The Oregon Government Ethics Commission (OGEC) has decided not to investigate a lobbyist for the state’s largest teachers union who provided an incomplete and falsified copy of a Freedom Foundation mailer to legislators earlier this year.
OGEC’s commissioners formally voted to adopt its staff’s preliminary report on the matter, which recommended they dismiss the case rather than open a full investigation.
In May, the Freedom Foundation filed a complaint against Cynthia Branger Muñoz, a lobbyist for the Oregon Education Association (OEA), alleging she misrepresented evidence to Oregon lawmakers when she gave them a doctored version of one of the Freedom Foundation’s mailers for the purpose of supporting House Bill (HB) 3789, the union-backed legislation designed to subject the Freedom Foundation to lawsuits over bogus claims that it “impersonates” unions when communicating to public employees.
The bill’s premise was every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, but Oregon’s Democrat-controlled legislature ultimately passed it along party lines anyway.
Among those supporting the effort was state Rep. Lesly Muñoz, sister of Branger Muñoz and a former OEA employee herself.
As the Freedom Foundation thoroughly pointed out in its complaint, the actions by Branger Muñoz violate state law, which prohibits lobbyists from making false statements or misrepresentations to public officials that could influence the outcome of legislation unless they promptly acknowledge the indiscretion and notify officials of the truth.
That’s exactly what transpired at the hands of Branger Muñoz and the OEA. In an attempt to show that Freedom Foundation communications “falsely impersonate” unions and give the bill a guise of legitimacy, they provided legislative committee members with a photocopy of a Freedom Foundation mailer that had been deceptively edited to remove entire portions of the original document that clearly identified the Freedom Foundation and its Opt Out Today project.
With deception as the goal, Branger Muñoz and the OEA also predictably neglected to notify the committee members it wasn’t an accurate representation of Freedom Foundation material. In fact, they pretended not to know it came from the Freedom Foundation at all.
Moreover, as multiple Republican lawmakers later pointed out, the doctored mailer was the only documentation provided to them by the OEA or any of the unions supporting HB 3789 before the House floor vote — and they never would have known about its deceptive nature had the Freedom Foundation itself not called it out.
In its preliminary report provided to OCEG commissioners last month, however, OGEC staff concluded there was no evidence Branger Muñoz’s actions were intentional or would have influenced the outcome of lawmakers’ votes on HB 3789.
Both conclusions are completely unsupported by the fact or law, as the Freedom Foundation’s original complaint makes clear.
Nevertheless, OGEC’s commissioners subsequently voted to adopt its staff’s preliminary report, thereby dismissing the case and declining to open a full investigation.
Oregon law does not provide a procedure to appeal.
There was no debate among the bipartisan but Democrat-controlled commission before the vote, although OCEG’s chairman, Dave Fiskum, took the opportunity to seemingly question the Freedom Foundation’s motives for filing the complaint, commenting as “a quick parenthetical” that “[t]his may be the first such issue before the Ethics Commission in my memory… usually such issues as this based on my experience as a lobbyist are resolved at the Capitol … (T)hat doesn’t argue against this issue, it just suggests the context…”
What “context” that was, Fiskum did not explain. Fiskum, himself a former government employee and co-founder of a lobbying firm, was first appointed to OCEG by former Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.
Ultimately, the only context is what the facts themselves make clear: Branger Muñoz and the OEA violated a longstanding lobbyist ethics law that is clearly within OGEC’s jurisdiction, and OGEC is letting them get away with it.
If, as Fiskum implies, OGEC has never before been asked to enforce this particular law, perhaps it’s because nobody has ever lied to lawmakers as brazenly as the OEA did about the Freedom Foundation.
At any rate, there’s an ironic silver lining to OGEC’s conclusion, as disappointing as it may be.
In finding that Branger Muñoz’s version of the Freedom Foundation mailer did not contain “any misrepresentation,” OGEC’s report pointed out that, although the photocopy she provided did indeed omit the mailer’s most obvious references to the Freedom Foundation, the mailer still contained “an unaltered form the recipient could fill out to ‘authorize the Freedom Foundation’ to cease union dues incurred by union members” and that “the Mailer’s QR code led to the Freedom Foundation’s website stating it was ‘(a) project of the Freedom Foundation.’”
Therefore, OGEC reasoned, it was obvious the mailer “contained information that could be used to identify the Freedom Foundation,” and thus could not have misled lawmakers.
While that conclusion badly misses the mark when it comes to lobbyist ethics, it could very well have unintended consequences for union leaders’ HB 3789 enforcement plans.
After all, considering state officials have now determined the Freedom Foundation’s mailers and website so clearly identify the organization that they couldn’t possibly be used to mislead legislators, government union leaders might have a harder time convincing a judge the exact same information is somehow misleading to their members in future claims.
That is, unless they think just that little of their members’ ability to comprehend it.
The Freedom Foundation doesn’t—and will continue to make sure public employees in Oregon have all the information they need to make up their own minds about union membership and dues payments.
