). CPPR provided at least one-third of the budget raised by each of those five groups that year. CPPR’s next-largest expenses were $10.3 million for “communications and surveys” and $5.5 million to Americans for Limited Government, which sent out mailings attacking House Democrats.

“For the first time”
: Pooley,
Climate War
, 406.

“The Koch brothers went after me”
: Rick Boucher, interview with author.

McCarthy was an old hand
: Larry McCarthy declined to comment.

“Larry is not just”
: Floyd Brown, interview with author, which first appeared in Jane Mayer, “Attack Dog,”
New Yorker
, Feb. 13, 2012.

“serial offender”
: Geoff Garin, interview with author, which first appeared in ibid.

“a war”
: Jonathan Alter, “Schwarzman: ‘It’s a War’ Between Obama, Wall St.,”
Newsweek
, Aug. 15, 2010.

“You have no idea”
: James B. Stewart, “The Birthday Party,”
New Yorker
, Feb. 11, 2008.

A 2007
Wall Street Journal
profile
: Henry Sender and Monica Langley, “How Blackstone’s Chief Became $7 Million Man,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 13, 2007.

The media sensation
: Even business publications ran columns blasting the loophole. See Martin Sosnoff, “The $3 Billion Birthday Party,”
Forbes
, June 21, 2007.

over $6 billion a year
: Randall Dodd, “Tax Breaks for Billionaires,” Economic Policy Institute, July 24, 2007.

“Hedge funds really need”
: Asness’s open letter was written earlier, in May 2009, and was criticizing Obama for demonizing hedge funds for not going along with his administration’s attempt to restructure Chrysler. See Clifford Asness, “Unafraid in Greenwich Connecticut,”
Business Insider
, May 5, 2009.

“the closest thing”
: Andrew Miga, “Rich Spark Soft Money Surge—Financier Typifies New Type of Donor,”
Boston Herald
, Nov. 29, 1999.

According to later reports
: See Michael Isikoff and Peter Stone, “How Wall Street Execs Bankrolled GOP Victory,” NBC News, Jan. 5, 2011.

eleven were on
Forbes
’s list
: They were as follows:

Charles Koch: $44.7 billion

David Koch: $44.7 billion

Steve Schwarzman: $11.3 billion

Philip Anschutz: $11 billion

Ken Griffin: $7 billion

Richard DeVos: $5.8 billion

Diane Hendricks: $3.6 billion

Ken Langone: $2.9 billion

Steve Bechtel: $2.7 billion

Stan Hubbard: $2 billion

Joe Craft: $1.4 billion

“target-rich”
: Paul Abowd, “Donors Use Charity to Push Free-Market Policies in States,” Center for Public Integrity, Feb. 14, 2013.

By the end of the meal
: Kenneth Vogel and Simmi Aujla, “Koch Conference Under Scrutiny,”
Politico
, Jan. 27, 2011.

“one hell of a wake-up call”
: See Sam Stein, “$200 Million GOP Campaign Avalanche Planned, Democrats Stunned,”
Huffington Post
, July 8, 2010.

“It was clear”
: Anita Dunn, interview with author.

As late as May
: David Axelrod, conversation with author, May 2010.

“dropped on me”
: Bruce Braley, interview with author, which first appeared in Mayer, “Attack Dog.”

In 2010, Americans for Prosperity
: See Fang,
Machine
, 174. He describes attending the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference and seeing attendees taught to use video cameras “to harass Democratic officials until their inevitable outbursts were caught on tape.” He writes that several conservative groups held training sessions in the ambush video technique, according to attendees at their functions, including Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and American Majority.

Only in 2011 did it surface
: See Ben Smith, “Hedge Fund Figure Financed Mosque Campaign,”
Politico
, Jan. 18, 2011. Smith credits his colleague Maggie Haberman with figuring out the money trail.

“I voted to help build”
: Mayer, “State for Sale.”

Pope was instrumental
: The racially charged ad was produced by the North Carolina Republican Party. Pope said that he was not involved in its creation, but he and three members of his family gave the Davis campaign a $4,000 check each—the maximum individual donation allowed by state law. Pope told ProPublica that his $200,000 donation to Real Jobs NC was not for the REDMAP operation, or redistricting work. A lawsuit filed after the election concerning the redistricting effort, however, revealed that Pope consulted on how the borders were drawn. See Pierce, Elliott, and Meyer, “How Dark Money Helped Republicans Hold the House and Hurt Voters.”

“We didn’t have that before 2010”
: Mayer, “State for Sale.”

“Those ads hurt me”
: Ibid.

“If you put all of the Pope groups”
: Ibid.

“People throw around terms”
: Art Pope, interview with author, which first appeared in Mayer, “State for Sale.”

“The Obama team”
: Thrush, “Obama’s States of Despair.”

“We lost all hope”
: David Corn,
Showdown: The Inside Story of How Obama Fought Back Against Boehner, Cantor, and the Tea Party
(William Morrow, 2012), 44.

The conventional wisdom
: See a more detailed description of the debate over blaming dark money in ibid., 40.

“a 5,700-square-foot, eight-bedroom house”
: Jonathan Salant, “Secret Political Cash Moves Through Nonprofit Daisy Chain,” Bloomberg News, Oct. 15, 2012.

“There’s class warfare all right”
: Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,”
New York Times
, Nov. 26, 2006.

whose donor network had spent
: The figure $130.7 million represents the 2009–2010 spending by the Center to Protect Patient Rights ($72 million), the TC4 Trust ($38.5 million), and Americans for Prosperity ($38.5 million), deducting the money passed back and forth among these three nonprofits to avoid double counting, as reported by the groups’ IRS filings.

“Charles and David Koch no longer”
: Tom Hamburger, Kathleen Hennessey, and Neela Banerjee, “Koch Brothers Now at Heart of GOP Power,”
Los Angeles Times
, Feb. 6, 2011.

those with massive financial resources
: Freeland,
Plutocrats
.

“The more Republicans depend”
: Lee Drutman, “Are the 1% of the 1% Pulling Politics in a Conservative Direction?,” Sunlight Foundation, June 26, 2013.

“radicalization of the party’s donor base”
: For more on the implications of the “rise of the radical rich,” as Frum terms it, see David Frum, “Crashing the Party: Why the GOP Must Modernize to Win,”
Foreign Affairs
, Sept./Oct. 2014.

“took the biggest leap”
: Skocpol,
Naming the Problem
, 92.

Now the new Republican leadership
: The contributions and influence of the Kochs over the committee were first detailed by Hamburger, Hennessey, and Banerjee, “Koch Brothers Now at Heart of GOP Power.”

signed an unusual pledge
: Lewis et al., “Koch Millions Spread Influence Through Nonprofits, Colleges.”

“No Climate Tax” pledge
: See Eric Holmberg and Alexia Fernandez Campbell, “Koch Climate Pledge Strategy Continues to Grow,” Investigative Reporting Workshop, July 1, 2013.

By then, the 1980 Superfund law
: For more on the defunding of the Superfund program, see Charlie Cray and Peter Montague, “Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy,” Greenpeace, Sept. 2014, 26.

“rejected in a class action suit”
: See “Crossett, Arkansas—Fact Check and Activist Falsehoods,”
KochFacts.com
, Oct. 12, 2011.

“All along our street”
: David Bouie was interviewed in Robert Greenwald’s film,
Koch Brothers Exposed
, produced by Brave New Films.

Two years earlier
: See “The Smokestack Effect,”
USA Today
, Dec. 10, 2008.

Of this total output
: See EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory databank. By 2013 Koch Industries had improved its standing so that it ranked as the country’s tenth-largest toxic polluter, out of eight thousand companies required by law to register with the EPA.

“The investment banks”
: Continetti, “Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics.”

Another defender
: The University of Kansas political science professor Burdett Loomis told the
Washington Post
, “I’m sure he would vigorously dispute this, but it’s hard not to characterize him as the congressman from Koch.” See Dan Eggen, “GOP Freshman Pompeo Turned to Koch for Money for Business, Then Politics,”
Washington Post
, March 20, 2011.

Within weeks, Pompeo
:
The Washington Post
first wrote about Pompeo’s championing of the Kochs’ legislative priorities. Ibid.

Koch Industries’ lobbying disclosures
: See the Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer data,
http://data.influenceexplorer.com/lobbying/?r#aXNzdWU9RU5WJnJlZ2lzdHJhbnRfZnQ9a29jaCUyMGluZHVzdHJpZXM=
.

“naked belly crawl”
: Robert Draper,
When the Tea Party Came to Town
(Simon & Schuster, 2012), 180.

“It hurts to be tossed out”
: Robert Inglis, interview with author.

“an unconstitutional power grab”
: Fred Upton and Tim Phillips, “How Congress Can Stop the EPA’s Power Grab,”
Wall Street Journal
, Dec. 28, 2010.

“a wish list”
: Leslie Kaufman, “Republicans Seek Big Cuts in Environmental Rules,”
New York Times
, July 27, 2011.

“rips the heart out”
: “A GOP Assault on Environmental Regulations,”
Los Angeles Times
, Oct. 10, 2011.

Contrary to the partisan hype
: Solyndra went bankrupt, as did several other firms supported by the huge government loan guarantee program, but as National Public Radio reported, despite $780 million in losses from defaults on loans, the program made $810 million in interest, yielding a $30 million profit. Jeff Brady, “After Solyndra Loss, U.S. Energy Loan Program Turning a Profit,” NPR, Nov. 13, 2014.

A huge investor
: Dixon Doll’s firm, DCM, invested in Abound Solar.

“like night and day”
: Hamburger, Hennessey, and Banerjee, “Koch Brothers Now at Heart of GOP Power.”

“If you look”
: Coral Davenport, “Heads in Sand,”
National Journal
, Dec. 3, 2011.

“citizen’s arrest”
: Kenneth P. Vogel, “The Kochs Fight Back,”
Politico
, Feb. 2, 2011.

“spumed and sputtered”
: Golf partner of the Kochs, interview with author. The Kochs laying blame on the media for death threats and the need for bodyguards is based on author interviews with two of their interlocutors.

“They somehow thought”
: Vogel, “Kochs Fight Back.”

Michael Goldfarb
: See Jim Rutenberg, “A Conservative Provocateur, Using a Blowtorch as His Pen,”
New York Times
, Feb. 23, 2013. See more at
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/center_for_american_freedom/#_edn13
.

Later, he founded
: When the Kochs signed him on, Goldfarb was vice president of a public relations firm called Orion Strategies, LLC.
The Washington Free Beacon
was published by a nonprofit organization that hid its donors, called the Center for American Freedom. Its chairman was Goldfarb. Its 990 IRS disclosure shows that the Goldfarb-led nonprofit reported paying one for-profit vendor for public relations work: his own firm, Orion Strategies, LLC.

“Do unto them”
: See Matthew Continetti, “Combat Journalism: Taking the Fight to the Left,”
Washington Free Beacon
, Feb. 6, 2012.

“I mean no disrespect”
: Eliza Gray, “Right vs. Write,”
New Republic
, Feb. 22, 2012.

“tactics that have helped”
: See Kenneth Vogel, “Philip Ellender: The Kochs’ Unlikely Democratic Enforcer,”
Politico
, June 14, 2011.

“a wake-up call”
: Liz Goodwin, “Mark Holden Wants You to Love the Koch Brothers,”
Yahoo News
, March 25, 2015.

It’s uncommon for a private detective
: In a story about the company’s unusually aggressive dealings with reporters, in which
The Washington Post
described me as “the Kochs’ Public Enemy No. 1,” their spokesmen said only that the brothers had “no knowledge” of the plagiarism allegations made against me. See Paul Farhi, “Billionaire Koch Brothers Use Web to Take on Media Reports They Dispute,”
Washington Post
, July 14, 2013.

This time the sender
: Friess later said he had no involvement in the proposed investigative story on me.

“intellectual ammunition”
: See Schulman,
Sons of Wichita
, 320, which quotes Robert Levy, then Cato’s chairman, describing David Koch’s telling him that he wanted more “ammunition” for Americans for Prosperity and to support the Republican Party.

If anything, the Kochs’ ham-fisted reaction
: Kenneth Vogel and Tarini Parti, “Inside Koch World,”
Politico
, June 15, 2012.

The bidding during the final
: Interview with a guest at the resort during the seminar weekend.

“There’s a lot of sharp knives”
: Halperin and Heilemann,
Double Down
, 346.

Tea Party leaders
: See Skocpol and Williamson,
Tea Party and the Remaking of
Republican Conservatism.

While rich free-market enthusiasts
: For more on the differences in the policy preferences of the rich and others concerning entitlement spending, see Martin Gilens,
Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America
(Princeton University Press and Russell Sage Foundation, 2012), 119.

It was an intriguing idea
: Chapter 7 of the House of Representatives’ ethics manual bans all “unofficial office accounts” including “in-kind contribution of goods and services for official purposes.” Specifically, members are prohibited from accepting “volunteer services” from paid political consultants “pertaining to the development and implementation of [the member’s] legislative agenda.”

Much of it moved
: Overseeing the project at TC4 Trust, and later at a subgroup called Public Notice, was the same operative, a former Bush administration press officer named Gretchen Hamel, who had given a presentation at the January 2011 Koch seminar titled “Framing the Debate on Spending.”

The TC4 Trust was little more
:
OpenSecrets.org
did the groundbreaking reporting on the TC4 Trust. See, for instance, Novak, Maguire, and Choma, “Nonprofit Funneled Money to Kochs’ Voter Database Effort, Other Conservative Groups.”

“It wasn’t about developing policy”
: Ed Goeas, interview with author.

As President Obama worked up
: Paul Ryan’s eventual pitch, which was found misleading by several nonpartisan fact-checkers, claimed that it was Obama, not he, who planned to cut Medicare. In reality, Obama’s health-care act anticipated steady increases in Medicare spending but predicted a future reduction in the
rate
of increase, thanks to projected savings. Obama critics soon echoed the line of attack, though. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, claimed on his radio show, “Paul Ryan doesn’t rape Medicare to the tune of $500 billion! Your guy did!”

“When oligarchs control”
: Neera Tanden, interview with author.

A 2008 study
: For the study of the four hundred top taxpayers and tax rates during the twentieth century, see James Stewart, “High Income, Low Taxes, and Never a Bad Year,”
New York Times
, Nov. 2, 2013.

Fully 60 percent
: A concise and illuminating report on capital gains taxes, from which the statistics here are drawn, is Steve Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang, “Capital Gains Tax Rates Benefiting Wealthy Feed Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor,”
Washington Post
, Sept. 11, 2011. They note that 80 percent of capital gains during the previous twenty years went to just 5 percent of Americans, of which half were among the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the population.

Soon, though, those at the very top
: Jeffrey A. Winters,
Oligarchy
(Cambridge University Press, 2011), 228.

“tax-cutting spree”
: See Hacker and Pierson,
Winner-Take-All Politics
, 48.

“Our goal”
: Charles Koch, “Business Community.”

“Wealthy people self-tax”
: Friess as quoted by Freeland,
Plutocrats
, 246–47.

“I agree with”
: Charles Koch’s speech to the Council for National Policy, Jan. 1999.

“This is false”
: Leon Wieseltier, interview with author.

According to one 2006 report
: Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy,
Spending Millions to Save Billions: The Campaign of the Super Wealthy to Kill the Estate Tax
, April 2006,
http://www.citizen.org/documents/EstateTaxFinal.pdf
.

One member of their network
: Cris Barrish, “Judge Shuts Down Heiress’ Effort to Alter Trust with Adoption Plot,”
Wilmington News Journal
, Aug. 2, 2011.

“It used to be”
: Corn,
Showdown
, 76.

“failed to withstand”
: Barry Ritholtz, “What Caused the Financial Crisis? The Big Lie Goes Viral,”
Washington Post
, Nov. 5, 2011.

“right-wing lunacy”
: Noam Scheiber,
The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery
(Simon & Schuster, 2011).

According to a
New York Times
analysis
: These projections of the fallout from cuts in Ryan’s budget refer to its 2012 iteration and appeared in Jonathan Weisman, “In Control, Republican Lawmakers See Budget as Way to Push Agenda,”
New York Times
, Nov. 13, 2014.

“Robin Hood in reverse”
: See Jonathan Chait, “The Legendary Paul Ryan,”
New York
, April 29, 2012.

“the most courageous”
: David Brooks, “Moment of Truth,”
New York Times
, April 5, 2011.

“The right had succeeded”
: See Freeland,
Plutocrats
, 265. She writes, “In April and May of 2011, when unemployment was 9 percent,…the five largest papers in the country published 201 stories about the budget deficit and only sixty-three about joblessness.”

“We made a mistake”
: Bob Woodward,
The Price of Politics
(Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013), 107.

A Democratic underdog
: The race in New York’s Twenty-Sixth Congressional District was won by the Democrat, Kathy Hochul.

But the House Republicans
: See Draper,
When the Tea Party Came to Town
, 151.

“We led”
: Ibid.

The donors were excited
: The assertion that the donors felt their investment was worth it is based on an interview with someone familiar with their thinking, who asked not to be identified.

“an apocalyptic cult”
: Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein,
It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism
(Basic Books, 2012), 54.

“deal with it as adults”
: Naftali Bendavid, “Boehner Warns GOP on Debt Ceiling,”
Wall Street Journal
, Nov. 18, 2010.

“if we don’t solve”
: Frum, in “Crashing the Party,” describes Stanley Druckenmiller’s position as “amazing” and radical.

“delay tough decisions”
: In addition, Koch-backed advocates had long argued against closing the carried-interest loophole. In 2007, when Congress debated closing it, Adam Creighton, a Koch fellow at the Tax Foundation, a research group supported by Charles Koch, argued that “this is not going to raise tax revenue at all.”