Palin's PAC Reportedly Paid Big Money To Mysterious Company

This story was buried on the Huffington Post website, with links to third party websites, no story on Huffington Post itself. It's all about a very strange research company that has been hired by Sarah Palin's Political Action Committee. The company has taken "significant steps to mask its ownership, with addresses linked just to mail drops, no website, no phone numbers, and the lawyer who set it up in California doesn't know who is behind it".

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From the article

Two recent federal filings for SarahPAC list a Sheridan, Wyoming, address for Paideia Research. When one local blogger visited the address, he found a low-slung, non-descript building that's home to Sheridan Answering and Secretarial Services, a company that handles phone calls and mail for customers. (Other bloggers soon started asking questions about Palin's mystery research firm.) When asked by Mother Jones about Paideia, Sheridan Answering's owner, Ginger Horton, replied, "I have no idea who they are."

Wyoming business records show that Paideia was incorporated in July. In addition to the local Wyoming address, these records list another in southern California. That address, in turn, traces to another mail forwarding service. Paideia's corporate filings also indicate that it is managed by Pyramid Management LLC, which belongs to a California-based ex-lawyer and realtor, David DeLoach, who specializes in setting up untraceable LLCs and pre-fab shell companies in Wyoming and Nevada—states that don't tax corporate income and have exceedingly lax disclosure rules.

More recently, he's been a combative contributor to the website Conservatives4Palin. There he took on Palin's critics on the left and the right, attacking journalists including Marc Ambinder (then of The Atlantic, now of National Journal), Politico's Ben Smith, and National Review's Jonah Goldberg, among many others.

Not surprisingly, Livestro's views skew to the right. He helped to found the Edmund Burke Foundation, a right-wing Dutch think tank created to push back against progressive politics in the Netherlands. In one manifesto, citing the number of Muslims in the Netherlands, the foundation warned of ethnic conflict and said the country's borders should be closed. In the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland, Livestro once wrote that the gruesome photos depicting detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib resembled little more than an out-of-control frat party; he complained that Abu Ghraib critics were "cry-babies" exaggerating the episode's signficiance. On his blog, Livestro similarly quipped that the CIA's torture techniques—with the exception of waterboarding—were milder than the hazing methods of fraternities. On the issue of climate change, Livestro falls into the denier camp: Last year, he wrote that the Climategate e-mail scandal showed there was no need for tackling a global climate treaty.

SarahPAC's filings note that Paideia provides "research consulting." On Friday, in an article about Palin's 2012 aspirations, Real Clear Politics reported in passing that Livestro had been hired by the Palin camp to advise her on the European debt crisis. (The story didn't mention Livestro's company, Paideia.)

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