him and struck up a conversation. Whitehorn said the gauger eventually told him: “We did steal from you.” The man seemed contrite. Whitehorn didn’t dwell on it. He didn’t want to carry a grudge against Koch.
The Osage chiefs might have felt duped later on, but their public comments in the early 1990s achieved an important goal. The government suddenly looked overzealous and unfair. This fed into Koch’s broader efforts. While Howell was reshaping the story in Oklahoma, Koch was working to do the same thing in Washington, DC.
Charles Koch understood now that he needed a political operation in Washington. Up until that point, he operated as if he could stay out of the miasma of the nation’s capital, staying true to his libertarian beliefs and focusing his efforts on the business in Wichita. This left Koch vulnerable. When Ken Ballen was conducting his investigation, he was contacted frequently by high-paid attorneys and experts who worked for companies like Exxon and Chevron. They defended their clients and even helped focus attention on Koch Industries. Koch had no such presence. This would change in the early 1990s.
Koch Industries deepened its relationship with Kansas senator Bob Dole. The Kochs already contributed to his campaigns and political causes, giving $245,000 between 1979 to 1994. David Koch would abandon the Libertarian Party to become the vice chairman of Dole’s presidential campaign against incumbent Bill Clinton in 1996. By that time, the family would become Dole’s third-largest financial supporter, according to an investigation later published in Businessweek magazine.
Dole helped Koch delegitimize the issue of oil theft. Dole submitted the story from the Daily Oklahoman into the Senate record, and said that he was concerned that the Senate had rushed to judgment to condemn Koch. Koch amplified his concerns by helping to draw other senators into the fight, including Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and David Boren and Don Nickles from Oklahoma.
During a speech on the Senate floor in 1990, Dole criticized the committee’s work, saying: “Several senators, including myself, Senator Kassebaum, Senator Boren, and Senator Nickles, had very real concerns about some of the evidence on which the special committee was basing its findings, concerns we raised with the committee in successive letters before the report was issued. It now looks like those concerns were well founded.”II
As senators fought against the findings of their own committee, Koch put another piece of its plan into place. The biggest threat wasn’t emanating from the Senate but from the courts and the US Attorney’s office, two institutions that could not be influenced by campaign donations or lobbyists. In response, Koch initiated a long-term plan to reshape America’s judiciary system.
Ron Howell founded an obscure nonprofit group called Oklahomans for Judicial Excellence. It did something unheard of: it started grading local judges based on their fealty to free-market economic theory. The group created scorecards for state judges, measuring how well their verdicts conformed with the teachings of Hayek and von Mises. The group publicized these rankings with public opinion articles published in places like the Daily Oklahoman. The grading system created a way to embarrass judges in the local press by publicizing their low scores. Koch Industries also offered them a way to escape this embarrassment: the company sponsored a series of free seminars that judges could attend if they received poor grades from Koch’s rating system. The seminars were not held in stuffy classrooms. Koch Industries paid for judges to travel to a ski resort in Utah or a beachfront condominium, among other locations, relaxing places where the judges might be more open to Koch’s message. The company held lectures that emphasized the importance of market forces in society, and warned against the consideration of things like “junk science” that plaintiffs often used to prove corporate malfeasance. The seminars were well attended, sometimes by more than sixty judges at a time. A Kansas state district court judge named Michael Corrigan attended a Koch-sponsored seminar at the Sundial Beach Resort in Sanibel, Florida, and another at the University of Kansas; in between these seminars he handled two cases involving Koch Industries without disclosing the potential conflict of interest, according to an account later published in the Wall Street Journal.
The junkets that it organized might have been disclosed or even regulated if they were enjoyed by other public officials, such as members of Congress. But there were no such restraints on treating judges to all-paid vacations, perhaps because no one had thought to organize such events on such a large scale before. Koch’s