The Intimidation Game (34 page)

VanderSloot was stunned, and attempted to set things straight. He put out a long statement in February addressing many of the claims about his business and the history of the newspaper series. He publicly stated that he had “many gay friends whom I love and respect. And I believe they love and respect me. I am very close to some of these very good people. Our company has thousands of gay customers, independent marketing executives and employees. I believe they feel welcomed and valued. I believe that people deserve freedom, respect, and privacy in their own lives.” He added, “At the same time, I believe there are both appropriate and inappropriate ways to address the concerns of the gay community,” and listed his opposition to using public tax dollars to air the PBS documentary at a “time when it would attract the most children.”

VanderSloot flew to San Francisco to meet with the editor of
Mother Jones
and the reporter who wrote the piece. He wanted them to understand what had really happened. They refused to retract the attacks on his and his company's reputation. VanderSloot ultimately decided to litigate.

One of VanderSloot's gay friends meanwhile set up a meeting between the CEO and the Human Rights Campaign, so that he could mend fences. He and that friend flew to New York and spent a long time explaining to the HRC that while he'd taken a position on gay marriage, he'd never taken one against gay people. The HRC never retracted its comments, but it did let its online action die off.

VanderSloot meanwhile spent a lot of time back in Idaho Falls on conference calls, reassuring employees and customers. “We lost business at that time,” he says. “It was tough. But we were putting a lot of time into it, and we were able to manage it.”

On April 20, Barack Obama's campaign swept up every innuendo, insult, stain, and insinuation against VanderSloot and threw it up on the website.

That proved far less manageable.

I was on the phone with a source a few days after the Obama post came out. He was complaining about the audacity of the president, and randomly mentioned the website, and that Obama had taken to smearing private donors. I hadn't seen it, but I went to look.

A few liberal bloggers were busy recirculating the smears. But while there was no question that the mainstream media was monitoring Obama websites, nobody had really written about the post. Few in the press corps seemed remotely bothered that the leader of the free world had named names.

I wrote a column called “The President Has a List.” It went through the blog entry, and the president's history of smearing other political “enemies.” It pointed out that, unlike senators or congressmen, presidents alone represent all Americans. Their powers—to jail, to fine, to bankrupt—are so vast as to require restraint. It noted that any president who targets a private citizen for his politics is de facto engaged in government intimidation and threats—which is why presidents since Nixon had carefully avoided the practice.

It also noted that while the men listed were wealthy individuals, they were private citizens nonetheless. Not one held elected office. Not one was a criminal. Not one had the barest fraction of the power of the president who was attacking them. And I quoted Ted Olson, the former solicitor general. “We don't tolerate presidents or people of high power to do these things. When you have the power of the presidency—the power of the IRS, the INS, the Justice Department, the DEA, the SEC—what you have effectively done is put these guys' names up on ‘Wanted' posters in government offices.”

The article noted that the men's only real crime, as the site tacitly acknowledged, was that they'd had the presumption to give money to Mr. Obama's opponent. The White House had spent two years claiming it was simply interested in outing dark money. But these donors had acknowledged their giving, and here was an example of what Obama was really after—names, for retribution. And the campaign's argument that its website was about holding “the eventual Republican nominee accountable” was silly. What did VanderSloot's billboard of fifteen years earlier have to do with Romney? To this day it remains the most-read column I've ever written—a testament to Americans' abiding interest in free speech.

A few weeks later, I got a call from Frank VanderSloot. I recognized the name from the blog post. By this point, the CEO was a bit media shy. He'd been through the liberal wringer, and he was nervous on the phone. I didn't blame him. He'd seen my piece and was hopeful I was open-minded. Because he had a tale to tell—about what had followed the president's blog post. It turns out that when the president singles you out, bad things really do happen.

Twelve days after VanderSloot ended up on the list, he got a tip from someone he knows in Idaho Falls. A man named Michael Wolf had just contacted the Bonneville County Court in that city, in search of court records about VanderSloot. Specifically, Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with VanderSloot's divorce records, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.

Wolf sent a fax to the clerk's office—which I obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or VanderSloot. He listed only his name and a private cell phone number.

This is what VanderSloot told me. When I started reporting, I found out that Wolf until a few months prior had been a lawyer on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. But he'd found new, shadier work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from “Glenn Simpson.” That's the name of a former
Wall Street Journal
reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.

The website for that company, Fusion GPS, describes itself as providing “strategic intelligence,” with expertise in areas like “politics.” That's a polite way of saying “opposition research.”

When I called Fusion's main number and asked to speak to Michael Wolf, a man said Wolf wasn't in the office that day but he'd be back the next week. When I reached Wolf on his private cell, he confirmed that he had until recently worked at the Senate.

When I asked what his interest was in VanderSloot's divorce records, he hesitated, then said he didn't want to talk about that. When I asked what his relationship was with Fusion, he hesitated again and said he had “no comment.” “It's a legal thing,” he added.

Fusion dodged my calls, so I never was able to ask who was paying it to troll through VanderSloot's divorce records. As my column on this was about to go live, Simpson finally sent an e-mail stating, “Frank VanderSloot is a figure of interest in the debate over civil rights for gay Americans. As his own record on gay issues amply demonstrates, he is a legitimate subject of public records research into his lengthy history of legal disputes.”

A look through Federal Election Commission records did not show any payments to Fusion or Wolf from political players, such as the Democratic National Committee, the Obama campaign, or liberal super PACs. Then again, when political groups want to hire researchers, it is not uncommon to hire a less controversial third party, which then hires the researchers. VanderSloot would later do some of his own research, but couldn't find out who Simpson's client was. It isn't too hard to guess.

Fusion, interestingly, surfaced again in 2015. It turned out to be the creator of a “forensic report”—commissioned by Planned Parenthood—that sought to claim that videos showing the group discussing the harvesting of fetal organs were “manipulated.” Planned Parenthood never mentioned that Simpson's Fusion GPS is a for-hire hit group.

The column about VanderSloot's travails caused quite a stir, and he ended up going on a lot of TV shows. One was Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show. On the show, the CEO worried out loud about who was “supposed to receive the message? Is it only the liberal press that's supposed to go after these folks? Or is it also the agencies that he runs…that he's in charge of and who report to him and want to please him? The FTC, the FDA, the USDA?”

Turns out that was a very legitimate worry. In a letter dated June 21, he'd been informed that his tax records had been “selected for examination” by the Internal Revenue Service. The audit also encompassed VanderSloot's wife, and not one but two years of past filings (2008 and 2009).

VanderSloot had been working since his teens, and neither he nor his accountants could recall his ever being subject to a federal tax audit before. He was once required to send documents on a line item inquiry into his charitable donations, which resulted in no changes to his taxes. But nothing more—that is, until after he'd written a big check to a Romney-supporting super PAC.

Two weeks after receiving the IRS letter, VanderSloot received another, this one from the Department of Labor. He was informed it would be doing an audit of workers he employed on his cattle ranch under the federal visa program for temporary agriculture workers.

The H-2A program allows tens of thousands of temporary workers in the United States; VanderSloot employed precisely three. All are from Mexico and have worked on the VanderSloot ranch—which employs about twenty people—for five years. Two are brothers. Mr. VanderSloot had never been audited for this, though two years prior his workers' ranch homes were inspected. (The cattle ranch was fined $8,400, mainly for too many “flies” and for “grease build-up” on the stove.)

This letter requested an array of documents to ascertain whether VanderSloot's “foreign workers are provided the full scope of protections” under the visa program: information on the hours they'd worked each day and their rate of pay, an explanation of their deductions, copies of contracts. And on and on.

In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. The CEO, never audited before, had suddenly been subjected to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny. And he was audited by the Labor Department again. The last of his IRS audits didn't conclude until May 2013. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But VanderSloot had by then been waiting more than twenty months for a sizable refund. And his legal bills came in at around $80,000. That figure didn't account for what the president's vilification had done to his business and reputation.

It's a testament to VanderSloot's integrity that there was yet more that he never told me about. When I called him in October 2015 to do a follow-up interview for this book, he acknowledged he'd also been subject to an audit by the Food and Drug Administration. When I asked why he'd left that out, he simply said, “Well. You know. The FDA does these audits from time to time. And I just didn't think it was fair for me to say it was deliberate. Maybe it would have happened regardless of everything else.”

VanderSloot had known all the way back when the post came out that what Obama had done was like “taping a target on my back.” And, again, Obama hadn't had to pick up the phone to order an attack. All he'd had to do was put out the web post. Moreover, he'd left a man with no recourse. To what authority was VanderSloot to appeal if he believed this was politically motivated? The Obama Justice Department? The same Justice Department that by that time was running its Lerner non-investigation?

Here's the truly sad part of the VanderSloot story. He was largely alone. The Obama website listed eight donors. After VanderSloot got in touch, I tried calling all seven others. One, investor and conservationist Louis Bacon, called me back with a quote for a column: “It is un-American and irresponsible for a president to target individual, law-abiding citizens for political retribution, and it is inconceivable that any U.S. agency would stoop to do the bidding for this campaign's silliness.”

The others either didn't return calls, or didn't want to go on the record. And VanderSloot's experience was the same. Following his targeting, he reached out to the other seven as well, with an idea. He suggested they go public, make a campaign of it, with T-shirts and numbers. “I'm No. 227 on the Enemies List, I'm No. 228—that sort of thing,” he says. Four were open to the idea, and were willing even to get a picture taken together. The other four went underground. “We don't want to talk, this has been horrible on my life and family and my business, so please, no more,” they told VanderSloot.

He didn't blame them. “It isn't much different than the Middle Ages, really,” he says. “They had the stocks, or a beheading. It's done in public. They put you out there, so that everyone can see what happens when you do something they don't like. The public watches and they think, ‘Well, he did X, and I'm never going to do X—because look at that. They still do this in third-world countries. And I guess we do it here.”

Public humiliation only works if you let it. VanderSloot had his dream. And from that moment, he didn't waver. He called me. He went on O'Reilly. While he was on that show—even before all the audits and abuse—he publicly announced that he was writing a check for another $100,000 to the Romney campaign. That was his response to the intimidation.

VanderSloot went on a slew of other TV and radio shows—Greta Van Susteren, Neil Cavuto, Megyn Kelly, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck—to tell his story. And the phones went wild again. Americans were appalled by his tale, and they wanted to show support. “‘What does Melaleuca sell? We want to buy some,'” was the new message, VanderSloot remembers. The episode sparked a tremendous resurgence in Melaleuca's sales, a boom that hasn't let up. The company's revenues have increased by $400 million annually. And 2015 was its best year ever. VanderSloot sees it as more inspiring evidence that it is always worth speaking out.

He's now embraced a national role. Obama didn't shut him out of politics; he created a new national player. He's fully committed in 2016, with money and support. In the Republican primary election season of 2015, he had national candidates flying out to see him to try to get his blessing. “We've been getting three or four media calls every week—asking, ‘Who are you supporting, who are you going to back?'” says VanderSloot. “Because we will back someone.”