Will Jon Stewart go to jail for running Stephen Colbert's?

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert is running for president. He's parodying the process — including, now, superPACS — in the same way he's parodied cable news. He's getting plenty of attention, but to really look into his political practical joke, I needed to go upstairs and find Peter Overby, NPR's man on campaign finance. I warned him it would seem like a dumb question, but I needed his help. What, exactly, is a superPAC?


"Welcome to my world," he told me. "It's nuts. It's the craziest situation in political money that I've seen in the something like 20 years I've been covering this." He said that for the first time this past year, super political action committees — superPACS — can raise unlimited money to run ads. Often, they're attack ads.


One such ad, produced by a superPAC run partly by old friends and staff of Newt Gingrich, twisted facts to the point that Gingrich was embarrassed by it. But because of superPAC rules, he couldn't make a phone call to get it off the air. He could only call a press conference and say he was "calling on" the superPAC to alter or pull the ads. But he noted, "I cannot coordinate with them; I cannot communicate directly."


It's those strange superPAC rules about coordinating that Colbert is mocking right now. Colbert appeared on his show with the guy who was taking over his superPAC — maybe you've heard of Jon Stewart? — and their shared lawyer, who took them together through a careful discussion of the fact that they were definitely not coordinating. How much were they not coordinating? Well, the new name of the superPAC, once called Citizens For A Better Tomorrow Tomorrow, is the Definitely Not Coordinating With Stephen Colbert SuperPAC.


Jon Stewart and  Stephen Colbert  then talked to elections lawyer Trevor Potter – who is the attorney for both Colbert’s exploratory committee and the super PAC – through the same phone. Stewart said he’d bought air time in South Carolina, and so on, and Colbert just said he couldn’t coordinate, but smiled or frowned, depending on which city the ad time was in. Columbia, no. Charleston, yes!


Is this all legal, or are these comedians pushing the legal envelope and in fact risking jail time?


Nope, amazing as it sounds, they’re doing everything right. Election law expert Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine, on his blog linked to clips from the show, and posted but one additional word: “hilarious.”


So which of the GOP candidates stand to benefit most from super PAC money? So far the Romney-friendly “Restore Our Future” super PAC has spent about $7.8 million on ads and other pro-Romney activities, according to an analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics.


“That’s far more than any other super PAC involved in the 2012 GOP presidential primaries,” wrote analyst Michael Beckel on the group’s “Open Secrets” blog.


The pro-Gingrich “Winning Our Future” has spent about $4.2 million so far. Groups associated with the other candidates have all spent much less, according to CRP.