Not an Employee? Herman Cain Had Mailing and Email Addresses at Koch's Americans For Prosperity HQ

As the New Yorker's Jane Mayer wrote earlier this week, members of Herman Cain's campaign staff are loath to discuss his longstanding ties to Americans for Prosperity and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the organizing groups founded by billionaire David Koch, about whom Mayer famously wrote a comprehensive profile last year. AlterNet, which began reporting on Cain's ties to Koch last June, has learned that Cain's work for AFP at one time had all the appearances of a staff position.

In Mayer's 2010 exposé, "Covert Operations," she detailed the network of right-wing think tanks and organizations funded by David Koch and his brother Charles, principals in Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States, according to Forbes.

Now, Mayer has turned her gaze to the ties between Koch and Cain, seeking to find out how much Cain earned from Americans for Prosperity and its foundation, and whether or not Cain has ever been considered an employee of either entity. She writes:

Earlier this week, I asked J. D. Gordon, communications director for Cain’s campaign, whether Cain was an employee of Americans for Prosperity. “No,” he said, “He’s not an employee.” I noted that I’d seen Cain speak at an Americans for Prosperity event in Austin, Texas in July 2010....Gordon acknowledged that Cain had received “speaking fees” from Americans for Prosperity. He said he would have to get back to me with details.

As far back as 2005 -- the year Americans for Prosperity was founded -- Cain was fronting the group's efforts to add chapters, as Think Progress reported earlier this month, and the Associated Press explored last weekend, with a campaign called the Prosperity Expansion Project. AlterNet has since learned that Cain was more than simply a cheerleader for the project; he had a mailing address and email address at Americans for Prosperity headquarters.

Here's a screen shot from the AFP Web site, of a 2005 page about the Prosperity Expansion Project (click here to open the image a separate window):

Now, the corporate types are famous for embracing employment models that exempt the people who work for them from the sort of benefits and workplace protections that come with being an actual "employee." Perhaps Herman Cain was just an "independent contractor" or a temp worker. If so, then his campaign would be technically correct in saying that he hasn't been on the payroll.

Truth be told, Cain may not have fared too badly as an independent contractor -- it that's indeed what he was -- for Americans for Prosperity and/or its foundation.

When Mayer began peeling back what appear to be layers of obfuscation, she found, listed on the organization's tax forms, payouts by Americans for Prosperity in excess of $120,000 in 2010 to the speakers bureau that books Cain. She also discovered unspecified payments of $50,000 - $100,000 listed on Cain's filing with the Federal Election Commission as fees paid to his company, New Voice, which, Mayer writes, "he describes as a 'public speaking' and 'publishing' entity."

In June, when Herman Cain announced his presidential candidacy, AlterNet began laying out Cain's relationship to AFP and its foundation, beginning with his campaign manager, Mark Block, the former director of the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, known as both a talented organizer and underhanded player in Wisconsin elections. As we noted in our June report, Block was fined $15,000 and banned from participating in Wisconsin politics for three years because of election-law violations he committed on behalf of a campaign he was managing for a state Supreme Court candidate.