Facebook is getting political. Really political.
The company, which in September confirmed it was forming a political action committee, “FB PAC,” on Wednesday filed an update to its documentation with the Federal Election Commission in order to report that it switched its corporate headquarters to Menlo Park, California from its previous location in Palo Alto.
The document, a standard statement of organization, also provides a link to the official website of the Facebook PAC, fbpac.org, which went live back in September, according to a Facebook spokesperson.
Currently, the Facebook PAC website is blocked from public view, containing only entry fields for employees to privately log in.
A Facebook spokesperson also reiterated to TPM the goals of the PAC: “FB PAC will give our employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process by supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
Facebook first announced it had completed its move to the sprawling, 1-million-square-foot, former campus of Sun Microsystems on Monday, December 19. The updated PAC form declaring the new headquarters is just another piece of good housekeeping.
But the updated statement of organization also provides a glimpse of just who will be pulling the strings behind Facebook’s newly concerted effort to raise money and influence politics by backing specific candidates.
FB PAC names as its treasurer Joel Kaplan, President George W. Bush’s former deputy chief of staff, who was in May recruited away from his post-political job as an executive at Texas utility Energy Future Holdings to join Facebook as VP of U.S. public policy.
The treasurer of a PAC is responsible for authorizing all of the PAC’s expenditures, or appointing someone to authorize the expenditures, as well as depositing all of the PAC’s receipts within 10 days, among other duties, according to the FEC. The FEC also notes that the treasurer can be held personally liable for violating federal election law.
But already, Kaplan has shifted his expenditures-reporting duties to assistant treasurer Corey Owens, also named in the FB PAC filing as the “custodian of records,” whom the FEC notes is responsible for maintaining a record of the PAC’s financial activities for the past three years running.
Owens previously served as press secretary at the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think tank dedicated to safeguarding the Constitution, and as a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union International, according to AllFacebook.com.
As previously noted, Facebook joins a shortlist of large tech companies to have formed PACs in order to sway Washington in their favor — among them Microsoft, with its high-spending MSPAC ($6.8 million in expenditures in 2011), while Google’s PAC has been ramping up in advance of the 2012 election, raising $570,000 in the first six-months of 2011 but spending only $70,000 of it so far, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Facebook, by contrast, spent $910,000 on lobbying in 2011, according to the Center, and that was well before and separate from its PAC, which has yet to report any expenditures. How Facebook plans to raise and spend its PAC money remains to be seen. Stay tuned.
