A federal lawsuit has smoked out 312 previously unknown individuals who volunteered to become part of George W. Bush’s record-breaking 2000 “Pioneer” presidential fundraising effort. This new information more than doubles the previously known list of participants in the Pioneer program, which the campaign once shrouded in complete secrecy.

The new disclosure also provides some data on the total amount of money that some previously known Pioneers delivered to the campaign. Topping this list are business partners William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, whom the new records reveal supported Bush to an extent rivaled perhaps only by Enron. Sharing the same Pioneer tracking number, these two men (who bailed out Bush’s hemorrhaging Bush Oil Co. in 1984 and invested in the Texas Rangers venture that made Bush a millionaire 15 times over) delivered a minimum of $605,082 in Pioneer money.¹

The largest known single individual Pioneer fundraiser was Michigan real estate magnate Ronald Weiser, who delivered a minimum of $588,309. Weiser apparently got illicit help in this effort in 1999, when then-Michigan House Speaker Chuck Perricone used his state staff and office to coax colleagues to attend a fundraiser featuring Bush and Weiser. 

After a July 1999 Texans for Public Justice disclosure request, the Bush campaign began revealing the names of those Pioneers whom it said successfully raised $100,000 or more. By the time Bush became the Republican Party’s official nominee in the summer of 2000, his campaign had disclosed the names of 226 Pioneers who collectively had raised a minimum of $22.6 million. After his nomination, Bush accepted federal campaign funds, which barred him from raising any more private campaign money.

With the new disclosure list there are 538 individuals known to have answered the Pioneer call. If these Pioneers raised an average of $100,000 each, they would have delivered a staggering $53.8 million to the Bush campaign. The Bush campaign claims that it does not know the total amount raised by each participant or the program as a whole. The new disclosure contains actual contribution data on just 212 Pioneers, who individually raised between $7,000 and $588,309 (Weiser). The incomplete records indicate that these 212 Pioneer volunteers raised $25 million. The records indicate that ex-Enron chief Ken Lay raised a minimum of $112,050.

Observers long suspected that Bush’s disclosures on his Pioneer program were incomplete—if not selective. Bush Pioneer coordinator Jim Francis told the media that almost 400 individuals already had taken the Pioneer pledge by July 1999. An April 2000 article reported that the campaign had revealed just one-third of the names that appeared on campaign Pioneer lists obtained by The Nation. In fact, six of the eleven new Pioneers that the Nation reported by name still have not been disclosed by the campaign as of its latest disclosure. As it happens, all six of these missing names have worked the corporate lobby.²

As with the corporate-lobbyist Pioneer volunteers whom only the Nation disclosed, the campaign may have been reluctant to reveal some of the newly disclosed names. These include: 

With the home states of nine Pioneers still unidentified, Bush’s home state produced 201 new Pioneers, or almost two-thirds of the fundraising program’s new names. California was a distant second (16 new names), followed by Washington, DC (16), Connecticut and Pennsylvania (nine each) and New York and Florida (seven each).

The incomplete contribution data just released reveals that 15 Super Pioneers raised more than $200,000 apiece. The campaign credited more than $200,000 to nine other tracking numbers that appear to have been shared by two or three individuals in an apparent Pioneer buddy system.

Six newly disclosed Pioneer volunteers were rewarded with pajama parties at the White House, including Bush’s Texas Rangers partner Tom Bernstein, golfer Ben Crenshaw and Katherine Idsal, daughter of Richard Nixon advisor Anne Armstrong.