White House Violates Anti-lobbying Statues

It took a while, but the administration finally came clean. Not so clean that you'd want to eat off of them, but they removed a bit of their murky mud to admit that they actually were behind the unsolicited email that flooded the internet on behalf of their radical health care reform agenda. According to a Fox News report:

The White House hired a private communications company based in Minnesota to distribute mass e-mails, helping to shed light on how some recipients received e-mails in support of President Obama's health care plan without signing up for them.

The company, Govdelivery, describes itself as the world's leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions and says its e-mail service provides a fully-automated on-demand public communication system.

It is still unknown how much taxpayer money the White House provides to Govdelivery for its services.

If taxpayer cabbage was used for this obviously agenda-driven e-barrage, then we are looking at a clear violation of anti-lobbying statutes.

The Oval Office is trying to pass of the whole sordid affair as a mistake on the part of Govdelivery massive mailings, but as reported by Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air, who took time off from his Marriage Encounter weekend to dip back into the truth (I hope his wife understands), Govdelivery is not taking the fall and dropped this exchange on their website.

Q: Where do GovDelivery clients get the email addresses and mobile phone numbers used to reach the public through the GovDelivery digital communications platform?

A: GovDelivery’s clients can offer updates on specific topics through their websites, and often include a subscription sign-up (opt-in) form. Some GovDelivery clients serving a similar audience cross-promote content (topics) from related government agencies by offering subscription items from other agencies (think of this as ‘one stop shopping’ for government information that is of interest to a particular citizen). Finally, GovDelivery allows clients to upload existing contact lists into GovDelivery. …

Q: Does GovDelivery ever share one GovDelivery client’s contact list with another organization?
A: No. GovDelivery does not share contact information collected and stored by one client with any other clients under any circumstances.

In other words, the address list of recipients for this taxpayer-funded spam was provided by the White House. Oops.