The Eagle Foundation

Why did ProtectMarriage.com pay these guys $130K last month?

The Eagle Foundation LinkedIn page.

The Eagle Foundation is a Washington D.C. based 501(c)(4) formed this past summer.

David Parker, former Co-Chairman, National Finance Committee at Romney for President, Inc., is apparently involved.

The Salt Lake Tribune, Utah Mormons will no longer aid Prop 8:

Individual Mormons in Utah and elsewhere were asked if they would participate in call centers, said David Parker, an LDS businessman who has a house in Sundance and works with the California coalition. "It was clearly stated that [this] had not yet been sanctioned or approved by the church. It was just a preparatory effort."

David Parker is also a former Chairman of the board of SRS Insurance Services, which donated $25K to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Did the Prop 8 campaign slip a little cash to somebody's pet project?

Or ... did that $130K payment go to this Eagle Foundation (which is a Prince ["Blackwater"] family vehicle for funneling $$ to Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, et al.)?

Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army:

The Prince and DeVos clans were also a major driving force behind the Michigan Family Forum (MFF), the state's chapter of Jim Dobson's Focus on the Family. Besides the tens of thousands of dollars that the Prince family poured into the MFF, another of Erik Prince's sisters, Emilie Wierda [Pres. of the Eagle Foundation], has served as its treasurer. The MFF has mobilized voters in conservative churches to support legislators who have backed the Christian right's agenda. Beginning in 1990, the MFF ran what was essentially a backdoor lobbying system, through the establishment of more than one thousand church-based Community Impact Committees (CICs), which operated under the radar, away from public scrutiny. "The CICs offer advantages to political organizing that other Christian Right organizing doesn't have," Russ Bellant wrote in his 1996 book The Religious Right in Michigan Politics. "Because they are based in churches, their meetings are not visible in the world of politics. Since laypersons rather than pastors may run these groups, they may not have a high profile even in the church community outside the Family Forum network." The MFF also established the Michigan Prayer Network, which consisted of "prayer warriors" assigned to nearly every legislator in the state. While the groups were prohibited from expressly lobbying, the effect of asking legislators to "pray" for issues like school choice and against gay rights made it, as one Michigan legislator put it, "just another lobbying gimmick."

So, which Eagle landed this tidy sum?

Based on the email below, I'm gonna go out on a limb and bet that it's actually the Mormon-run Eagle Foundation (h/t STM):

Sonja Eddings Brown has sent out an urgent call for a broad-based group of people to come to the Press conference at the DoubleTree in Santa Ana tomorrow, Friday, November 14that 12 p.m. See attachment for details and directions

WHERE: Santa Ana Doubletree Hotel, 201 East MacArthur Boulevard

WHEN: Friday, November 14that 12 p.m

She wants over two hundred people there, with a few Yes on 8 signs if they have them. I would guess that even home-made signs would be useful, as long as they say nothing extreme, but just talk about supporting free elections and respecting first amendment rights and freedom to exercise political rights and so forth.

She especially needs people there who represent the broad spectrum of the coalition: a dozen each of religious leaders or other representatives from the Coalition, including Evangelical, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim, LDS, Sikh, Hindu, Orthodox, and other religions; and including - again, about a dozen each - Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latino, Armenian, African-American, Iranian, Tongan, Samoan, other Pacific Islanders, Pakistani, Russian, Filipino, and many others. Please think of the groups that you worked with during the campaign, and ask them to attend the conference and join the coalition in condemning the violence, vandalism, threats, and harassment that have been committed against individuals and religious groups that supported the passage of Proposition 8.

Each of you please attend, and please let me know whether you are coming and whether you would like to speak with the media.

The shameful display of intolerance, hatred, and persecution that we have seen in the past week is taking a toll on the people of the state, and we need to show them that we stand by our votes and we continue to stand by marriage. Please attend the press conference, and bring with you several other people from your community and the other communities with whom you worked. We scheduled this at the lunch hour so people could leave work if they would like to attend.

Please ensure that everyone who comes will show the true nature of our coalition, i.e. that we are peaceful people who simply want to enjoy our political rights with no interference from others. We must not have any extreme voices there - they do not represent our leadership, our volutneers, or our voters, and will only detract from our message. If anyone who has been harmed is so hurt and angry that they would sound extreme if their comments were taken out of context, it is better that they not come. It is very important to have a large crowd, with no discordant voices that could be taken out of context and protrayed as representative of the whole coalition.

some of you will have gotten this message several times already, and others live too far away for it to be useful. To the former I apologize for the repetition; for the altter, I include this only for your information, so you know what is happening. If you know of people in Southern California that you think ought to attend, please let them know and ask them to attend. See the attachment for full information on the event.

Thank you.

- Bart
–
Barton W. Marcois
President
Eagle Foundation

Message Information:

From: bart marcois
Date: November 13, 2008 4:22:40 PM MST
To: “bmarcois@gmail.com”
Subject: Need people at Friday press conference - URGENT

Barton W. Marcois is a Senior Director at RJI Government Strategies, Inc. Until September 2003, he was the Bush Administration’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy. Bart is an active member of the Mormon church and sits on the board of the Mormon-led Family Leader Network.

And here's a little more about Bart:

He founded and chaired the RNC Advisory Council on LDS Outreach, and was responsible for the deployment of over 2,000 young volunteers to dozens of targeted battleground states and Congressional districts over the last three election cycles. These young people constituted 25% and 33%, respectively, of the total 72-Hour Task Force volunteers deployed nationwide in the 2004 and 2006 campaign cycles.

And a little background on Bart's Eagle PAC: Mormon-Run PAC Aims to Broaden Its Reach

Did the Eagle PAC morph into the Eagle Foundation around mid-summer?

April 2007 - EAGLE PAC WILL RAISE CASH FROM MORMONS: A new congressional campaign group could piggyback on Mitt Romney's apparent success in rounding up political cash from first-time Mormon contributors. Neither the website nor filing papers for the Eagle Political Action Committee, or Eagle PAC, mentions Mormons. But those familiar with the PAC say one of the reasons Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), a Mormon, created it this year was to solicit money from Mormons for distribution to Republican congressional candidates. That has never been tried before, said Cannon's congressional chief of staff, Joe Hunter, who registered the group as a leadership PAC with the Federal Election Commission on his own time.

Fast forward to June 25, 2008 - Cannon (R-Utah) has just lost his seat to a Republican challenger in the primary. Did Eagle PAC somehow get quickly re-purposed to support Prop 8 after June 25th? Because around that same time is when we first start hearing news that a new Mormon-run 501(c)(4) called "Eagle Foundation" is being launched and involves several of the cast of characters from Cannon's Eagle PAC.

Hmmmm.

Rather than speculating, maybe I should have just paid closer attention to this August 17th blog post:

In support of family values and conservative principles, the Eagle Foundation (“Foundation”) has agreed to sponsor, support and facilitate the grass roots effort of the Protect Marriage Amendment Initiative in California. Specifically, the Foundation has agreed to jointly employ key statewide grass roots personnel for the Protect Marriage Initiative. Additionally, the Foundation will assist in coordinating, managing and training a state wide grass roots field organization for critical voter turnout initiatives, as well as the development of a 72 hour Initiative Task Force.

D'oh.

A sobering reminder that those of us who fought Prop 8 got beat by serious pros with a volunteer army at their fingertips:

Mormon Journal from Ground Zero Ohio - Election Day, November 2, 2004 ...

Latter-day Saint Volunteers: 50% in Akron ... That's about 3% of the Latter-day Saint population in Akron, a county where Latter-day Saints only comprise about 3/10ths of a percent of the population ... In the end, 50% of the poll observers were LDS ... [As Bart Marcois told me, "Our voices need to be heard during the election so that we will be included in the policy setting after the elections.”]

Time to stop getting beat and start studying our opponent.

Odd & Ends:

https://www.sunstonemagazine.com/issues/135.pdf :

At the national level, Republicans did a better job of reaching out to Mormons, which is not surprising since a strong majority of Latter-day Saints generally support Republican candidates and policies. The Republican National Committee set up webpages targeting specific religious groups. KerryWrongforMormons.com (with sister sites KerryWrongforChristians and KerryWrongforEvangelicals) detailed issues where the RNC felt Kerry strayed from religious values. The sites were all very similar, with little content specific to the individual religions, but the Mormon site did have one major difference: across the top of the page, there was a link for Latter-day Saints to become part of a 72-hour volunteer task force.

Did Bart help Kiahna shift from DOJ to DOE?

Kiahna Sellers, LDS Outreach, Republican National Committee

Kiahna Sellers, Kyle Sampson, Monica Goodling - email pals

Meet former Mormon missionary Kiahna Sellers

Bush-Cheney '04 asked that Church Directories be sent to BC04 Headquarters

Bart Marcois requests we send him our post-2008 election Incident Reports

Bart is a member of The Committee on the Present Danger. More about the CPD here.

If you're not a member of this Facebook group, well, you suck.

Blackwater Guards Plan Utah Surrender: