from the oops dept
The saga of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and his cozy ties to Hollywood continue to come out. He's been claiming that, sure, he met with Hollywood's top lawyer, Tom Perrelli, had him prep Hood for a meeting with Google, and even took a ~4,000 word angry letter that Perrelli wrote for him,
signed it as his own and sent it to Google -- but he did all that
without knowing that Perrelli worked for Hollywood's top lobbying arm, the MPAA. Uh huh.
And then in a press conference, he insisted that he was doing this out of his own interest in protecting the children -- but also admitted that his office didn't have any intellectual property experts and didn't have a million dollars to do an investigation (approximately the amount the MPAA's leaked emails show them discussing to fund this investigation) and that he needed to
rely on such help from "victims" to make his case. It's fairly rare, though, that "victims" of a crime run the actual law enforcement investigation and fund it as well.
Still, in that last post, we also mentioned how Hood implied that anyone suggesting he was "paid off" might be defaming him, and apparently also stated that he
wasn't getting any money from Hollywood, encouraging reporters to "check records."
Okay then. Let's... check the records. Here, for example, is the MPAA's Political Action Committee apparently
giving $2,500 to an operation called "The Friends of Jim Hood."
And, you can also look at the
public record of who donated to his campaign, which pretty clearly shows donations to his campaign from NBC Universal and 20th Century Fox.
Oh, and for good measure, the RIAA as well:
And then there are some that are not as direct, but are at least noteworthy. First up, we've got the "Mike Moore Law Firm." Now, this might not be that surprising. Moore is a long time friend of Hood and preceded him as Attorney General. Moore apparently helped Hood get into politics and the two are regularly seen together. So it's no surprise that Moore would donate to his campaign. But it's at least noteworthy because the NY Times revealed that a Hollywood front group, the Digital Consumer's Alliance, which is funded by the movie studios, hired Moore as a lobbyist. So, at the very least, this may count partially as money from Hollywood:
There were a few other interesting ones, but the other one I'll point to is from the Patrick Lynch Group. It's a
"government affairs" operation focused on lobbying state attorneys general. But if you look at its page listing out when it's "in the news," a large number of them involve
stories attacking Google. Here's
an op-ed written by Patrick Lynch a few years ago attacking Google, which notes that he represents "FairSearch.org," which is a somewhat infamous Microsoft front group that has been behind a variety of attacks on Google throughout the years. So it may not be "Hollywood" money directly, but it's a top lobbyist for an effort to attack Google.
None of that, of course, means that Hood is, in any way, beholden to this kind of money. This is just the nature of politics. But Hood was the one who directly dared reporters to check the record and said he hadn't received money from such sources. That's wrong. He did. The least he can do is admit it.
Filed Under: campaign contributions, funding, jim hood, mike moore, patrick lynch, tom perrelli
Companies: 20th century fox, comcast, fox, google, mpaa, nbc universal, riaa
