Fake Bush Site

Bush Campaign Tries to Limit Internet Attacks
2.09 p.m. ET (1809 GMT) May 19, 1999
By Alan Elsner Reuters

WASHINGTON — As politics tries to adjust to the digital revolution, Texas Gov. George W. Bush's presidential committee is wading into uncharted waters, trying to limit what is written about him on the Internet.

Bush's senior campaign adviser Karl Rove bought the rights to 200 Internet domain names last year, including bushsucks.com and bushblows.com, to prevent critics of the governor using those sites to disseminate anti-Bush material.

But Zack Exley, a Massachusetts computer consultant, got in ahead of Rove in registering three sites — GWBush.com, GWBush.org and GBush.org.

Exley, who said it was inconvenient for him to be interviewed but responded to questions from Reuters by e-mail, said his original idea was to sell the sites to the Bush campaign. In an exchange with Bush's legal counsel Benjamin Ginsberg, he offered to hand them over for $350,000.

"If Ginsberg had offered any amount I probably would have taken it at that time. However, he would not make an offer and pressed me to give him a lower number. I made a one-time offer to sell at $80,000," Exley said.

"Though I would have accepted much, much less, I had no idea what they thought was reasonable and didn't want to undersell myself. But I told him that if he still didn't want to buy the names, I would continue with other plans and couldn't guarantee that the names would even ever be for sale again," he said.

Exley turned to a company in California, RTMark, to build an anti-Bush Web site that currently displays unproven allegations that Bush dabbled in drugs during his youth.

Whereupon Ginsberg on April 14 wrote Exley a "cease and desist" letter accusing him of using material from the exploratory committee's official Web site without authorization and containing links to sites that "promote violence and degrade women."

Ginsberg followed up in an official letter of complaint to the Federal Election Commission on May 3 in which he argued that Exley was operating like a political action committee and should therefore be required to file regular financial disclosure reports.

"It (the site) is filled with libelous and untrue statements whose aim is to damage Gov. Bush. ... The headline of the site is, 'Just Say No to Former Cocaine User for President.' This site's innuendoes and false statements attack the governor's positions on tough standards for convicted drug users," Ginsberg's letter said.

RTMark has posted both letters on its Web site and Ginsberg confirmed their authenticity in an interview with Reuters.

"We're not concerned about Web sites that poke fun or parody a candidate, but there are certain bounds we have to disassociate the governor from," he said.

Many political analysts believe the 2000 presidential election will be the first campaign in which the Internet plays a substantial role. But that role is far from clear.

Candidates have been quick to spot the potential advantages of the new medium in signing up supporters, collecting campaign contributions and disseminating information.

Republican presidential hopeful Elizabeth Dole told Reuters in an interview Tuesday her Web site registered one million hits in the first three hours of its existence and she signed up 7,400 campaign volunteers in the first week, of whom 1,234 expressed interest in fund-raising.

But Ginsberg said there was also a dark side. "We're grappling with what the Internet is doing to the flow of information, which gets passed around in new and different ways than ever before," he said.

As for Exley, he still sees the chance of making big money, especially if Bush is elected president. He said his site was getting thousands of hits a day from people looking for the official Bush site.

"It's possible that advertising revenue alone over the next nine years (if Bush becomes president) could add up to more than $350,000," he said.