Asher Burke, who assists Assemblyman Tim Donnelly’s gubernatorial campaign with “social media and online creative,” is also a principal officer of Public Safety Advocates, a political campaign committee working to defeat Republican-endorsed candidates in San Diego County.

According to campaign reports filed with the County of San Diego Registrar of Voters, the campaign committee has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from public employee unions, including the Deputy Sheriffs Association of San Diego County, the San Diego Police Officers Association and the Peace Officers Research Association of California.

Those funds are going to support Bob Brewer, who is running for San Diego County District Attorney. The Republican Party of San Diego County has endorsed Bonnie Dumanis, the incumbent, who has been outspent by Brewer.

“County records show Brewer also outraised Dumanis in the first six months of this year, bringing in more than $281,000,” the Voice of San Diego reported on the competitive race. “Dumanis received about $213,300 during the same period.”

Brewer, a first-time candidate, has received support from “11 police unions – including, most recently, the statewide California Coalition of Law Enforcement Associations,” according to the Voice of San Diego.

Union-funded Public Safety Advocates attack GOP candidates

Burke said the campaign committee welcomes the support of police and fire unions.

“Public Safety Advocates is a political expenditure committee for public safety organizations to support candidates they have determined will keep our local communities safer,” Burke told CalWatchdog.com. “Almost every campaign, probably including Assemblyman Donnelly’s, would welcome the support of police and fire. If you were a candidate, wouldn’t you?”

He added, “As Jerry Brown continues to dump dangerous criminals on our streets, due to his early release boondoggle, I find my work with local groups like police and fire to be extremely important to maintaining the type of city and state I want to live in.”

In addition to backing the union candidate for district attorney, the campaign committee has spent money to attack John McCann, a candidate for Chula Vista City Council who has also been endorsed by the Republican Party of San Diego County.

A recent mailer distributed by the Public Safety Advocates campaign committee attacks John McCann as “the man who CAN’T.”

“John McCann is bad news for Chula Vista,” the mailer warns. “Tell McCann you CAN’T support his failed management and incompetence.” (A copy of the flyer is shown at the end of this article.)

Donnelly’s anti-union rhetoric

Burke’s work with public employee unions coincides with his work for Donnelly’s campaign for governor, which has repeatedly attacked the unions for excessive salaries and benefits. Writing in an open letter to Brown in 2011, Donnelly accused the governor of submitting new contract agreements that “protect the well-paid public employee unions, even at the cost of students, public safety, and jobs.”

According to state campaign finance records, Burke and his businesses, Burke Communications, Inc. and Campaign Services Group, Inc., have received $69,194 in payments from Donnelly’s gubernatorial campaign committee, of which $38,500 was for campaign consulting. It easily makes Burke one of the highest-paid employees of Donnelly’s low-budget campaign.

Donnelly’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. However, in the past, the GOP candidate has boasted that hard-core liberals also work on his campaign.

“I have hard-core liberal Democrats working on my campaign as well as libertarians,” Donnelly told the Redding Tea Party in September 2013.

Payments to Asher Burke

The incumbent Democrat governor, according to state disclosure reports released recently, raised $9.9 million last year — with the overwhelming majority of those funds coming from big corporations, labor unions, oil companies and high-worth individuals that routinely lobby state government.

“When you’ve been through the experience like Jerry Brown went through with Meg Whitman, your gut tells you that you better go out and raise as much money as you can because there might be some millionaire or billionaire lurking in the shadows that will try to spend you out of office,” Garry South, one of the state’s leading Democrat campaign consultants, told Bloomberg.

Brown’s Republican opponents will have only a fraction of the governor’s campaign funds. Former Treasury Department official Neel Kashkari, who launched his campaign in January, has yet to file any campaign disclosure reports. Former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, who dropped out of the race in January, raised slightly more than half a million dollars last year.

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Twin Peaks, reported just $54,299 in cash on hand at the end of the year, after raising $374,212 for his gubernatorial campaign in 2013. However, Donnelly’s fundraising picked up steam after the campaign filing deadline. In mid-January, Donnelly’s campaign received $20,000 from the California Houndsmen for Conservation, which is not factored in the latest cash-on-hand figures.

Neither Cindy Sheehan, the Peace and Freedom’s candidate, nor the Green Party’s Luis Rodriguez filed disclosure reports.

Brown’s fundraising dependent on max-out contributors

Brown’s fundraising in 2013 was largely dependent on max-out contributions from large special interest groups. Under state law, individuals and corporations may contribute up to $27,200 per election. In 2013, Brown’s average campaign contribution was $17,713, with 287 contributions of $10,000 or more. That high average was buoyed by 198 campaign checks of $25,000 or more – with 167 checks written for the legal maximum, $27,200.

Several of those max-out contributions are drawing questions about mixing state business with campaign finances. One max-out contributor, Occidental Petroleum, according to a report by Bloomberg, has an interest in California’s pending review of the state laws governing hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking.

“Brown took two checks in January for $27,200 each from GEO Group Inc. (GEO), the second-largest U.S. prison operator,” observes Bloomberg. “The donations come after GEO, based in Boca Raton, Florida, last year won a five-year contract worth as much as $150 million to house 1,400 of California’s inmates at two of the company’s jails in the state.”

The governor’s office denies that campaign contributions affect state business. “Contributions have no bearing whatsoever on the state’s legal filings,” said Evan Westrup, Brown’s spokesman.

Campaigning strategy

Brown’s opponents have gotten creative with their limited funds. In contrast to Brown’s high-budget campaign, Donnelly has focused on a grassroots effort, which includes a two-week statewide bus tour. The campaign has more than 40 stops scheduled in its 1,000-mile journey across the Golden State.

“We’re hitting the road to save California!” Donnelly explained on his website. “Over the next two weeks, I’ll be aboard our campaign bus, The Liberty Express, visiting with you and holding events throughout the state.”

In 2010, Brown’s campaign held $12 million

At the same point four years ago, Brown’s campaign reported nearly $12 million in the bank, according to the Associated Press. This year’s campaign chest, thanks to the power and influence of incumbency, is $5 million better, or a 41 percent improvement.

Brown also proved that a penny saved is a penny earned. The report shows Brown spent just shy of $208,000 last year, a relatively low sum for a statewide campaign. The largest expenditure was for two $25,000 bonuses paid to Angie Tate, one of the best Democratic fundraisers in the state, and Edward Ruthrauff, a Brown aide.

Assemblyman Tim Donnelly said he discovered something this week: the Capitol is not paperless, nor is it even close.

Donnelly, a Republican from Twin Peaks, said his office receives thousands of papers every month. He was looking at ways to become more efficient and reduce the stacks of paper.

His Capitol office and his district office have to fax papers back and forth, to keep each in the scheduling loop. In fact, Donnelly said, just about everything that comes into one office, must be shared with the other office.

Donnelly said he wanted a central place to put all of the information needing to be shared — he needed a scanner so his offices could share information and documents electronically, rather than by fax, which just creates more stacks of paper.

Assembly Rules Committee — not so green

So Tim Donnelly contacted the Assembly Rules Committee to get permission to purchase a scanner so his two offices could share everything digitally and they could lose the stacks of papers and mail.

The State of California even has a website dedicated to going green, run by the Department of General Services. The website highlights the state’s efficiencies:

Donnelly said the Rules Committee told him every office would be getting new photocopiers by December, and they would have scanning capability.

Donnelly was thrilled — he looked for ward to ushering in efficiency and an end to the mountains of office paper.

Another government technical glitch

But efficiency in government is not to be. Donnelly said he received word from the Rules Committee that there is a technical glitch with the now photocopiers — they are not compatible with the state’s computers. The state’s IT folks can’t get the computers to work with the scanners, Donnelly said the Rules Committee told him, and it would be at least six months before they expected to fix this glitch.

“We’re the state that invented computers,” Donnelly said, incredulously. “I’m dumbfounded.”

It’s back to the fax machine…

SACRAMENTO — Two Republican members of the California Assembly recently authored resolutions encouraging Congress to halt the eavesdropping on the America people by the National Security Agency. Both resolutions were smacked down Tuesday in the Assembly Judiciary Committee, whose hearings I attended. The Democratic majority refused even to vote on the resolutions, claiming more information was needed.

“What this says is, ‘We don’t want to error on the side of liberty,’” Assemblyman Tim Donnelly told me. A Republican from Twin Peaks, he authored Assembly Joint Resolution 27 to encourage Congress to pass and President Obama to sign into law the “Limiting Internet and Blanket Electronic Review of Telecommunications and Email Act.”

AJR 26, by Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach, calls on the president and Congress to make the protection of civil liberties and national security equal priorities, and to immediately discontinue any practices contrary to the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. That amendment allows searches only with a warrant from a judge.

Leading up to the hearing, both bills had bipartisan support, the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, and a Democratic co-author.

However, Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, removed his name as co-author of Donnelly’s bill, and strongly recommended to committee members they not vote on the resolution.

Donnelly attributed Wieckowski’s change of heart to a case of partisan politics, specifically on orders “from the powers that be.” According to Donnelly, Assembly Speaker John Perez, D-Los Angeles, was not happy Wieckowski had his name on a Donnelly bill.

I called Wieckowski, who is an attorney, to discuss why he removed his name from AJR 27, but did not receive a return call.

What’s this all about?

In June, Edward Snowden, an American computer specialist who worked as a contractor for the NSA, admitted leaking secrets about classified U.S. surveillance programs, along with documents detailing U.S. telephone and Internet surveillance efforts, to the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. When the news broke, Americans were in an uproar. Charges of spying on Americans were levied against the NSA by politicians and civil libertarian groups.

The NSA had obtained direct access to Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. Internet companies, according to the documents first provided by Snowden to the Guardian.

The NSA’s extensive access was originally enabled by changes to U.S. surveillance law introduced under President George W. Bush following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. And NSA access was renewed under President Obama in December 2012.

The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment guarantees, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Donnelly called the NSA spying practice “abusive” and “tyrannical,” and said his LIBERT-E Act had bipartisan support from hundreds of groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Republican Liberty Caucus.

NSA audit confirms excessive snooping

There have been countless news stories about the NSA collecting and storing Americans’ Internet, phone and financial data, while claiming the information is needed to prevent or stop terrorist activity.

A May 2012 audit of the NSA found 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications, the Washington Post recently reported. “The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.”

Allen said, “This revelation that the NSA has been collecting these records from unaware American citizens and ignoring court orders to cease their activities is raising questions and distrust amongst the public regarding the constitutionality of the government’s actions. AJR 26 appeals to the federal government to equally prioritize the need for national security against terrorist threats and the protection of every American citizen’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches.”

What’s a government to do?

According to several news stories, more than one billion records a day are collected by the NSA in the name of “national security.” The excuse is that all that data is needed to preempt terrorist attacks.

Yet with all the federal muscle and high-tech surveillance available to the NSA, it was a citizen who found the Boston Bombers after three people were killed, and more than 260 were injured.

Both Allen and Donnelly reiterated to the Judiciary Committee they understand the federal government is responsible for protecting Americans from threats to national security, but must balance that with also protecting citizens’ constitutional rights to privacy.

“Our country was founded on the principles of protecting individual liberties and the inalienable rights of the people from the infringement of overreaching governments,” Allen said at the hearing. “Government should be transparent, strive for the highest level of integrity, and be held accountable to the public.”

But Assemblyman Ed Chau, D-Monterey Park, said there just wasn’t sufficient information for him to be able to make a decision. Other Democratic members of the Assembly Judiciary Committee echoed this sentiment, including Assembly members Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrence and Wieckowski — all attorneys.