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A little-known, Arizona-based tea party organization has hired a prominent Republican operative to help advance its mission in Washington, D.C. But after more than a year in operation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, it’s still not clear what the group’s mission actually is.

Todd Cefaratti, founder of TheTeaParty.net, announced last week that the group had hired a big Washington gun: governmental affairs specialist Donna Wiesner Keene, a veteran of the Bush and Reagan administrations and the wife of the incoming president of the National Rifle Association, David Keene.

Donna Keene said she will act as an intermediary between the field and Washington, helping activists connect effectively with lawmakers to influence policy and advising potential first-time candidates. She has lobbied for conservative groups such as Americans for Fair Taxation in the past, but she is not registered as a lobbyist for the TheTeaParty.net.

But it’s not clear what TheTeaParty.net is active in. Despite its extensive website and an impressive ability to pull in money, TheTeaParty.net appears to do little more than promote its own name. Unlike several large tea party organizations, whose leaders frequently discuss specific goals and agenda items with journalists, TheTeaParty.net supposedly acts quietly as an online meeting place and resource for other tea party groups. Cefaratti, the man behind the group, rarely, if ever, speaks to the press and did not return numerous phone calls to his home or office. The group’s spokeswoman said he was too busy for an interview.

Cefaratti, who splits his time between his marketing consulting business and a second company that specializes in connecting loan officers with seniors interested in reverse mortgages, set up TheTeaParty.net last year as the tea party movement started to galvanize voters and dollars around “outsider” Republican candidates.

At the same time, he established a political action committee, called Stop This Insanity, which raised nearly $500,000 in the months leading up to the 2010 midterm elections. From March to October 2010, the committee spent just less than half that. Nearly all of its expenditures went to advertising services, airfare, lodging and promotional paraphernalia such as buttons and T-shirts, according to federal records.

The group has left very little trail since it was founded last spring, organizing few, if any, events. Federal records show no donations to candidates in the last election cycle.

But come Election Day, lawyers for TheTeaParty.net notified the Federal Election Commission that it was dissolving the PAC arm of its operation. When asked what had become of the $258,000 remaining in the committee’s account, the group’s spokeswoman said she didn’t know.

“The money gets used for marketing the tea parties all over the country, not just the TheTeaParty.net,” Dooling said, citing contributions to the Wounded Warrior Project and other conservative causes. She would not reveal how much each group got and could not point to any local tea party groups in particular that TheTeaParty.net has financed.

The group arranged for a NASCAR truck to appear on the circuit this summer emblazoned with the logo for TheTeaParty.net and the text of the Constitution. It appears that the organization also makes money off its mailing list. Emails obtained by Roll Call reveal that the group has rented its 200,000-person mailing list to companies such as Gold Rarities Gallery, an online gold and silver warehouse. An advertising representative at Newsmax said he helps TheTeaParty.net find clients and confirmed that the list is available for $7,000 ($35 for every thousand names).

Questions about the legitimacy of TheTeaParty.net — previously known as JoinTheTeaParty.us — are rife throughout the blogosphere and among the leaders of other tea party groups.Some top conservatives have never even heard of the group, and other tea party leaders have only a vague understanding of what the group is and what it does.“I have absolutely no idea who they are,” said Randy Lewis, a spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots. “I honestly don’t know a thing about them.” http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_110/teapartynet-204896-1.html?pg=1]

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2012 Total Receipts: $1,021,463
Total spent: $795,347
Contributions to federal candidates: $12,500
Electioneering, communication expenses, by targeted candidate: $182,673
Official PAC name: The Tea Party Leadership Fund

Location: Washington, DC 20003
Industry: Republican/Conservative
Treasurer: Backer, Dan Mr. Esq.
FEC Committee ID: C00520825
http://images.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00520825]

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A tea party organization based in Mesa, Ariz., which has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, spent nearly half of its budget on marketing its own name, according to Federal Elections Commission documents.

Those records, obtained during a CBS 5 News investigation, also show the organization spent no money to directly support tea party candidates.

The website, JoinTheTeaParty.us is registered to a nonprofit corporation in Mesa. When CBS 5 News reporters contacted the director of that company, they were referred to a Washington, D.C., attorney, who said the personnel in Phoenix were too busy to sit down for an interview.

CBS 5 News began its investigation into the company after receiving a phone call from an East Coast tea party activist who said nobody within the tea party movement he had spoken to had heard of the Mesa organization.

The caller also told CBS 5 News it did not appear the organization was spending any of its donations to support tea party priorities.

Among the findings of the CBS 5 News investigation, the organization spent $181,000 on Google, Facebook and other websites for advertising. As a result, when CBS 5 producers typed the phrase, "tea party," into the Google search engine, the first paid advertisement that popped up was for JoinTheTeaParty.us.

Additional digging into the organization's background revealed the director of the nonprofit also has ties to companies that collect and sell people's personal information. Todd Cefaratti is listed as the director the the nonprofit, as well as a company known as reverseleadclub.com.

At a recent tea party rally at the state Capitol, no tea party supporters approached by CBS 5 News had heard of the wesbite.

An e-mail written to CBS 5 News from Washington attorney Dan Backer stated that the site develops and distributes daily information on local and national tea party events.

Several donors to the site contacted by CBS 5 News said they were under the impression they were joining the official tea party when they donated to the website. The populist tea party movement is not an official national political party. (Link to FEC documents at http://www.kpho.com/story/14801253/tea-partiers-question-ariz-based-we
bsite-10-28-2010)]

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